Christina Aguilera in "Burlesque"
Film Friday
In memory of a friend who died this past March, this past weekend Julia and I went to see Burlesque, the new Christina Aguilera/Cher film. The friend was Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, who in 1934 made her way from a tiny east Texas town to New York by way of burlesque. The Great Depression was at its height, Maurine was 22, and burlesque helped make her dreams of becoming an actress come true.
More on that story in a moment. As far as the film is concerned, it is not (as I was hoping) about burlesque from Maurine’s era but rather revived 21st century burlesque. It gestures towards stories like Maurine’s, however, by having Ali, its protagonist, hail from small town Iowa and achieve a certain degree of fame by performing burlesque in a Los Angeles theater. (My wife and I liked that part since Julia is a farm girl from Iowa who went on to find–well, some fame and some fortune in city-in-name-only St. Mary’s City, Maryland.) The movie can be summed up by the Dolly Parton lyrics, “she met the devil in the city of angels but she never lost her soul.” It also self-consciously mimics any number of 1930’s Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals: we can’t pay the mortgage so let’s put on a show. Ali’s singing (and savvy) save the music hall, just as Aguilera’s singing saves the movie. In short, the plot is lame but the movie is fun. Now back to Maurine.
I can’t remember all of Maurine’s burlesque stories, but here’s how I wrote about her in a profile published several years ago:
Determined to go to New York . . . , she joined the burlesque as a chorus girl and danced her way across America. She still remembers her harassed director’s instructions on the first night. To her complaint that the other women wouldn’t teach her the steps, he told her to “just smile and kick.” She also remembers the three “meals” a day that went with the job: sandwiches and coffee gobbled down between the four shows.
A friend in burlesque mentioned a contact she knew, a producer on the New York “subway circuit” with a soft spot for burlesque people. “Not knowing any better,” Maurine walked into the man’s office upon reaching New York and was cast as a 12-year old (she was 22) in Lillian Hellmann’s first play, The Children’s Hour. The year was 1934.
Maurine used to describe for me a seductive “Russian countess” from her burlesque troupe who would vamp the audience with a long feathered boa and talk in a fake Russian accent about her “pussy-nality.” Maurine said that she seemed terribly exotic, even though she was actually a housewife from New Jersey.
Ah, that was a more innocent age. And yet I’m struck by how the story of pursuing one’s dreams in the big city never seems to get old. Ali does it in Burlesque, Maurine set her sights on New York in 1934, my novelist friend Rachel Kranz made her way there in the 1980’s (from small town Minnesota), and now I’m watching my son Darien and his wife Betsy starting up a marketing business in Manhattan. Calling their company “Discovering Oz” (the name makes my point), Darien and Betsy work with theatre groups and other companies (the other companies pay the bills) and have an office in the fabled LaMama, a performance space dedicated to experimental theatre. The entrepreneurial spirit of Americans continually amazes me.
Sometimes when I am seized by the rage to simplify, I think all American literature can be boiled down to two stories: achieving the American dream (comedy) and becoming disillusioned with the American dream (melodrama and tragedy). Theodor Drieser, someone who puts these dramas at the center of his novels, gives us the key to not becoming disillusioned.
The passage I have in mind occurs in Sister Carrie, a novel that charts the trajectory of an actress who reminds me a lot of Maurine. (The novel was written in 1900, 12 years before Maurine was born.) Carrie starts off in rural Wisconsin, gets to Chicago, and eventually ends up in New York, where for a while she works as a chorus girl before achieving prominence. Like Maurine, she has an irrepressible vitality that is her key to achieving the dream. A thoughtful young man tells her how she can use her gifts to achieve her dream and also how she must treat those gifts to keep the dream from turning sour:
“The world is always struggling to express itself,” he went on. “Most people are not capable of voicing their feelings. They depend upon others. That is what genius is for. One man expresses their desires for them in music; another one in poetry; another one in a play. Sometimes nature does it in a face—it makes the face representative of all desire. That’s what has happened in your case.”
He looked at her with so much of the import of the thing in his eyes that she caught it. At least, she got the idea that her look was something which represented the world’s longing. She took it to heart as a creditable thing, until he added:
“That puts a burden of duty on you. It so happens that you have this thing. It is no credit to you–that is, I mean, you might not have had it. You paid nothing to get it. But now that you have it, you must do something with it.”
“What?” asked Carrie.
“I should say, turn to the dramatic field. You have so much sympathy and such a melodious voice. Make them valuable to others. It will make your powers endure.”
Carrie did not understand this last. All the rest showed her that her comedy success was little or nothing.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Why, just this. You have this quality in your eyes and mouth and in your nature. You can lose it, you know. If you turn away from it and live to satisfy yourself alone, it will go fast enough. The look will leave your eyes. Your mouth will change. Your power to act will disappear. You may think they won’t, but they will. Nature takes care of that.”
Maurine lived by this philosophy. She would talk about the difference between cathedral actors and career actors and saw herself as one of the latter—which is to say, one more interested in love of the craft than in the fame that could accompany it.
Even after Maurine was stricken with dementia in her mid-nineties, the look never left her eyes and her mouth never changed. She continued to express our feelings and brighten our lives all the way to 98. The American dream started her out, burlesque gave her the boost she needed, and from there on out her life was a comedy in the deepest sense of the word.