Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (145 page)

Sarne informed Mae that in one sequence, she’d appear in front of a chorus line of African-American men, each of them dressed in white tie and tails. She issued a warning: “They must never touch me—because of all those rednecks in the South, you know.”

When Gore heard that, he remarked, “In her private life, Mae never had any objection to being touched by a black man—that’s touched, not fucked.”

Raquel had her own views about Mae West, her casting, and the script itself.

“If you can buy the fact that a woman of 77 can send a 22-year-old stud to the hospital to recuperate after a night of sex, then you can buy anything in this picture.”

At one point, Mae was introduced to Farrah Fawcett. “Oh, you play the lesbian lover of Myra Breckinridge,” Mae said. “You certainly look the part. I guess you’re quite familiar with mattresses.”

[Mae’s put-downs always contained a double entendre. She’d previously seen Fawcett advertising Beautyrest mattresses on TV.]

Sarne tossed out nearly all of Mae’s quips, which seriously angered her. She later claimed “the movie would have been sure box office if they’d kept in my one-liners and some of my musical numbers.”

[One of her memorable lines in
Myra Breckinridge
is delivered when she auditions a row of good-looking men. One in particular strikes her fancy. “Cowboy,” she asks. “How tall are you?”

“I’m six feet, seven inches,” he replies
.

“Well, never mind the six feet—let’s talk about the seven inches.”

Gore read some of Mae’s quips that she’d submitted for inclusion in the movie. “She must have gone down memory lane and opened an old stage trunk when these one-liners were first written. I think Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House. A typical sample would be, ‘I don’t expect too much from a man—just what he’s got!’”]

In subsequent releases of
Myra Breckin-ridge
, some of which were heavily edited, some of the best scenes were cut, including when Rex Reed, as Myron, confronts the Surgeon, played by John Carradine. He’s ready to undergo “the cruelest cut” in his attempt to transform himself into Myra.

“You realize that once we cut it off, it won’t grow back?” Carradine warns Myron. “How about circumcision instead? It’ll be cheaper.”

Raquel and Mae, during a rare break in their frequent battles, agreed on only one point: Sarne should be fired and replaced with the gay director George Cukor. But finally, they decided that even Cukor wouldn’t be able to save this picture.

***

When
Myra Breckinridge
opened in 1970, it was an immediate flop, and Fox soon withdrew it from circulation. It was one of two X-rated films that Fox released that year, the other being
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
.

Movie critics at
Time
magazine pounced on it, asserting, “
Myra Breckin-ridge
is about as funny as a child molester. It is an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility, and an abomination to the eye.”

Vincent Canby of
The New York Times
denounced filmmakers who go to “great lengths to try to be different and dirty. As for Mae West, she possesses a figure of a cinched-in penguin and a face made of pink-and-white plaster in which little holes have been left for her eyes and mouth.”

Author Simon Louvish wrote: “The problem derives largely from the original material: Gore Vidal’s mock-trashy vision of a morally and physically polluted America, drawn through the transsexual’s eyes—and in particular, the subculture of Los Angeles, inhabited by a rogue’s gallery of phonies and grotesques. George Cukor would have floundered as deeply as Michael Sarne, who survived the movie without being assassinated.”

The film also attracted unwanted attention from Golden Age movie stars. From the Fox archives, footage of movies filmed in the 1930s had been inserted to punctuate the jokes, and as a spoof of the film’s climatic dildo-rape scene. During the latter, images of Myra getting invasive with Rusty fade as footage from Shirley Temple’s 1937 film
Heidi
appears on the screen. The 1937 clip showed Shirley (as Heidi) getting squirted with milk during her attempt to milk a stubborn goat. The symbolism of ejaculation in her face is quite clear.

Objections to the scene reached all the way to the White House. “Shirley’s face, symbolically at least, is being sprayed with semen,” claimed Richard Nixon, of all people.

For reasons known only to himself, Nixon had requested a screening of
Myra Breckinridge
at the White House. The morning after he saw it, he telephoned Richard Zanuck in Hollywood, asking him to remove the Shirley Temple footage from the context of the larger film, fuming, “Shirley is a staunch Republican and, as an ambassador
[to the United Nations in 1969; to Ghana in 1974; and to Czechoslovakia in 1989]
will represent the United States.”

Loretta Young successfully sued to have old film footage of herself removed from the picture.

After the film’s release, Gore picked up a copy of the
Los Angeles Times
to read a letter to the editor written by one J. Correll. “Mae West has become a tiresome old bore, forever talking about how wonderful she was—and she thinks she still is. At almost eighty, she’s a gabby girl, but not the Mae West of forty years ago, when I was a fan of hers. She belongs to the past, and only the past, an old lady who thinks of herself as a sex symbol. It is sad and somewhat revolting.”

Gore showed the letter to his breakfast companion, Howard Austen. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

The story may be apocryphal, but years later, Gore heard that Sarne was working as a waiter in a restaurant. “God does exist,” he said.

In spite of its initial reception, the film version of
Myra Breckinridge
has, since its release, become a cult classic.

Despite the dismal reception of the movie, in 1974, based on the bestselling success of his 1968 novel,
Myra Breckinridge
, Gore, in 1974, released a sequel,
Myron
, which was published shortly after an anti-pornography crackdown by the U.S. Supreme Court. To show his contempt for specific members of the Court, Gore satirized their names by inserting them at unexpectedly salacious points within his manuscript.
[Example: “He thrust his enormous Rehnquist deep within her Whizzer White.”]

In the sequel,
Myron
, Gore went wild with the he/she fluidity. As literary critic Robert F. Kiernan encapsulated the novel, “Obscenities and recriminations shoot freely back and forth as the antagonists (Myra battling Myron) settle down to a stalemated war, and tweezered eyebrows, padded brassieres, and raw oysters become delightful beachheads in their battle for sexual supremacy. Myron threatens Myra that he will take male hormones and turn the Breckinridge body as hairy as a tarantula, and she threatens him that she will dance the tarantella in a Maidenform bra on his grave.”

Maria Montez, the sultry Dominican star of such movies as
Cobra Woman
(1944), figures into the newer novel. One night, while watching
Siren of Babylon (Gore’s satire of Montez’s 1948 movie, Siren of Atlantis)
, Myron/Myra is transported to a 1940s film set via his/her television set.

For the Myra aspect of the protagonist’s character, this is a dream come true; for Myron, it’s his worst nightmare. As he desperately tries to escape from the film set, he encounters Richard Nixon seeking a hideaway from the Watergate scandal.

Gore also used this novel to “send up” his critics. Its character of Whittaker Kaiser is clearly inspired by author Norman Mailer. From Kaiser’s mouth emerges this declaration: “Look, every man wants to make it with another man, but the
real
man is the one who fights off his hideous weak fag self and takes one woman after another without the use of any contraceptives or pill or diaphragm or rubber, just the all-conquering sperm, because contraception of any kind is as bad as masturbation.”

At the novel’s climax, a former cowboy actor in the film, now a transsexual, has been elected as the Republican Governor of Arizona. The episode was an obvious spoof of Rex Bell, the former celluloid cowboy who became the Lieutenant Governor of Nevada who (unhappily) married the emotionally unstable silent screen vamp, Clara Bow.

Kiernan summed up the two
Breckinridge
novels: “They are preposterous, droll, and gaudily offensive—although altogether triumphant and altogether wonderful.”

Chapter Forty-Four