September 30th – In the entertainment industry
when do you know you’ve arrived? By that I mean what constitutes success? Not
that fleeting, one-hit-one appearance on Big
Brother kind of success nor the popularity gained from having a string of
hits, they’re both just transient things; they’re what brings you in the money
in order for you to begin to build a legacy (unless, of course, your fame comes
from the aforementioned Big Brother
appearance, in which case it’s just the wherewithal which allows you access to
the watering-holes of sleb-dom from where you can stumble out at four in the
morning pissed as the proverbial with your skirt round your arse or your
dress-shirt covered in vomit as you plot a short-lived but highly reportable
course towards oblivion). In honesty and not to put a too fine point on it, if
the roll-call of the great is to be believed, you’ve never really arrived until
you’ve gone…as in died.
On this day in 1991, Liza Minnelli got a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and you’d be excused for
thinking, well, there it was; there’’s the recognition that you’d finally made
it. Well…yeesss-ish.
Ms. Liza was the product of a union between Judy Garland and
Vincente Minnelli, and by all reports she had what can only be described as a
varied and interesting childhood. Her mother’s life is and was the archetypal
child star gone wrong story and with four marriages and several battles with
alcoholism and drug addiction to contend with, we can only imagine how the
young Ms. Minnelli survived it all. But for all the disaster area that her life
was, Judy Garland has got to be the marker by which all other performers are
measured, both child and adult. An absolute survivor until her untimely (and
somewhat unexpected) death at just 47, she managed to pack in enough for
several lifetimes; four marriages, Grammy’s, Oscars, Golden Globes, Tony’s,
voted in the top ten all-time greatest actresses by the AFI…and she dodged a
whole magazine of health-bullets in the process. Certainly made a huge figure
for her daughter to climb from under, should she choose to enter showbiz…and
why shouldn’t she, after all, it was really all she knew and what daughter
doesn’t want to somehow become her mother?
The fact that Liza Minnelli became such a feted performer
must in part be due to the high possibility that she not only gained some of
her mother’s performing talent but also some of her life-grits too, for Ms. Minnelli
not only beat the prognosis of viral encephalitis, which in 2000 had her
destined for a wheelchair and the inability to speak again, but also came
through her own wars with alcoholism and drug addiction relatively
unscathed…relatively enough to still be a performing icon to be reckoned with.
With Academy Awards, Emmy’s, Tony’s, Oscars and Grammy’s under her belt one
would think she could say she’d arrived
and was able to stand alongside her mum
who, one would figure, would’ve been very proud of her daughter’s outstanding
performance in the film of Cabaret
(although, I personally believe Judy Dench did it the best, on stage in the
1968 original London production, but that’s just me being a pompous old
theatre-slut…can I say that today after…y’know, after…? Well, whatever, it’s
out there now so…).
So, there we are, finally you get the American showbiz
equivalent of a Purple Heart, a star on the Walk
of Fame and you can look all in the eye and say, here I am, I’ve achieved
all that is required of me and am the equal to my mother…’cept…’cept mum has
three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame…
(Yes 3) and time runs short…
On this day in 1955 a well known but little used actor had
his future cut from under him when he was pronounced D.O.A. at the Paso Robles
War Memorial Hospital after being involved in a motor vehicle accident.
Achieving little but promising much in the way of greatness, a great deal was
made of him after his one and only film release, East of Eden. He was so under the radar in his career that his
demise attracted only 18 lines in the Tribune
newspaper and only made the front page of the Paso Robles Press newspaper because he was amongst a weekend of
accidents that the paper announced in its headline, WEEKEND CRASH KILL 2, HURT 14 – Dozen Accidents Take Heavy Toll.
His family couldn’t have been less showbizzy. His father a farmer and later a
dentist, his mother, who he was reportedly very close to, dying of cancer when
he was just nine years old. He was packed off to his aunt by his father and had
a childhood of mixed fortune, religion figuring heavily in his formative
years…as did the advances of a priest who befriended our young man (good Lord,
they get everywhere, in every country and in every decade don’t they?). Ursula
Andress had an affair with him and Marlon Brando was fascinated by him, more on
the virility front but also as an actor. As they both came from the same school
of acting.
By now you’ve probably worked out who I’m sketching out? Yup,
James Dean no less and yet had I have asked that before he had that fatal
accident, would you have known? Honest? Unless you were a film-head or under 20
at the time, I doubt it. Now we do, but it’s only after 60 years of
brainwashing that we recognised his supposed brilliance. It’s only posthumously
that Mr. Dean achieved a level of greatness placed upon him by lovers of cool,
becoming a fashion and acting icon of immense proportions to generations of
method actors. His style (hair, clothing, hep-ness) has been used as a template
for ranks of young men. A gay icon (the guy in the stone-washed Levis
With that as a resume, I guess you can say that Mr. Dean
finally arrived by checking out.
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