Milking the Moon (55 page)

Crawford, Joan
(1908–1977) An American film star of dozens of movies, Crawford won an Academy Award for best actress in the 1945 film
Mildred Pierce,
in which she played a woman who martyrs herself for her no-good child. The role is an ironic one, considering Crawford’s reputation for being spiteful, jealous, and nasty. Her adopted daughter’s tell-all biography,
Mommy Dearest,
helped to codify Crawford’s persona as a colossal bitch. However, she was purported to have never let a fan letter go unanswered.

Croce, Benedetto
(1866–1952) Italian philosopher. Croce was a prolific writer. His four-volume
Philosophy of the Spirit
is considered his seminal work. Eleanor was one of his four daughters.

cummings, e.e.
(1894–1962) American poet, cummings’s poetry is most recognized for its innovations of syntax and punctuation. The lack of punctuation in his poems and his insistence on lowercasing his name are examples of his resistance to mechanical convention. Although his writing career began in the 1920s, cummings was not recognized as an important poet until the 1950s. cummings moved into 4 Patchin Place in 1924, just after his wife left him for another man. Patchin Place is described by his biographer, Robert S. Kennedy, as a “quiet, tree-shaded court near the old Jefferson market at Sixth Avenue and 10th Street.” He lived there until his death in 1962.

Dagmar, Alexandra
(dates unknown) Famous British music hall queen. She was sponsored by the Schuberts in America, where she performed in operettas. She is buried in Mobile. She should not be confused with the famous variety actress and friend of Noel Coward’s known as Gertrude Lawrence, whose real name was Alexandra Dagmar.

Davenport, John
(dates unknown) British journalist. Davenport was an editor for a couple of literary journals in England just after World War II. He coedited
Arena: A Literary Magazine
from 1949 to 1951. He also worked on the journal
Circus: The Pocket Review of Our Time,
where he was one of three editors.
Circus
was quite short-lived, running only three issues from April to June 1950.

De Acosta, Mercedes
(1893–1968) American bon vivant. Although de Acosta wrote some poetry, she is better known for her love affairs. She had affairs with dancer Isadora Duncan and with film star Marlene Dietrich. For years de Acosta was rumored to have had an affair with Greta Garbo. Her letters from Garbo were unsealed in April 2000, ten years after Garbo died, and are generally held to have verified the rumor that they had an affair but that for the majority of their relationship they were friends.

De Reszke, Jean
(1850–1925) Polish-born operatic tenor. De Reszke performed to acclaim in leading roles in most of the French and Italian operas. He performed in some Wagnerian operas as well.

Derwood, Gene
(1909–1954) American poet; married to Oscar Williams. A collection of Derwood’s poetry, entitled simply
Poems,
was published posthumously in 1955.

De Wilde, Brandon
(1942–1972) American actor of stage, radio, and film, best known when he was a child. De Wilde’s role in the play
Member of the Wedding,
his first at the age of eight, earned him the prestigious Donaldson Award for best debut performance of the 1949–50 season. De Wilde performed in several plays on the radio program
Theatre Guild of the Air.
As he got older, he lost much of his appeal. He had some forgettable roles in a few films before he died at the age of thirty.

Dinesen, Isak
(1885–1962) Danish writer. Isak Dinesen was the pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen, author of several works including
Out of Africa
(1937). Dinesen married Baron Bror Blixen in 1914 and moved with him to a coffee plantation in Kenya. Although they divorced in 1921, Dinesen continued to live on the plantation for the next ten years.
Out of Africa
is based on her life and experiences in Kenya.

duBois, William Pène
(1916–1993) American writer and illustrator of children’s literature; founding editor of
Paris Review.
DuBois, who was the son of the art critic and painter Guy Pène duBois, won several awards for his work in children’s literature.

Duhamel, Georges
(1884–1966) French physician by profession; novelist, essayist, critic, dramatist, and travel diarist; director of
Mercure de France,
a literary magazine, 1935—1937. Among the dozens of works published by Duhamel is a collection of essays entitled
La Possession du Monde
(1919; English translation:
The Heart’s Domain). La Table Ronde
was a subsidiary of the publishing house of Plon, whose offices were at 8 rue Garancière.

du Plessix
,
Francine
(b. 1930) French-born American writer. In addition to several novels and works of nonfiction, du Plessix has contributed articles, stories, and reviews for periodicals including
The New Yorker,
the
New York Review of Books,
and the
New Republic.
She published
At Home with the Marquis de Sade
in 1998 and is currently at work on a novel.

Edwards, Blake
(b. 1922) American film director and producer. Some of the films that Edwards directed are
Operation Petticoat
(1959),
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1961),
Days of Wine and Roses
(1963), and the Pink Panther movies, beginning with
The Pink Panther
(1964). He had a lull of hits until 1979, when he directed
10.
In recent years his best-known work was
Victor/Victoria,
in which he directed his wife, Julie Andrews.

Eliot, T. S.
(1888–1965) Anglo-American poet, dramatist. Although a native of St. Louis, Missouri, and a graduate of Harvard, Eliot was an Anglophile who lived the majority of his life in Great Britain. Many of his poems, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and
The Waste Land
(1922), are masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, and his essays have become standards of literary criticism. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eliot’s first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, suffered from severe mental illness, and Eliot’s efforts to support her contributed to his own breakdown in 1921, when he spent six months under psychiatric treatment in Switzerland. Ten years after Haigh-Wood’s death, Eliot married Esme Valerie Fletch, who had been his secretary for six years and was almost forty years his junior. The marriage is believed to have been a happy one.

Ellison, Ralph
(1914–1994) African-American writer. His novel
Invisible Man
won the National Book Award. From 1955 to 1957, Ellison was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where he meet Eugene.

Evans, Edith
(1913–1976) English actress. Although Evans acted in some films, her career was most successful in the theater. She made her New York debut in 1931 and began a career of performing in Shakespeare comedies and tragedies, in Restoration comedy, and in plays by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Her films include
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1951),
Tom Jones
(1963), and
A Doll’s House
(1973).

Fargue, Jean-Paul
(1876–1947) French journalist and poet. In the beginning of his career, with the publishing in 1894 of
Tancred,
Fargue’s literary focus was on poetry. In the 1920s he published in
Commerce
with Paul Valéry. In the 1930s his writing and focus had turned to journalism.

Faulkner, William
(1897–1962) American novelist. Born in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote novels that were formally innovative and that focused on the social and psychological complexities of the American South, such as
The Sound and the Fury
(1931) and
Absalom, Absalom!
(1937). Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and a Pulitzer for
A Fable
(1955) and another for
The Reivers
(1962). During the 1950s Faulkner did a great deal of traveling in America, Europe, and Japan on the lecture circuit.

Fellini, Federico
(1920–1993) Italian film director, screenwriter; considered a major auteur. Although he was born in Rimini, a resort town on the Adriatic Sea, Fellini said that when he moved to Rome in 1938, it felt like going home. From a young age, Fellini had a fascination for performance and theater. His mother once said that he “always loved comic things and crazy, unexpected things” like carnivals and circuses. As a child he would stage his own puppet shows.

Fellini became an internationally renowned director and won a string of film awards, including six Oscars: five for best foreign film for the movies
La Strada
(1954),
Nights of Cabiria
(1956),
La Dolce Vita
(1960),
8½
(1963), and
Amarcord
(1973); and a special Oscar for his body of work in 1993. Critics have used the term
Felliniesque
to discuss the unique quality of his cinematic vision and the coherence of his work, which was said to be autobiographical, but not in a conventionally narrative way.

According to Fellini’s biographer Edward Murray, the quality of spontaneity and naturalness in his films upon which so many critics have commented may be, in part, a consequence of his childhood belief that movie actors made up the film’s plot and dialogue spontaneously. As Eugene points out, Fellini was a great student of humankind, and he was able to elicit innovative and fresh performances from his actors. He said that “faces are more important to me than anything else” and that casting is “the most important element of filmmaking.” That he cast his wife, Giulietta Masina, whom he married in 1943, in six of his films suggests how important she was to his work.

It is interesting to note that in Murray’s biography of Fellini,
Fellini the Artist,
he mentions Eugene’s “interview” of Fellini and “quotes” Fellini as saying, “Cinema is an old whore like circus and variety who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure.”

Fields, W. C.
(1880–1946) American comedian. Fields, who began his career as an expert juggler, worked in the Ziegfeld follies from 1915 to 1921. From 1923 to 1935, Fields performed in revues across the country; Eugene apparently saw him in one of these. Fields’s work in films began in the 1920s and includes
My Little Chickadee
(1940) and
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
(1941).

Ford, Charles Henri
(b. 1913) American poet born in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Ford has been called the first American surrealist poet. In 1940 he founded the publication
View
as a vehicle through which to introduce American readers to the work of surrealist authors like William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens. He was editor of
View
from 1940 to 1947. His sister Ruth Ford is the actress for whom William Faulkner wrote the play
Requiem for a Nun.

Fry, Christopher
(b. 1907) English playwright. In the postwar period, Fry enjoyed popularity with his plays
Phoenix Too Frequent
and
The Lady’s Not for Burning,
both 1949. By the mid-1950s, his drama fell out of vogue, which may explain his uncredited work on the screenplay of
Ben-Hur
(1959).

Galbraith, John Kenneth
(b. 1908) American scholar of economics. Galbraith has been a Harvard economics professor since 1949 and has been an emeritus professor since 1975. He has written many books, including
The Affluent Society
(1958) and
The Culture of Contentment
(1992).

Gale, Edra
(b. 1921) American actress. Gale appeared in Fellini’s
8½.

Garbo, Greta
(1905–1990) Swedish actress who retired at age thirty-six and became rather reclusive. She was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood at the time. She received an Honorary Academy Award in 1954. Her affair with Mercedes de Acosta was intense but short-lived.

Garland, Judy
(1922–1969) American film and recording star made famous by her role as Dorothy in
The Wizard of
Oz (1939). By the time Eugene met Garland in (what was probably late) 1967, she had been suffering years of well-publicized problems with drugs and ill health. Her reputation for emotional instability made her something of a pariah in show business in the latter half of her career. Garland made her first of several suicide attempts after being fired from a movie. Eventually she could no longer function professionally, and in 1950 MGM suspended her contract. She made what was her final performance in a London nightclub in late 1968, and perhaps this is the show to which Eugene alludes as the one for which Garland was rehearsing. She died several months after of a drug overdose.