Grayson ’66

by S. R. Shutt

“It was hell, honey!” Grayson on the making of Polly Maggoo, August 31, 1982

1966. It was the year of tripping, hippies and Yippies. The year of riots, protest marches, sit-ins, be-ins and die-ins. LBJ, SDS, and the Establishment. The fuzz, the creeps, the pigs. Making the scene. Digging the groove. The year of Sunshine Superman and Batmania. Hip, hep, pop. Mad, mod, op. Edie Sedgwick and “the Twig.” The beginnings of Flower Power and the first gaudy shimmerings of the Summer of Love. The year of radical chic and restless hemlines. The year when anything not shiny and plastic was unlikely to attract much attention. It was the year, in retrospect, when the Sixties (in the sense in which most people remember the decade) really got underway. Of course, it was also the year when Dark Shadows debuted. And it was the year Grayson Hall went to Paris to make a movie.

Screenwriter and director William Klein was an American painter who had moved to Paris in 1948. He had promptly married and settled down to a new life there. In the Fifties, more or less by accident, he had begun taking photographs. His book of New York photographs (1956) attracted a lot of attention-outside America; a harbinger of things to come in his career. To this day little known in the US, his work has been appreciated for its unique energy, aesthetic unruliness and sheer innovative extravagance in the art circles of Rome, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, and other cities he has photographed. A recurrent topic in his work has been the fashion world; he captured vivid snapshots from this industry of surreal lunacy in such films as Who are you, Polly Maggoo (1966) and Mode in France (a French Ministry of Culture commission, 1985).

William Klein himself described the mise-en-scene of Polly Maggoo in an interview with a New York Times reporter published about a month after the film was completed. (Note that in the titles for the film, designed and created by Klein himself, the model’s name is spelled Maggoo; in the film itself, it is spelled Magoo.)

“Polly Magoo is an American girl who comes to Paris as a [fashion model]. She appears in a collection in which the models wear clanking armour that an ambitious designer is trying to introduce as the latest vogue. ... Polly is acclaimed by an aggressive, all-powerful fashion editor, a dragon of a woman who rules international taste with an iron hand. Polly is suddenly famous and the public becomes grotesquely interested in her. What is she really like? Does she differ from other girls or is she just the same?

“The inquisition commences: the Qui etes-vous [Who are you?] TV program hectically prepares her portrait for their anxious viewers. She is subjected to interviews, psychotests, hypnosis, magic. Her family albums are explored, but all to no avail. But she must be unmasked, insist the experts, for all mannequins are either extraordinarily unhappy, or mad, usually both.”

After seeing a print of Polly Maggoo (never commercially released in the US, due to a legal dispute between Klein’s co-producer and the distributor), Stanley Kubrick is reported to have informed the auteur that this 1966 film was 10 years ahead of its time. It actually feels like a prophetic Sixties meditation upon many of the themes that continue to obsess us all even now, in the new millennium: the inner lives of supermodels, the all consuming hunger for an invasive media presence, the colonization of our most deeply cherished dreams by movies and television, the notion of American culture as world culture, the sacrifice of a long procession of starved virgins on the altar of high fashion, and on and on. For all its prescience, Polly is also clearly a film of and about a particular cultural moment, circa 1966. Many of Klein’s innovations can be seen resonating with other precocious films of the day-particularly Richard Lester’s Hard Day’s Night (the work of another American expatriate), or John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965).

Grayson was drafted for the role of fashion potentate Miss Maxwell, a character described in the above NY Times article as “the domineering fashion editor before whom all designers cringe. ‘Change is the law of fashion as it is the law of life,’ pontificates this terrifing harpy. ‘Change! Change! Change!’ is her shrill and oft-heard war-cry.” (Unfortunately, the sequences involving this dialogue were cut from the completed film.)

The character of Miss Maxwell was based on Klein’s sometime boss at Vogue, the extraordinary Diana Vreeland, best remembered now for her role in founding the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In the Sixties, Vreeland was exactly the kind of juggernaut depicted in Klein’s film. Slight in stature, she favored bold patterns, big hand gestures, and a stentorian speaking style to get her point across. She was known for her emphatic, sometimes gnomic utterances: “Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola.” Or: “Elegance is refusal.” Or: “Japan is TOTAL.” Probably her most basic motto was “If you can’t do it, FAKE IT.” She could write pages on a topic like “allure.” Klein recalled her in a February 2000 interview with this writer as “a real pain in the ass” whose primary fashion interest around the Polly Maggoo period was “a lot of Indian bullshit” (obliquely alluded to in the Turkish harem derived styles the films costume designer, Klein’s wife Janine, dressed Grayson and her entourage in during a pivotal sequence set in the Vogue offices in Paris). In a somewhat more reflective mood, Klein commented regarding the start of Vreeland’s tenure at Vogue in 1962: “Her arrival was the beginning of the end of my collaboration with Vogue. She was a fashion fundamentalist and saw me as an infidel. The distrust was mutual. Her grail was Pizazz and we were all to assist in her quest. When I asked once, ‘What exactly do you mean by Pizazz?’, she was shocked and almost pained. It was only much later that I found out she was a friend of people like Fred Astaire and Josephine Baker.” (Interestingly, Vreeland herself was the subject of an 8 photo spread in the national US picture weekly, Look magazine, in January 1966, under the telling headline: “Diana Vreeland: she sets the fashion.”)

Originally, Klein wanted New York actress Ruth Gordon for the part of Miss Maxwell. But Gordon did not know French-contrary to current widespread European practice, Klein wanted the actress to be able to loop her own dialogue-and, moreover, was unwilling to put her career on hold for a couple of months to make a trip to Paris. Klein had met Grayson at a party a few years previously, and gotten to know her in the course of various visits to New York; she seemed like the next logical choice when Ruth Gordon proved unavailable. As he recalled recently, Grayson was “a little bit hungry, and crazy enough to do it.” He expressed considerable satisfaction with Grayson’s performance, recalling her as “a very good actress.”

The film certainly gave her the most dramatic entrance of her entire cinematic career. In the midst of the chaotic preparations for a fashion show held inside a huge, Cubistic, beehive-shaped structure, she marches in, lips pursed in disapproval, eyes wide and scrutinizing, a packet of Marlboros, a cigarette lighter and a pair of sunglasses clutched tightly in one hand. Her dress in this initial sequence showed elegant restraint, and included a chic white coat, provocatively draped over one shoulder. As the first model enters wearing a strange confection of angles and curves carried out in shiny, glittery aluminum, all eyes are on Grayson, eagerly and anxiously awaiting her verdict, which bursts like a cry of basso exaltation from her almost feverish lips: “Magnifique!” A triumphant Handelian chorale (the baroque score was the work of Michel Legrand) carries forward the cry of “Magnifique, magnifique, magnifique!” as the camera swirls around a poised procession of models, each in a more unlikely and immobilising suit of haute-couture “armour” than the previous one. The final model appears enveloped in a long steel tube that leaves her unable to move, with a sort of bulb at the top for her breasts and arms. As she is literally elevated (on a lift) over the mob of fashionistas and photographers, with angles that suggest Mary’s Apotheosis, Miss Maxwell leaps to her feet and declaims the line: “He has re-created Woman!” The scene is not only devastatingly beautiful; it’s a brilliant slash at the strange ways in which fashion literally paralyzes women in its cruel but glamorous grip.

Although reviews and summaries of the film describe this sequence as including a scene in which Miss Maxwell acclaims Polly Maggoo as incarnating the new Look, in the final version of the film such a scene does not exist. Instead, Klein cuts away to Polly walking the streets and dealing with the attentions she receives from her obsessed fans. Grayson’s second appearance in the film comes about about a third of the way through the running time. This time she enters in the midst of the rackety but sybaritic melee of the Vogue offices-ladies receiving pedicures, makeovers, noodling away at arcane layouts, or simply gossiping whilst lolling about on cushioned divans. Again, Grayson’s entrance is flamboyant: she swaggers into the room attired in an extraordinary costume that might best be described as “seraglio chic.” A huge turban tied with a black moire bow and a pair of vast earrings composed of intricately worked filigree beads frame her face, heavily painted a la Theda Bara, with glitter eyeshadow shimmering exclamation points above her naughtily gleaming eyes. A vest and blouse in sheer silk provide the backdrop for festoons of gems and a medallion that could have been used by Julia Hoffman a year later as a lethal weapon. Huge pantaloons with gathered pleats emphasize her imperial role as undisputed sultan of this haute-couture satrapy, and little harem slippers provide yet another of those notes of jarring whimsy that were one of Diana Vreeland’s signature points. Her rings spark further fashion explosions, especially the outsized knuckle-duster spyglass ring with the thick black frame that seems to gleam with a frenetic lustre. The scene has barely begun when Miss Maxwell grabs the telephone and begins dictating her latest proclamation, full of bold headlines such as: “Fashion is dead! Long live fashion!” She repeats her battle cry: “The great producer of the female body, Isidore Ducasse, has recreated Woman!” and, with a sly wink, describes his aluminum chic collection as suitable for “The Eve of the Atomic Era!”

The scene degenerates into a slapstick rollercoaster when two dimwitted spies, who have disguised themselves as chimneysweeps, make off with the latest Vogue layouts and scamper around the office to the horror of Miss Maxwell, left covered with cinders and screaming at her staff in complete disarray. The scene is noteworthy for Grayson’s only English dialogue in the film (she tells a stressed assistant to “relax!”, declares the new fashion layouts “divine!,” and hollers to her lackeys to “stop him!” when the disguised chimneysweep absconds with the magazine layouts).

Her ensemble in her final appearance in the film provides one of the sharpest bits of satire upon the trendy fashion sensibilties of the mid Sixties. A cheongsam-styled trapeze dress, accessorized with a huge jewelled brooch pinned to the center of her bosom, completes an image of up-to-date, almost cybernetic femininity. The hairpieces Grayson wears in this scene are those clip-on chignon poufs that gave ladies’ heads the appearance of lapdogs’ tails. With her own hair cinched severely back and the natural exotic geometry of her face accentuated with some extreme eye makeup, and with little lacquered top-knots springing up from the top and sides of her head, Grayson resembles a couture diva from outer space. (Shots of Grayson in this get-up standing on a pedestal leaning into the camera like an immense Byzantine road-runner preparing for flight and shrieking “beep! beep!” occur in the climactic, hyper-paced montage that finishes up the film.)

The scene features Miss Maxwell hectoring the Vogue hairstylists (played by the women who created the coiffures actually used in the film): “Listen to ME, Carita Sisters! We are ready to go to the moon, and you give me Marie-Antoinette curls! It is NOT possible!” She orders a makeover for Polly, demanding that the stylists copy the imperious editor’s own obvious resemblance to a space rocket, a homing beacon that whistles through the air towards its target chirping “Beep! Beep!” The scene ends with Polly marching out of the salon obediently piping “Beep! beep!” Miss Maxwell watches her critically and ponders: “She really doesn’t quite make it as a rocket. She isn’t really the type. She is more the Cinderella type. And Cinderella is going out of style. I’ll have to find another look-another girl! I have an idea!” Her grovelling assistants inform one another excitedly, “SHE has an idea!”

“SHE” had plenty of ideas, but few of them got off the ground in 1966. Grayson returned from her sojourn in Paris armed with plenty of dining-out stories: for instance, how she survived staying in Gore Vidal’s unheated cold-water flat (hopping “like a frog across the lily-pads” from one cushion to another across the floor in the mornings), not to mention the insanity of doing an entire film in French (“it was HELL, honey!” she commented with dramatic relish many years later). But offers, or, at least, ones that interested her, were thin on the ground. She had already appeared in minor roles on such TV series as The Nurses and Route 66, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she rose to the bait of a richly written guest role in the camp hit adventure series of 1966, The Man from UNCLE. The script, “The Pieces of FATE Affair,” was the work of bulldoggish young science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.  It was a curious cocktail, spinning the media hoopla surrounding Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls with self-referential satire upon the typical UNCLE episode plots, and in-jokes about the New York literary scene.  Grayson’s character, Judith Merle (subsequently changed in episode redubbing to Jody Moore), was based upon an actual literary critic and author, Judith Merrill. It’s noteworthy in this regard that two of Grayson’s projects in 1966 had her playing theatrical caricatures of real people. In the case of The Man from UNCLE, the stunt backfired when Merrill sued. Probably the most memorable scene had Grayson lounging in her negligee (“Do you usually work in bed?” “Only ... in the daytime!”) with her THRUSH superior (portrayed by brilliant TV character actor Theo Marcuse): “Ellipsis Zark ... fourteen years top agent of THRUSH ... holder of three medals for meritorious service ... Jody Moore ... world famous critic ... litterateur ... book reviewer ... confidante of authors ... We employ different means ... but we’re both equally skilled ... as assassins.” Her smile as she winds up this long string of phrases is devilishly and delightfully sinister. And she looks more authentically, radiantly glamorous in this short sequence than she did in all the elaborate gewgaw ensembles of Polly Maggoo.

1966 summed up the central contradiction in Grayson’s career: on the one hand making an avant-garde independent film in a foreign language in Europe-a dangerous and rarefied thing for an American actress to do; on the other hand, slumming in the media’s riposte to pop culture with her role in The Man from UNCLE. Her acting in the latter showed a certain rich vein of irony which of course escaped the attention of critics of the day (who routinely regarded all television as trash); portraying cultural “assassin” Judith Merle, she adroitly punctured a few gaseous bubbles of Establishment pretension in her own inimitable way, with a performance and a stance that was uniquely her own. It’s hardly incidental that she also had a lot of fun doing so. Her eventual involvement on Dark Shadows in 1967 may be regarded as Grayson finally figuring out how to make the system work for her. At the end of the DS period, financial security finally gave her the freedom to do a series of avant-garde projects and even some Broadway roles. Her work (especially in such projects as Genet’s The Screens and Brecht’s Happy End) gave her the kind of substantial artistic satisfaction that had eluded her through her years of struggle to establish herself. She also became something of a heroine to millions of young viewers through the courage, elan, and humor she brought into their lives when she created the character of Dr Julia Hoffman. If the past is prelude, it’s not difficult to find the seeds of Julia’s gutsiness, humor, and tenacity in the artistic integrity exemplified in the early career of Grayson Hall. She was truly her own greatest, most luminous creation.