“All I ever wanted was to lead a simple life, with one man to love, and to love me.”
Imbued by fever, reader, and dreams too, I return to you with a weary heart. Sat perched above my laptop, sweaty and panting, in the loneliness of November I’ve had much to contend with.
Ten or so years ago, there was a boy I adored - face-flushed and gushing - who undoubtedly now does not remember me. Through the foolish gossip of school corridors, I found out a fact that I’ve never forgotten. Picture this: You’re in an English village. Six boys, of seventeen or so, sit within a dingy Wetherspoons. Sticky tables and fingerprints, chips trodden into the gaudy, garish carpet. Clinked drinks glasses and ambient, swelling laughter.
“Leah’s hot, but she’s a bit weird isn't she?”
Shirley MacLaine in What a Way to Go! (1964) dir. J. Lee Thompson.
I’ve always pined to be the dream girl, baby-angel, and I’ve never been able to get there. Curls pinched and pursed, brite and beaming, meaty and malleable. A porcelain doll with posable arms. A distant figure chants from the back row, impatiently so, “Enough exposition!”
I clear my throat. I check my phone.
I’ve wanted to write to you, reader, for as long as I can recall ‘On the greatest movie you’ve never heard of’: 1964’s What a Way to Go!, directed by J. Lee Thompson. Instead, as I reflect upon this film in its totality with poor critical rigour, I’ve instead decided to write in little bits and pieces on the ‘dream girl’, or rather the idea of being the ‘dream girl’.
Trawling through Tumblr late into the nite, she comes to me. Beyond fluttered lashes sits a wisp of candy-flossed curls: the girl of all mood boards adorned in pink, Louisa May Foster. A black-comedy-come-musical, What a Way to Go! charts Louisa’s journey through countless men, in a desperate attempt to find her one, true, be-all-end-all love. It is, undoubtedly, one of my favourite films of all time. Within the opening scene, we see Louisa solemnly bounding down the staircase of a bubblegum-rich nineteen-sixties palace, wrapped in black, head-to-toe. Tears gently flooding down powdered cheeks, she enters a widow amidst pink marble.
Her husband is dead. She is lost.
Moments later, a cascade of black tulle wades around her, as Louisa rests upon a leather chaise longue, hidden in the clinical privacy of her psychiatrist’s office. Throughout the black-comedy-romp, Louisa time and time again reflects upon lost loves, pining for what once could have been. Within a litany of flashbacks, we see her lovers laid bare before us.
To name but a few: shop-front owner Edgar Hopper, tortured artist Larry Flint, millionaire tycoon Rod Anderson and, finally, beloved entertainer Pinky Benson.
What I find remarkable, reader, is that amidst its humour remains a very real truth - the need to be needed, and what I shall refer to as ‘becoming the other’. Through each and every phase of Louisa’s life, from one husband to the next, Louisa loses all sense of self.
Take it with a grain of salt, baby-angel - this film built for laughs and adoration - but Louisa has always stuck with me, through it all, for I identify with her aimlessness. Pining for a man that doesn’t really love you, doesn’t really know you, but sees you as an extension of himself. A plaything, an accessory, a fantasy to project onto. Manic-pixie-dream-girled, all over again, God.
The first phase of the ‘dream girl’ occurs as, gingham-clad and wet from cold waters, Louisa swims toward her soon-to-be lover, Edgar Hopper, as a clumsy kind of siren. Sitting in the sanctity of his simple boat, fishing attire abound, Edgar literally reels her in, rod-in-hand. She climbs aboard and sits beside him, recalling a quote from American philosopher Henry David Thoreau.
“Our lives are frittered away by detail...”
“…Simplify, simplify,” they chant in perfect harmony.
And so, it begins.
“A girl who can quote Thoreau!”, Edgar beams.
“Oh, I couldn’t quote him before I went to the library this morning. I’d never even heard of him before yesterday.”
Dick Van Dyke and Shirley MacLaine in What a Way to Go! (1964) dir. J. Lee Thompson.
Whiling away a day beneath the Summer sun, Hopper and Foster canoodle together, now both gingham-clad in country-bumpkin attire. She paints the picture of a perfect lover: doe-eyed, besotted, pouring herself into him. Becoming half of one whole, she is the mythic ‘dream girl’, calm girl, cool girl, anything you want girl. The dilemma with which this poses, reader, is that self-conceptualisation is finite. No girl can be perfect forever, plump, perky, amenable. Something’s got to give. Idealising her new found country-bound life, Louisa breathlessly reflects on their life together as “a wonderful, old silent movie.”
Scene: Jaunty piano keys jump up-and-down as, black-and-white and bouncing, Louisa dances around their shared cabin kitchen to prepare dinner, placing a pie into the oven, and preparing a pot atop the stove. In four steady successions, an intertitle lingers on screen, momentarily: Never mind darling, love conquers all. Then, before she knows it, pipes-bursting, Louisa’s real world falls all around her. Cooped up in their cabin and pulled away from her daydream, a gush of water wades in through a faulty pipe, drenching her wet and bringing her right-back-down to the roughness of Earth.
It seems the life she pined for was better in fiction than in reality.
Never mind darling, love conquers all.
As the pipes burst, something snaps in Edgar and, overnight, he changes. Entranced by work, wealth and ephemeral success, Edgar slowly, day-by-day-by-day, recedes from Louisa’s life. She becomes background noise, a nuisance, a lost doll no longer needed.
Throughout the duration of What a Way to Go!, each and every time, Louisa’s lovers become entranced by success - the pursuit of it, the idea of it, the ego drive it provides - so much so that she becomes denigrated to doting wife, bastion and ballast. And yet, as soon as her lover calls, she runs to him, whoever he is, with urgency. I never thought I’d find a comedy this sad, but I’ve been that girl, I am that girl, angel - a ghost in another man’s home, adopting idioms that don’t really belong to me.
We return to the psychiatrist's office, the chaise longue growing higher and higher and higher, Louisa reeling until she reaches the ceiling. In desperate search of something new, Louisa recounts her impulsive escape to Paris, finding herself alone.
“What was I doing in Paris, 4,500 miles away from home?” She bemoans, bewildered.
“It was fate. I had come to meet Larry Flint, an unspoiled, dedicated artist, searching in his own troubled way for the simple life.”
Shirley MacLaine and Paul Newman in What a Way to Go! (1964) dir. J. Lee Thompson.
Hauled forth to the anarchy of the artist’s studio, she becomes inquisitive, amused by Larry, as his run-down Paris apartment is littered with abstract impressionist works. Slowly, but surely, she falls for him. Scene: No, no silent film, but rather the epitome of sixties French New Wave. In turtle-neck-and-pencil-skirt, hair piled high as a Bardot bouffant, Louisa slinks around their now-shared Paris apartment as a parodied Anna Karina. Fragrant strings ensue as she is taken by him within the pits of their desolate bedroom, camera panning to darkness.
She re-emerges, next scene, as a new kind of dream girl, no longer country bumpkin but instead, the artist’s muse. A pattern begins to reveal itself, reader, as Louisa falls in deep, becoming ‘the other’, half of that whole, while her one-true-love falls into the pursuit of greatness, casting her to the side.
She is ‘good girl’: accessory, assistant, muse. Yet, she pines as I do, indulging all advances in earnest want of adoration.
At the culmination of their fraught relationship, the grand opening of Larry’s solo show arrives, to which the camera swiftly pans to Louisa - now completely absorbed by his abstract world. She stands splashed in cobalt blue, magenta and yellow, as a living painting. Beyond muse and inspiration, now an object to behold.
“I was just another canvas to him, just another walking catalogue.”
Louisa tries, and fails, to flee Paris in pure desperation. Instead she finds herself alone, listless, stranded at the airport. As if by magic, a new lover appears by dead of nite: millionaire tycoon Rod Anderson. Impulsive, enraptured, besotted once again, Louisa boards his private plane to New York, in earnest search of normalcy. Ushered in by his domination, she sits by the bar adorned in chestnut fur, in total silence.
A waiter approaches. Rod orders for her, without asking.
Now trapped, strapped in the cockpit, Rod takes the wheel and departs for New York, for good. Married once again, Louisa re-appears in a new home, a new life, as a new girl. Finding herself in pursuit of perfection, she gives in to whatever her love requires at any given moment. From the clattering, black-and-white silent film of Edgar, and Larry’s Sixties sex romp, another new scene emerges: a lush production of Rod and Louisa as the classical Hollywood couple. Adorned in orange ostrich feathers, the dream girl returns to the soundstage. Repeated scenes ensure, each time Louisa emerging in a perfect, monochromatic moment. Orange, ice-white, lemon yellow, in fur and feathers and diamonds.
Lulled to sleep in a champagne glass of satin, framed by pearlescent velvet drapes, Louisa’s imagined movie once again draws to its inevitable close.
Shirley MacLaine and Gene Kelly in What a Way to Go! (1964) dir. J. Lee Thompson.
Another lover becomes besotted by his own brilliance. Louisa exists only as inspiration, an idea, an object to project want onto. She emerges, for the final time, as the visual manifestation of Pinky Benson, big-time entertainer. That image you’ve seen reblogged, reader, time and time again, adorned in all-pink chinchilla fur, bubblegum curls above her head, offset by magenta gemstones. Within a pivotal scene she stands alone, retrieving a pink satin handkerchief to dab her would-be pink tears.
We return to the psychiatrist’s office, chaise longue now back to Earth. The one man she confides in, her psychiatrist, confesses his love to her.
I sit in my chair, now, and ask myself what I want, and what I need. I’d like to be myself, not what a man wants of me.