Best Bitches

There seem to be some unwritten rules when it comes to how TV and movies portray friendship. In slasher movies, friends are indistinguishable from bullies, competing to see who’s the bigger asshole until they’re beheaded by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Male friendships are usually situational, and usually action-adventure related: a grizzled cop assigned a rookie/loose cannon partner, or two partners in crime out to make one last score. In either case, they’re too busy blowing shit up to get hung up on how much they mean to each other because #NoHomo.

Kurt Russell never knew he was the wind beneath Sly’s wings.

In “chick flicks,” however, female friendships tend to go way back, sometimes as far back as elementary school, and last a lifetime, with no chainsaw-wielding maniac in sight to put them out of their misery. The 1980s were (roughly) bookended by two such stories, 1981’s RICH AND FAMOUS and 1988’s BEACHES, both telling essentially the same story, though with significantly different results.

The friendship in Rich and Famous dates to the 1950s, when Liz Hamilton (Jacqueline Bisset), beautiful, studious and English, and Merry Noel Blake (Candice Bergen), beautiful, shallow and Southern, were roommates at Smith College. Merry elopes with Doug (David Selby), moving to California, becoming a well-off stay-at-home mom. Liz, on the other hand, becomes an Important Writer, her first novel garnering acclaim among the intelligentsia who clamor for a second book that Liz can’t seem to finish.

Merry hasn’t been spending all her time cleaning her beachside house in Malibu and raising her daughter Debby. When she and Liz reconnect in 1969, Merry sheepishly reveals she’s written a roman à clef based on her famous neighbors, one of whom has “become far too familiar with drugs, some of which he puts up his nose!”

Merry and Doug have an unsatisfying night.

Merry then proceeds to read the manuscript to her. It’s clear Liz is not impressed, and a little angry that her friend—not a real writer—is encroaching on her territory (and possibly pissed she’s been kept up all night by Merry’s reading). However, though Liz makes a lot of oblique jabs, she refrains from explicitly criticizing Merry’s book, leaving Merry to believe she liked her novel. Merry urges Liz to show the manuscript to her publisher and though Liz resists at first, she ultimately does, assuming her publisher is too high-minded to even entertain buying it.

You pretty much know what happens next. By 1975, Merry has become a wildly successful—and very prolific—author of trash fiction in the tradition of Jacqueline Susann or Judith Krantz (though she has more in common with Jackie Collins as a talk show personality). This is also the point where Rich and Famous becomes two different films. Merry charges through the rest of the movie like a neurotic Prime Time soap villain, her hair perfectly coiffed and swaddled in fur coats, getting into arguments with whomever is in her path—with her husband, who leaves her; with her teenaged daughter Debby (Meg Ryan in her film debut), who leaves her; and, crucially, with Liz.

Merry is unfazed by Doug’s threats.

If Bergen acts as if she’s in Valley of the Dolls, or maybe 101 Dalmatians, Bisset, who co-produced (though only her production company Jacquet is credited), acts as if she’s in The Turning Point, giving a relatively grounded performance as she glides gracefully through her scenes looking fabulous in silk blouses and pencil skirts, but also looking the same no matter what decade she’s supposed to be in (Bergen’s fashions may be outrageous, but at least they suggest the passage of time, whereas Bisset spends the entire movie stuck in 1978).

Liz joins the mile high club with widower Max (an uncredited Michael
Brandon). Spoiler: Max’s wife is very much alive.

Matt Lattanzi and Jacqueline Bisset audition
for their 1983 movies My Tutor and Class.

The movie also doesn’t quite know what to do with Liz, apparently finding her well-respected work as boring as the audience does. So, the movie instead focuses on Liz’s sex life. She joins the mile high club with a 30-something “widower” she meets on a flight to New York (“We hope your flight has been pleasurable,” a flight attendant intones over the cabin speakers as Liz is getting plowed in the airplane’s bathroom). Later, she’s seduced by an 18-year-old gigolo in nut-crunchingly tight jeans (Olivia Newton-John’s then future ex-husband Matt Lattanzi), before ultimately settling into a doomed romance with Chris (Hart Bochner), a 22-year-old Rolling Stone reporter.

I first thought the movie was trying to emphasize how Liz is a sexually liberated woman, in contrast to Merry who, despite writing a lot about sex, is a puritan at heart. In one of Liz and Merry’s many arguments, Liz asks Merry just how many men one must fuck to qualify as a slut. “Three!” Merry snaps. But ascribing a deeper meaning to Liz’s dalliances is giving Rich and Famous too much credit. Liz is down to fuck because how long are people going to sit for her discussing T.S. Elliot and D.H. Lawrence with Hart Bochner?

Merry and Liz have yet another fight.

Rich and Famous is a remake of the 1943 film Old Acquaintance, starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, though George Ayres’ screenplay has more in common with a Sidney Sheldon novel than the original John Van Druten play. The movie is capably directed by Golden Age Hollywood director George Cukor, but even he can’t elevate the film. Rich and Famous is just trash.

Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen toast
making it to the end of Rich and Famous.

But while being trash makes Rich and Famous an unfortunate final bow for Cukor, who died in 1983 at age 83, it’s for that very reason it’s worth checking out. Merry would be insufferable in real life, but Bergen’s portrayal of her livens up the film considerably. When I saw this movie in 1981, I’d only known Bergen as The Golden Turkey Awards’ nominee for the Lifetime Achievement Award – Worst Actress. The nomination was unfair, it turned out (Raquel Welch was the “winner,” which I also disagree with). I’ll concede that Bergen can be a bit wooden in dramatic roles, but fortunately the role of Merry allows Bergen to showcase her flair for comedy. Though her Southern accent is better suited for an SNL sketch than a serious movie, I can overlook that when Bergen’s delivering such lines as “We all have these little bits in our pants, that doesn’t mean we have to pick at them all the time,” and “If you get to thinking about boys too much, just get on the back of a horse.” You’ll never buy that these two women would still exchange Christmas cards, let alone maintain a close friendship for more than two decades, but Bergen’s over-the-top performance makes it worth watching.

From Trash to Schmaltz

Rich and Famous was a commercial failure when it was released in 1981, but that didn’t stop Disney’s Touchstone Pictures from peddling the same story seven years later when it released Beaches in 1988.

Though the two films have the shared theme of an enduring friendship forged between opposites, they do have some key differences. The friends in Rich and Famous are on a level playing field, both being attractive, privileged women (Merry might be the rich one, but apparently there is considerable cash to be made writing magazine think pieces, judging by Liz’s a picturesque riverside farmhouse in Connecticut). In Beaches, the friendship is between the tough-talking, working-class C.C. Bloom (Bette Midler) and the wealthy, conventionally attractive Hillary (Barbara Hershey). In Rich and Famous, Liz and Merry are in competition with each other in the world of publishing, whereas in Beaches C.C. is an entertainer and Hillary is an attorney. The biggest difference of all: Rich and Famous ends with a gay panic joke; Beaches ends with the death of one of its main characters. I would apologize for the spoiler, but the movie pretty much gives it away in the first 10 minutes, when C.C.’s concert rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl is interrupted with the news that Hillary is in the hospital. 

Before she was Blossom or annoying, Mayim Bialik
killed it as Lil’ C.C. in Beaches.

The movie flashes back to Atlantic City in the late 1950s, when a lost 11-year-old Hillary, played by Marcie Leeds, vacationing with her family, meets 11-year-old C.C., played by Miyam “Ask me about my Ph.D. in neuroscience!” Bialik (in fairness, while Bialik is kind of annoying today, she is pretty great in this early role). Hillary is fascinated by this brash girl she meets under the Boardwalk, and C.C. is eager to please her new fan. Even though the girls live on different coasts, they maintain their friendship through frequent letters (the Iris Rainer-Dart novel on which Beaches is based tells much of its story through the main characters’ letters).

Too bad he’s not a furry: John Pierce (John Heard) is more
 into Hillary at first meeting.

Their friendship is tested in adulthood, especially whenever the two women are in the same room together. They’re all squeals and hugs in the late 1960s, when they share a cramped New York walk-up, C.C. singing in dive bars and delivering/performing singing telegrams and Hillary working for the ACLU. Their friendship becomes strained, however, when they fall for the same man, theater director John Pierce (the late John Heard).

She’ll cut a bitch.

Not pictured: Barbara Hershey and
Bette Midler

The film settles into a pattern: C.C. and Hillary reunite, resume their friendship, then fight/separate abruptly. Along the way the women marry—C.C. to John; Hillary to Michael Essex (James Read), a snooty attorney who is most definitely not a fan of his wife’s tacky friend—only to get divorced a few years later. C.C. finally achieves her dream of stardom, her bawdy musical revue making her the toast of Broadway in the early 1970s, but near the decade’s end she’s hoping recording a disco album will revive her flagging career (Beaches none too subtly mimics the ups and downs of Midler’s own career). Disco can wait, though, C.C. deciding to stick around in San Francisco to help Hillary through her pregnancy (a parting gift from Michael). Things take a ridiculous turn when C.C. begins dating Hillary’s OB/GYN (the late Spalding Gray), uncharacteristically considering abandoning show business to become his wife. That is, until she gets a call from her agent about a part in a play that’s perfect for her, leaving abruptly for New York—and leaving Hillary to break the bad news to her doctor. “He’d take it coming from you,” C.C. says. “He’s your gynecologist!”

Hillary questions C.C.’s choices, but not that hair.

Hillary returns to practicing law, balancing her career and motherhood (easier to do when you’re already rich). But then she’s diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy, a condition that, though fatal, ensures Hillary will remain looking lovely on her way out. Cue “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

It’s titled Beaches for a reason.

The Divine Miss M adds one more ballad to
Beaches’ bestselling soundtrack.

Though novelist Rainer-Dart reportedly had Cher in mind when she conceived the character of C.C. (Cee Cee in the book), the role is tailor made for Midler. The role not only shows off Midler’s strengths as an entertainer, it also provides Midler an opportunity to recycle re-introduce past material, as she does when C.C. performs the ditty “Otto Titsling,” originally featured on her 1985 comedy album Mud will be Flung Tonight. Hershey is good, too, counterbalancing Midler’s flamboyance with a relatively restrained performance, but really, the part of Hillary could just as well be credited as The Other One (Hershey got more publicity for getting collagen lip injections for the film than she did for her performance in it). This is Bette’s show.

Beaches was remade in 2017 as a Lifetime
 TV movie, starring Idina Menzel
 and Nia Long, retroactively making
the 1988 original look like Terms
of Endearment. Menzel and Long do alright
with what they’re given, and the script even
improves on the original slightly by
eliminating that romance between C.C.
 and Hillary’s gynecologist, but otherwise
 it’s about what you would expect.
Put another way: don’t bother.

Beaches was a box office hit when it was released in 1988, solidifying Midler’s status as a movie star. Its soundtrack was an even bigger hit, reviving Midler’s then dormant singing career. I love Midler, so much that I saw Jinxed! during its theatrical run and liked it (c’mon, she’s done much, much worse). Yet even though it’s one of Midler’s better movies, Beaches is not a favorite. Director Garry Marshall adeptly balances the comedy and drama, but the laughs are mild—I laughed more often watching Rich and Famous—and the drama hollow. Marshall’s roots in TV sit-coms are readily apparent, the result being that Beaches has more in common with A Very Special Episode than a big screen dramedy, with all the edges sanded down for a wide audience. This reputed weepie failed to jerk a single tear from my eyes, probably because I’m dead inside, but I also blame it on the fact that many of Beaches’ emotional beats feel manipulative. Rich and Famous may be trash, but Beaches is schmaltz.

Another reason I’m not a huge fan of Beaches has nothing to do with the movie itself but what it represents. It’s the demarcation line in Midler’s career when she went from being that raucous performer adored by your gay uncle to that sappy balladeer your mom likes (mitigating factor: by 1988, your gay uncle was probably dead). Instead of growing Midler settled, making saccharine dramedies (Stella; For the Boys) and comedies of varying quality, the best of which being her 1996 hit The First Wives Club, though even that movie falls short of its potential, Olivia Goldsmith’s novel being transformed from dark revenge fantasy to frothy—and toothless—romp. The Divine Miss M persona Midler had crafted throughout the ’70s only got trotted out for unsuspecting moms during live performances. Millennials likely only know her as the star of Hocus Pocus. For Gen Z, she’s just another Boomer celebrity tweeting herself into hot water.

Beaches may be the more successful ‘80s movie about female friendship, but it’s the ‘70s-style trashiness of Rich and Famous that I always return to. Love the Beaches soundtrack, though.

Candice Bergen and Bette Midler have each starred in more recent movies about life-long
friendships among women, now a staple in the SCAPT subgenre. Book Club was enjoyable, but its sequel, Book Club: The Next Chapter, was fucking painful. I haven’t seen The Fabulous Four yet, but the reviews have not been glowing.

Short Takes: ‘Butterflies in Heat’ (1979) ★ ½

In 1986 Butterflies in Heat appeared
on video store shelves as Tropic of Desire
(no, not that one), masquerading
as a sexy romance.

I’ll give this much to Butterflies in Heat, the 1979 film adaptation of Darwin Porter’s 1976 novel: it’s got a hell of an opening shot. The first thing we see onscreen is a close-up of the lead actor’s crotch, his jeans adorned with an elaborate butterfly patch placed over where the head of his dick rests. OK, I’m intrigued.

That lead actor is 1970s model Matt Collins, who plays Numie Chase, a hustler who’s come down to Key West, Florida, to put as many miles as possible between him and a potential murder charge in New York City. While there he meets Lola (the incomparable Eartha Kitt), a nightclub singer who loves white wigs, referring to herself in the third person, and pretty young men like Numie. However, she has no intention of paying for it (“People pay Lola,” she informs him). Numie then spots Anne (bland Roxanne Gregory), sitting alone in a corner of the same tawdry club, his interest in her strictly recreational. Anne resists his advances, but only because she is afraid of incurring the wrath of her domineering mother, Leonora (Barbara Baxley), supposedly a very rich and very famous fashion designer though her decaying mansion suggests the money and fame are disappearing fast. Numie instead settles for fucking (off-screen) Anne’s no-so-closeted husband (Numie says he doesn’t usually service dudes, but the watch he’s offered as payment is valued at $1,000). Rounding out the cast of characters is Leonora’s plus-sized housekeeper/assistant Tangerine (Pat Carroll), who is willing to pay for Numie’s body but settles for his friendship instead, and Sheriff Webb (Bert Williams), who appears periodically to rough up Numie and arrest him on spurious charges.

Butterflies in Heat—the book and the movie—sounds like the kind shit I’d love. It’s Tennessee Williams via glory hole or, at the very least, a queer 92 in the Shade. Instead, I found both to be tedious and frustrating. I bought a copy of Porter’s novel when it was re-released in the mid-1990s with a cover more befitting a gay porn video, my hopes high that I’d found some trash I could truly treasure. I barely made it through 75 pages before giving up. Porter, it turned out, was more interested in having his female (and female-presenting) characters deliver paragraphs of fanciful dialog than in Numie unleashing the monster caged within his butterfly-festooned jeans. Its gay sensibility was aimed not at bath house sluts, as its X-rated cover art suggested, but at drag cabaret queens.

I likely would have been just as disappointed if I bought
the 1976 paperback edition of Butterflies in Heat (left),
but at least that cover doesn't arouse expectations as high—
and as hard—as the raunchy cover for the 1997 edition.

Director Cash Baxter’s movie adaptation similarly let me down despite all it had going for it. Though the film’s budget was obviously meager, the production is fittingly seedy, and the cast of mostly TV veterans doubles its value. Kitt’s Lola—a drag queen in the book but more ambiguous here—is almost single-handedly worth the price of admission. Carroll, a character actor perhaps best known today as the voice of Ursula in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, takes what could easily be described as The Shelley Winters Role and makes the character Tangerine her own. The least interesting performances are by Collins and Gregory, but then they are saddled with Butterflies’ least interesting characters. Though screenwriters Tony (Point of Terror) Crechales and George (The Killing Kind) Edwards reign in the book’s long-winded dialog, they also water down its gay appeal and any potential the movie had of becoming a camp classic. And forget any sexy fun. The movie’s one (one!) sex scene is fairly tepid, with only Gregory showing any skin. Despite everyone lusting after Numie, Collins, who sort of resembles Nathan Fillion in his Firefly days, seldom even takes off his shirt, let alone his pants.

Butterflies in Heat was released on video in 1986 under the title Tropic of Desire—“not to be confused with the same-named porno movie,” the IMDb trivia page cheekily warns. Likely anyone renting the porn movie by mistake would’ve been less disappointed. At least that Tropic of Desire delivers what it promises; not so this cock tease of a movie.

Short Takes: ‘Mr. Wonderful’ (2022) ★ ½

Shouldn’t documentaries have a point? One would think so, but then one isn’t Larry Costa, the director of Mr. Wonderful, a 47-minute documentary which purports to tell the story of Charles Phillips, a middle-aged gay man, presumably unhoused, with a long rap sheet, substance abuse issues, and delusions of grandeur.

Phillips’ stream-of-consciousness rambling about his past is oddly compelling, even if it’s clear that much of it is bullshit. Costa juxtaposes Phillips’ tales of resisting a marriage proposal with his many mugshots, as well as a list of his many charges (DUI, drug dealing, abduction). When Phillips talks of helping older people, Costa inserts text on screen revealing that Phillips was convicted in 2010 of abusing a 65-year-old neighbor. Often, the onscreen text is sarcastic, e.g., when Phillips loses his place in his story (“Damn, that reefer good!”), the text on the right hand on the screen reads “Intelligent!” When Phillips finds his place in that story and talks of being hired as a butler/gofer for a wealthy man, replacing his predecessor to whom Phillips regularly sold crack and ass (crack and crack?), because he showed “respect, honesty and loyalty” to his client’s boss, the text on screen reads: “Tip: Get friend fired, then take his job.” Phillips also has ambitions of being a rap artist, which Costa encourages, offering him a chance to record a few tracks, but it’s clear Costa is more interested in getting footage of Phillips making an ass of himself than helping him pursue his dream. Phillips biggest failure as a rapper, by the way, is his inability to stay focused long enough to spit out more than a single bar.

Wisely, Costa refrains from the snarky chyrons when Phillips graphically recounts the sexual abuse he endured at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend when he was 6 years old. It’s also one of the few times Phillips is likely telling the truth. Had this documentary been about LGBTQ+ homelessness or queer sex workers, the abuse revelations might have been allowed to provide insight into Phillips’ life of bad choices. But that’s not a story Costa is interested in telling; he just wants the viewer to know Charles Phillips is full of shit.

Charles Phillips doesn’t necessarily deserve the viewers’ sympathy, but viewers do deserve a real documentary. Mr. Wonderful has more in common with a YouTube video of teens ridiculing homeless people in the park for views, only it’s not that honest.

Short Takes: ‘Murder by Phone’ (1982) ★★ ½

The days before caller I.D. were
indeed terrifying.

While there have been plenty of thrillers and horror movies built around scary phone calls (Sorry, Wrong Number; When a Stranger Calls; Scream) and a few where the phone is a conduit to an evil force (976-Evil and The Ring-with-a-wireless-plan One Missed Call), to my knowledge the Canadian-made Murder by Phone (a.k.a. Bells) is the only movie to feature, well, murders by phone. And there may be a reason why there have been no other killer phone movies afterwards: Phones just aren’t all that scary, especially when potential victims can simply hang up.

Despite a silly concept, director and co-writer Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days, Logan’s Run, Orca) managed to turn out an engaging-in-spite-of-itself thriller. Helping sell the story is the late Richard Chamberlain at peak fuckability (it’s bearded Richard Chamberlain, which is the best Richard Chamberlain), who stars as a college science teacher/environmental activist Nat Bridger. While attending a conference in Toronto Bridger investigates the death of one of his former students at the request of her father. The former student’s death was ruled a heart attack, but Bridger and the girl’s father aren’t buying it since she was only 19. We know from the movie’s opening scene that what killed her was her answering a ringing pay phone [link for younger readers] that then emitted a high-pitched whine that, apparently, immobilized her while she bled from her nose and eyes before a blast of electricity is shot directly into her ear, sending her flying across a subway platform and onto a nearby escalator.

Several more people die this way, with some of the kills being unintentionally hilarious, such as a very Mac and Me scene in which an executive is sent flying through an upper floor window of an office high rise, still seated in his desk chair. Bridger pieces together that the calls are being perpetrated by a person who has somehow devised a way to send high-voltage blasts through the telephone lines (just go with it), but phone company execs stonewall him when he goes to them with his concerns, turning Murder by Phone into an awkward conspiracy thriller. Bridger’s trip to the phone company isn’t for naught, however. While there he meets R.T. (Sarah Botsford), an artist creating a mural in the lobby of the phone company’s headquarters, who assists him in his investigation as well as becoming his love interest.

I first learned about this movie when the Glorious Trash blog reviewed Phone Call, Jon Messmann’s novelization of this movie’s script published a full year before the movie was filmed in 1980, and three years before its release in the U.S. Glorious Trash described the book as “sluggish” and “more deadening than thrilling,” before launching into a tirade about Bridger being written as a hardcore environmentalist <sigh>. Even dismissing the right-wing complaints, the book sounds like a chore to read. The movie, though, is well-paced and entertaining. Chamberlain and Botsford, besides being easy on the eyes, keep things grounded by playing it straight, while supporting actors John Houseman, as Bridger’s pompous mentor, and Gary Reineke, as a skeptical police lieutenant, give more outsized performances befitting a B-movie. Anderson’s stylish direction also helps, even wringing (or is that ringing?) some genuine tension from the goofy premise.

Though I’d be among the first to buy this movie if Vinegar Syndrome ever got ahold of it for a Blu-ray release (hint, hint), I’d also be the first to admit that it doesn’t fully work. The movie’s story would’ve been easier to buy had there been a supernatural/paranormal cause behind killer phones. No matter how much science-y sounding dialog the movie throws at us, it just can’t convince us someone could kill via landline. Even more far-fetched: Bridger, who has a Ph.D., allowing people to address him Mister Bridger without once correcting them. I call bullshit.

A Bizarre (and Kinda' Hot) Love Triangle

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