And finally, "The Lonely Doll" starring opposite Naomi Watts for Gia Coppola.
If this is what I think it is....it's based on a very interesting book. It's a little like Grey Gardens...but on Park Avenue.
SEE:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Life-Lonely-Doll/dp/0312424922
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE LONELY DOLL The Search for Dare Wright. By Jean Nathan. Illustrated. 308 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $25.
MANY distinguished children's writers haven't had children of their own -- or, for that matter, conventional family lives. Lewis Carroll, a lifelong bachelor, enjoyed a famously eyebrow-raising attachment to the little girl who inspired "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." George Selden, the unmarried author of "The Cricket in Times Square," also wrote "The Story of Harold," a pseudonymous, semi-autobiographical adult novel that dealt with bisexuality and sadomasochism. And in stories like "The Little Mermaid," Hans Christian Andersen, another lifelong bachelor, dealt with impossible, unrequited love.
To this collection of childless children's writers must be added Dare Wright, author of "The Lonely Doll," a book published in 1957 that engendered both a vast cult following and many sequels. Like Carroll, Wright was a photographer, and in addition to illustrating her stories she took many self-portraits that project a glossy and perfect image, the epitome of glamour. In real life, however, Wright was a mess: a frigid, miserable woman locked in a suffocating relationship with her monstrous mother, with whom she slept, nestling "like spoons," until the older woman finally died in 1975.
Jean Nathan explores the disparity between Wright's polished facade and her turbulent interior in her first book, "The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll," an exhaustively reported, gracefully written biography. The book was compiled with the cooperation of Wright's estate (she died, at the age of 86, in 2001), and since Nathan was privy to Wright's letters, she is in a position to tell you everything you could possibly want to know. Nathan also can -- and does -- tell things you may not want to know.
As Nathan sees it, "The Lonely Doll" is a metaphorical recasting of Wright's tormented childhood. Her mother, Edith Stevenson Wright (known as Edie), fled a failing marriage on the East Coast for Cleveland, where she established herself as a society portrait painter. She severed all contact with her former husband and son -- which, for them, may have been a blessing. Although Dare, whom she brought with her, was subjected to active neglect, Edie made her pose for many portraits. Dare did this eagerly; at least while Dare was sitting for her, Edie seemed to notice her presence. As a consequence, throughout her life, Dare compulsively recorded her appearance, as if a person were only visible when captured in paint or on film.
It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that the heroine of Wright's book is Edith, a doll she named for her mother but patterned after herself. Forlorn and without playmates, Edith is rescued by two teddy bears -- stand-ins, Nathan suggests, for Wright's missing brother and father. In various sequels, Wright tweaked Edith so the doll appeared more human, becoming a bizarre "effigy of her owner -- and, for a doll, oddly sexy," with a made-up face and suggestively visible underwear.
Wright herself radiated similar sexiness, but pushed men away -- at one point even shoving the doll between herself and an unwanted admirer. And her repressed sexuality burbled up in her books. In several of the books, Wright eroticized corporal discipline in what Nathan terms the "spanking scene": dimly lighted, almost noir photographs of the big bear whacking the doll, which is coyly baring its knickers for the camera.
In her 20's, in New York, Wright reconnected with her brother, a failed writer and drunk, whom she adored. (Her mother did not.) Enraged by Edie's abandonment, he countered by vying with his mother to control his sister's life -- and, for a time, he succeeded, providing her with a fiancé, an R.A.F. pilot whose striking good looks were almost a mirror image of hers. This relationship tanked when, frustrated by Wright's iciness, the pilot began an affair with another woman.
"No matter which way she went," Nathan writes, Dare Wright "would be devoured -- either by loneliness or by Edie's wrath -- if she were to align herself with a man." Instead, she aligned herself with Edie, becoming part of "Edie-Dare," as her mother signed letters. When her mother died and the weird symbiosis ended, Wright immersed herself in alcohol and hung out in Central Park with homeless people, one of whom, in an incident symbolic of her degradation, raped her.
Because Wright is far from, say, Henry James, I was at first skeptical that her life warranted intense biographical scrutiny. Nathan, however, convinced me. Her strongest argument is emotional -- the appeal "the Lonely Doll" had for her as a child when her family "abandoned" her mentally retarded brother in an institution. "Every goodbye felt like a rerun of the first one," Nathan writes about visiting him. "When he didn't cry, I knew he was trying not to as hard as I was. . . . When he did cry, it was ghastly and we all cried, all the way home." She also tells how this trauma affected her own decision to have children.
Where Wright's art was accidental and campy, Nathan's self-reflection, which emerges in her prologue and epilogue, seems well considered and even moving. This biography left me wanting to know more -- about Jean Nathan.
NEW YORK TIMES
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