Читать книгу Dear Prudence - David Trinidad - Страница 27

THE DRESS THAT JOAN WORE

This is the dress that Joan Crawford wore

towards the end of her career (1964)

in the B-horror flick Strait-Jacket, directed by William Castle, King of the Cheapo Box-Office Gimmicks, in which she portrays an axe murderess who chops off the heads of her husband and his mistress as they lay postcoital in her own bed, and who twenty years later is released from a hospital for the criminally insane and reunited with her now-grown daughter (played by Diane Baker) and is the prime suspect (of course) in a fresh rash of killings.

This is the dress that Joan Crawford wore

(gray, black, and white floral-printed silk

with scoop neck, capped sleeves, and self-belt)

as she milked her performance for all it was worth,

guzzling (real?) highballs,

jangling twin charm bracelets,

and putting the moves on

her daughter’s handsome young fiancé

(by fumbling drunken fingers at

his horror-struck lips).

This is the dress that Joan Crawford wore

in “a camp classic as compulsively watchable as a train wreck”

(so says the Internet)

that was put up for auction in June 2009

in an Entertainment Memorabilia sale at Bonhams & Butterfields

(that included the Emmy Estelle Getty won for Golden Girls and a Marilyn Monroe blank check and one of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra wigs) and sold for $5,185.00 to god knows who, probably an impeccably manicured Queer Eye type who’ll display the costume on a dressmaker’s dummy and invite over a few flamboyant friends to ooh and aah (and maybe try it on) and view the DVD of Strait-Jacket on his 52” flat-panel HDTV while sipping blood-red (pomegranate) martinis and screaming—not in horror at each lopped-off head, but with shrill glee as Joan slurs her words and “insanely” unravels her knitting and lights a cigarette by striking a wooden match on a record spinning on a phonograph and in the dress at which they’d gasped brandishes (spoiler alert: it’s really Diane) the gore-splashed axe.