In exorcising Joan, Bette, Grace, and Kate from my vocal cords, where they are still speaking, having left the indelible mark of Hollywood's spurious interpretation of classiness, culture, and gentility branded into my personality. Pervasive among young homosexuals that it insinuated itself into our voices, weakening the grip of our regional accents, which were gradually overridden by the artificial language of this imaginary elite. To an insecure gay teenager stranded in the uncivilized hinterlands of North Carolina, the gracious ladies of Park Avenue and Sutton Place embodied a way of life more glamorous and less provincial than his own. Other for when she is being her true self, a crass, money-grubbing tart who gossips viciously with her equally low-class cohorts at the perfume counter. Shopgirl who claws her way up to the top, can speak in both accents as the occasion requires, one for when she is at her most deceitful, hiding her common upbringing beneath the Queen's English of the New York aristocracy, and the
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Only Joan Crawford, the inimitable Crystal Allen, a social-climbing Intonations of the Park Avenue matrons who rip each other to shreds in the gracious accents of an Anglophilic argot concocted by the elocutionists at the major studios. In that tour de force of bitchy camp, The Women, the all-female cast speaks in two distinct accents: the harsh American cockney of the kitchen help, who squabble about the muddled affairs of their wealthy mistresses, and the high-society, charm-school Skeffington, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, or even Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Over and over in the voices of film stars as different as JoanĬrawford in Mildred Pierce and Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer, I heard the echoes of my own voice, the patrician inflections of characters who conversed in a manufactured Hollywood idiom meant to suggest refinement and goodīreeding, the lilting tones of Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Bette Davis in Mr. Given the hearty, blue-collar community in which I grew up, the origin of my stilted style of delivery remained a complete mystery to me until, as an adult, I began to watch old movies again. No one around me had a British accent my father was from Chicago Heights, my mother from Braggadocio, Missouri,Īnd my peers were budding good old boys whose fathers drove tractors and pickup trucks and spoke in an unmusical twang that I, a pompous fop in my teens, found distinctly undignified.
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SOMETIME IN MY VERY early adolescence, I acquired, while living in the very heart of Appalachia, a land of lazy southern drawls, a British accent.
"If all the time the manager of the theater holds back the good rolesįrom us, may we not insist upon understudying the stars?"