On the Life, Death, and Shameful Blacklisting of Lynne Frederick

 Lynne Frederick (1954 - 1994)

 Portrait by Terry Fincher (c. 1974)

I. 

 

Let's get straight to the point: the treatment that the English actress Lynne Frederick received, following the death of her husband Peter Sellers in 1980, was shameful. 

 

The abuse and ridicule meted out by the press and public was bad enough; but the behavior of the Hollywood set who, in a display of grotesque moral hypocrisy and spitefulness, blacklisted her was even worse - but then there's no people like show people ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Lynne Frederick was born in Middlesex, in July 1954. Her parents separated when she was just two years old and she never knew her father or had any connections with his side of the family. Her mother was a casting director for Thames Television. Raised in Leicestershire, she was later schooled in London and had ambitions of becoming a science teacher.  

However, when Frederick was fifteen fate - in the form of actor and film director Cornel Wilde, a famous friend of her mother's unfairly described by some as a poor man's Tony Curtis - intervened and put the teenager on the road to stardom. Wilde had been searching for a young unknown to star in his movie adaptation of the best-selling sci-fi novel The Death of Grass (1956). 

 

Wilde was instantly besotted with the beautiful and charismatic teen and so, despite Frederick having no previous acting experience, he offered her the role (sans audition). Whilst the film - released in 1970 as No Blade of Grass - received mixed reviews [2], Frederick became an overnight sensation, much loved by the same British public who would turn on her ten years later.          

As well as establishing an acting career that included a number of TV commercials for soap and shampoo, Frederick regularly featured in fashion magazines as a model and cover girl. In one famous spread for Vogue (Sept 1971), she was photographed by Patrick Lichfield. She was, in short, the fresh-faced girl of the moment; young women wanted to be her and men of all ages wanted ... well, we can all imagine what they wanted ...     

III.

 

During the mid-late '70s, Frederick's career as an actress and model continued to develop and she began to evolve a more sophisticated style and image, no longer content to simply play the girl next door or young innocent. Thus, in 1976, for example, she happily took a role in a BBC Play for Today as a sexually enigmatic character who falls for a lesbian artist [3]. She also starred in Pete Walker's slasher-horror movie Schizo, now regarded as a cult classic amongst fans of the genre.   

 

Meanwhile, her A-list Hollywood agent, Dennis Selinger, was preparing Frederick for global stardom in more mainstream film and television, as he had previously done with Susan George. Sadly, however, things were about to go very wrong - both professionally and personally - for Frederick, following her fateful marriage to sociopathic goon Peter Sellers in February 1977. She was 22 and Sellers, who had already married and divorced three wives, was 51.

 

The couple had met at a dinner party the year before, shortly after Frederick had finished making Schizo. He proposed to her two days afterwards, but she sensibly turned him down. However, she not-so-sensibly agreed to date and a year later they married. Initially, things went well and they formed a popular red carpet couple. But things quickly turned sour and rumours began to circulate of drug abuse, infidelity, and domestic violence. As his health deteriorated, Frederick was forced to put her own career on ice in order to look after him.    

 

Whilst they separated several times, Frederick always returned to care for Sellers until he died of a heart attack on 24 July 1980 (the day before her 26th birthday). Although Sellers was reportedly in the process of excluding her from his will shortly before he died, the planned changes were never legally finalised and so Frederick inherited the entire estate, worth an estimated £4.5 million. 

To which I say: Good for her! Unfortunately, that wasn't the reaction of his children from earlier marriages (who only received £800 each); nor was it the reaction of the press and public, or his Hollywood chums. 

 

Accepting unsubstantiated claims made by her stepson, Michael Sellers, it was almost universally decided that Frederick was a deceitful and cunning young woman who had only married for the money and to increase her own fame: the term used over and over again was gold digger - one that is not only derogatory, but misogynistic, as it is invariably applied to young women [4].       

Attempts to restart her film career post-Sellers were unsuccessful; she was effectively blacklisted by Hollywood, although she continued to live (reclusively) in California until her death in 1994, aged 39 [5]. 

 

Whilst I don't wish to go into details of her tragic final years - which involved seizures, alcoholism, and depression - I'm pleased to say that in the decades since her death, Frederick has gained a posthumous following of loyal fans and that even some of those who had been unfairly critical of her were prepared to concede that she had been poorly treated. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Famous names who voiced unfavourable opinions of Frederick include Roger Moore, Spike Milligan, and Britt Ekland. One person who always stood by her, however, was the actor David Niven, whom she had met whilst filming in 1974. Frederick regarded him not only as a close friend, but as a trusted father figure.   

 

[2] No Blade of Grass also generated disquiet amongst some critics due to a controversial abduction and gang rape scene involving Frederick as 16-year-old Mary Custance. The graphic nature of the sexual violence - lasting for several minutes on screen - was regarded as gratuitous at best. Although the rape sequence was cut in length when the film was released on video, the full scene was restored when issued on DVD.    

 

[3] Admittedly, the fact that she married former lover David Frost just a few months after the death of Peter Sellers didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that she divorced Frost after 17 months and then married a Californian heart surgeon shortly afterwards.   

 

[4] To her credit, Frederick was an outspoken advocate for same sex relationships and gay rights in a time when this was not so fashionable or morally and politically de rigeur. 

 

[5] Frederick was found dead by her mother in her West Los Angeles home on 27 April 1994. Whilst foul play and suicide were quickly ruled out, an autopsy failed to determine the cause of death. 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence: The Reluctant Fashion Beast

 D. H. Lawrence in 1915 modelling his Edwardian 

hipster look complete with velveteen jacket

 National Portrait Gallery, London 

(NPG x140423)

 

I.

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 

 

Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those essays and those authors most likely to give pleasure. Let's begin with Judith Ruderman's essay on the importance in Lawrence's work of clothing and jewellery (though note that I'll not be discussing the latter here) ...

 

 

II.

 

Ruderman says that Lawrence's views on fashion are complex (sometimes contradictory) and often need to be discussed in relation to his other concerns to do with art, sex, and society. That's certainly true. In fact, it could be argued that the Lawrentian call for a revaluation of all values is founded upon a revolt into style: "Start with externals, and proceed to internals" [1], as he puts it. 

 

Unfortunately, however, this statement merely reveals Lawrence's metaphysical naivety. For there are no internals to which we might proceed and outer form or appearance is not expressive of inner essence or substance; things have no concealed reality. The secret of life revealed by dandyism - conceived by Foucault as a critical ontology and philosophical ethos beyond the dualism of inside/outside - is that it has no secret.

 

Thus, what's ironic - Ruderman's word - is not that "an author infamous for having his characters shed their clothes actually paid a great deal of close attention to what they are wearing" [2], but that an author who cared so much about fashion seems not to have grasped its deconstructive  logic. 

 

Strolling along the Strand in brave feathers - which for Lawrence means wearing "tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats" [3] - isn't simply to defy dreary social convention and sartorial dullness, it's to declare that one is Greek in the Nietzschean sense - i.e.,  superficial out of profundity [4].

 

Another thing that Ruderman highlights is Lawrence's fascination for strikingly colourful clothing. And it's true, he did favour fabulous - some might say garish - colour combinations in his battle against the drabness of those he calls the grey ones. And whilst I'd probably feel a little uncomfortable in some of the gay outfits Lawrence proposes, they would certainly have delighted Oscar Wilde, who wrote:

 

"There would be more joy in life if we could accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can fashioning our own clothes. The dress of the future, I think, will [...] abound with joyous colour.” [5]

 

Maybe, Oscar, maybe ... Though as all fashionistas and "naturally exquisite people" [6] - from Mrs Morel to Coco Chanel - know, ultimately, there's nowhere to go but back to black, which paradoxically, is the negation of all colour whilst also the most vital of colours. Sometimes, even Lawrence comes close to admitting this, when, for example, he talks of dark gods and the invisible black sun. 

 

But, push comes to shove, when it comes to clothes, Lawrence prefers sensible blues and browns and home-knit socks. What's more, he often sneers at truly fashionable people (who frighten and repulse him), openly disparaging haute couture. As Ruderman reminds us, although like other modernist writers he was happy to have his pieces published in Vogue, "being 'smart' in the Vogue sense was anathema to him" [7] - full of what he described as the vanity of the ego.      

 

That's why, despite his fetishistic fascination with clothes - particularly stockings - I think we can characterise Lawrence as a reluctant fashion beast or closeted dandy; one who is slightly ashamed of his own love for and knowledge of clothes and who regards those who always dress to impress as affected and a bit show-offy [8]. 

 

Ruderman concludes: 

"Fashion for Lawrence is best adopted as a hallmark of transformation and revitalisation: not for the sake of impressing others, but, rather, for expressing the self at any given moment in time. [...] As a 'rare bird' among men [...] Lawrence appreciated fashion, but with caveats and contradictions. That Lawrence's attitudes towards this subject are complex and evocative only highlights how they are intricately woven into the fabric of the life and art of a very complicated man." [9]

I agree with that and would only add that Lawrence's appreciation of fashion isn't all that rare amongst male writers; indeed, some of the most insightful meditations on clothes have come from our poets, novelists, and philosophers - from Baudelaire to Roland Barthes. Even Kant, when mocked for wearing silver-buckled shoes, replied: Better to be a fool in fashion, than a fool out of fashion ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138.  

[2] Judith Ruderman, 'Clothes and Jewellery', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 371.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Red Trousers', Late Essays and Articles, p. 138. 

[4] See section 4 of the preface to the second edition of Nietzsche's The Gay Science. For Nietzsche, living courageously in the Greek manner requires remaining at the surface at the level of folds, adoring appearance, believing in forms, etc.

      Of course, the desire to become-Greek isn't the only logic of fashion; it is also motivated by the desire to become new (to constantly change one's look). To his great credit, Kant realised that fashion has nothing to do with aesthetic criteria (i.e. that it's not a striving after beauty); in this respect his writings on fashion are rather more modern than those of Baudelaire.

      The key point is that fashion seeks to make an object superfluous as quickly as possible. It does not seek to improve an object, which is why there is no ideal of progress within the world of fashion; a short skirt is not an advance on a long one. As Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen writes: "Fashion does not have any telos, any final purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new forms and constellations ad infinitum." See Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons, (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.  

[5] Oscar Wilde, 'The House Beautiful', in the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (Harper Collins, 1994), p. 923. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 151. Quoted by Judith Ruderman, op. cit., p. 371.

 

[7] Judith Ruderman, op. cit., 377.

 

[8] As Ruderman reminds us, in 'Education of the People' Lawrence sneers at the modern woman who follows fashion and "wants to look ultra-smart and chic beyond words", creating an effect on those around her. See D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 152. Quoted by Ruderman, op. cit., p. 381. 

 

[9] Judith Ruderman, op. cit., pp. 381-82.  

Philosophical Reflections on Self-Partnering

Emma Watson
Photo: Action Press / Rex / Shutterstock

As members of the Hollywood set are amongst the most self-absorbed, self-obsessed, and self-indulgent individuals in the world, it came as no surprise to hear Emma Watson speak in an interview with Vogue about self-partnering [click here to read online].

Of course, such a single-positive proposition is really nothing very new: we could trace out a long and fascinating history of self-partnering from Narcissus to Jerry Seinfeld; "Now I know what I've been looking for all these years - myself. I've been waiting for me to come along. And now I've swept myself off my feet!"*

And although some people seem to react with hostility to the idea, there's really nothing to get angry or judgemental about. In fact, I would encourage people to be happy for Ms Watson - particularly as she seems to be so content with the arrangement.

Ultimately, self-partnering is better than sitting around moping like Bridget Jones, or complaining about not having met your soulmate - that special someone who will complete you as a human being (as if Aristophanes's amorous fantasy was anything other than that).**

I also agree with Foucault that care for others shouldn't be put before the care of oneself; that the latter is ethically prior due to the fact that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior. ***    

The only problem comes when you grow tired of the arrangement and seek a conscious uncoupling; i.e., a releasing of oneself from oneself  - 'cos breaking up is hard to do (comma, comma, down dooby doo down down).  

Notes

*Dialogue from Seinfeld, 'The Invitations', (S7/E22, 1999), written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, episode dir. Andy Ackerman. Click here to watch a clip on YouTube.

** Plato, The Symposium, ed. M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, trans. M. C. Howatson, (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

*** Michel Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and Others, (The New Press, 1997).

Readers who enjoyed this post will probably find an earlier one on sologamy also of interest: click here.

On Poetry, Fashion and Punk

Sonia Delaunay and Tristan Tzara

Robe poème, Le ventillateur tourne ... (1922)

Photo: R. Riss / The Delaunay Estate (Paris)

According to an article in Vogue, poetry is back in fashion and a number of recent collections have been inspired by verse.

Pierpaolo Piccioli, for example, collaborated with several poets to create a series of garments for his autumn/winter 2019 Valentino collection, in an attempt to redefine romanticism for a digital generation (i.e., to transport millennials beyond the screen and into the realm of dreams). 

But of course, as Rosalind Jana reminds us:

"The dialogue between clothes and poetry isn’t a novel one. In the '20s, textile artist Sonia Delaunay collaborated with [...] Dadaist poets including Tristan Tzara and Joseph Delteil to cover a series of dresses in snippets of their poetry. She called them robes poèmes. None of the resulting works still exist, but illustrations show gorgeous, colour-blocked garments with words snaking across arms and descending down skirts."

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I'm naturally excited by this combination of words and fabrics - or text and textiles - animated by the body of the wearer. However, as more punk-provocateur than poet, I'm perhaps more interested in the possibilities that fashion provides for political sloganeering rather than the reproduction of lines of verse.    

Thus, lovely as Delaunay's colourful designs could be - and as amusingly avant-garde as Tzara's poems were - I prefer the clothes of - or inspired by - McLaren and Westwood that incorporated Situationist slogans and lyrics by the Sex Pistols. I'm not sure to what extent (if any) these items brought about social and cultural change, but they certainly made one feel heroic and dangerous at the time.

I remember, for example, riding the rush hour tube in my youth and attempting to antagonise commuters by wearing a hand-painted shirt that read: 'Wise up sucker! Punch your boss, not the clock!'       

c. 1984/85

Notes

Rosalind Jana, 'Why Poetry is Back in Fashion', Vogue (15 March 2019): click here to read online.

The poem by Tristan Tzara that appears on the dress design by Sonia Delaunay above reads in the original French:

Le ventillateur tourne
dans le coeur de la tête
La fleur du froid serpent
de tendresse chimique

Susan de Muth's English translation reads:

The extractor fan turns 
In the head's heart
Bloom of the cold snake
Of chemical tenderness

See: Tristan Tzara and Susan de Muth, 'Dress Poems', Art in Translation, (Routledge, 2015), Vol. 7, No. 2, 304-308. Published online 17 August 2015: click here.    

Miles Aldridge: Supposing Truth to be a Supermodel

Miles Aldridge: 3-D (2010) 
milesaldridge.com

London-born photographer Miles Aldridge is someone whose work I admire immensely; it's so beautifully dark beneath the fluorescent colours and combines so perfectly his obvious obsessions: the great F-words of fashion, film, and fetishised femininity.

Clearly interested in the philosophical question of style, Aldridge playfully explores and experiments with the semiotics of the catwalk, the fatal seduction of cinema and the cultural construction of woman as a revered object within the pornographic imagination.

It's an artistic and a perverse quest for truth, resting upon the quasi-Nietzschean supposition that truth might be a supermodel or a goddess of the silver screen; sacred monsters whose mask-like faces express neither sensitivity nor sincerity; transsexual creatures who, as Baudrillard says, never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and what we might even describe as their apparent frigidity.

Of course, some critics find Aldridge's work vacuous and a form of conceit; a glossy fantasy that far from subverting the political and social realities of gender, class and consumerism - as is sometimes claimed - merely reinforces these things. But I beg to differ with this analysis. For me, his work matters. And it matters because it demonstrates how what we consume, what we worship, or what we most desire - be it a Birkin bag, a lifestyle, or the attractive stranger sitting across the bar - is never a new object in itself, but is rather an object previously encountered on screen or in the pages of Vogue; i.e. one that has already been assigned meaning within a discursive framework.

In other words, Aldridge's work disconcertingly suggests that it's impossible to know real objects existing outside a frame of reference; reality itself is constituted via representation and staged performance - just like a photo shoot. Those commentators who, like Glenn O'Brien, insist that Aldridge is in the business of constructing dreams, have radically misunderstood what is going on in his work - or underestimated what's at stake. For what Aldridge is doing is far more fundamental; he's using the logic of fashion and his passion for artificiality to rupture the order of referential reason.

And central to this project, as indicated, is the figure of woman as actress, as model, as perfect object; as one who understands the need for cosmetics and defends the right to lie. Not because she wishes to protect or disguise some concealed essence beneath appearances, but because she has no such essence. Again, many critics will protest that by placing the question of woman into the context of fashion and film, it means she becomes fetishized and commodified as an object or image, rather than liberated as a subject. But, even if this is the case, is that so bad? Mightn't a clever woman - who is always a well-dressed woman - use her own emptiness and reification to her own advantage?

Aldridge insists that his models have a blank expression not because they are mindless, but, on the contrary, because they are lost in thought. And, far from feeling on the verge of extinction because they have been transformed into a hollowed-out figure of male fantasy, they exhibit the pale power of seduction and stillness that is particular to those who are soulless; what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic.

For me, as for Aldridge, it's on the runway or the movie screen, where woman best stages her refusal of - and resistance to - male power and masculine depth. For although obliged to pout and to pose and embody consumer capitalism's ideals of femininity, luxury and artifice, woman as seductive object remains fundamentally untouchable and inaccessible. She teases her male spectators with a glimpse or the promise of her nakedness, whilst exposing also the truth that they are as fake and as hollow as she (in their desires, emotions and highest values).

Stare long enough into the void, says Nietzsche, and the void begins to stare into you ...

Give a Girl the Right Shoes ...

Photo by Mario Testino for Vogue

Mario Testino's stunning photograph of Suki Waterhouse, Cara Delevigne, and Georgia May Jagger in the new edition of Vogue (April 2015) obviously owes a great deal to Antonio Canova's sculpture The Three Graces, in which the beautiful young daughters of Zeus are shown huddled together in naked embrace.

What excites most about Testino's photograph, however, is not the obvious sexual allure of the models but the fabulous faux-fur heel sandals they're wearing, designed by Sophia Webster for Shrimps (SS15), the playful fashion label created by Hannah Weiland.

Miss Webster, a graduate of the London College of Fashion and the Royal College of Art, presented her first collection of footwear in SS13, after having worked as a design assistant to Nicholas Kirkwood. She has rightly been recognised within the British fashion industry as a genius and received several prestigious awards for developing a unique but nonetheless commercially viable aesthetic that, like Canova's sculpture or Testino's picture, combines beauty, charm, and joy in a modern, sophisticated, slightly subversive manner that one is almost tempted to term neon-classical.

As Marilyn Monroe famously said: Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world.