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JUST
KIDDING
Howard
Hughes Wasn’t
Welsh showed me a photo of himself in the
sixties.
All bouffant hair, flairs and simp expression. So much for the hard man
he
likes to think he is. ‘You
look like
a big girl’s blouse’, I said. ‘Not
bad’, says
Welsh, ‘if it’s Jane Russell’s.’ The
Outlaw was
made in the year of my birth (1943) but not released till six and a
half years
later when, by a strange concordance between Stendhalian reckoning and Sheehan’s
Apologetics, my moral age was about to begin. I
don’t know why my mother
brought me to see it, anymore than why ten years later she and my
father queued
outside the Lee cinema for High Society (1956).
Only holy movies were
considered suitable for children. I remember one about a much put-upon
donkey,
and The Song of Bernadette (1943, reissued 1950,
the Marian Year) for
Jennifer Jones’s numinous irises rather than Arthur
Miller’s script. It was too
soon for Quo Vadis (1951) but not for Cecil B de
Mille’s first go at The
Ten Commandments (1923), which my godmother took me to see,
counting them
off, as they were broken. Aunt Lily only believed in music. I
can still
hear my mother telling the plot of The Outlaw to
Kitty the maid. As
Kitty was the regular moviegoer it was usually the other way round. She
always
spoke of the movie stars, not the characters (‘So Larry
Olivier said, my
kingdom for a horse’). When my mother cited Billy the Kid,
Kitty sighed ‘Jack
Beutel’. Jane Russell’s character must have been
herself because they both
called her Jane Russell. I could only think of her, being of ages with
Stendhal
(alias Henri Brulard) when he loved to cover his plump little mother
with
burning kisses. His ardour compelled her to put her clothes back on.
She died
in childbirth before he reached seven, and so started his moral life
and its
bane, loving women the wrong way (De L’amour, 1823). The
two Howards
- Hawks and Hughes - directed The Outlaw and fought
over Jane Russell’s
breasts. Hughes insisted on closer and closer close-ups so he could get
a
better look, even though he was only seeing them on the telephone (as a
boy I
saw rugby internationals on the radio and so I understand). Hawks, on
the other
hand, wanted to keep them at a distance like Mayan pyramids - long
shots that
lingered like the sentences of William Faulkner (on the
writers’ payroll but
not credited). When Gregg Toland, the cameraman, suggested they take
one breast
each and get on with it, Hawks dropped out and Hughes finished the
movie. Billy
the Kid
lies dying. ‘Why am I always cold?’ he says. Jane
Russell, big enough to be his
mammy, pulls off her pullover. ‘I’ll get you
warm.’ And so she did. In the
scene before that, a cock called ‘Why
did the
silly bird do that?’ she says. ‘He
smelt
blood. And was going to peck out Billy’s eyes’,
says Mimi. ‘I’ll
peck
you’, says Jane Russell and twists The
seminal
warming was left to the imagination. But readers of
Steinbeck’s The Grapes
of Wrath (1939) will remember the Rose of Sharon who had lost
her baby
opening her blouse to the starving old man. ‘You got
to’, she said. Once
the blood
drains back and Billy’s on his feet again, he wants to barter
Jane Russell with
Doc Holliday for Red, the horse they both love and neither owns. The
deal goes
wrong because Red nuzzles Doc’s hand, a claim Billy honours.
Moreover, Jane
Russell isn’t for Billy to auction, being Doc’s
intended (someone’s gambling
debt?), and when Billy chooses Doc rather than her to ride off into
High Noon
they don’t get far. Jane Russell had put sand in their
canteens and Pat Garrett
on their trail. She follows at a safe distance and, when the
sheriff’s posse
has them truly cuffed, Jane Russell punches Billy into a cesspool,
holding him
down long enough to drown. Pat pulls her off, wanting Billy alive so he
can do
the glory killing himself. Nearly dead, the Kid sits against a tree,
wondering
about women. The
plot
thickens, but doesn’t quite gel. That must have been the
point when I stopped
listening to my mother, or when Hughes took over, director and
direction lost
at the same time. I remember the jealousy, so perfect for a farce
(minds and
horses keep changing). Pat Garrett, jealous of Billy who took Doc, his
ex-best
friend, away from him: Doc of Billy who took his girl: Billy of Pat
because Doc
and him go back a long way, and of Doc as Red wants him: and Jane
Russell’s
jealous of the horse.
‘Of
all the
low-down tricks’, says Pat Garrett when his double-cross with
guns backfires.
It’s trigonometry without the safety catch of answers at the
back. You have to
trust Gregg Toland’s euclidian camera angles (he shot Citizen
Kane the
year before) to appreciate the action. Doc Holliday, in the face of Pat
Garrett’s avowed friendship, walks between him and Billy the
Kid and takes the
bullet in the heart. He didn’t fire, believing Pat, who
doesn’t believe him
until it’s too late. This brings The Kid and Pat together.
And they bury Doc,
but not the hatchet (‘The trouble with you, Billy is you
trust nobody. I don’t
know what’s to become of you, I honestly
don’t’). Pat
offers
Billy the Doc’s horse and six-shooters in exchange for his
colts, explaining
everybody will think that he killed The Kid, so the law would not
bother Billy
anymore and it wouldn’t do him any harm. Too much of a
bargain, thinks Billy,
and hands them over. ‘Dat's the spirit’, says Pat,
pulling the guns on Billy,
only to find himself on the wrong end of the barrel. Billy, seeing the
firing
pins had been removed, had switched his own with Doc’s.
‘Dirty little cheat. Of
all the lowdown tricks’, says Pat, the trapped rat. I
am Billy the
Kid, cool, as Jane Russell’s cleavage is hot. I want to start
a new life. I tie
Pat Garrett to a post beside the grave of Doc Holliday, plunking
Doc’s hat on
Pat’s head, a trademark Holliday touch, always the gentleman.
I leave his guns
just out of reach, and, giving Jane Russell a condescending nod, saddle
up and
sidle off, but stop at the crest of the hill to look back and throw
Jane
Russell another nod, lingering long enough for it to dawn on her that
it’s a
yup for her to jump up behind. Her features contort into a smile so
unexpected
that only Doc Holiday could have believed it, and he’s dead.
She leaps on and
off we ride into a studio dust-storm without any luggage. The End
brings up
Doc’s grave. ‘Here lies Billy the Kid, killed by
Pat Garrett, July 13, I
keep
returning to Jane Russell’s smile (I note the breasts in
passing). Her face,
a contour map that could have
proved the world was flat, existed like And
yet, when
Jane Russell realises Billy the Kid wants her, her smile for an instant
is a
sister of Sue Lyon’s in Lolita (1962),
lolling on the lawn, mouth
half-open, gawking at ‘the great big handsome hunk of
Hollywood manhood’ that
another HH (Humbert Humbert) thought she saw in him. Willfully yours.
But not
for full possession. Jack
Beutel
never worked again in Jane
Russell
ooh-la-la’d herself out of her Hughes contract. He was
distracted, designing
and building The Spruce Goose, the largest plane ever. But Jane
Russell’s
maiden flight in The Outlaw was more successful
than The Spruce Goose
because, even though it didn’t quite get her career off the
ground, it wasn’t
her last. On Billy the Kid’s anniversary, July 13, 1947, The
Spruce Goose
failed to rise high enough to avoid the balloons floated in
celebration. Release
meant
she had to put up with Bob Hope films until getting to play second pulpeuse
to Marilyn Monroe for Howard Hawks (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
1953).
Jane Russell’s career was mainly supporting roles. She put
the blame on Mame,
for Rita Hayworth was her Montgomery Clift. Kitty
asked, ‘I
wonder what happened to them?’ ‘The
Kid and
Jane Russell went to
Legend
has it that Billy and Jane had six children – Jane, Billy,
John Henry, Redmond
and two Howards. This kept Jane Russell busy while Billy the Kid got
bored with
poncey Santa Fé and took to tequila. It’s a bit
like the afterlife of Lolita
with her Dick. Billy should have shot himself Hemingway style but
instead chose
suicide endura in his ‘little ease’ like Howard
Hughes, dropping dead ‘in legal
captivity of a coronary thrombosis’ while on hunger-strike
four days before
being tried for molesting a minor. He left a note. ‘Trust
nobody.’ Jane Russell
was happy to see the back of him. When
Welsh was
on his hippie world tour he stole a blouse from the washing-line and
the woman
caught him. He said it reminded him of Jane Russell’s and she
brought him into
her trailer truck and gave him a glass of milk. I wonder if Welsh has
read The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
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