Hello! You’re reading HeirMail, the only newsletter to come from me (hi) setting a Google Alert for the word “heiress” and then just writing about whatever pops up.
This week you are reading HeirMail, the only newsletter to come from me (hi) setting a Google Alert for the word “heiress” and then getting really tired.
For obvious reasons, of course, and because I mostly self-assigned two explainers, about brands weighing in on the mob at the Capitol and Sean Hannity’s Pasta Pass since Friday morning (that is how I cope with insurrection anxiety), and I only slept four hours. And I’m not going to miss my self-imposed deadline on this.
Also like, how does a person sound right now? When next week, or the next moment, seems to promise massive violence? No one is on my Twitter talking about self-care and that might be the thing that destabilizes me the most, just the eerie lack of social media assurances and reminders and people proclaiming that they’re going to go watch Derry Girls, or whatever.
Still I refuse, I refuse, to deprive you of heiresses on a weekend when people deserve something silly (I think? let me know if it’s definitely the complete opposite) so here are some Heiress related things.
First, links
“DNA under fingernails link British ex-soldier to Riviera heiress kidnapping, court hears,” The Telegraph
I can’t even read this one but it looks tremendous. If you have a Telegraph account, let me know.
“What happened when restaurant heiress went missing from NYC in 1977,” Yahoo! News
Maybe the Dating Game serial killer is what?
“Publix heiress donated $110000 to Georgia GOP Senate candidates,” Creative Loafing Tampa
This says the chain donates to conservative causes regularly; sorry the brand’s intense fandom.
“Still on its paper plate” is hilarious but not in the way they mean — the Daily Mail works so hard but it just doesn’t always come off.
Also: not from the alert, but of interest: Louise Linton made a movie; there’s a subhed in this story about a mother-son fight that reads “the yacht dispute.”
Second, a movie recommendation?
I would hate for you to think I wasn’t thinking, always and exclusively, about heiresses. I’m kidding because that’s insane and you definitely don’t need to think that or anything else about me — a person who should try to act normal — but also I say that to tee up that hey, I was thinking about heiresses even as I refused to look closely at the week’s news.
I watched High Society this afternoon (Saturday, that is). It was was my favorite movie as a kid, and it’s on last chance from HBO Max, and I do recommend it. If today, when you’re reading this, is Sunday and you’re all, “what am I going to do? That absurdly long, silly newsletter I was going to read doesn’t even have the decency to be absurdly long this week!” Well, you should watch High Society on HBO Max, if you happen to have it, and while you still can.
It’s the Cole Porter musical version of The Philadelphia Story. So that great film, but with less chemistry and even more dancing. In this version, though, they’ve moved, so everything you know is wrong. They’re in Newport, RI, where a beautiful rich lady, divorced from the jazz musician heir who lives next door and engaged to a man who works for her father’s company, is forced to agree to let a tabloid cover her wedding. The reporter’s cute too. Hijinks ensue.
Grace Kelly plays the Katharine Hepburn part, our heiress. The rich guy was Cary Grant in the original and it’s Bing Crosby here which is an absolutely historic downgrade, something I’d feel worse about saying except Bing’s kids said he was a real asshole. Frank Sinatra is the reporter (originally Jimmy Stewart). The fiancé doesn’t matter in either version. Celeste Holm is the tabloid photographer and secret best gal. Louis Armstrong plays himself.
The movie’s message is muddled, but there are real fun lines lifted direct from the original, and the songs are a joy. Grace Kelly sounds like Moira Rose most of the time — right up until she gets drunk, and then she sounds like she’s in love every moment.
Early on, the fiancé, who is kind of as close as the whole thing gets to having a villain because he doesn’t sing, says about his soon-to-be wife’s ex-husband, “Poor Dexter is the sort of man whose inheritance robbed him of well, his heritage. He never earned you so how could be expected to appreciate you.” It almost seems like it could be an interesting statement about inherited wealth, but instead I think it’s an insane statement about gender roles (Grace Kelly, we should note, isn’t money).
The society is indeed high. Bing pithily refers to his grandfather as a robber baron. But whereas as TPS actually has a bit to say about class, if not to follow through on, HS only alludes. There’s a whole tortured metaphor about Grace being like the Newport houses, all boarded up and sold for taxes, that doesn’t actually make any sense. Frank and Celeste sing “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” in a room surrounded by dining silver, and agree that they’d rather have each other than caviar and tickets to Wagner at the Met. It’s a kicky tune, and it is stuck in my head, but they seem to be like, 1960’s friends with 1960’s benefits, so it’s actually kind of confusing. Lots of stuff is kind of unclear, presumably on the assumption that you know the original plot, where the heir is a drunk and the writer bonds with the heiress over his book. That stuff is absent here, and the motivations are too.
Later, in heiressdom, Grace’s dad blames his affair with a dancer on Grace’s coldness. He says that if a man had “the right kind of daughter,” one whose love was “unquestioning and uncritical,” that would be the “mainstay” that would keep him faithful. That is… a way to blame a woman for a man’s infidelity that I have never otherwise heard of! Then Frank Sinatra romances her by singing not one but two songs about how he wants to fuck her so bad and would be totally good at it (“making love is quite an art/ what you require is the proper squire to fire your heart”). Everyone tells her how mean she is and how unfeeling, constantly. In the end, Grace remarries her ex — who was in love with her the whole time so her relief at and acceptance of his proposal seems out of character, but the wedding reaffirms both class and traditional marriage — and apologizes to her wretched father which: holy god, absolutely not. This plot, which should rightly be about class, simply reeks of gender!
The costumes are beautiful.
The movie recommendation is a joy, and your writing is too. Very witty, clever, and funny.