Beware the Eyes that Hypnotize!
In Part I of our Faye extravaganza, we were reminded that like the psychic photographer she played in Eyes of Laura Mars (above), we gay men have always seen fantastic things in the Faye face:
Beauty, of course — but beauty is expected in a movie star and not a distinguishing mark. Drive — that too, but drive is part of the kit of every successful person. It was something else, something made not for the stage but for the screen … the deft play of eyes, eyebrows and voice modulations calculated to dominate a movie frame.
We also learned, with little surprise, that overnight — with no pit-stops through the young actress’s parallel world of waitress and secretary jobs — the young Faye went from acting role to acting role, surviving even the dogs, those first two films, to become the breakout star of her third, Bonnie and Clyde.
Come with us now as Stephen Moser of the Austin Chronicle resumes his walk through the life of Faye Dunaway, Movie Star and Group Hallucination. – John Calendo
Network (1976), Faye in love: :
(Setting her sights on senior producer William Holden, she first wines and dines him.)
FAYE: Well Max, here we are: Middle-aged man reaffirming his middle-aged manhood. And a terrified young woman with a father complex. What sort of script do you think we can make out of this?(Later, having picked his brain, she lets him down easy.)
FAYE: The time has come to re-evaluate our relationship, Max … I don’t like the way this script of ours has turned out. It’s turning into a seedy little drama.
WH: You’re going to cancel the show?
FAYE: Right … I’m sorry for all those things I said to you last night. You’re not the worst fuck I ever had. Believe me, I’ve had worse. You don’t puff or snorkel and make death-like rattles … As a matter of fact, you’re rather serene in the sack.
WH: Why is it that a woman always thinks that the most savage thing she can say to a man is to impugn his cocksmanship?
The peak of Faye Dunaway’s beauty — the film that lifted her into a constellation with the six or seven essential fashion icons to come out of Hollywood (Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn, among them) — was The Thomas Crown Affair. As a slinky super-sleuth in the biggest hats, the shortest skirts and the thickest eyelashes ever seen — even for 1968 when the film was made — Faye was beautifully outrageous and outrageously beautiful.
The aftershocks of Faye’s fashion-icon ascendancy were felt throughout the culture, from Vogue covers to her official anointment as Class-A kitsch by Margaret Keane, painter of globe-eyed moppets, who modeled a portrait after her (right).
In 1970, Faye capitalized on her new fame and pushed through a star vehicle, directed by former lover Jerry Schatzberg, in which she actually played a fashion model in a bit of cryptic nonsense called Puzzle of a Downfall Child. More importantly, she played a queen’s delight — a drugged-out, has-been psychotic floozy of a fashion model who still manages – hey, this is Faye — to look faaabulous.
Of this filmic mess, Pauline Kael was moved to write, “I have a constitutional aversion to movies about women whose souls have been lost, stolen or destroyed, especially when it isn’t made clear — and it never is — whether the heroine had a soul in the first place.” The ever on-target Kael had nailed, so early in the career, the essential Dunaway experience: Cold, soulless and fabulous!
Faye had now become a master at picking roles that were contorted to provide her with a string of show-stopping outbursts and opportunities to put all her gusto into every arch of her exquisite eyebrows. After Thomas Crown, it was clear that audiences expected — demanded – that she look terrific even if she were streaked with dirt, soaked in oil, or passed out in a dive
Happily, Faye did not disappoint.
Chinatown (1974), Faye explains the windows into her soul to Jack Nicholson:
JN: There’s something black in the green part of your eye.
FAYE: Oh, that. It’s a… it’s a flaw in the iris.
JN: Flaw?
FAYE: Yes, it’s sort of a … birthmark.
In the stylishly tawdry neo-noir Chinatown (above), Faye’s finely tuned portrait of a high-strung heiress is remarkable because it showed that even in a subdued mood, she could be effectively neurotic, quietly unnerving. The subdued mood did not come naturally, however. She and her director, the brilliant paedo-perv Roman Polanski, clashed on every bit of business, almost coming to blows (at one point, Polanski ripped at her hair), agreeing only on the character’s glamorous maquillage which was based on the authentic 1930’s look of Polanski’s mother.
And yet Polanski had fought for the actress, turning down both the producer’s wife, Ali MacGraw (yikes, can you imagine!), as well as Jane Fonda, who had recently won the Oscar. Whether the poisonous atmosphere on the set after the hair-ripping episode was ever dispelled is now irrelevant. Chinatown is one of the essential Faye Dunaway films, thanks in part to its shocking last-reel revelations. It also holds the distinction of being Polanski’s last American film, finished just in time for him to “depart” for distant shores, one step ahead of the L.A. district attorney who wanted to apprehend him on statutory rape charges. The director, it seems, had “befriended” yet another lovely, soft-spoken Lolita, who was many years shy of 18.
Faye won an Oscar of her own a few years later for Network when she played a babbling, half-mad (but perfectly at home in the insane world of network programming) TV executive that one online reviewer described as ““brilliant, beautiful, and as cold as a frozen dinner.” Smart as a whip and crazy as a loon, attired in an impeccable Theoni V. Aldredge power-wardrobe of high-waisted trousers and silk blouses, this speed-talking, quick-walking incarnation of Faye was the most jaw-dropping to date.
For those young readers who think it was Mommie Dearest that put Faye over the top as The Great Bitch Goddess of the Latter Days, guess again. Network did it first, serving up a Joan Crawford on amphetamines, with everything but the wire-hanger flip-out scene. Though Faye’s Network character was intended as a broad satire, many of this mad woman’s programming ideas have come to pass in the form of reality shows, car-crash hours and Bill (I’m-mad-as-hell) O’Reilly. She predicted, in short, the entire Fox network!
In The Eyes of Laura Mars, Faye is crazy in a brand-new way. She’s psychic! She sees murders in advance and takes edgy, Helmut Newton-esque fashion photos of the visions. Like a roller coaster ride, the film makes no sense but is fun to go on again and again. What matters most in Laura Mars is that this is very much 1978: Disco rules and everybody is beautiful. Faye, above all, is beautifully dressed (again!) by Theoni V. Aldredge in haute-couture fantasy clothes that border at times on the hysterical, as when during a photo shoot she crouches down into an impossible dancer’s sprawl (below) and her midi-skirt promptly slits way up on either side.
And then came Mommie Dearest.
This movie deserves a long entry all on its own [It will get one in the future -- Ed.] We will not begin to address its apocalyptic impact here, except to say that Faye thought it ended her career but we know it made her an Immortal.
Still, we admit it ended all further designs she might have had on a second Oscar. What should have been a high point in a major A-List career took a wrong turn and wound up in the dark alley of pure queer camp. Faye will probably never again be confused with a “serious actress.”
The roles that followed grew smaller and more marginal. The rest of the 1980’s were not particularly kind to Faye – nor was Faye very kind in return, give or take a few scenery-chewing exercises like Wicked Lady and Supergirl, where she gets to spout evil sorceress lines like “Don’t call me your sweetness. I am Selena, and I am a bitter, bitter pill to swallow!”
The 90’s saw the disaster of a TV sit-com, “It Had to Be You”, starring herself as the main character, getting canceled after about five minutes — or is that “put on hiatus?” The unkindest cut was when the show was brought back without her character! (though supposedly it had been built around her.) Equally grim was her recent foray into reality TV, on the low-rated The Starlet, where she was at her Mommie-Bitchiest in the form of a judge whose tag-line — delivered always with the most leering sadism — was “Don’t call us, we’ll call you!”
Oh well, Faye is ours, and we are hers. Mommie Dearest sealed the deal. Never really out of work, though she skids along from cameo role to cameo role now, the 64-year-old Faye has given us a glittering body of work, but more than that, a rollicking good time at the movies. Reviewing her parade of films, as we have been doing, she comes through all over again:
Faye Dunaway — beautiful in youth, a DIVA ever afterwards.
Mommie Dearest (1981), Faye as Joan Crawford addresses the fans camped out in front of her house on Oscar night:
FAYE: I would rather be here with you … than anywhere else in the world! You! … all of you here! … and everywhere! … gave me this award tonight. And I accept it from you … and only you. I love all of you. Now please forgive me, good night.
