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Anne Boleyn and the games men play

March 16, 2015

One of the nuggets I gleaned from attending the Algonkian Writers’ Conference last December in Manhattan was that when it comes to historical romance, it’s the Tudors or bust.

It figures. Working backward, there was Elizabeth I, England’s greatest ruler; her sister, the pathetic, misguided “Bloody Mary”; their baby bro, Edward VI; and, of course, the daddy from Hell, Henry VIII, with those – count ’em – six wives. No dramatist could conjure such symmetrical marital disaster – Catherine of Aragon, annulled; Anne Boleyn, beheaded; Jane Seymour, dead in childbirth; Anne of Cleves, annulled; Katherine Howard, beheaded; and Catherine Parr, survived Henry, but wait, would remarry and, you guessed it, wind up dead in childbirth.

Historian David Starkey (“Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII”) once told me that of the half-dozen, Catherine of Aragon was the only one Henry ever really loved. But his quest for a son, for proof of his manhood and for liberation from papal Rome and the memory of his older brother, Arthur, who had been Catherine’s husband, drove him into the arms of the bewitching Anne Boleyn, linchpin of the six wives’ psychodrama. Did he use Anne to gain control of the Church in England or was he, as Starkey said, so in love with her that he was willing to renounce his role as Defender of the (Roman Catholic) Faith? Perhaps a bit of both?

Anne’s rise and fall is told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell – the blacksmith’s son-turned-chancellor – in Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” (She’s at work on the last book in the trilogy.) Naturally, PBS’ “Masterpiece” couldn’t resist. “Wolf Hall” (April 5 through May 10) dramatizes the first two books, with British theater star Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis (“Homeland”) as Henry and Claire Foy (“Little Dorrit”) as Anne. “Wolf Hall” – the title refers to rival Jane Seymour’s familial estate but suggests the den of wolves the Tudors were – is a daring conceit. For what makes men like Cromwell effective, their ability to manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes, is what can make them potentially boring front and center. (Imagine the story of Bill and Hillary Clinton told from the viewpoint of their accountant.) The beauty of the books and the miniseries is that we enter Cromwell’s mind to meet a man weary of and disgusted by the power games men play but unable to relinquish them. ...

The Open mind-body of Novak Djokovic

March 11, 2015

A recent footnote in the tennis world – Novak Djokovic and his wife, Jelena, have taken up ballet.

Let the sniggering begin. “Ballet?” someone named Jaybee88 responded. “Ah, now, no wonder an ageing Federer beat him in Qatar.”

Ah, now, Jaybee, if you’re going to criticize, you’re going to have to learn how to spell “aging.” What is a wonder is that in the 21st century, ballet is still considered unmanly, effete – and let’s face it – gay. After covering the arts for 30 years, I can tell you that many if not most of the top male dancers are straight or bi. I remember Ethan Stiefel, one of the greatest male dancers, telling me in response to a question about why he became a dancer, “You spend your days touching women in various states of undress. What man wouldn’t love it?”

But that’s not the point, is it? Gay or straight, ballet is one of the most physically and mentally demanding of careers. You start class at 10 or 11 in the morning. Then there are hours of rehearsal. You dance at night; on weekends, at matinees and evening performances. You finish around 11 p.m., grab dinner, then sleep and the whole thing starts all over again. And that’s if you’re lucky and you perform regularly. Otherwise, guess what? You’re not getting paid.

If you’re a man, you’ve got to make the woman you partner always look good. That means sometimes you are lifting dead weight, no matter how light she is. You can’t ever show the strain the way an athlete can. And you can’t hide a few extra pounds. No wonder legendary New York Yankee first baseman Lou Gehrig – the great “Iron Horse” of baseball – said, “Dancers make the best athletes.” ...

The once and future king

November 14, 2014

You would think that someone whose earthly life ended more than 2,000 years ago would be beyond controversy. But then look at Jesus. He’s still “a sign to be contradicted,” to quote the Gospels, almost two millennia after he was crucified.

So it is with Alexander the Great. Some 330 years before Jesus was born, this king of Macedon and hegemon of Greece conquered the Persian Empire, ushering in a Hellenistic age that would unite East and West. (The reason we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ” is because of the Alexandrian spread of the Greek language and culture.)

Such is the Alexander mystique – he never lost a battle but died at age 32 in Babylon, possibly of cerebral malaria – that he thrives in the imagination today as a metaphor for many things, including leadership from the front; the ultimate gay in the military (many consider him to have been the lover of his right-hand man, Hephaestion); and the tension between East and West.

That tension has escalated recently with Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s decision to give waxworks of Alexander, his father, Philip II of Macedon and his mother, Olympias, pride of place in a new archaeological museum in the capital city of Skopje, which already has the world’s largest statue of Alexander in its central square.

A little background here...

The return of Lestat

October 29, 2014

With Halloween-y coming up on Friday, I thought it a good moment to touch on the new Anne Rice, which brings her back to her greatest creation, the Vampire Lestat.

Or at least to his world. He seems to be the absent sun around which the other characters revolve in “Prince Lestat” (Knopf, $28.95, 451 pages). But then he often is in the later “Vampire Chronicles” novels.

It’s easy to make fun of Rice’s purple prose and bizarr-o plotting. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Terrence Rafferty writes:

Lestat’s vampirism dates from the late 18th century, but his star quality seems very much the product of the time in which Rice gave birth to him, the 1970s: “Interview With the Vampire” reads like a People magazine profile written by Ann Radcliffe. (People had begun publication just a couple of years earlier.) Although the style, mixing celebrity-worshiping gush with Gothic portentousness, is, not to put too fine a point on it, nutty, Rice wielded it with amazing self-assurance, as if it were inevitable, something that had been waiting to be discovered. That’s what all pop-culture geniuses do, in their different ways. And over nearly four decades and many, many books, she has seen no reason to change it. In “Prince Lestat,” the first Vampire Chronicles novel in a decade, Rice’s queenly prose is unaltered. Time cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite monotony.

But back in the 1970s when the gay rights movement was young and AIDS was lurking in the wings, Rice’s homoerotic bloodsuckers tapped into the zeitgeist – something that Rafferty himself alludes to. It’s what all great pop novelists do, be they John Grisham or J.K. Rowling. ...

Carry on, Cleo: New exhibit considers the Egyptian queen’s ancestors

October 13, 2014

Thanks to Hollywood (on one end of the spectrum of ludicrousness) and historical revisionism (on the other), there are many misconceptions about Cleopatra.

She was a sex kitten unfurling herself before Julius Caesar, a beautiful siren setting Marc Antony on a collision course with Rome. She was milky white. She was black.

She was nothing of the kind but rather something more complex and far more interesting – a striking if not beautiful, intelligent , commanding woman who managed to attract two of the most powerful men of her time as she balanced two very different cultures. That she could not hold a third culture in the equation was part of her undoing.

Like many great and tragic figures – the sculptor Isamu Noguchi comes to mind but we might also want to throw President Barack Obama into the mix – Cleopatra was part of two worlds. And when you’re part of two worlds, you often end up belonging to neither. She was the last of the Ptolemies, who were in turn the last pharaohs and are the subject of a new exhibit, “When the Greeks Ruled Egypt,” at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World through Jan. 4. ...

Men – the fairer sex?

October 11, 2014

Boy, nothing gets women piqued faster than telling them that men are the better-looking sex.

I had this conversation with two female friends recently, one of whom skeptically said to me, “Do you really believe that?”

Yes, I do, though perhaps not in the way they might think. Of course, the average woman – with her makeup and her Spanx – might be more gussied up than the average guy. But what I mean is that aesthetically, the best-looking man is better-looking than the best-looking woman, that I would take the Apollo Belvedere over the Venus de Milo any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Blame it on hormones. Male hormones give them bigger, hotter, lusher, more dangerous looks that read easily across a crowded room. Consider Colin Kaepernick, photographed by Bruce Weber on the cover of the new V Man magazine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he has a nose like a toucan, closely cropped hair and lots of tattoos, which displease some of the fashion police.

And yet – wow – those eyes, like Cognac in firelight; those long, thick lashes; that cut jawline (to go with that cut body). Ladies, ladies, do you think a woman could carry those off? ...

‘Antigone’ in Ferguson

August 29, 2014

Seeing the front-page photo in The New York Times of Michael Brown’s body lying in the street – like so much road-kill – after he was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson filled me with revulsion and anguish.

In a previous post, I wrote about the desecration of the dead from the Malaysian airline flight that was gunned down and the need to observe the proper rites for the them, not just for the departed but for ourselves as civilized human beings. I also wrote about “Antigone” – a tragedy by Sophocles that’s been reinterpreted by many, including playwright Jean Anouilh – which hinges on the moral consequences of failing to honor the dead.

So I was heartened to see this Aug. 27 letter to The Times’ editor by Jean P. Moore of Greenwich, Conn. ...