What's Up, Doc? (Lesbians, Mostly)
Classic films and classic bookstore finds await you, Dames Nation!
Dame Margaret Wants to Recommend a Classic Film for YOU!
Next month, I, Dame Margaret, am making my triumphant return to ’s Culture Study podcast to discuss one of my very favorite things: old movies!! As a HUGE fan of Anne’s old Hairpin column “The Scandals of Classic Hollywood”, this is a TRUE HONOR, and I could not be more excited. Moreover, it is a TRUE HONOR from which you, lucky Two Bossy Dame reader, might benefit: we are looking to help folks connect with specific classic films we think they’ll really like. If you’d like a chance to be one of the people who receive a bespoke recommendation from Anne Helen Peterson and me, you should head to Culture Study’s Google form and, where it asks for your question, just name three movies from the last 25-30 years you love and we’ll take it from there.
To whet your appetite, I am going to share my recommendation of What’s Up, Doc? (1972) from the 2019 Mega-Issue on rom-coms I wrote with my best friend, the inimitable Kerry Mullin. I had intended to recommend this movie from scratch, but when I searched for GIFs from it, this earlier mention was one of the first hits, and my 6-year-old recommendation is nearly exactly what I would write today, so why tinker with perfection?
If Bringing Up Baby were dragged forward into the 1970s, jazzed up with a dash of Bugs Bunny, and spiked with a hint of Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy, this delightful romantic comedy would be the zany result. Four identical plaid suitcases get mixed up, leading one staid engagement between a hilariously bespectacled Ryan O’Neill and an early career Madeline Kahn to be sidelined by Barbra Streisand at her most beguiling, all while top secret files are on the loose somewhere in San Francisco. There is never a moment when this film is not doing The Most and I couldn’t love it more if I tried.
To use the Culture Study question approach, in reverse, I would recommend What’s Up, Doc? to people whose favorite modern movies include Knives Out (2019), Spy (2015), and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) or any other enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy.
So please! If you want Anne Helen Petersen and I to handpick an old movie for you, tell us three of your favorite modern movies right here!
Dame Karen is Finally Reading Her Weird Books
Hello, Dames Nation, and welcome to a new regular Dames column in which I finally pay attention to my enormous collection of what I fondly call “my weird books.” I very rarely buy new books, and I would say 99 percent of my home library is the result of my poking around used bookstores, library and yard sales, Little Free Libraries [which are not libraries, but I digress], and thrift stores and going either “oh, I’ve been wanting to read this one,” or “oh, I love this one” or “hmmmm, what’s going on here?!” The books aren’t necessarily weird at all, but sometimes they are! Being a “collector” (hoarder?) often means amassing many things for future use that never get used. This column is my attempt to finally read some of these books I’ve meant to read for years and make myself write about them. Everyone wins? Let’s find out!
This week’s Weird Book is Carol In A Thousand Cities, an anthology edited by Ann Aldrich, which was one of the many pseudonyms used by the late, great Marijane Meaker, all of which are listed on her gravestone, which makes my heart swell. Meaker, usually writing as M.E. Kerr, was one of my favorite writers when I was a tween/teen. I have never recovered from Shockproof Sydney Skate in which the titular Cornell-bound Sydney and his lesbian mother fall in love with the same girl, Bryn Mawr student [hi, Dame Sophie] Alison. (Here’s a fun Slate review of it from 2013.)
Anyway, Carol…was published in 1960 by Fawcett World Library, and my copy looks like this:
You can see this and other covers of the other books Meaker wrote as Ann Aldrich, We, Too, Must Love (!!) and We Walk Alone with the subtitle Through Lesbos’ Lonely Grove (!!!!!!) in this 2012 blog post from TheInkBrain. It’s pretty clear that these covers are meant to intrigue and titillate The Straights, and sure, we can yuk the fuck up about them, but here we are in 2025, getting the news that it’s now totally fine to say all sorts of nonsensical shit, including that LGBTQIA+ people are “mentally ill,” on Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. The notion of stories about “women who love…other women” being “startling” remains sadly and stupidly relevant.
The book's title comes from the last paragraph of The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan, aka Carol by Patricia Highsmith:
Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person now and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and hell.
Has anyone considered publishing a new edition of Carol In A Thousand Cities called Harold, They’re Lesbians? Just an idea! Highsmith and Meaker dated for two years, which Meaker wrote about in her 2003 book Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950’s. Amazing to go from editing an anthology under a pseudonym featuring an excerpt from a novel by your ex, also written under a pseudonym, to writing a tell-all (or tell-a-lot, anyway) about your relationship over 40 years later. Also amazing is this quote from the anthology’s introduction:
It would be extraordinary if the majority is not inclined to reveal lesbianism as something less than wholesome. Yet the fact that she is no longer treated with frivolity, not necessarily pictured as a whore, an exotic bisexual [not an EXOTIC BISEXUAL, help], or a strange “dark” enigma, shows that concern with the lesbian, if not often sympathetic, is at least a more intelligent concern currently. In a sense, she has been taken out of the side show and been put on the analyst’s couch; she is not so much a freak as a sick individual.
Welpity welp welp welp. This is highlighted by Freud's quote on the back regarding a “woman in torment” who nevertheless does not feel “any urgent need to be freed from her homosexuality.” Indeed, an entire section of the book is called “Though The Eyes of the Psychoanalyst” and features an essay by one Frank S. Caprio who writes “Society must be made to understand that we cannot wipe out lesbianism. We can only take steps toward its prevention.” (No thank you, Frank.) In the first section, “Through The Eyes of the Writer,” there’s an absolutely wild 1880 story by Guy de Maupassant, “Paul’s Mistress,” that features French people going completely out of their minds over a boatful of lesbians:
At once a cry arose from La Grenouillere: “There are the Lesbians!”; and there ensured a furious clamor, an awful scramble. Glasses were knocked down, and people jumped up on tables, while all in a bedlam of noise bawled “Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians!”…The men raised their hats, and the women waved their handkerchiefs; and all the voices—the deep male ones and the shrill female ones, cried together: “Lesbians!”
Recreation of the “Paul’s Mistress” La Grenouillere “Lesbians!” freak-out scene at a local Pride celebration WHEN?!?!?!?
In last section of the book, titled “Through Her Own Eyes,” actual lesbians get to “speak” and two of the four stories there are by “Ann Aldrich” herself. Another, by “Anonymous,” called “A Happy Life, A Constructive Life,” notes that the 27-year-old author is
“…certainly not a masculine girl, nor even a very aggressive one. I have a normal amount of good looks, an average I.Q., an an optimistic nature. Unlike many of the lesbians Miss Aldrich writes about, I am not a heavy drinker, not a member of a metropolitan clique of lesbians, nor a homosexual who speaks the jargon. No one I know uses the words “gay,” “camp,” “dike,” or “cruising,” and I have never set foot in a homosexual bar.”
LOVE IS LOVE, amirite?! I am ridiculously imagining Ross’ ex-wife Carol (!!!!!) here, or maybe her wife Susan.
Anyway, like The Price of Salt, Anon’s story has a happy ending; after flunking out of college because being in a sorority makes her too horny to concentrate [sorry, Anon, you’d probably hate that summary, but it is exactly what you describe!] she becomes a nurse. She soon meets a doctor, “a lovely brunette, fifteen years my senior, with steel-blue eyes that answered mine in an unmistakable acquiescence.” Hell yeah! After seven years with Jean, Anon writes, “With Jean, I have a home, and for the first time, I think of home as the place where I am myself in every room…My home is not only me in every room, but Jean in all of them. Without her, it would simply be a house where I wouldn’t want to live.”
Finally, there’s an entire, fascinating section featuring letters from readers of The Ladder, the magazine put out by the Daughters of Bilitis, which had an ongoing feud with Meaker even as they supported each others’ work, as described in the Wikipedia entry for The Ladder. Perhaps a good reminder that now more than ever, we need to be willing to work for the common good with people who annoy us? Anyway, this was a worthy addition to my Weird Books collection and I’m glad I finally gave it a look!
Old films & weird books! A winning combination!! Great newsletter.
“Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians!"