October 30, 2016 |
Liz Goldwyn has a surname most people will recognise – her grandfather was Samuel Goldwyn, who helped shape the identity of Hollywood in the early 20th century. But Liz has carved out a niche for herself, as a film-maker, writer and sexual anthropologist.
The latter aspect of her work ties to the others: Pretty Things, Goldwyn’s 2005 documentary and accompanying 2006 book, examined the American burlesque scene, then a little-known historical oddity. Goldwyn helped burgeon its spectacular revival. Her latest book is Sporting Guide: Los Angeles, 1897. It’s a factional trawl of the city’s underbelly, little known since its reinvention as the home of popular entertainment, in emulation of real almanacs illicitly published in the period.
So Goldwyn is determined to lift the lid on sex and sexuality, not to make people uncomfortable, but to satisfy her own fascination – one that, evidently, others share. Goldwyn lives in Los Angeles, and she’s just as determined to uncover the forgotten side to the city, the grit beneath the glamour of its relatively recent reinventions. History is an obsession. Goldwyn embeds herself in research of past eras to revive them, not just in look, but most importantly, in feel.
It started young: in her teenage years in the 1990s, Goldwyn began wearing vintage. Now 39, she has a storage unit filled with the stuff and describes herself as “shopping” her archive, as well as loaning to designer friends and costume departments. Perhaps donning vintage as a teen was Goldwyn’s way of communicating with the past, with re-treading the steps of historical figures. Her subsequent writing and documentary work is devoted to capturing the vibrancy of the past and immortalising people. Sporting Guide mixes the real with fantasy, but, she says, everything has a connection with the past. And sometimes Goldwyn herself looks like she has stepped out of history; it’s a look reminiscent of the heyday of her grandfather’s studio, with her swirl of perfectly coiffed Veronica Lake hair and impeccable slick of red lipstick.
We’re talking on the phone, though, so I don’t see any of that, after a weekend where British red tops crowed that London was warmer than Los Angeles. It’s looked on as a great thing, rather than apocalyptically symptomatic of climate change, or the like. And we wind up talking about courtesans of the Edwardian era – these women who looked like a Boldini come to life, who entranced kings and emperors, novelists and artists. Goldwyn is obsessed with those women, and so am I.
LIZ GOLDWYN: “They’re all in my first book, Pretty Things. I talk about the courtesans of the belle époque – Liane de
Pougy, Émilienne d’Alençon and La Belle Otero. There may be a picture of her in the first book.”
ALEXANDER FURY: “With her diamond bolero?”
LIZ GOLDWYN: “Actually, there’s a corset made of diamonds by Cartier, which is attributed to Émilienne d’Alençon. But during that period, there were all these rumours floating around about all those courtesans.”
AF: “You get a little of that if you read Zola – all these popular-culture references, half-recognised people and their secret lives. Reading Sporting Guide, it felt to me that it was very much about this kind of secret Los Angeles, for people who don’t know a great deal of its history, myself included.”
LG: “Well, people from LA don’t realise there was an LA before the movie business. Sporting guides were real things that existed in every period, culture and language. They were a guidebook, a travel guide, but for a city’s best brothels and whores. I was always fascinated by them, and I was always fascinated by prostitution from a very early age. So when I decided to set my story in LA, it was because there’s also this secret history of the city.”
AF: “Was that something you’d become interested in earlier?”
LG: “I’m interested in history in general, and I’m interested in sexuality. That’s kind of my main concern. My grandfather founded most of the main studios in Hollywood. He came out here and made the first film – The Squaw Man, with Cecil B DeMille and Jesse Lasky – in 1914. So I grew up in a family that other people projected onto – ‘Oh, you’re LA history.’ My father, who died last year, at 88, was an older father. I spent a lot of time around older people. All the burlesque queens are obviously older. I’ve always been fascinated with the past. I guess it bothers me, the idea of what Los Angeles is in the broader culture. That it’s this cultural wasteland, populated by the Kardashians and plastic surgery and Paris Hilton. Celebrity. All these things that I think are so vapid. When outsiders look at LA, that’s all they focus on, when in fact it’s such a rich city, culturally. I think I felt some sort of mission to present my hometown. I’ve done other projects that may be considered a love letter to LA.”
AF: “I guess uncommon LA, not the mass LA.”
LG: “But it is actually common LA. If you go out in LA, this is what LA is. It’s really this. It’s such a funny city. People say it’s the only postmodern city in the world, because it’s so much about what other people project onto it. And I guess I’m quite sensitive to that – just growing up with the last name I have, I constantly get people projecting onto me who they think I am and what they think I’m about. Which is so different from my reality, the things I’m really interested in and want to explore. I couldn’t give a shit about celebrity.”
AF: “I suppose the first thing anyone will ask you is whether you want to act.”
LG: “Hell, no. I have a couple of times, when other people have really pushed me to do it. I played twins in a film that Jeremy Scott made, called Starring.”
AF: “Oh my God, I love that film.”
LG: “I executive produced that film. The only person who’s really good in it is Tori Spelling.”
AF: “The Tori Spelling hospital scene.”
LG: “She’s the only one who understands that particular format, a soap opera format. I play twins and Asia Argento is my mother. But I executive produced that, so, for me, when people ask me to act… To be an actor, you’re not in control at all. You’re a cog in a wheel. They aren’t your words, it’s not your vision. One of my brothers is an actor and he’s a great actor. But he’s able to subvert his ego to become someone else. I’m way too conscious of the lighting, the DP. I did a Miranda July short film with Kim Gordon and Damian Kulash from OK Go, and I did a short film for Viktor & Rolf, in which I played the CEO of the internet. And with that one, I rewrote the script and had a lot of input. So, I don’t want to act. I’m comfortable in front of the camera or public speaking, when I’m myself, talking about my work or sexuality. I’m much less comfortable if… I mean, this photoshoot for 10 – it’s a fashion shoot! But I just like to be myself, I guess.”
AF: “I suppose, with acting, you’re helping someone else realise their story. Ultimately, it’s someone else saying if it’s good or bad. It’s not your story.”
LG: “Right. And I think, also, I’m happy to tell someone else’s story when it comes to real life, but for acting, and I think for women – I have so many close friends who are actresses – there’s so much insecurity and pressure that comes with that job, for a woman. That, I have a lot of trouble with. I mean, my entire family is in the movie business – I have four brothers, and my father and my grandfather, who were in it, too. It’s definitely a boys’ club. There’s a lot of talk of that changing, but it’s slow to change. The pressure for women who make their careers in front of the camera… It’s about, ‘Is she fuckable? She’s fuckable. Have you seen her tits? I’ve seen her tits. We don’t want to see her tits any more.’ They’re always on a diet. Even for the most intelligent, conscientious people, it would be very hard not to judge yourself in that situation.”
AF: “I guess it’s also that slight sense of losing control a little bit. You have to maintain a certain look, there are certain expectations.”
LG: “For sure. And I think every woman falls into that, no matter what their job is. The fashion world obviously has a lot of that, too, and I’m very happy to circulate around a lot of different worlds. But I’m happiest in a library, in academia. I actually work with a girl’s high school and I’m happiest in these contexts, where it’s more about education or research. It’s not like it’s not fun to go to a Vanity Fair Oscars party, or to be invited to a fashion show. I love clothes, but I’m so much in my head that I’m constantly deconstructing it. I can’t be like, ‘Oh, isn’t this fun, drinking champagne?!’”
AF: “I understand – if you see a depth to fashion, it’s difficult to explore it as just a surface.”
LG: “You know, when I was a teenager I helped to start the fashion department at Sotheby’s in New York. We’d go into these women’s homes… It’s such a personal relationship with the garments. You would see where somebody had had a mastectomy. It’s so intimate, these things that happen in a piece of clothing. Your heart is broken or you fall in love. It’s the most intimate thing that everyone has, whether it’s haute couture or hand-sewn because your mother doesn’t have any money to get you the same jeans that everyone else in school has, or whatever it is. I’ve always loved that.”
AF: “How did that come about? How did you wind up at Sotheby’s? You had studied photography in New York, and art history.”
LG: “I feel like every sort of job I had has been following a very unprescribed path. My first job was at Planned Parenthood, educating teenagers. I answered phones, talked to single fathers about how to talk to their kids about sex. I went from there to the costume department on a couple of films in Hollywood. That was all in high school. My parents were very big on that – I never didn’t have a job. I worked my whole way through college. So at Sotheby’s, I was 17. I was in college. When I moved to New York I was 16 and I was a paid intern for Fabien Baron. It was at the time he was doing Calvin Klein and Harper’s Bazaar. Everyone was wearing black. I didn’t know what fashion was. Actually, I’d just always collected vintage clothes since I was a kid. That’s what me and my friends were into. I was wearing 1940s dresses, 1920s gowns. I was in my office in those, and red lipstick and Japanese platform shoes. I think they got complaints when they sent me to Calvin Klein, because I wasn’t wearing all black. I stood out. I didn’t look like other people and I wasn’t really interested in fitting in. That’s when I really understood what ‘fashion’ was.
Then I started interning for Gilles Peress, who is a Magnum war photographer, and he would photograph me in what I wore. And he encouraged me that my interest in burlesque queens wasn’t silly or superficial. And Sotheby’s hired me away from him. [It happened when] I was going to lunch with a friend of my family who was the head of impressionist art at Sotheby’s. I met him at Sotheby’s and we were walking through, and I saw a woman dressing a mannequin. And I said something like, ‘Oh, that’s Rudi Gernreich, 1968.’ The woman asked how I knew and I said, ‘I just know.’ And it turned out she was Tiffany Dubin, who was starting the fashion department. She said, ‘Come work with me.’”
AF: “At that point, in 1997, vintage clothes were starting to become fashionable, but nothing like they are today. People didn’t realise the value of it.”
LG: “At the time, we lost money on every sale. Catalogues cost more money to produce than our sales made. And it wasn’t a worldwide market. There was only Didier Ludot in Paris, and Decades, in LA, which opened maybe in 1998. Resurrection in New York was just opening. It wasn’t a market, it was still fringe. Before, it was like, ‘Why do you care about these old strippers?’ Now, everyone knows about burlesque”
AF: “Did you grow up around fashion?”
LG: “My mother was super-feminist. When we would go back-to-school shopping, she would be like, ‘Oh, look at this nice, earth-toned whatever.’ And I’d say, ‘What about this pink glitter thing?’ It even took her a long time to understand, coming from that sort of background, that I was someone who had very strong ideas about feminism, but wanted to wear a pink glitter corset and didn’t feel that took away from having brains.”
AF: “Even today, there’s that very odd perception. It is possible for people to look glamorous but still be not obsessed with their appearance – where appearance isn’t the be-all and end-all.”
LG: “I remember doing the publicity for HBO, for my documentary Pretty Things. I was quite young when that first came out – I was really nervous about them finding out that I had any profile in the fashion world. I was worried they would think I wasn’t a serious documentary maker. In fact, they were thrilled. Fashion magazines wanted to write about a documentary, which wasn’t really a normal thing. So it’s really interesting the reach that fashion has. There are people who come to be interested in what I’m doing because they’re really fascinated with sex, or burlesque, or fetish. And there are other people who come to the topics they really care about because they like my style, or are into vintage. I found, over time, it can be quite an advantage to have these relationships with the fashion world. I don’t think it’s superficial, because I know my relationship with it.”
AF: “In terms of being interested in burlesque, where did that come from? Was it tied in with that interest in fashion?”
LG: “I was always interested in sex and sexuality. The stuff I am working on now is probably the first time in my entire career when people have understood what I’m doing. ‘Why do you care about vintage? Why do you care about dead prostitutes?’ Burlesque – I was in art school, as a photography major, and I was going through my Cindy Sherman phase, as every art-school girl does, and I was taking pictures of myself in these costumes that I was collecting at the flea market. And they were burlesque costumes.
“I was fascinated by these old pin- up photographs and these old burlesque queens I was looking at. I would try to emulate their pose. I definitely did not feel the sexual empowerment or confidence these women embodied through these flat images. So I started writing letters to them. Because I was collecting this stuff and because I was at Sotheby’s, I had access to a global network of museums and dealers. So I knew no one else was dealing with this, I knew that no museum in the world had a collection. So anytime something would come up, people would contact me. It’s kind of a small world. So I began meeting these women. I was at Sotheby’s, so I could understand the context for collecting, I could understand that it was important. I could research and go back to La Belle Otero and those times. But all of a sudden there was this group of women who were dying – in their seventies, eighties, nineties at the time – and there was a possibility to get first-person stories.”
AF: “Social history, more than anything to do with costume. Sexuality, society, morality.”
LG: “Also performance. I’m not going to toot my own horn or anything, but I was doing this work early. And so was one of my best friends, Dita Von Teese. So I think that, both through talking about the history like I did, and her bringing the contemporary neo-burlesque thing to such a level, people began to understand it was performance art. And these women had never been called performance artists in their lives. At the time I began talking to them, sometimes it took a year or more to convince them to speak to me. A lot of them had really dark back stories – ‘I was married, I met my ex-husband when I was 18 years old.’ And in this strange way, I had my own sexual awakening through these 80-year-old women. Which was the wildest thing ever.”
Alexander Fury is men’s critic, US Vogue.com, and contributing editor, T Magazine – The New York Times
Taken from Issue 57, TRUE RANDOM AUTHENTIC, on newsstands now…
Photographer Cameron McCool
Fashion Editor: Keegan Singh
Hair: Jamal Hammadi at Forward Artists
Make-up: Hinako at The Wall Group
Fashion assistant: Derek Brown
Shot at The Los Angeles Athletic Drum
