Dusty and Lesley and Grace of My Heart
Earlier this week, I was listening to the "All Out 60s" playlist on Spotify while I was out on a walk (I realize that listening to pre-fab Spotify playlists is most definitely a sign of impending middle age, and, frankly, I welcome it), and "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore came up on shuffle.
I really admire the way the unabashed messiness of the lyrics belies the song's extremely tight production by Quincy Jones. The narrator has absolutely no qualms about abandoning her guests to wallow in self-pity:
Play all my records,
Keep dancing all night,
But leave me alone for a while
No brave face for our girl. Her frantic search for boyfriend Johnny, who has disappeared along with rival Judy ("Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone, but Judy left the same time") calls to mind for me the increasingly hysterical hostess of the party in 1997's Can't Hardly Wait, who becomes justifiably unhinged as her classmates destroy her parents' house. The party of our dreams is almost always in reality a nightmare.
While its unfortunate sequel, "Judy's Turn to Cry," — which triumphs in Judy's pain as wayward cad Johnny returns to the narrator — gives the whole song set a regrettable and anti-feminist cast (never was a "The Boy is Mine" moment needed more), "It's My Party" on its own has no such problems: After all, you would cry too if it happened to you. (Readers, it was her birthday!)
I'm also tickled that the record label apparently sought to capitalize on the success of this song by releasing an album centered entirely around sobbing and terrible parties.
This is a long way of saying that "It's My Party," reminded me that (the amazing 17-year-old) Lesley Gore, who had a relatively brief but wildly successful career in the mid-60s singing mostly about boys (including proto-feminist anthem "You Don't Own Me," perhaps most famously performed by Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, and Bette Midler in the final scene of "The First Wives Club") was herself a lesbian.
Grace of My Heart
This, in turn, made me think of the 1996 film "Grace of My Heart," starring Illeana Douglas as a lightly fictionalized version of singer-songwriter Carole King. Produced by Martin Scorcese (who was married to Douglas at the time) and directed by Allison Anders, it's a great depiction of the Brill Building era in American pop music — that time after Elvis but before the Beatles. It's got a great cast, including Matt Dillon as the sensitive and doomed leader of a surf-rock group that is obviously a riff on Brian Wilson.
Bridget Fonda plays a young teenage singer named Kelly Porter who, like Gore, is a closeted lesbian. (Though Gore claims she herself was never exactly closeted; and that may be true in terms of her real life and her interactions with industry people, but it's def not true in terms of her actual public-facing career, which was, as previously stated, very boy-focused.)In the film, Douglas's character writes a knowing song for Porter called "My Secret Love."
Being reminded of this film, however, I briefly wondered if Kelly Porter was actually meant to be Gore or was inspired by another famous 1960s singer who was also blond and closeted: Dusty Springfield.
Springfield did, in fact, have a long association with King and her one-time husband and songwriting collaborator, Gerry Goffin. ("Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" appears on Springfield's first US album, and four King/Goffin songs appear on her legendary 1969 album Dusty in Memphis.)
More talented, but more troubled
Springfield unquestionably had much more difficulty reconciling her sexuality and her career than Gore, though in part this is because Springfield was just a much bigger talent than Gore (sorry, Lesley!) and her career started earlier and lasted longer. (As something of a supper-club singer, Springfield was, like Gore, marginalized by the ascendance of folk and psychedelic rock in the latter half of the '60s. She had her last big hit — after an 18-year hiatus from the charts — in 1987 with "What Have I Done To Deserve This" with the Pet Shop Boys, and died not too long after the Pulp Fiction soundtrack rocketed her recording of "Son of A Preacher Man" back into public consciousness.)
I read (but did not finish) the authorized biography of Springfield, Dancing With Demons, back in college, and I stopped because it was too depressing. There was a brief push around that time for Springfield to ascend to tragic gay icon status à la Judy Garland, but it never quite happened. (I think the fact that Garland was more publicly a mess probably helped; she was also still selling out shows even as her life crumbled. Springfield fell into relative obscurity for two decades and did everything she could to hide her problems.)
Unlike Gore, Springfield was petrified of being outed, and she wore extremely heavy makeup (and that trademark bouffant) as a hedge against it, performing an exaggerated femininity as a means of disguise. (This had the unintended consequence of also making her look much older than she was. She was older than Gore but only by a few years, yet her image is far more mature and "adult". She was only 30 when she recorded Dusty in Memphis!)
Combined with extremely campy hits like "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," a truly astonishing anthem of pathetic desperation, her distinctive look has made her a long-time favorite of drag queens everywhere.
(I do want to point out that, on the cover for I Only Want To Be With You, Springfield lets her guard down a bit and wears an outfit that is to this day extremely popular with queer women: jeans and a chambray shirt. The bouffant and eyeliner remain.)
Due to her stress about her sexuality, deep insecurities about her talent as a singer (after Aretha Franklin recorded "Son of a Preacher Man," Springfield refused to ever perform it again, feeling Franklin's version to be obviously superior, a judgment that history has proved false), and some family trauma and mental illness, Springfield had a very unhappy life and was involved in several difficult relationships that were sometimes violent. Later in life, she semi-regularly got herself committed to Bellevue as a way of taking a vacation from reality. I believe the moment I stopped reading Dancing with Demons was when the biographers, who were friends of Springfield's, wrote, "It wasn't a party until Dusty threw a plate." (Their understandable attempts to mitigate the bleak facts of Springfield's life only made it more upsetting!)
In terms of putting on straight drag, I think nothing in Gore's oeuvre will top Springfield's 1964 hit, "Wishin' and Hopin'" which, like a lot of the songs I have mentioned here, got a new life in the 1990s. It was used (ironically) in the opening credits of Julia Robert's My Best Friend's Wedding. (It wasn't Springfield's recording; it was a cover by Ani DiFranco.) A sampling :
Show him that you care just for him
Do the things he likes to do
Wear your hair just for him, 'cause
You won't get him
Thinkin' and a-prayin', wishin' and a-hopin'
In the My Best's Friend's Wedding credit sequence, the aggressive blond femininity that Springfield used as armor in the 1960s is now a weapon, presumably for ensnaring men into matrimony. It's clear, from that blond lady's over-emphatic acting, that catering to his whims will only last until "I do," and then all bets are off.
"Wishin' and Hopin'" is another Burt Bacharach/Hal David song; To bring it back to Gore, "The First Wives Club" used another of his old hits, "Wives and Lovers," recorded by Dionne Warwick, for its opening title sequence. It's in a similar vein, though this time it's advice on how wives must stay attractive to ensure their husbands don't cheat. (Constant vigilance, ladies!) I feel there's a point to be made here about mainstream feminism in the 1990s and its focus on the concerns of privileged white women and their conflicted feelings about marriage. But I digress.
There are obviously a lot of parallels between Gore and Springfield, though also a great deal of contrast: Gore seemed to live a relatively peaceful and happy life, and in later years, was involved in a series for PBS about LGBTQ Americans. She was writing a Broadway musical about herself when she died of lung cancer in 2015. At the time of her death, she had been in a relationship with jewelry designer Lois Sasson for nearly 30 years. Springfield, on the other hand, never really got comfortable and no success ever seemed to satisfy her or to assuage her self-doubt. And even success was relatively fleeting, with her ascension to legend status coming at the end of her life and after her death.
Even this supposedly revelatory quote from her from 1970 obfuscates as much as it discloses. To me, it feels as much about her desire to regain some kind of hipness in a rapidly changing cultural landscape ("more and more people feel that way") as about her actual desires. It's a deflection.
Many other people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it ... I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don't see why I shouldn't.
Lesley Gore seemingly found a comfortable refuge in her wholesome teen image and then chucked it aside, whereas Dusty Springfield spent her whole life looking for a safe place to hide.
It's tempting to connect Springfield's unhappy life with her brilliant work, and I'm hesitant to reinforce tired narratives about tortured geniuses. But it is simply true that Springfield was particularly adept at depicting despair and making it beautiful; her work has a poignancy that comes as much from her talent as a singer as it does from the lyrics or instrumentation of the songs themselves. (She had great taste in songwriters, Bacharach's retrograde gender politics aside, though she herself could not read music.)
All her work is great, but Dusty in Memphis is exceptional, and I'd recommend the deluxe edition, which has an additional 13 songs, many of which I like as much as those included on the original release.
One of those extras, "All the King's Horses", is to me a great example of what she can do: The song itself is a relatively standard lover's lament, but she gives it much greater depth (helped along by a really wonderful piano line). The way she sings "always" in the chorus of "I Can't Make It Alone" kills me anew every time I hear it. I could go on: the "la la las" that open "I'll Be Faithful." The easy sexiness of "Son of a Preacher Man." The entire album is full of soaring violins.
I am, as we speak, ordering it on vinyl.
The real Kelly Porter
The mystery around the inspiration for Kelly Porter is, however, no real mystery at all: Once I was able to Google, I learned that Lesley Gore actually wrote "My Secret Love" for the Grace of My Heart soundtrack. D'oh!
And knowing what we know about Dusty Springfield, even a fictionalized version of her would probably never record a song that could have an overt queer reading.
Thanks for joining me on this circuitous route to a very easy answer.
Dusty in Memphis is streaming pretty much everywhere. Grace of My Heart is available to rent on YouTube, Google Play, Apple TV, and Vudu. "It's My Party" is probably playing on my speakers at this moment.