Why I Miss Susannah York
by Jeff Weinstein
JANUARY 24, 2011 TAGS:
For a few years, when I was becoming an adult, I fell in love with Susannah York. I suppose there should be quotes around my “love,” because it was long-distance, admiring, and sexless, more like a warm fascination. But now that she’s gone, those childish yearnings have come back, and I have to wonder why.
Part of the answer must lie in a scene from a 1968 film I’ve never forgotten, The Killing of Sister George. In it, the absurdly attractive, off-kilter “Childie,” played by York, is on her knees, commanded in some kind of relationship ritual to chew a cigar butt smoked by her bullying older lover, a woman called George. But Childie, no fool, figures out that she can have the upper hand by pretending to enjoy it, so she drags out a sickening smile.
London. Lesbian. Lovers. In some hushed movie palace, my young jaw dropped and didn’t come up for months. Right before Stonewall, I was expert at lying to myself.
Robert Aldrich’s trashy, groundbreaking Sister George starred tweedy Beryl Reid, who had won a best-actress Tony for her Broadway George the year before, and my Susannah as Childie. It’s a dark comedy that’s as voyeuristic and marred with gay cliché as the later Boys in the Band, but it had the cheek to assume that same-sex love simply existed and may even be living right next door. A bright scene in a genuine lesbian bar shows lady customers actually having fun, so unlike the murky “How can they?” homosexual hangouts of earlier potboilers like Advise and Consent.
At last, there’s no beating around the bush in this mod, au courant universe, no Children’s Hour Shirley MacLaine hanging at the end of her rope. Sister George is also the industry’s first major film to be X-rated, a commercial kiss of death awarded not just because of the blunt, woman-to-woman sex at the end of the film, which the director offered to cut, but merely a result of the movie’s sinful lesbian theme.
Did those pert, caressed nipples truly belong to our Susannah?
Part of my cinematic shock – for which I have long been grateful – was that I had fallen for Childie five years before, when York made her mark playing the blushing, true-love Sophie Western to Albert Finney’s irresistible rake Tom Jones. She was so perfectly lovely! Her emotions, no matter how pouty or perverse, showed themselves always as innocent roses in cream.
It’s called displacement. I was really in love with Tom.
Susannah York, properly applauded as a darling of the free-form ’60s, died Jan. 15, 2011 of cancer at the age of 72. Her flute-to-oboe voice was just as winning as her face, and as her career developed she took on serious roles, in Genet’s The Maids, and with Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine in the overwrought X, Y and Zee, that acknowledged and used her familiar wide-eyed looks.
Yet York never became a standard, high-rent star; her increasingly smart acting seemed unable to supplant the vulnerable persona that her youthful bloom created. She continued to work fitfully in movies and on TV, and she wrote children’s books, but my boyish investment in her as a permanent idol never paid off. That wasn’t York’s fault, of course: Expectations born in movie theaters are bound to be dashed.
Since I was old enough to see, movies were where I went to escape – a cultural cliché, to be sure. But what was I running from? It wasn’t just self-knowledge.
On a freezing November day, with only thin jackets on, my best friend, Jeff, and I cut school and took the subway from Queens into the city because Tom Jones had opened and we had to see it. As the two of us ran through the streets to make the showing, we were blocked by people gathering in front of an appliance-store window – yes, there were “appliance stores” then. I pushed through, and on a flickering black-and-white screen could see the words under the picture: “Kennedy Shot.”
“What’s going on?” Jeff asked me.
“Nothing. Come on, we’ll miss it.”
About a third of the way into hip Tony Richardson’s version of once-hip Henry Fielding’s story, as I immersed myself in what I now know was a real romance – between teenage me and charming, beautiful characters in charming, faraway places – someone in the next row started to sob. The sobbing multiplied; ushers gathered and whispered; a few in the audience got up and left. We stayed till the end.
On the endless subway ride home, almost everyone looked shocked. Some riders, African American, openly wailed. Both of us Jeffs sat still, silent.
That was when I learned that real life, in the form of death, could intrude on my movie-going world. And, as you will understand, it’s also the underlying reason I mourn, with affection and gratitude, the passing of the talented, appealing Susannah York.
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
Part of the answer must lie in a scene from a 1968 film I’ve never forgotten, The Killing of Sister George. In it, the absurdly attractive, off-kilter “Childie,” played by York, is on her knees, commanded in some kind of relationship ritual to chew a cigar butt smoked by her bullying older lover, a woman called George. But Childie, no fool, figures out that she can have the upper hand by pretending to enjoy it, so she drags out a sickening smile.
London. Lesbian. Lovers. In some hushed movie palace, my young jaw dropped and didn’t come up for months. Right before Stonewall, I was expert at lying to myself.
Robert Aldrich’s trashy, groundbreaking Sister George starred tweedy Beryl Reid, who had won a best-actress Tony for her Broadway George the year before, and my Susannah as Childie. It’s a dark comedy that’s as voyeuristic and marred with gay cliché as the later Boys in the Band, but it had the cheek to assume that same-sex love simply existed and may even be living right next door. A bright scene in a genuine lesbian bar shows lady customers actually having fun, so unlike the murky “How can they?” homosexual hangouts of earlier potboilers like Advise and Consent.
At last, there’s no beating around the bush in this mod, au courant universe, no Children’s Hour Shirley MacLaine hanging at the end of her rope. Sister George is also the industry’s first major film to be X-rated, a commercial kiss of death awarded not just because of the blunt, woman-to-woman sex at the end of the film, which the director offered to cut, but merely a result of the movie’s sinful lesbian theme.
Did those pert, caressed nipples truly belong to our Susannah?
Part of my cinematic shock – for which I have long been grateful – was that I had fallen for Childie five years before, when York made her mark playing the blushing, true-love Sophie Western to Albert Finney’s irresistible rake Tom Jones. She was so perfectly lovely! Her emotions, no matter how pouty or perverse, showed themselves always as innocent roses in cream.
It’s called displacement. I was really in love with Tom.
Susannah York, properly applauded as a darling of the free-form ’60s, died Jan. 15, 2011 of cancer at the age of 72. Her flute-to-oboe voice was just as winning as her face, and as her career developed she took on serious roles, in Genet’s The Maids, and with Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine in the overwrought X, Y and Zee, that acknowledged and used her familiar wide-eyed looks.
Yet York never became a standard, high-rent star; her increasingly smart acting seemed unable to supplant the vulnerable persona that her youthful bloom created. She continued to work fitfully in movies and on TV, and she wrote children’s books, but my boyish investment in her as a permanent idol never paid off. That wasn’t York’s fault, of course: Expectations born in movie theaters are bound to be dashed.
Since I was old enough to see, movies were where I went to escape – a cultural cliché, to be sure. But what was I running from? It wasn’t just self-knowledge.
On a freezing November day, with only thin jackets on, my best friend, Jeff, and I cut school and took the subway from Queens into the city because Tom Jones had opened and we had to see it. As the two of us ran through the streets to make the showing, we were blocked by people gathering in front of an appliance-store window – yes, there were “appliance stores” then. I pushed through, and on a flickering black-and-white screen could see the words under the picture: “Kennedy Shot.”“What’s going on?” Jeff asked me.
“Nothing. Come on, we’ll miss it.”
About a third of the way into hip Tony Richardson’s version of once-hip Henry Fielding’s story, as I immersed myself in what I now know was a real romance – between teenage me and charming, beautiful characters in charming, faraway places – someone in the next row started to sob. The sobbing multiplied; ushers gathered and whispered; a few in the audience got up and left. We stayed till the end.
On the endless subway ride home, almost everyone looked shocked. Some riders, African American, openly wailed. Both of us Jeffs sat still, silent.
That was when I learned that real life, in the form of death, could intrude on my movie-going world. And, as you will understand, it’s also the underlying reason I mourn, with affection and gratitude, the passing of the talented, appealing Susannah York.
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
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