Life of the Party

PARTY GIRLS

When hearing Ann-Margret was considered for Life of the Party: The Pamela Harriman Story, I felt no urgency to shout miscasting, even though Harriman was by birth English and blue-blooded. Throughout the years, Harriman gained notoriety built on high profile promiscuity; divorced from Winston Churchill’s son, she became plumpy aristocratic courtesan to Averell Harriman (decades before marrying him), William Paley, Ed Murrow, Ali Khan, Gianni Agnelli, a Rothchild and several others. Disliked by foes because she was assertive and possessive, she was nevertheless resourceful, rebounding and, the key to her later triumphs, centered on the men she set her sights on. Indisputably she was Florence Nightingale to two husbands as they lay dying. Labeled a “practical dreamer,” she grew into a driven, powerful force in politics—to die while in the service of her adopted country as the first woman American Ambassador to France. Ann-Margret started out as the salacious image of minx and, though scorned for perceived artistic shortcomings, grew into a driven actress wanting to disprove her critics by taking on Blanche in a TV version of A Streetcar Named Desire and in time became the grand dame of television’s most entertaining fact-based soapers. (And like Pamela, she put her husband first during his battle with the debilitating myasthenia gravis.) We know beyond gossip why Pamela never really lacked a man in her life; when she threw her head back, flashed her beguiling smile and spoke with her boudoir voice, she seduced with promise, then conquered with her secret formula. (Rumored to be the same as Wallis Simpson’s.) We gather about Ann-Margret a sportive naughtiness—a force of barely curbed wiles manipulating marks to total surrender; seasoned now, she’s the epitome of working-class savoir-faire. So when first appearing in Life of the Party, looking this much like Pamela in her last years we’re a bit spooked, there’s sweet vindication—recognizing parallels, channeling commiseration, she’s going to pull it off. If she’s not quite able to achieve Pamela’s inimitably charming yet almost tipsied voice, she gets close enough with its infamous flirtatiousness. One regret—the script by Lisa Friedman Bloch and Kathy Kirtland Silverman. Pitifully empty of details, we want more, especially about the early juicy affairs. Not knowing impediments, I suspect director Waris Hussein didn’t want to give up a good hour or so to the younger actress playing Pamela during the Blitz of London; a healthy cut & paste montage and a voice-over explaining what’s missing would have served adequately. Later, the accusations of avarice are left dangling and you wish for a confirmation of Pamela’s “I love you” phone call to her son before her death. As mini-view, Life of the Party isn’t all it could be but Pamela probably would have been flattered. She’d have slipped Ann-Margret her private number.

Ann-Margret is most compelling when strutting the slut stuff; few smear the libidinous on the lips more tantalizingly or sway the hips with more oomph. She was a hoot as a white trash hot box right from the start of Bye Bye Birdie. She seemed born to play the universal high school tramp who’d graduate to fleshy sex kitten in Viva Las Vegas, Kitten with a Whip, The Cincinnati Kid, The Swinger, The Tiger and the Pussycat and C.C. and Company. But the image of lewd purring changed when she enlarged her boobs for Carnal Knowledge and didn’t get the sexual satisfaction she demanded from Jack Nicholson. Something promising appeared—an honorable effort toward acting. Her career took one of those audience-applauded U-turns and though she’d occasionally go back to parodying her former signature (as in Tommy), she started surprising us in Middle Age Crazy, The Return of the Soldier, Who Will Love My Children? and in the 1984 A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she wasn’t ready for but isn’t at all embarrassing as Blanche, one of the great tragediennes of American theatre. It’s a role demanding a liquefied transformation going from whatever the personality of the actress playing her to the arrival of insanity. Unlike Vivien Leigh and Jessica Lange, both of whom had stage runs permitting exploration before filming, Ann-Margret does it with minimal rehearsal—basically cold—and damn if we don’t keep rooting for her even though the part’s too grandly maddening for a pop star. New to Tennessee Williams’ garden, she strains in getting his flowery language to blossom; she has neither the power nor range to bring painful dignity when carted off. We have to sense Blanche is walking a tightrope between crushing realism and escapist magic; we have to feel her desperation for the latter. Earthy as well as earth-bound—and amazingly watchable as she does a quite fine attempt at seduction of the young bill collector, delivering with slutty exactitude “You make my mouth water” and “I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children”—Ann-Margret’s Blanche is not unexpectedly the whoriest of versions, rightly acquiesced to by director John Erman, with whom the star is comfortable. The emotional roller coaster she doesn’t quite ride in Streetcar is what she comes closer to in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. Based on Dominick Dunne’s novel about a Long Island socialite killed in 1955 by his wife, and also directed by Erman, the miniseries puts her into the familiar role of flashy showgirl striving for respectability, only here the character’s doomed by having to act out the role of unindicted murderess in order not to be imprisoned for “accidentally” killing her philandering husband, a convenient punishment set up by her mother-in-law Claudette Colbert, in her swan song as a mix of Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale. The trappings and glossed-over sins of the rich get the customary Dunne treatment—there are few modern American writers who get this moneyed milieu down so patently, who underline the obscene upholstered detachment the wealthy can summon when they pull together to protect each other. An outsider can be destroyed by this shrewd aloofness, which is what makes Ann-Margret so good; while her character is desperate to prove worthy of the snobs, only to be made victim of their expedience, the performance parallels the star’s career—she’s earning our esteem by going full tilt in a role we’d be the first to imprison her in and then commend her for proving once again no one can do Ann-Margret better. (And fearlessly in S 11, E 18 of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit entitled “Bedtime.”) As a long overdue tribute to her for whatever it is she’s got plenty of, the boozed up Mad Men admitted failing to adapt the opening of Bye Bye Birdie as a commercial for a new diet soda. They’re acknowledging a guilty pleasure—no one wants Ann-Margret on a health kick.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com