Vivien Leigh is most remembered for giving two of the best performances ever caught on film. Despite being British, she won her Oscars playing two very different daughters of the American South.
Her Scarlett O’Hara is a tenacious survivor who will stop at nothing to get what she wants in Gone with the Wind, ending the film with the famous line, “After all, tomorrow is another day!” In A Streetcar Named Desire, her Blanche DuBois is the broken remnant of a lady living in world in which she has “always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” Whatever else she did in these roles, Ms. Leigh did not provide the audience with an appropriate role model.
However, in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, we see Ms. Leigh provide the role model of a lady circa 1961. Of course, this being an adaptation of the only novel of Tennessee Williams, it’ll go bad before it’s over. The titular Mrs. Stone that she plays is an American actress who remains in Rome after her wealthy husband has the bad taste to die on the plane going there.
Ms. Leigh as Mrs. Stone is a consummate lady, from the way she coaxes her gloves from her hands to how she rolls her cigarettes in an ashtray. (To younger readers, at that time, ladies always wore gloves and sometimes smoked.) She says “Thank you” when her cigarette is lit or her chair is pulled out for her in that way that ladies do that is perfunctory without being dismissive, all while wearing a wardrobe from Balmain that defines mid-century chic.
Through the Contessa, a friend of faded nobility reduced to operating as a highbrow pimp, Mrs. Stone meets a young Italian man. He is lyrically named Paolo Di Leo and played by a young American named Warren Beatty, who was quite lyrical in his own way at 24. Of course he’s a gigolo, and of course Mrs. Stone resists him. At least at first.
The Contessa, impatient for her cut, confronts Paolo about his inability to seal the deal with Mrs. Stone. He defends himself by protesting that Mrs. Stone is a great lady to which she replies, “There’s no such thing as a great American lady. Great ladies do not occur in a nation less than 200 years old.”
Well, we’re not less than 200 years old anymore, and I suspect we can all come up with some nominees for great American ladies that has nothing to do with not appearing barelegged in public. The one that comes to my mind is an icon of everything patriotic Americans aspire for this country to be, has visitors who come from far and wide to see her, and has her very own island in New York Harbor. Of course, I speak of Lady Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty is a monument unlike any other found in the United States. She was not built by us to celebrate us or any of our more august leaders. She was not carved into the side of a mountain to increase tourism in a pocket of the country to which few people would otherwise ever go. She was a gift from the people of France.
She stands with a gilded torch in her right hand held above her head. It might bear pointing out that gold leaf is applied judiciously to the flame of her torch and her left hand holds a tablet inscribed with the date of July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals rather than a bible.
I remember thinking after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that to have destroyed the Statue of Liberty would have been more demoralizing to Americans as an assault on who we are as a people. As we approach the 25th anniversary of that horrible day, I must reflect that perhaps the terrorists having struck against our financial and military symbols might have been the right odious choice after all.
Lady Liberty has a foot on broken chains and shackles, symbolizing the end of slavery in the United States. She has welcomed immigrants and represented hope and refuge for the “huddled masses.” But she was dedicated in 1886, long before the realities of generational inequality from Jim Crow forward to the anti-immigrant policies of the current era. She was never a reality, only a hope, much like those of the immigrants, the formerly enslaved, and all of their descendants.
So, Contessa, we have produced at least one great American lady, even if she was made in another country, modeled on neoclassical themes from another civilization, and brought here without her consent. That doesn’t prevent her from being American.
That’s what makes her American.
