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cosette_giryI've reading up a lot about Hollywood in the 20th century, listening to podcasts - and it's incredible and heartbreaking all at once to see the number of actresses who were put through so much abuse and strain because of pressure not only from the studios, but also their relatives. And that included stage moms from Hell, who, for the most part, projected their own career failings through their daughters and made them into stars - no matter the costs.
And for some reason - I thought of Meg Giry and her mother, and how they were portrayed in the Phantom of the Opera not-sequel (I mean, at least according to certain parts of the fandom, including yours truly), Love Never Dies.
I'm not trying to give an explanation here, but... thinking about it, it does seem like perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber might have been trying to go for a stage mom from Hell approach for Madame Giry. I mean, who knows what he's thinking in that nut head of his. Thing is, Meg in LND is the kind of character Bette Davis would play. Because Bette Davis' specialty back in the old days was playing the bad girl you loved to hate. (But with a script like LND, if you would have given that to Bette Davis, she probably would have glanced at it, laughed in your face and not even bother to tell you she refused the job.)
Except Meg... well, she's not a Bette Davis type. If you look at her in POTO, she's rather the type of role you'd meet for female leads in the silent era, or heck, if you want to get more modern, she's a Debbie Reynolds (actually, yes, let's go back in time and let's have a Meg Giry movie with Debbie Reynolds. I'd pay big money for that).
From the little we see of Meg in POTO, I just... don't see her as the type to become embittered. If you take the 2004 movie (I know, it's not great, but I use it as reference since that's where Meg is the most thoroughly developed), you can see she wishes to be in the spotlight like Christine is, during the Think of Me scene - but is she upset about how her friend gets to be the star? No, quite the contrary. I don't find a Pollyanna type of Meg interesting, mainly because the setting of POTO doesn't really adapt well to that type of character, since this isn't a sitcom, obviously.
So I don't think Meg would project any "failures" or lack of recognition on Christine, necessarily, but considering the type of mother Madame Giry is, she'd probably be the type of kid who'd have some pretty low self-esteem, mostly because it'll seem to her she can never satisfy her mother. The only case where I could see Meg becoming resentful of Christine is if Madame Giry started favoring her - though again, Madame Giry taking care of Christine is 2004-movie only, and in both the musical and the movie, Madame Giry doesn't really give any signs she prefers Christine to Meg - quite the contrary, since she's more often openly affectionate to Meg than to Christine. And Madame Giry is not the affectionate type to start with...
One thing LND is kind of unclear about in the revised version is whether Madame Giry knew about Meg sleeping with powerful men to gather money for Phantasma. Meg does mention towards the end that she "did as Mother said", but did that involve that as well? In the London production, it was made clear she forced Meg to do it, but it was changed afterwards because I guess ALW realized himself it was a bit much. Obviously, Madame Giry still pretty much brainwashed and emotionally abused Meg into only thinking to please the Phantom via her career (and unlike a lot of people, I can buy Meg falling in love with the Phantom, but I'm a Erik/Meg shipper, so I'm biased obviously), but did she go as far as to pimp out her daughter, or did Meg do it all behind her back without her knowing? The latter... is shaky at best, because considering how Giry seems to oversee everything and that nothing escapes her notice in both musicals, she'd ask herself FOR SURE where the money Meg brought back came from. So, unless Meg came up with a REALLY good excuse (and I myself can't think of a good one right now), it wouldn't be hard for her to put two and two together.
I'm not sure whether it's worth including or not, but in the Prologue to the original London production (which was later removed in the Australian production and the others that came after), Miss Fleck calls Madame Giry "Madam Giry", with "Madam" said in the American way instead of the French way. The explanation could be as simple as Fleck, well, being American, but "Madam" said in the American/English way instead of the French way means you're a woman running a brothel. So it could be a jab to Giry for what happened to Meg, just like you could honestly wonder whether Meg was the only one who was pimped out to get money for Phantasma...
But either way... Meg doesn't seem to be frightened by or angry at her mother. All her anger and despair go to the Phantom and Christine, and I know that if I was in her spot and that Giry forced me to sleep with men while I didn't want to, my breakdown wouldn't have been drowning Gustave: it would have been grabbing the closest metal chair and slapping Giry in the face with it for being such a godawful mother.
So either Giry did pimp out Meg (the most plausible option at this point, even if it's just AWFUL), either she was just that irresponsible and inattentive - which I have trouble to buy, since her number one characteristic in LND is that she's the Stage Mom from Hell.
So look - in POTO, Giry was definitely strict and demanding with Meg, but there was a certain benevolence to it, and nothing hinting anything abusive - since Meg does get to pipe back at her mother cheekily without being reprimanded ("Rehearsals! Always rehearsals!"). You could still tell she was fiercely protective of her daughter, not to say she was pretty much her only soft spot.
And yes, ballet dancers and even actresses at the time didn't have the prestige they have today and were pretty much considered to be akin to prostitutes, since a lot of them managed to go up the ladder by becoming the mistresses of powerful patrons. Meg in the original novel by Gaston Leroux becomes a baroness, which makes her one of the lucky ones. So if Meg just went on and slept with powerful men because "that's just what dancers do", wouldn't she and Madame Giry but a lot more savvy about it? Heck, the story would make a lot more sense if Meg became a 1910s Lily Garland from On The Twentieth Century and either fucked her way to the top à la Eva Perón or found a guy powerful enough to give her a good career in New York. Both Girys would have realized pretty quickly that for all his genius, the Phantom was dead weight thanks to his Christine moping and that "investing in him" would be a waste of time.
And - personal headcanon coming in here, but - I always believed that one of the reasons Christine became friends with Meg in the first place was because of how "ingenuesque" and innocent in a way both of them were - Christine because of her Angel of Music "watching over her", and Meg because of her mother's eagle eye. So that Madame Giry would chose to throw that all away once they would both be on Coney Island is a bit... drastic, to say the least, unless, again, you go with the theory that Meg did it all behind Giry's back and that it was her way of rebelling against her mother. But again, Giry not knowing anything isn't plausible for me. Or the explanation could be as simple as Meg taking the initiative and Giry just rolling with it - but she seems a bit too authoritative for letting that happen.
The saddest thing about it is that in real life, mothers pimping out their daughters to the Harvey Weinsteins who were around at the time to ensure they had a successful career really did happen. The number of Hollywood stars back in the Golden Age who had to go through this is as horrifying as it is sad. Jean Harlow died pretty much thanks to having a Stage Mom from Hell. But LND, like in so many other aspects, not only failed to understand the roots and clues we had in the original musical, but they also did give a proper follow-up and didn't even denounce the abusive aspects of stardom that could have been done with the two of them - instead shifting the blame on Meg, who ends up in the end just being a crazy hag who would kill a child to get the attention of the man she loves - and said man, in the context of LND, can only be described in one word: pathetic.
Because just like LND, the Phantom in this musical is just that: pathetic.
And for some reason - I thought of Meg Giry and her mother, and how they were portrayed in the Phantom of the Opera not-sequel (I mean, at least according to certain parts of the fandom, including yours truly), Love Never Dies.
I'm not trying to give an explanation here, but... thinking about it, it does seem like perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber might have been trying to go for a stage mom from Hell approach for Madame Giry. I mean, who knows what he's thinking in that nut head of his. Thing is, Meg in LND is the kind of character Bette Davis would play. Because Bette Davis' specialty back in the old days was playing the bad girl you loved to hate. (But with a script like LND, if you would have given that to Bette Davis, she probably would have glanced at it, laughed in your face and not even bother to tell you she refused the job.)
Except Meg... well, she's not a Bette Davis type. If you look at her in POTO, she's rather the type of role you'd meet for female leads in the silent era, or heck, if you want to get more modern, she's a Debbie Reynolds (actually, yes, let's go back in time and let's have a Meg Giry movie with Debbie Reynolds. I'd pay big money for that).
From the little we see of Meg in POTO, I just... don't see her as the type to become embittered. If you take the 2004 movie (I know, it's not great, but I use it as reference since that's where Meg is the most thoroughly developed), you can see she wishes to be in the spotlight like Christine is, during the Think of Me scene - but is she upset about how her friend gets to be the star? No, quite the contrary. I don't find a Pollyanna type of Meg interesting, mainly because the setting of POTO doesn't really adapt well to that type of character, since this isn't a sitcom, obviously.
So I don't think Meg would project any "failures" or lack of recognition on Christine, necessarily, but considering the type of mother Madame Giry is, she'd probably be the type of kid who'd have some pretty low self-esteem, mostly because it'll seem to her she can never satisfy her mother. The only case where I could see Meg becoming resentful of Christine is if Madame Giry started favoring her - though again, Madame Giry taking care of Christine is 2004-movie only, and in both the musical and the movie, Madame Giry doesn't really give any signs she prefers Christine to Meg - quite the contrary, since she's more often openly affectionate to Meg than to Christine. And Madame Giry is not the affectionate type to start with...
One thing LND is kind of unclear about in the revised version is whether Madame Giry knew about Meg sleeping with powerful men to gather money for Phantasma. Meg does mention towards the end that she "did as Mother said", but did that involve that as well? In the London production, it was made clear she forced Meg to do it, but it was changed afterwards because I guess ALW realized himself it was a bit much. Obviously, Madame Giry still pretty much brainwashed and emotionally abused Meg into only thinking to please the Phantom via her career (and unlike a lot of people, I can buy Meg falling in love with the Phantom, but I'm a Erik/Meg shipper, so I'm biased obviously), but did she go as far as to pimp out her daughter, or did Meg do it all behind her back without her knowing? The latter... is shaky at best, because considering how Giry seems to oversee everything and that nothing escapes her notice in both musicals, she'd ask herself FOR SURE where the money Meg brought back came from. So, unless Meg came up with a REALLY good excuse (and I myself can't think of a good one right now), it wouldn't be hard for her to put two and two together.
I'm not sure whether it's worth including or not, but in the Prologue to the original London production (which was later removed in the Australian production and the others that came after), Miss Fleck calls Madame Giry "Madam Giry", with "Madam" said in the American way instead of the French way. The explanation could be as simple as Fleck, well, being American, but "Madam" said in the American/English way instead of the French way means you're a woman running a brothel. So it could be a jab to Giry for what happened to Meg, just like you could honestly wonder whether Meg was the only one who was pimped out to get money for Phantasma...
But either way... Meg doesn't seem to be frightened by or angry at her mother. All her anger and despair go to the Phantom and Christine, and I know that if I was in her spot and that Giry forced me to sleep with men while I didn't want to, my breakdown wouldn't have been drowning Gustave: it would have been grabbing the closest metal chair and slapping Giry in the face with it for being such a godawful mother.
So either Giry did pimp out Meg (the most plausible option at this point, even if it's just AWFUL), either she was just that irresponsible and inattentive - which I have trouble to buy, since her number one characteristic in LND is that she's the Stage Mom from Hell.
So look - in POTO, Giry was definitely strict and demanding with Meg, but there was a certain benevolence to it, and nothing hinting anything abusive - since Meg does get to pipe back at her mother cheekily without being reprimanded ("Rehearsals! Always rehearsals!"). You could still tell she was fiercely protective of her daughter, not to say she was pretty much her only soft spot.
And yes, ballet dancers and even actresses at the time didn't have the prestige they have today and were pretty much considered to be akin to prostitutes, since a lot of them managed to go up the ladder by becoming the mistresses of powerful patrons. Meg in the original novel by Gaston Leroux becomes a baroness, which makes her one of the lucky ones. So if Meg just went on and slept with powerful men because "that's just what dancers do", wouldn't she and Madame Giry but a lot more savvy about it? Heck, the story would make a lot more sense if Meg became a 1910s Lily Garland from On The Twentieth Century and either fucked her way to the top à la Eva Perón or found a guy powerful enough to give her a good career in New York. Both Girys would have realized pretty quickly that for all his genius, the Phantom was dead weight thanks to his Christine moping and that "investing in him" would be a waste of time.
And - personal headcanon coming in here, but - I always believed that one of the reasons Christine became friends with Meg in the first place was because of how "ingenuesque" and innocent in a way both of them were - Christine because of her Angel of Music "watching over her", and Meg because of her mother's eagle eye. So that Madame Giry would chose to throw that all away once they would both be on Coney Island is a bit... drastic, to say the least, unless, again, you go with the theory that Meg did it all behind Giry's back and that it was her way of rebelling against her mother. But again, Giry not knowing anything isn't plausible for me. Or the explanation could be as simple as Meg taking the initiative and Giry just rolling with it - but she seems a bit too authoritative for letting that happen.
The saddest thing about it is that in real life, mothers pimping out their daughters to the Harvey Weinsteins who were around at the time to ensure they had a successful career really did happen. The number of Hollywood stars back in the Golden Age who had to go through this is as horrifying as it is sad. Jean Harlow died pretty much thanks to having a Stage Mom from Hell. But LND, like in so many other aspects, not only failed to understand the roots and clues we had in the original musical, but they also did give a proper follow-up and didn't even denounce the abusive aspects of stardom that could have been done with the two of them - instead shifting the blame on Meg, who ends up in the end just being a crazy hag who would kill a child to get the attention of the man she loves - and said man, in the context of LND, can only be described in one word: pathetic.
Because just like LND, the Phantom in this musical is just that: pathetic.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 02:28 am (UTC)You know, I can definitely see that ;-D
I don't suppose you've ever seen Sparrows, but Pickford in that is very much in the spirit of your Meg...
And yes, I think Madame Giry in "Love Never Dies" was intended to be played as the Stage Mother stereotype.
"Madam" isn't a brothel-keeper's title, though; it only has that imputation if used as a noun. (If the hall porter tells you "There is a letter for you, Madam", he certainly isn't delivering an insult!)
It's an interesting question as to whether Meg could have been the only one pimped out for the benefit of Phantasma, but I think the implication in "Love Never Dies" is that she definitely was. It wasn't a business deal; it's portrayed as a special favour that Meg as an individual does for Erik as an individual, not as something that's expected of her as an employee of Erik's organisation..
I don't think anyone forced her to do it. I think she was guilt-tripped into the idea that she had to be useful to Erik (why? what on earth does she owe him?), and that being a poor helpless female, all she could do was use her natural assets to bamboozle men on his behalf. And I would guess that she and/or her mother didn't originally intend it to go that far.
If you want to keep things vaguely plausible, you could say that it never actually dawned on Mme Giry that after a while, when she was 'being nice' to these powerful men, Meg had started to get pressured into giving them more than she wanted to. Perhaps she really did think her daughter was so charming and persuasive Meg could wrap mob bosses round her finger just by flattering them and letting them be seen out in public with a young and pretty woman :-(
It does seem pretty unlikely that Mme Giry wouldn't notice about money coming in, if nothing else. Particularly the way she harps on about how much Erik owes them... (But then it probably wasn't money, or at least only money in the form of contracts being awarded and the rest of it. I doubt Meg was actually being paid cash for her services, coming back and putting it into the accounts at Phantasma.)
Sleeping with the producers (and sometimes marrying them: Merle Oberon, for one) was a recognised route to improve your career (and presumably one not available to male would-be stars, although... Merle Oberon again :-p) It's more or less the premise of "The Producers", after all!
So naturally it would be one understood very well by ambitious mothers. ('Just be nice to him, darling... you know he's very important.')
But the one thing LND-Meg doesn't succeed in doing is boosting her career by sleeping with the man whose attention she is desperately trying to get -- the only one who can promote her :-(
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 03:25 am (UTC)You're absolutely right in the sense that Meg doesn't owe Erik anything - heck, Madame Giry isn't wrong in saying Erik owes her and Meg a lot more gratitude than he actually shows! And even then - let's say Meg *did* decide to go for "using her feminine wiles" in order to obtain what she wants, you'd have to ask why she'd concentrate all her efforts on someone who spends more time crying for his long lost love instead of fighting tooth and nail instead for bigger fish - because New York was rife with those at the time LND takes place, especially that the movie business has started for a few years already and they're actively recruiting in New York, considering a lot of aspiring actresses and dancers went there in hopes to get parts on Broadway. Biograph (one of the very first studios) had been around in the US since 1895, and that's the studio that started the careers of the likes of D.W. Griffith, Lionel Barrymore or Mary Pickford...
The money *could* have come in the form of contracts and all the like - but again, that Madame Giry would be "naive" enough to think Meg was just being arm candy to said powerful men seems a bit unlikely to me...
Merle Oberon wasn't the only one, indeed! One pretty infamous case is Howard Hughes and all his girlfriends (he even almost married Katharine Hepburn, who already had a successful career before she met him and then understandably got cold feet when came the time to tie the knot). Another was Norma Shearer who pretty much became "Queen of the Lot" at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the 30s since she was producer Irving Thalberg's wife - which obviously made a lot of other MGM leading ladies jealous, but it seems by various accounts they were genuinely in love with each other until Thalberg died prematurely.
I guess my question is more: "if Meg was willing to do *anything* for her career, why did she spend ten years on a guy who obviously wasn't even interested in the first place?" I guess the one explanation is that she's in love with him - but LND leaves you wondering why Meg *or* Christine even give the Phantom the time of day in the first place!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 12:55 am (UTC)The earliest reference I could find was Edison's "Parsifal", made in 1904, which sold all of 16 copies and was not a financial or critical success. "Looked at silently without a detailed knowledge of the story, the film is and was unintelligible; it was sold with a lecture and treated as a 'sacred' film similar to "The Passion Play of Oberammergau"... Certainly its static style and dearth of entertaining features made it appropriate for the holy day" :-P
("Before the Nickelodeon"(1991) by Charles Musser, p288)
I've seen Shakespeare adaptations of this era, and they consist of costumed characters gesturing at the camera in a series of brief tableaux which, as he says, are quite incomprehensible unless you already know the story in question. This sounds very similar.
Successful silent opera seems to have had to wait until the 1910s, when the sophistication of the technology had improved -- and frankly, I suspect Christine would probably have gone to Germany or Austria to star in filmed opera, and not to America!
The trouble with LND is that it takes it for granted that what Meg wants is Erik (like millions of fangirls), not success in her career; she wants *his* attention, not any old big-shot Broadway producer's casting couch. In fact her list of people she's slept with doesn't include anyone who would be of use to her personally: she 'swayed the local bosses', 'curried favour with the press', bought him time with his debtors, arranged permits, and tried to do "what little I could do" for him.
She also talks about helping him "raise money", which could be a reference to men paying her directly for her services, but I didn't get that impression -- first of all, she is helping *him* do it rather than doing it herself, secondly, when she talks earlier about Coney Island making "you pay for every little crumb" she says "I gave what they would take", which suggests to me that she is paying in kind for services *he* has received, using the only coin she has, rather than that she is vending herself for profit :-(
There was another Norma, Norma Talmadge, who married Joseph Schenck, who set up a film company to produce films especially for her and became one of the most powerful producers of the day... To be fair, I don't think that the propensity of actresses to marry film producers/directors was any greater than that for them to marry fellow performers/cinematographers etc. it was a question of moving in a common social circle and tending to marry the people you worked with. Although proverbially the rare individuals who married *outside* the profession generally had the most longest-lasting and most successful unions :-(
I guess my question is more: "if Meg was willing to do *anything* for her
career, why did she spend ten years on a guy who obviously wasn't even
interested in the first place?" I guess the one explanation is that she's
in love with him - but LND leaves you wondering why Meg *or* Christine
even give the Phantom the time of day in the first place!
LND certainly doesn't present the Phantom as a very appealing character, either in the abstract or in his treatment of either of them...
I think the answer is that Meg -- as presented in the musical -- wasn't influenced by a desire to further her *career* at all; the career was simply a means of getting his attention. It's pretty explicit that it was all for "your sake", "desperate for your favour", "because of you". She gets nothing out of it, and doesn't expect to get anything :-(