I finally watched Victor/Victoria (Netflix link), which I added to my list after reading a couple of books about Julie Andrews.
(image from Amazon.com)
There were a lot of things I liked about it. I was completely charmed to see Robert Preston from The Music Man working with Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music; I’ve watched both movies quite a few times. I liked James Garner in it, too, and it was fun to see Webster’s dad in something that wasn’t Webster.
(This reminds me to recommend The Garner Files, if you like celebrity autobiographies. I barely knew who James Garner was when I read it, and yet still enjoyed it and found it interesting. It’s been awhile, but I remember finding it funny, too. I think he looks a little like David Boreanaz. See?
(image from Amazon.com)
I also very much enjoy the way he puts the author’s name right on the cover, instead of implying he wrote it himself. /digression)
The main trouble I had with the movie is that Julie Andrews didn’t look or seem even one tiny bit like a man to me. Not one tiny bit. She looked and sounded like a poised lady the entire time. Possibly it’s that I’m too familiar with her as an actress (and particularly as a short-haired actress, so that when she dramatically Removes! Her! Wig!, she just looks like her regular self with her hair slicked back). But mostly it’s that she just Didn’t Look Like a Guy, At All, not even like a guy who was enormously successful at pretending to be a woman. She looked like a woman in a suit, and not even like a woman pretending to be a guy in a suit: just, like a woman in a suit. So it was difficult to get into that fairly major plot point of the movie, which is that she would be fooling and amazing audiences with her act.
I also found the musical acts themselves kind of meh. Everyone in the movie is just BLOWN AWAY by her talent, but I barely remember the songs or the performances—unlike movies such as The Sound of Music, where you could watch and re-watch it just to see the songs.
Regardless! I liked the movie and was glad to have seen it, and I feel increased affection for all the actors in it.
I was very interested to read this book:
(image from Amazon.com)
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, by Jillian Lauren. Here is the description: “A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a prince’s harem.” Well! That sounds spicy!
But here is my understanding of “harem”: It’s like a collection of women, owned and cared for by the collector. They’re not paid; they may be given gifts, but it’s hard to know what ownership means if the person is owned by the gift-giver. They don’t come and go; they’re unlikely to be free to leave. They can be family, living there domestically with their children (as opposed to a more sordid image of the life there), but they’re not employees or guests.
And here is my understanding of “girl from the suburbs”: if you could equally well say “prostitute from the city,” and if in fact the latter term would be considered more accurate, then readers of the book are going to be a little disappointed.
What I was picturing before I read the book was a nice college girl traveling to another country, perhaps as part of her education, and ending up accidentally or deliberately part of a harem. Perhaps the girl would be majoring in journalism, so would turn the experience into a great story showing the inside of something we never get to see—and very likely de-sexualizing the image quite a bit. I wondered how she would manage to escape in order to publish the book.
The actual story is that woman working in New York City as a prostitute is hired to be a “party girl”: to come voluntarily and be paid to look pretty and be fun at the royal household’s nightly parties, and to have sex with the princes when they want to. She can leave if she wants to, and she does; she then returns; she then leaves freely a second time, taking her jewelry and clothing gifts with her each time. She is very well paid for this job. She’s not part of a harem, even though that’s what she calls it. We get a peek into the inner life of a hired party girl, not a peek into the inner life of a harem member.
As with many non-fiction books, this one seemed to have about two chapters of story stretched into a full-length book. The story is watered down with other talk about the author’s life. I found it very difficult to get into, in part because the story was so stretched out, in part because I was irritated that it was sold as one thing when it was actually another thing, and in part because I found the narrator so unlikeable. The way she describes other people is so mean (and done with such cunning faux innocence) it almost made me gasp—and if she was telling the truth, she failed to sell it. It’s one thing to “tell your story” and “not be ashamed,” and it’s another thing to publicly and viciously tell one side of a story, with the worst possible spin and assumptions, in a forum where the other side can’t respond. Reading it, I felt as if she’d noticed that other people got sympathy and pity when they used certain language and told their stories certain ways, and so she tried to copy/use that formula to make her own story sympathetic—but instead it reads as false/wily/manipulative/sociopathic. In the second half, her occasional brief sympathetic/self-aware remarks had become cumulatively successful (in a way that made me wonder if I were getting a better idea of her, or if I were succumbing to manipulation), so that I no longer found her unendurable—though still felt a strong urge to armchair-diagnose her, and still felt very sorry for everyone she skewered.
I don’t even recommend it as an “inner life of a party girl” story, because it wasn’t that interesting. What this book did was whet my appetite for someone ELSE to write such a book.
I’ve never seen Victor/Victoria, but I have read “Some Girls.”
I actively hated the author. She seemed like a cruel, spoiled brat. I saw her on a morning program and she seemed so wholesome and earnest that I picked up the book immediately because I wanted to know how this “suburban girl” ended up in a harem and if she had to escape. I was picturing more adventure and a daring escape than sitting around, bored, trying to raise up in the ranks for better cash and prizes.
She has a new book that has recently come out and I am in no rush to read it after the first experience.
Yes. Cruel, spoiled brat: yes. Sitting around, bored, trying for better cash and prizes: yes. That is exactly it. I read this comment several times with great satisfaction.
And, **I** read your review with the same satisfaction!
Faithful reader, rare commenter. I recommend the book, The Kadin, by Bertrice Small. It is fiction, a romance, so possibly not all that accurate, but I love the way the harem is presented. While the woman start out as victims (sold into slavery), they are strong and smart and do well for themselves in their new world. There is also quite a bit of Ottoman history. The Kadin is one of my very favorite books and I reread it frequently. (It’s an older book and now I’m wondering if it’s out of print? I’ll check … it’s available in both print and ereader.)
I just checked, and my library system has it! I placed a request.
(Correction: women, not woman. The shame.)
Oh, I’m so glad! Read it with a grain of salt, as it is a romance, but it does describe harem life.
On your other topic, I thought Lesley Ann Warren STOLE the whole movie.
She was SO FUNNY, and I loved the contrast between her loud talkative expressiveness and James Garner’s near-silent underacting.
It is blowing my tiny mind that everyone hasn’t seen and loved Victor Victoria, but I think I am dating myself by saying that. I keep thinking when I watched it, it never OCCURRED to me that people weren’t shocked that she was a woman playing a man playing a woman. It makes me feel like a big dummy but then I think, welllll, I was a little kid when I first saw it so maybe that’s it. Anyway, I love it and I agree about Lesley Anne Warren – so great! I never read a book about a harem, but I did read a novel called Going Down years ago, it was about a young woman who works in a bordello to put herself through college? I think? Anyway, there are parts of that book that I remember so clearly, even years after reading it.
I thought the same thing! I saw this movie in the theater with my parents in-I just looked it up to confirm,1982. This is the same year that Tootsie came out, which I also saw, in the theater with my parents.
Maybe it isn’t that we were just kids and easily duped but it’s more that in the last thirty plus years movies have explored beyond these topics and audiences have become more unfazed by these types of “shocking reveals”.
We’re no longer an audience watching the reaction of people in a movie reacting to a character revealing they are really a man or woman in drag. We’re now watching characters become a different gender. Specifically Jeffrey Tambor’s character in Transparent or Sophia’s (Orange is the New Black) backstory episodes.
I’ve wanted to re watch Victor/Victoria for years. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid and love to see it now as an adult. Tootsie continues to be one of my favorite movies of all time. There’s a really great interview with Dustin Hoffman discussing how disappointed he was that he didn’t make a more attractive woman and how it made him realize how many interesting women he overlooked for that same reason:
Oh dear, I didn’t mean to actually MAKE the whole clip appear, I just wanted to link! I’m sorry Swistle. I don’t think I can go back and take it out.
Thank you so much for posting that clip – not only did it make me cry, it made me love Dustin Hoffman even more. Tootsie is one of my all-time favorite movies and I think I’ll make my kids watch it with me this weekend. :)
Well, this is disappointing, because when you described what the book was SUPPOSED to be I was all excited, and then when you said what it actually turned out to be, well. There was a bit of a let-down.
I read “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood” a few years ago and really enjoyed it, but it is not exactly what you are looking for because it is about a domestic harem (extended family) rather than the sexual arrangement for a prince or high official. And it is not about a Westerner experiencing a harem. But it is a beautiful piece of writing.
I always enjoy your reviews, but especially this one because I definitely would have thought the same thing you did about the harem book. Now I have The Kadin on my Goodreads list.
A couple of nonfiction suggestions:
At the Drop of a Veil, Marianne Alireza (Western woman leaves the US to enter her Saudi husband’s sequestered domestic harem/ home in the 1940s; until her husband finds a second wife, she considers herself very happily married)
Dreams of Trespass, by Fatima Mernissi, has already been mentioned, but Mernissi also wrote Scheherezade Goes West, which talks about her harem-bred grandmother and the advice that led Mernissi herself to be an independent Moroccan feminist.
Daughter of Persia, by Sattareh Farman-Farmaian, is the story of the daughter of a prince, brought up in a harem, who grew up to do a lot of important social changes against ignorance, poverty, and disease in the last days of the Shah in Iran.
These sound strong!
::busily making notes about all of these fascinating harem books suggested in the comments::
**also making notes of other titles** THANK YOU!!
I’d recommend checking out First a Girl on netflix. Victor/Victoria is based on it and while, yes, the actress is very feminine I think she works better in the main role than Julie Andrews does because she’s younger and more boyish looking. Here’s the info on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026361/
I’m a few days late to comment on this post, but have you read Orange is the New Black? I recently read it because I watch and enjoy the series, and it was FASCINATING–though I think I would have gotten the same amount of enjoyment out of it if I hadn’t seen the series. Based on what you expected/wanted Some Girls to be like, I would say it’s right up your alley. (In case you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a woman who has to go to prison because of a drug crime she’d committed ten years prior.) I’m generally not a huge fan of nonfiction, but this one reads like a novel, and it doesn’t feel like the author is trying to stretch two chapters worth of material into a full-length book–if anything, I wanted MORE.
Oh, I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard a lot of (positive) talk about the series! I should try it!