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  • Marginalized Citizens
  • Gary Lain (bio)
The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives. Mel Freilicher. San Diego City Works Press. http://www.cityworkspress.org. 135 pages; paper, $12.95.

The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, by Mel Freilicher, portrays seven tragically exemplary Americans. In three sections sorted by both implicit and explicit similarities, Freilicher investigates/interprets the biographies of troubled "divas" Bettie Page, Dorothy Dandridge, and Joey Stefano; proto-feminists Margaret Fuller and Margaret Sanger; and the talented, complex, and committed black Americans Billy Strayhorn and Bayard Rustin, both of whom were openly gay during a time when "they didn't even have legal rights." To provide a loose thematic/emotional continuity for The Unmaking of Americans, and to bring these very diverse figures into the context of our own recent times, Freilicher introduces the character Peripatetic Book Reviewer. An itinerant scholar and college lecturer, and an amusingly everyday picaro, Peripatetic Book Reviewer dovetails the ways in which our "7 Americans" were marginalized by the official culture because of their varying sexual and gender orientations/preferences/attitudes with his own autobiography in very personal, immediate, and moving ways.

Book 1 of The Unmaking of Americans relates the fate of troubled divas Page, Stefano, and Dandridge. The focus of a recent, trendy cult following, Page is here portrayed (through the vehicle of her rather dubious, we are told, biography) as a fairly complex figure: a sexually adventure-some young woman and uninhibited bondage photo model, who later in life becomes a dangerous and abusive moral fanatic. Page is also drawn as knowing and funny, yet curiously indifferent as to the larger implications of her work, and the social sanctions that could befall her industry at any time. Stefano is viewed here as celebrity, as gay porn dreamboat, and we gain little access to his psychology or motivations. He is a vital and potent figure, and one is heartened by his lack of inhibition, but he was also a hopeless drug addict who committed suicide over what was ultimately a pedestrian misunderstanding.

There is somewhat more to say about the classy and accomplished Dorothy Dandridge (who, one might argue, is placed in rather rough company here with Page and Stefano). Polished, talented, and beautiful, Dandridge was a groundbreaking black actress, landing leading roles in major Hollywood films (Carmen Jones [1954], Porgy and Bess [1959]). Later, Dandridge (taking bad advice from her mentor/lover Otto Preminger) declined a role in The King and I (1956). This decision (based in part on her refusal to play a slave) led to her breaking her contract Twentieth Century Fox, and she felt later that this did irreparable damage to her career. An abusive marriage to dancer Jack Denison left Dandridge bankrupt; she was later hospitalized at the California state mental institution at Camarillo, and finally died of an overdose of [End Page 15] anti-depressant medication at fourty-two.

Freilicher's tone in these Dandridge passages is sober, sympathetic, and precise. Yet during the Stefano passages, he employs a campy and playfully lascivious tone. This dialectic sets up a pattern he employs throughout the novel. (Freilicher approaches Bettie Page in a spirit of intellectual inquiry well suited to this down-home paragon of sexual deviancy.) For example, toward the end of book 1, we find a set piece involving an imaginary frolic at the "Cukaracha Club" involving Page, Stefano, and Dandridge and (later) Hedda Hopper (who here represents everything that is prurient, opportunistic, and false). This scene is done with great verve and is quite funny, very outré. But when juxtaposed with the somber details of Dandridge's decline (especially the long, late-night phone calls to old friends in which she would sing tunes from younger, better days), Freilicher's tonal range allows us to see these "divas" in their complexity as people who, despite their fame, were marginalized and done real emotional damage based on the most intimate aspects of their identities. Furthermore, the episodic passages concerning Peripatetic Book Reviewer's life and times (which take place during our own era, and run through all three books) serve to provide a degree of thematic unity to the text, as his own experiences often intersect the biographies...

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