LINE OF BEAUTY: BAD GIRLS

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Femmes fatales, adulteresses, killers, cultural rule-breakers—every age seems to be riveted by women who are less sugar, more spice. Matthew Sweet picks out the best of a bad lot ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2011

Bathsheba Jan Massys, mid-16th century
Somewhere between male fantasy and female defiance lies the bad girl. Here she comes, shouting, pouting or striding around in fur, or—as in Bathsheba’s case—going topless about Jerusalem in the second Book of Samuel. The Hittite hottie arranged for King David to clock her bathing in the nude—setting in motion the train of events that ended with her husband’s by-royal-appointment dispatch to the front-line. Unlike Leonard Cohen, whose “Hallelujah” counts the ways of Bathsheba’s indifference, Jan Massys seems inclined to be generous. That’s surely something more quizzical than appetite playing across these Swintonian features.

Lady Macbeth 11th century onwards
At first, she was no lady; Mrs Macbeth’s extravagantly perverse speech about dashing out baby brains was first delivered by a boy in a padded frock. But this Lady is a real dame: Ellen Terry, Victorian superstar, who recorded that her “Lady Mac” had divided critics because she did not “hold by the ‘fiend’ reading of the character”. The character’s moral badness, though, remains debated—and gender is at the heart of that debate. Macbeth is less a fiend—more accurately he’s a tragic hero. So what stops us from seeing his wife the same way?

Diamanda Galás Kristofer Buckle, 2010 (pictured)
Death becomes her. Disease, too. And insanity. They have been Galás’s inspirations since the 1980s, when she began performing quadraphonic jazz anthems of doom with titles such as “The Litanies of Satan” and “Plague Mass”. Nice girls don’t do this. Nor do they transform themselves into a vision that Bram Stoker might have had after bingeing on absinthe and raw pork chops. But Galas is a serious figure—a film-maker, too, whose “Schrei 27”, co-created with Davide Pepe, is something remarkable: an uncompromising experiment exploring those master-themes of mortality, morbidity and madness. You might sum up her life in the same phrase. "Schrei 27" Silk Street Theatre, London, April 22nd to 23rd; www.barbican.org.uk

Lola Montez Southworth and Hawes, c1851
Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl. But that was many years ago—160, to be precise. Its subject, the former Eliza Gilbert from County Sligo, was by then firmly established as Lola Montez—circus turn, courtesan to kings, “La Grande Horizontale” of mid-19th-century Europe. Her look—bum pushed out during some kind of equestrian fag-break—may not have survived the years, but her legacy lies in the sexualisation of two letters of the alphabet, still legible in strip clubs and on the cards tacked inside telephone boxes. Without Lola Montez, no Lolo Ferrari, no Lolita.

Bonnie Parker 1933
Contrary to the movie image, Bonnie Parker didn’t smoke cigars and didn’t spray bank tellers with bullets. After a car crash in which her leg was doused in battery acid, she couldn’t even walk straight. It’s not all Faye Dunaway’s fault: Bonnie ensured her own iconisation when she spent a day in March 1933 fooling around with a camera. Here she is, ascending the north face of Clyde Barrow—but she also posed with a gun; slipped someone else’s Havana between her fingers; curved her long lean body over the chassis of the getaway car. She had accomplices, however: it was the police who developed the pictures.

The Duchess of Windsor 1945
In the past few months she has featured in two big-deal British TV dramas (“Any Human Heart” and the revamped “Upstairs, Downstairs”) and slinked through “The King’s Speech”. Andrea Riseborough is about to play her in a picture directed by Madonna. But who, apart from her Edward, liked Wallis Simpson? Over the years, the reasons for hating her have shifted: in the 1930s she was a royal homewrecker who didn’t have the decency to be either unmarried or British—Alexis to the Queen Mother’s Krystle Carrington. Today she feels like the Nazi queen who never was: this look—black hair, black tailoring, black leather belt—would have passed muster at Nuremberg.

Ava Gardner 1953
Was ever a femme more fatale than Ava, the foul-mouthed farm-girl from Carolina who became one of the most lucent stars of the 1940s. See how she burns in the dark of a shot—or watch her first scene in “The Killers”, a pitch-black noir from 1946. It’s in the playing, in the angle of her head, in the way she conjures an implied world of sex that the censor could not have detected on the page. All the script contains is her character’s views on health and safety in the boxing business. But after 20 seconds of talking this talk, letting the candlelight play over her face, she has snared a prize-fighter (Burt Lancaster) and beaten his girlfriend into submission.

Candy Darling 1970
Candy was a product of Warhol’s factory, though more an objet trouvé than an original work. She had once been little Jimmy Slattery from Long Island, who livened up dull afternoons in the family bungalow by putting on mom’s mascara and making like Lana Turner. By the late 1960s, she was everybody’s Darling, and especially Lou Reed’s. But Candy kept her centre poisonous: when she failed to win the title role in the film “Myra Breckinridge”, she declared: “They decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite.”

Marianne Faithfull 2002
When she was good, she was very very good, a prim little folk-singer from Reading. Then came an affair with Mick Jagger, and she went wild with a convert’s zeal. But it was in her bloodline: her maternal great-great-uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who surrendered his name to dominatrices the world over. Only a true devotee of pain would crave all of Faithfull’s experiences—the years of addiction and homelessness, the boyfriend who jumped from the 14th floor. But the albums. And the plays. And the films. More of them, and better, than many happier artists manage in a lifetime. Would she have done all this had her years remained unpoisoned by catastrophe—or her own taste for misbehaviour?

Grace Jones 2009
The movies never knew what to do with Miss Jones—they asked her to scowl opposite Roger Moore, to shake her spear at Arnold Schwarzenegger. They might as well have asked Delacroix’s Liberty to take direction. Grace Jones is not an actor and possibly not much of a singer. It’s quite hard to think of her as a person at all. She is an embodiment of ferocity; a woman who has exaggerated the long hard lines of her body to become the kind of human artwork that would have no need of a gallery attendant to remind visitors to keep their hands to themselves.

Matthew Sweet presents "Night Waves" on BBC Radio 3.