The Ancient Greeks’ Blackened Reputation

My friend Michael Mailer is an extremely talented film director and producer, most recently of Cutman and Little Audrey, the latter a true story about a little girl that created miracles. Michael’s father, the novelist Norman Mailer, taught me how to headbutt, and when I asked him if there was brain damage involved, he looked nonplussed. “Writers have harder heads than normal people,” he said. 

Be that as it may, Norman was a frustrated movie director. He introduced me to Elia Kazan, the renowned director, and Larry McMurtry, the great western writer whose Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show were made into a memorable television series and movie, respectively. The night Norman had Kazan to dinner in his Brooklyn house, I happened to be in a terrible mood. It had to do with women, what else? Kazan and I spoke in Greek to each other; my new friend asked me why I was down. Once I explained to him.he stood up from the table, came around to my side of it, put his hands on my shoulders and whispered to me in Greek: “All you have to do is be nice, and she will come back.” Sure enough, he turned out to be right. 

McMurtry also turned out to be as nice and as intelligent about the fairer sex as Kazan. I dined with him chez Mailer, this time with my wife Alexandra present, and McMurtry paid me the best compliment I have ever had. Even Norman was impressed. Then Larry and I dropped Alexandra off at home, and the two of us went drinking late into the night. We hit a couple of nightspots and ended the evening at five in the morning. Many years later he wrote nice things about me. 

The reason I bring these two talents up is because of how much I would love for them to still be around so I could ask them certain questions about casting. What would Gone with the Wind be like if a white woman had been cast as Mamie? Or for that matter, if a black actor portrayed Rhett Butler? Alas, Elia and Larry are filming and writing up in Heaven nowadays, but their legacies are reminders what real talents they were, and, on the other hand, how untalented the present bunch of moviemakers are. Only dense, totally giftless nincompoops do this sort of thing, casting actors of different color in well known roles. It is the only way to attract attention. The latest outrage is a movie of the Odyssey with a black Penelope pining away for 20 years, surrounded by suitors in Ithaca. As they say, you couldn’t make it up. But wait—this morning, while in the midst of writing this column, I read that it’s Helen of Troy that is portrayed by a black actress, not Penelope. Or perhaps both are. Who cares? 

The first book recounted to me as a child was the Iliad, and then the Odyssey. Hollywood’s ludicrous pandering to minorities was a very long way away. Helen was described as very white, very fair, and, of course, beautiful. In the Greek version she had been kidnapped by Paris. No Greek would ever admit that the wife of a Spartan king, any Spartan, in fact any Greek, would run away with a Trojan. I mentioned this fact to Jacques Sernas, a very feminine but extremely handsome French actor-gigolo whom I sat next to at a Riviera lunch very long ago. He played Paris in some trashy movie, in which the beautiful Rosanna Podesta portrayed Helen. At least I think so. He was not best pleased but very polite. Friends who had witnessed the exchange told me I had been a bully. The story made the Riviera rounds; some called it “The revenge of the Spartan.” 

Absurdity aside, and before quotas, I remember asking Elia Kazan why the ancient Greeks, with the exception of Achilles and Alexander the Great, were always depicted in a negative manner. Basically I was asking why Menelaus was shown to be fat, ugly and aggressive in the movies I had seen. If memory serves, he said because we were always the winners, hence the losers were shown in the nicest possible manner. 

Well, let’s get this straight once and for all: If Menelaus actually existed and was not a product of Homer’s imagination, he would have been neither fat nor ugly, because then the Spartans would not have elected him king. And here’s some unsolicited advice to the halfwits making “historical” movies in infantile dioramas: The actress playing Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca was nominated for an Oscar, but had she portrayed Mamie in Gone with the Wind, she would have been laughed off the screen. Ditto about Helen, Penelope, and Menelaus. Take it from an ancient Greek. I know better.