The Bride Wore Red

Aries Joan Crawford, first glimpsed as a child by her 1979 biographer as

"a tiny figure in a bright red accordion-pleated dress."

Here in The Bride Wore Red.  "Anna scandalizes everyone late in the picture with the titular red dress, a year before Bette Davis would do the same early in the superior Jezebel." (Lawrence J. Quirk, Joan Crawford)

For Bette Davis see Aries in Red #13.

Red Aries #3: Lon Chaney

The red of Aries excites and vivifies, but it also shocks and terrifies.

Actor Lon Chaney (born 1 April 1883) developed his expressivity as the child of deaf parents. The silent screen is heavily populated with Aries, which must make itself known over all obstacles. Many of the most memorable were Aries-born: Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Harold Lloyd, George Arliss, Fatty Arbuckle, Freddie Bartholemew, not to mention Marcel Marceau, Houdini, Bill Irwin and David Blaine; there’s no silencing Aries.
For the range of his extreme characterizations Chaney was known as the ‘Man of 1000 Faces’,  recalling Aries Joseph Campbell’s mythic ‘Hero with 1000 Faces’. (In his one talkie Chaney played a ventriloquist with five voices.)

Chaney as The Masque of the Red Death
Opposite Joan Crawford in the gruesome 1927 silent The Unknown, Cheney plays Alonzo the Armless, a circus knife thrower. He excelled at the grotesque, the Hunchback of Notre- Dame, the scarred Phantom of the Opera, pathos and grotesque deformity are his Self. The Aries unconscious teems with primitive horrors, and a distinct terror of nothingness, as if recalling the suffocation of the womb.  

Chaney's talents extended far beyond the horror genre and stage makeup. He was also a highly skilled dancer, singer and comedian. In fact, many people who did not know Chaney were surprised by his rich baritone voice and his sharp comedic skills.  

Purposefully fostering a mysterious image, he  avoided the social scene in Hollywood. He tried not to be photographed undisguised and said “Between pictures there is no Lon Chaney."

Mars-ruled Aries is partial to the military. Chaney’s portrayal of a tough-as-nails marine drill instructor in Tell It to the Marines (1926), one of his favorite films, earned him the affection of the US Marine Corps, who made him their first honorary member from the motion picture industry, and provided a chaplain and Honor Guard for his funeral. He was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California, next to the crypt of his father. His wife Hazel was also interred there upon her death in 1933. For unknown reasons, Chaney's crypt has remained unmarked.

Aries in Red #4

Isn't it astonishing that Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday are all Aries? Not to mention Alberta Hunter, Pearl Bailey and Mariah Carey. Aries Maya Angelou'a autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", evokes the nascent soul, emprisoned in the negations of blackness and femaleness.

 

Holiday in Red (#5)

Joseph Stone supplied this red rendition of Billie Holiday.

She tells an unforgetable story about a red dress in her autobiography, "Lady Sings the Blues":

When you did something against the rules [in the Catholic institution], at least they didn't beat you . . .

When you were being punished you got a raggedy red dress to wear. When you wore this dress none of the other girls were supposed to go near you or speak to you.

I'll never forget the first girl I saw wear the dress. She was a real wild one and she was alone in the backyard, standing on a swing. She kept swinging higher and higher, shouting and hollering, swinging higher and higher. She worked so hard she was puffing and huffing. And the kids stood around watching her, all eyes.

The Mother Superior tried to keep the kids moving and break up the crowd of gawking girls. The girl in the raggedy red dress kept on swinging and screaming. I guess she figured as long as she stayed up there on the swing no one could touch her. The Mother Superior just looked at ther, then she turned to a group of us and said: "Just remember, God will punish her."

In a few seconds there was a terrible jerk. As she swing to the highest point she could make on the swing, the chair broke and the girl flew through the air. Then there was a terrible thud and then nothing. When they found her, her neck was broken.

The first time I wore the red dress was at Easter.

Scarlet women (#6)

Red signifies prostitution as codified in 17th century French legal code and in "scarlet woman" and "red light district". Here are two Aries actresses playing mother and daughter putting on the red in a grim tale of prostitution, Freeway.Reese Witherspoon and Amanda Plummer

Aries in red #7

Sarah Jessica Parker was the third to wear Little Orphan Annie's famous red dress.

James Ensor, Aries in red #9

James Ensor, The Red Parasol

James Ensor, the Belgian fantast, was born on April 13, 1860. His canvases are always marked by the well-placed reds. Favorite themes are red-cloaked skeletons, red lips, red caps, red fire.

Astrology cannot be captured by science. The two may be regarded as enterprises at right-angles. Scientific procedure requires the scrupulous eradication of subjectivity. Astrological procedure, on the other hand, requires the equally scrupulous  conservation of subjectivity. One must not confuse the truth of the horoscope with  methodical paragraphs of interpretive boilerplate. The truth of the horoscope is not to be found written on a page, it is something that unfolds within the experience of the Subject.

James Ensor, Skeletons warming themselves

Ensor, Self-portrait in red hat

Red Aries #10

Jayne Mansfield is Aries in Red #10

Aries in red #11

Kelly LeBrock, born March 24, 1960, never repeated the splash she made with her first film, The Woman in Red in 1984. See more of her. She seems to continue to have a good time. She married Aries Steven Seagal.

CASANOVA: Aries in red #12

Richard Chamberlain, b. 31 March 1934Giacomo Casanova (b. April 2, 1725) is an Aries archtype, the priapic libertine, irrepresible autobiographer, soldier, charlatan and adventurer, who once robbed a grave as a practical joke. Among his escapades his literal escape from the Venetian prison stands out as a dramatization of the Aries birth experience. He also stole and sold the secret formula of the red dye of British military cloth. Aries actors have often been cast as Casanova: David Tennant, Heath Ledger, Richard Chamberlain, while the not-Aries Donald Sutherland was distinctively miscast in Fellini's Casanova. Two other Aries natives are highpoints in the history of promiscuity: the Italian pornographer Pietro Aretino, (notably rendered in Titian red) Pietro Aretino (b. 20 April 1492) by TitianJohn Wilmot, Lord Rochester (b.1 April 1647)and the English poet-rake Lord Rochester. Closer to home, Aries actors Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty have famously notched bedposts.

Casanova costume for Heath Ledger (b. April 4, 1979)David Tennant (b. 18 April 1971) as CasanovaHugh Hefner, b. April 9, 1926

Jezebel: Aries in Red #13

Aries often steps forth with spirited conviction and brings about disastrous consequences. In Jezebel, just for wearing a red gown to the All-White Cotillion, Bette Davis is inundated with humiliation and catastrophe.

ARIES IN RED #14

Emma Thompson (b. April 15, 1959 )

Brenda Spencer (b. April 3, 1962). “A tiny girl, under five foot tall, with long red hair, epileptic. She stayed with her father after her parents divorced, living across the street from a school. On January 29, 1979, she took a rifle that her father had given her for Christmas, shot the custodian and principal dead and wounded six children and a policeman, because 'I hate Mondays.' ”   Astro Data  V, Profiles of Crime.


Marguerite Steinheil (b. April 16, 1869) Parisian courtesan, mistress of a president, murderess, known as the “Red Woman of Paris”.

Aries in red dress #17(Talk show hosts)

Graham Norton (b. 4 April 1963)

Rosie was born on March 21, 1962

I've been shlepping this Joe Ciardiello illustration of Dave Letterman (born April 12, 1947) since it appeared in the New Yorker in 1996. Now it's scanned and I can get rid of it! . . . . 

I was saving this one for a post devoted to Aries redheads:

O'Brien was born on April 18, 1963

One more of Graham Norton:

VanDyck n Descartes, Aries red #18

The great 17th century portraitist Anthony Van Dyck, a March 22 Aries, adored the ferric oxide pigment which has come to be known as Van Dyck red and made it the principal feature of many paintings. Red swags, red drapes, red trousers, dresses, robes, ribbons, tablecloths, stockings, capes, cloaks, rags, you name it.

Strange! That thy hand should not inspire
The beauty only, but the fire:
Not the form alone, and grace,
But act and power of a face. (Waller, To Van Dyck)

Van Dyck introduced to portraiture the goal of presenting, on a red curtained theatrical stage, distinctive, individual personality, dash and flair. His years (1599-1641) correspond to those of Descartes. His subjects all say, "Therefore I AM!" Descartes (born March 31, 1596-1650), the philosopher who ushers in the modern era, is ground zero for a methodical exposition of the zodiac as an approach to the post-modern Subject. (Which is in the works, but we're doing red dresses now.) We have no portrait of Descartes in red (although he was known to dress en militaire and carry a sword). Let Van Dyck represent him visually.

ARIES IN RED #19

Red Aries #20

Add Hugh Hefner to the list of Aries Casanovas.

The Red Shoes (#21)

In Aries Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Red Shoes" the color red plays the same role it does in Bette Davis's "Jezebel". To shock propriety, the heroine insists on wearing red dancing shoes to church, with dire consequences.

Aries Red #22 - Baby's first outfit - Descartes and Hobbes

 Aries remembers birth, emerging clothed in bloody viscera, in the seat of compulsion and pleasure/pain. Aries never gets over it and a marked ambivalence toward the Mother runs through the biography of the Ram.

The amniotic sac (gr. amnos, lamb) and the blood-laden placenta. Aries never fully recovers from the trauma of birth. They oscillate between the exhilaration of freedom and the unfairness of having no choice but to BE. They never give up their first lover/enemy, the Mother. The personal history of Aries often contains a flamboyancy in the mother-figuration, an dramatic engagement they can't pass up or let go of.

Aries tells us about beginnings: at the beginning of the modern mind Aries speaks through two philosophers, the contemporaneous Descartes (March 31, 1596 - 1650) and Hobbes ( April 5, 1588 - 1679). Philosophical argument deplores the ad hominem, but astrology adores it: both Descartes and Hobbes endured particularly vivid birth circumstances. Descartes, with cogito ergo sum, objectified the concept of the Self we continue to use and question. He experienced a complicated and politically dense infancy. Briefly, he lied about it; philosophers are not supposed to lie.

As for Hobbes, inventor of the rational materialist politics of power, his reputation rolls on the wheels of a few Arietic formulations, ("clear and distinct" as Descartes said thoughts should be) the "warre of each against all",  "nasty, brutish, and short". His birth took place during the bombardment of the English coast by the Spanish Armada. "His mother fell in labor with him upon the fright of the invasion of the Spaniards," Aubrey's Brief Lives puts it. A bachelor, Hobbes had no offspring but left an autobiography. He attributed his lifelong anxiety to his delivery: "And hereupon it was my Mother Dear/Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear."

Additional reading:

Bordo, Susan. Ed. Feminist Interpretations of Descartes (1999)

Hoffman, Piotr. The Quest for Power: Hobbes, Descartes, and the emergence of modernity (1996)

http://soysauced.blogspot.com/2008/10/marlon-brando-was-redhead.html

Amy Goodman, Aries in Red #23

Happy Birthday to "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman! Yet for all their outspokenness, we find very few Aries among the major names of the classical feminist movement. Gloria Steinem is just about the only one I can think of.

Red Aries #24 (Mothers)

Ann Miller, star of "Easter Parade", b. April 7, 1923

ARIES'S MOTHER PROBLEM

I hurry through these references in order to achieve a general impression of the harsh reality of the birth experience which Aries exposes.

Samuel Beckett (b. April 13, 1906): His parents made it clear that he was an unwanted pregnancy. He was obsessed with memories of suffocation in the womb, of an attempted wire hanger abortion on himself as a fetus, and with a nagging sensation of having been “incompletely born”.

Marguerite Duras (b. April 4, 1914) was obsessed by her demented mother, who favored her horrible eldest son. She was traumatized by her only pregnancy, which ended in stillbirth. She wrote, “I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”  

Cynthia Ozick (b. April 17, 1928): Her tale of Puttermesser and the Golem is an amazing meditation on the  mother/child dyad. So, for that matter, is her famous holocaust story, The Shawl.

Baudelaire (April 9, 1821) and his mother, the remarried Mme Aupick, a paradigmatic relationship acutely analyzed by J-P Sartre in his classic 'Baudelaire'. Baudelaire lived fatherless with his mother in a state of symbiotic, quasi-fetal bliss, until he was eight, when she abruptly married Aupick. The poet never recovered from the late loss of his paradise. 

The mother of the poet Paul Verlaine (b. March 30, 1844) “suffered three miscarriages before Paul’s birth in 1844; she preserved the fetuses in jars. When Paul came along he received the obsessive and indulgent mothering that such behavior portended. . . .In 1869 Verlaine made at least two violent attacks on his mother, threatening to kill her (how genuinely remains unclear), and on one occasion breaking the glass jars in which the three dead fetuses were kept.” (Bohemian Paris, by Jerrold E. Seigel)

Bette Davis, in the film Now, Voyager a self-proclaimed matricide and in her daughter's autobiography My Mother’s Keeper an abusive parent. Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, an abused mother, and in Mommy Dearest, an abusive mother. In Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, they abuse each other.

Among the psychoanalysts:
Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, two important post-Freudian theorists specializing in the child: Each of them criticized Freud for his over-emphasis of the oedipal phase and his neglect of the crucial and often traumatic mother/child bond.

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897): As a teenager he spied on his mother’s trysts, breathlessly reported them to his father, and thus precipitated her suicide. Then he had to discover her body. This parallels Aries Christopher Hitchens's mother's suicide, which he hints he might have prevented. He was summoned to Athens to fetch her body, and shockingly confronted the blood-soaked scene of her death.

Billie Holiday suffered this formative meta-maternal disaster. Her favorite family member was her greatgrandmother, her grandfather's mother:

She really loved me and I was crazy about her. She had been a slave on a big plantation in Virginia and she used to tell me about it. She had her own little house in the back of the plantation. Mr. Charles Fagan, the handsome Irish plantation owner, had his white wife and children in the big house. And he had my great grandmother out in back. She had sixteen children by him, and all of them were dead except Grandpop.

We used to talk about life. And she used to tell me how it felt to be a slave, to be owned body and soul by a white man who was the father of her children. She couldn't read or write, but she knew the Bible by heart from beginning to end and she was always ready to tell me a story from the Scriptures.

She was ninety-six or ninety-seven then and had dropsy. I used to take care of her every day after school. No one else paid any attention. I'd give her a bath sometimes. And I'd always bind her legs with fresh cloths and wash the smelly old ones.

She'd been sleeping in chairs for ten yearrs. The doctor told her she'd die if she ever laid down. But I didn't know. And once after I'd changed the cloths on her legs and she had told me a story, she begged me to let her lie down. She said she was tired. I didn't want to let her. But she kept begging and begging. It was pityful.

Finally I spred a blanket on the floor and helped her stretch out. Then she asked me to lie down with her because she wanted to tell me another story. I was tired too. I'd been up early that morning to scrub steps. So I laid down with her. I don't remember the story she told me because I fell asleep right away.

I woke up four or five hours later. Grandma's arm was still tight around my neck and I couldn't move it. I tried and tried and then I got scared. She was dead, and I began to scream. The neighbors came running. They had to break Grandma's arm to get me loose. Then they took me to a hospital. I was there for a month. Suffering from what they said was shock.

When I got home Cousin Ida started right in where she had left off, beating me. This time it was for letting Grandma out of her chair. The doctor tried to stop her. He said if she kept it up I'd grow up to be nervous. But she never stopped.

What a gruesome version of the birth trauma, the terrifying struggle of nascent being against negation and regression, that continually animates Aries, the sign of beginning.