Med, Med Passion

Guess WHAT, y’all? Apparently Oscar Wilde wasn't gay.

I KNOW.

I have spent more time than I care to admit this week under the spell of Lillie, a 1978 British ITV miniseries starring Francesca Annis as Lillie Langtry. It is freakin’ ridiculous. And I can't stop watching it.

I was flipping through the streaming Netflix on my TV when this juicy thirteen-part miniseries popped up in the 'Recommended for You Because You’ll Watch Anything With British Accents, Sucker!’ section. I was thumbing over it on the way to some reality TV selection when I saw that Annis was the star.

Now I love me some Francesca Annis. She was gorgeous in her prime, and really quite charming in the Agatha Christie Partners in Crime Tommy and Tuppence mystery adaptations, umpteen years ago. In fact, Annis is so charming when she's laughing and being silly, and so beautiful, that it really has managed to distract me from the fact that when she gives the occasional stab at Serious Dramatic Acting, capitalized, she only comes off as a mildly-constipated and thoroughly-campy moo-cow.

So anyway, Lillie begins with Annis-as-Langtry being wooed by some kind of army captain or somesuch, on the shores of Jersey. You can tell he’s important, because the costume department has really gone to town with the gold braid on his uniform. He's lovestruck by her beauty as the pair of them race their stallions across the glittering island sands. Okay, their stunt doubles race for them, in a very blurry long shot apparently filmed through several layers of gauze. Annis and her beau mostly stand still and cling onto their horses for dear life while they Emote, with a capital E.

Annis is a apparent mute on a horse, who responds to the captain’s questions by hiding behind her girlish curls and batting her lashes so fiercely that they stir up a medium-sized monsoon. She’s gorgeous, in a slightly big-eyed bovine way, but she’s got all the acting subtlety of one of the pre-talkies Gish sisters. She’s also, how shall we say . . . very busty?

Smitten by her mute beauty, the army captain races to Langtry's father to ask for her hand in marriage, and her father says something like, "Yes, she has something of her mother's handsome good looks and maturity.” Which I think is a tactful synonym for busty. “But tell me sir, did you not notice that she's...?"
And my brain automatically supplies, "...forty-five?"

Only the father says, "... a mere slip of a girl of age fifteen?"

And this is the point I sat up and screamed at the television, "FIFTEEN?!" Because I'm thinking, you know, it's only EIGHT years later that Annis is playing Kristin Scott Thomas' cougar MOTHER in that horrible Prince movie, Under the Cherry Moon, for chrissakes. Immediately I ran to IMDB and calculated that Annis had been THIRTY-THREE when this was abomination was made.

GOOD LORD. FIFTEEN?

But then when I realized that Lillie was one big ol' camp-fest, I started getting into it. It's the kind of plummy miniseries that isn't made any more, in which the passions and the period costume budgets run high, and in the name of getting the grand sweep of history wedged into, god help us, thirteen long hours, none of it quite makes any sense.

The result is a lot of disconnected, though sumptuous, scenes that involve people rushing into a room removing their gloves while breathing out exposition-heavy lines straight out of the Encyclopedia Britannica like, “Heavens above I cannot believe it was three years ago that I was last at home here in Jersey only twelve nautical miles from the Cotetin Peninsula of France in the home of my father the noted Dean of Jersey and how sad it is that now I am here for the funeral of my beloved brother Reggie born 1862 died 1881!”

Or in which the actors playing royalty shorthand their goodbreeding by replacing all of their Rs with Ws, so that they can spit out dialogue like, “Weally, Weginald! We wespect your views, but how can you wevel in the company of a mawwied woman with only a single dwess to her name? You are an awistocwat!” Or in which in all his appearances, Prince Leopold staggers and clutches at the scenery with such dramatic foreshadowing that you half-expect one of the extras to shout out, “Hey, Leo? Hemophilia acting up again?”

And of course, in order to give the viewers not on a sense of time and place, but a snobbish sense of having had a good-enough historical education, all of the nineteenth-century's notables all attend the same smart parties, where the dialogue inevitably runs like this:

THE BUTLER ANNOUNCING ARRIVALS: The poet and illustrator John Everett Millais!
LONG-HAIRED EFFETE POET CARRYING A GIANT CALLA LILY LEFT OVER FROM A COLLEGE PRODUCTION OF PATIENCE: Begorrah, but what a true vision of loveliness my eyes behold before me! So fresh, so young! If there is any justice in the world, there would be a portrait of you growing fearsome in age, mouldering in some attic! Begorrah!
SOME OTHER VICTORIAN PANSY: Why what a fine idea for one of your stories!
LONG-HAIRED POET: You’re always after me Lucky Charms!
THE BUTLER: Upstart novelist Charlotte Bronte and the tart Emily Dickinson!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED TWENTY-THREE: Sir, I can tell by your brogue that you must be of the Emerald Isle. Are you a poet?
OTHER VICTORIAN: Is he a poet! Only the best poet I know! Mrs. Langtry, permit me to introduce Mr. Oscar Wilde!
OSCAR WILDE: Why thank you, Mr. Robert Browning!
THE BUTLER: Alexander Graham Bell!
OSCAR WILDE: And here is my good American friend, John Whistler!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED TWENTY-FIVE: How d’ye do, Mr. Whistler.
WHISTLER: Peachy-keen! I am Amerrrrrrican. I am not a Burrrrritish actorrrr speaking very brrrrroad Rs to disguise that I am frrrrom Hampshirrrrrre. Why, you arrrre prrrretty as a picturrrrrrre, Mrs. Langtrrrrry.
OSCAR WILDE: You should make a portrait of this divinity, John. He was so desperate for a subject, Mrs. Langtry, that he was considering painting his mother next!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED THIRTY: Hah-hah-hah!
WHISTLER: Hah-hah-hah!
THE BUTLER: Charles Darwin, Arthur Conan Doyle and Florence Nightingale!

Okay, maybe in my fever to plow through the series I have confused some of the party guests, but the miniseries is so gleefully anachronistic that you half-expect to see some woman in a leather aviator hat stomp into the party with a glint of derring-do in her eye, so that Wilde can shout out, "Ah, Miss Earhart! Leaving on a trip?"

ANYWAY.

I have had the scales of hidebound tradition simply LIFTED from my eyes by Lillie’s revelation that Oscar Wilde wasn't at ALL a devotee of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Especially in 1978. Because he speaks her name all the time, and it’s LILLIE, baby!

You see, according to the screenwriters, Wilde had the hots for Lillie Langtry Aged Twenty-Sixish. She was his vixen, his goddess, his New Helen. She was WOMAN, baby. But she was so pure, so sweet, so beautiful, and so devoted to her husband that what could he do but renounce all earthly desire on the spot. and remained devoted to her forevermore. She ruined him for all lesser mortals, and remained his muse, his unrequited crush, his med, med pession, his womantic tweasure.

I don't care about whole mess with Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquess of Queensbury, or his jail time. Whatever. Scwew documented history. Wilde was Langtrysexual. That’s what the writers of Lillie tell me, and I’m sticking to it.