Girl Talk, Snobs & the Madness of a Famous Nobody

A brief history and the elusive power of a sexist term; a novel from the creator of 'Downton Abbey'; and an insight into the strange relationship between Peter Sellers & filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

What a relief it was to be out from under the heat dome just before Labor Day weekend!

I was born Georgia, but I don’t remember its being this hot when I was a child. Of course, years spent living in New York, California, and the Pacific Northwest may have changed my perspective.

“The New South would not be possible without air-conditioning,” wrote Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul in A Turn in the South. And I have certainly found that to be true. If you want to understand why Georgia teeters politically— and precariously—between the likes of Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams,  between the Red and the Blue, air-conditioning is to blame.

To hear the locals tell it — it’s those damn yankees, who flocked here when their corporate headquarters flew south in search of better tax rates and the promise of reliable air-conditioning, who are responsible for treacherous driving on metro-Atlanta freeways. They’re the ones causing the accidents. That’s why it takes an extra hour to get anywhere when it rains.

Horse pucky! cry the Yankee transplants. You just don’t know how to drive.

As a leading city magazine crassly observed in a cover story a while back, “This Is Not Your Grandparents’ Atlanta.” It’s not their housing market or airport, either. Back then, people like my mother were just housewives. Now we have the Real Housewives!

Mercifully, we also have air-conditioning.

Which is no longer a convenience but a necessity as the extreme heat of climate change irritates, oppresses, and in my case, pushes life-force into the slow lane. When the thermometer hits the high-90s and the feels-like temp is above 100, I find it harder to think and engage. I’m not quite my normal self. Even when I’m hunkered down under the good ole HVAC.

And yet, my family members in Austin, Houston, and New Orleans had it much worse this summer and for much longer. “If you think this is hot,” my mother used to say, “just imagine what hell is like.” We were strict, generations-old Catholics. Hellfire, damnation, and the fear of excommunication scared the unholy mackerel out of us. These days, a heat dome has a similar effect.

But with September

and temperatures in the mid-eighties, I feel that I’ve just emerged from a convalescence.

On the deck this morning, under a canopy of trees, dappled sunlight all around, and a familiar family of hawks hovering above, I remembered a few favorites I’ve been saving to share with you. Since there’s no time at all but the present (past and future being mere illusions), here are some things that have put a little joy in my heart. Maybe one or two will tickle your fancy, also.

(Heads up! YouTube clips come and go “like sands through the hour glass and the days of our lives.” If you put these on the back burner for too long, they may may not be there when you return.)

Photo by Stephanie Zieber via iStock

Let’s Begin with the Girl Talk

Perhaps some members of the audience were disappointed when jazz great Esperanza Spalding chose not to play her iconic bass during a concert at Emory University in January of this year. What nerve to rely solely upon her voice and the accompaniment of jazz pianist Fred Hersch.

But if anyone felt disappointed, they couldn’t have remained so for long. Voice, after all, is humanity’s first instrument. And the pairing of Spalding’s vocal improvisations with Hersch’s piano was a musical pas de deux.

The Atlanta recital was one of several touring performances of a concert the two recorded in New York in October, 2018, which they’ve called “Alive at the Village Vanguard.”

There’s more than one meaning in the show’s title

Hersch was diagnosed with HIV in 1984 and was in a coma for two months. When he regained consciousness, he discovered that he’d lost the ability to play music due to prolonged inactivity. Ten years later, he came out as gay, which was considered a bold move given the alleged homophobia of the jazz world, even though gay musicians have been on the down-low there for decades. In any case, Hersch is certainly alive now and playing with the beauty and freedom that usually follow an existential confrontation with death.

But it’s their rendition of “Girl Talk” that I want to share with you. Especially Spalding’s improvisation on the lyrics. If “guy talk” is about the crude stuff men say among themselves—grab ‘em by the (bleep!) and other locker-room vulgarity— “girl talk” is on a completely different plane.

Dictionaries define the term as conversation between women and girls, considered uninteresting to or inappropriate for men. Before periods, tampons, bras, and pantyliners were openly discussed on TV, those things fell into the category of “girl talk.”

Now it’s open season on those topics

Yet the term girl talk persists with a sexist connotation, even as its original meaning and ongoing evolution are overlooked. It’s applied to both women and girls, despite their maturity. Whereas “guy talk” includes males of any age.

To go back to early days—it was literally “girl talk” that sparked the revolution among thousands of Massachusetts mill workers in the 1800s. As Mattie Kahn observes in a new book, mills were staffed by American girls between the ages of 10 and 12. They were “exploited, harassed, subject to strict rules and mistreatment, low pay (which was sometimes cut), and a respiratory illness known as ‘the kiss of death’ brought on by lint in the lungs.”

Photo by Anna Shvets via Pixels

All those young girls working together began to talk and share stories among themselves. They kept diaries. Wrote letters. Passed notes. According to Kahn, this historical “girl talk” laid the groundwork for a revolution in the mill industry. Strikes and walkouts were eventually followed by a transformation that included better wages and working conditions.

The moral? Don’t ever underestimate the power of so-called girl talk.

By 1965 'girl talk’ had taken on a different meaning

Composer Neal Hefti used the term as the title of a song for the 1965 movie Harlow. The flick was a flop, but the song became a hit, covered by dozens of musicians, including giants like Tony Bennett, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, and Betty Carter.

Was it coincidence or inspiration that the film’s most famous song took its name from a daytime television talk show from the same period, which predated The View by three decades?

Virginia Graham’s Girl Talk ran between 1962 and 1970. Three female celebrities, led by the opinionated Graham, expressed their feelings about life, current events, and most often, their thoughts about each other.

Take a look at this 1970 clip in which Graham and her guests discuss homosexuality. Despite everything that’s happened since Stonewall, some of the comments bear a strong resemblance to dialogue you might hear today from Florida to Texas and beyond. (Sorry about the sound quality.)

Fast forward to 2002

That’s when Atlanta’s TLC put its own spin on a song called “Girl Talk.” Their version turns the sexism around, reminding bed-hopping misogynist men that girls do talk to each other about how well the guys perform in the bedroom. Think Stormy Daniels describing the genitals of a certain former president, and you get the idea.

But Esperanza Spalding’s take is more about unpacking the “Girl Talk” that’s become part of the American song book.

After singing the lyrics as written she delves into their meaning for today. Since jazz is all about improvisation, she never does it quite the same way twice. Her riff at the Emory venue was slightly different from versions at the Kennedy Center and elsewhere.

But I like the version below, which unpacks the song as it has never been unpacked before, bringing it to 21st-century women of color, digging past its seemingly frivolous surface to the empowering subtext not everyone can understand without a guide. It’s worth a listen next time you get a few minutes.

I’m nobody. Who are you?

You may remember those famous lines from Emily Dickinson’s short lyric poem, which sometimes came up during high school or college. To be nobody in a world where everyone else is striving to be somebody makes you peculiar. But if Ulysses hadn’t told the Cyclops his name was Nemo (Latin for nobody), he’d never have made it back to Penelope and his son.

If Dr. Richard Kimball hadn’t become nobody, he’d have been captured long before he caught up with the one-armed man. The same is true for Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, which is of course the original version of The Fugitive.

Peter Sellers

was deceptively straightforward about being nobody in the following 1980 interview with Gene Shalit on the Today show. He had just completed Being There, which required the tragically bipolar actor, who played multiple parts in Dr. Strangelove, to restrict himself to the very limited sphere of a mentally challenged gardener. Sellers would die of a heart attack just a few months after that interview. It’s as if it took all of his life force to quiet his bipolar nature and just keep still.

The following clip exemplifies how the actor’s art serves as metaphor for the masks we all wear at various times in our lives. Mother, daughter, son, husband, wife, employee, lover, manager, etc. And yet who are we really? Could it be that all these roles revolve around a particular Nobody at the center of it all, as psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli observed in his work on psychosynthesis during the last century? See if this Peter Sellers clip brings us any closer to the answer.

If you found that clip interesting, you might also be interested in what the critic Alexander Walker had to say about the relationship between Sellers and Director Stanley Kubrick. Walker believed that Kubrick exploited the actor’s manic ability to riff on written dialogue, bringing the script to unanticipated heights, as we would later see in the work of Robin Williams. Eventually, Peter Sellers looked for ways to get out from under it.

Now let’s talk about Snobs

This summer I finally got around to reading The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, in order to understand the individualist philosophy that drives people like presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Good story, bad novel marred by dialogue freighted with proselytizing speeches. No way I’m putting myself through Atlas Shrugged after that. I’ll read the Cliff Notes instead.

Prompted by the June release of a new documentary called Every Body, which makes the case against the genital mutilation of infants born with both male and female sex organs, (aka intersex, the ‘I” in LGBTQIA+), I picked up another book I’ve been putting off for years.

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. The man is a wizard with words. But the story is mostly about the Greek ancestry of the intersex narrator and how a mutant gene became manifest in their life. I learned lots I didn’t know before. However, the novel, which has been described as an example of “hysterical realism,” left me cold.

Call me trashy and trite

But my favorite summer read was a re-read of something I read years ago. A novel penned by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes called Snobs. As one reviewer said, It’s froth—but it’s great froth. I enjoyed it in 2004 and loved it even more this summer. It contains, for instance, this accurate observation:

[O]f the four great gifts that the fairies may or may not bring to the christening— Brains, Birth, Beauty and Money—it is Beauty that makes locked doors spring open at a touch.

Whether it is for a job interview, a place at a dining table, a brilliant promotion or a lift on the motorway, everyone, regardless of their sex or their sexual proclivity, would always rather deal with a good-looking face. And no one is more aware of this than the Beauties themselves.

Half the fun of revisiting Snobs was listening to the audiobook version by Richard Morant as I followed along. What is it about the human animal that makes us want to be better than others? If you have a Toyota, I must have a Lexus. If you send your kids to college, mine must go to Harvard.

This seemingly universal human desire to climb the social ladder is delightfully skewered in Snobs. Who better than a Brit familiar with the prejudices, presumptions, and posturing of class to deliver this sendup? The clip below is a one-hour adaptation of a 9-hour audiobook, which I’ve included just to give you a taste. But if you’re really interested, don’t listen all the way through. It’ll spoil your enjoyment of the rest.

Okay, that’s a wrap

So much for my recent preoccupations. I’ve left out the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare plays, and contemporary dramas I discovered at Digital Theatre Online and the National Theatre apps. Nor was there room to include Alice Munro’s final collection of short stories, the Hemingway pieces, or the vintage films I recently revisited.

But this is Atlanta. Even though there ain’t no mo’ Miss Scarlett ‘round here —tomorrow is, after all, another day.

©2023 Andrew Jazprose Hill. All rights reserved.

Thanks for reading/listening/watching. Please hit the LIKE, SHARE, or COMMENT buttons to weigh in and help others find my stories.