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"If all the time the manager of the theater holds back the good roles from us, may we not insist upon understudying the stars?" -Isak Dinesen, "The Deluge at Norderney"
Sometime in my childhood and very early adolescence, I acquired, while living in the very heart of Appalachia, a land of lazy Southern drawls, a British accent. No one around me had a British accent; my family was American, and my peers were budding good old boys whose fathers drove tractors and pick-up trucks and spoke in an unmusical twang that I, a pompous fop in my teens, found distinctly undignified. Given the hearty, blue-collar community in which I grew up, the origin of my stilted style of delivery remained a complete mystery to me until, as an adult, I began to watch old movies. Over and over again in the voices of film stars as different as Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce and Katherine Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer, I heard the echoes of my own voice, the affected patrician accents of characters who conversed in a manufactured Hollywood idiom meant to suggest refinement and good breeding, the lilting tones of Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Bette Davis in Mr. Skeffington, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, or even Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. In that tour de force of bitchy camp, The Women, the all-female cast speaks in two distinct accents, the harsh American cockney of the kitchen help who squabble about the muddled affairs of their wealthy mistresses, and the high-society, charm-school intonations of the Park Avenue matrons who rip each other to shreds in the gracious accents of an Anglophilic argot concocted by the elocutionists at the major studios. Only Joan Crawford, the inimitable Crystal Allen, a vulgar, social-climbing shop girl who claws her way up to the top, can speak in both accents as the occasion requires, one for when she is at her most deceitful, hiding her common upbringing beneath the Queen's English of the New York aristocracy, and the other for when she is being her true self, a crass, money-grubbing tart who gossips viciously with her equally low-class cohorts at the perfume counter. To an insecure gay teenager stranded in the uncivilized hinterlands of North...