It's recalled now for the star's performance, which netted her her first Oscar. In 1960 the performance of Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria Wondrous was considered a fine one for that up and coming actress, but despite her acting performance most people then (and since) have believed that it was not her sad portrayal of the self-destruction of a beautiful call girl that merited the award, but that she was recovering from a near fatal illness at the time. Taylor's performance was first rate - probably the best reason today to see this film. Despite an apparent hard shell she is quite vulnerable, and her tormented relationship with socialite Laurence Harvey leads up to his degradation and her demise.
John O'Hara's novels are still in print. He was a master of American idiom - the class and background of his characters could be seen by reading their dialog. He had a great eye for details, and for social class conflicts. This first comes out in his first novel "Appointment In Samara", but it appears in "Butterfield 8" as well, where the class problems that arise from Gloria's affair with Weston Liggett can be called the tragedy of the purloined fur coat. Gloria, as the novel opens, has had her one night stand with Liggett at his home, a ritzy upper-east side apartment in Manhattan. She is unsatisfied with leaving so soon, so she takes a fur coat out of the closet to cover herself in. It is this theft that leads to the gradual revelation of the affair with Liggett, and it's affects on Gloria, Liggett, her mother and friend Steve (Eddie Fisher), and his wife (Dina Merrill) and their family and friends. The coat symbolizes the sexual relationship that Gloria threatens to take away from Emily Liggett, and how the social order is shaken by the affair.
O'Hara based the story on a tragedy that happened in the summer of 1931 in New York City and Long Island (and that also affected Boston). A very beautiful young woman, Starr Faithful*, was found dead on the beach at the city of Long Beach in Nassau County, New York. Starr was soon revealed to have had a number of socially prominent acquaintances (one is hard put to call them friends). She and her sister Tucker and their mother and stepfather lived in Greenwich Village - their next door neighbor was Mayor James J. Walker (to be fair to "Beau James", it is not very likely that he ever really knew Starr and her family). She did have a habit of popping up at parties all over the place (rumor put her at a party to celebrate a Broadway production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata thrown by Bennett Cerf, and in honor of the star of the production Miriam Hopkins). She also slept around, one of her boyfriends being a ship's doctor on an Atlantic liner. But finally, it came out that in her youth she was sexually abused by Mr. Andrew J. Peters, a former Mayor of Boston. Peters actually was a cousin by marriage of Starr's mother. He continued seeing her as she grew up (she was a minor when the relationship began), and paid the family large sums to keep their mouths shut.
None of this background is in the novel or film. The novel does have a character (a respectable college professor) who has had a relationship with Gloria and is coming to New York to pay her some extortion money, but the tragedy of the Long Beach death is only approximated in the novel (where Gloria drowns in a freak accident on an aging steamboat), and is changed in the movie (I won't explain how). In any case the death of Gloria is an accident in the novel and the movie - although Gloria's final actions may have been based on a death wish.
Was that what killed Starr Faithful? Actually, her last biographer (Johnathan Goodman in "The Passing Of Starr Faithful") makes a case for her being murdered by gangsters who were after important secrets she might have had knowledge of. O'Hara would not have known of that theory, but would have just worked on the general assumption that his model committed suicide (which was accepted as likely in 1935, when the novel was written). Gloria may be based on Starr, but their fates are not quite the same even if their emotional problems seem very similar.
(*For some reason the spelling of the last name of Starr is consistently respelled incorrectly on this website - despite my attempts to correct it - as "Faithful" with one "ell" at the end. It has two "ells" at the end.)
John O'Hara's novels are still in print. He was a master of American idiom - the class and background of his characters could be seen by reading their dialog. He had a great eye for details, and for social class conflicts. This first comes out in his first novel "Appointment In Samara", but it appears in "Butterfield 8" as well, where the class problems that arise from Gloria's affair with Weston Liggett can be called the tragedy of the purloined fur coat. Gloria, as the novel opens, has had her one night stand with Liggett at his home, a ritzy upper-east side apartment in Manhattan. She is unsatisfied with leaving so soon, so she takes a fur coat out of the closet to cover herself in. It is this theft that leads to the gradual revelation of the affair with Liggett, and it's affects on Gloria, Liggett, her mother and friend Steve (Eddie Fisher), and his wife (Dina Merrill) and their family and friends. The coat symbolizes the sexual relationship that Gloria threatens to take away from Emily Liggett, and how the social order is shaken by the affair.
O'Hara based the story on a tragedy that happened in the summer of 1931 in New York City and Long Island (and that also affected Boston). A very beautiful young woman, Starr Faithful*, was found dead on the beach at the city of Long Beach in Nassau County, New York. Starr was soon revealed to have had a number of socially prominent acquaintances (one is hard put to call them friends). She and her sister Tucker and their mother and stepfather lived in Greenwich Village - their next door neighbor was Mayor James J. Walker (to be fair to "Beau James", it is not very likely that he ever really knew Starr and her family). She did have a habit of popping up at parties all over the place (rumor put her at a party to celebrate a Broadway production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata thrown by Bennett Cerf, and in honor of the star of the production Miriam Hopkins). She also slept around, one of her boyfriends being a ship's doctor on an Atlantic liner. But finally, it came out that in her youth she was sexually abused by Mr. Andrew J. Peters, a former Mayor of Boston. Peters actually was a cousin by marriage of Starr's mother. He continued seeing her as she grew up (she was a minor when the relationship began), and paid the family large sums to keep their mouths shut.
None of this background is in the novel or film. The novel does have a character (a respectable college professor) who has had a relationship with Gloria and is coming to New York to pay her some extortion money, but the tragedy of the Long Beach death is only approximated in the novel (where Gloria drowns in a freak accident on an aging steamboat), and is changed in the movie (I won't explain how). In any case the death of Gloria is an accident in the novel and the movie - although Gloria's final actions may have been based on a death wish.
Was that what killed Starr Faithful? Actually, her last biographer (Johnathan Goodman in "The Passing Of Starr Faithful") makes a case for her being murdered by gangsters who were after important secrets she might have had knowledge of. O'Hara would not have known of that theory, but would have just worked on the general assumption that his model committed suicide (which was accepted as likely in 1935, when the novel was written). Gloria may be based on Starr, but their fates are not quite the same even if their emotional problems seem very similar.
(*For some reason the spelling of the last name of Starr is consistently respelled incorrectly on this website - despite my attempts to correct it - as "Faithful" with one "ell" at the end. It has two "ells" at the end.)