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"Giving well is the best revenge."

The Return of Myra Breckinridge?

o celebrate America's birthday, we present proudly and patriotically a special issue devoted entirely to Gore Vidal's mythic creation, Myra Breckinridge. Definitely NOT for patriots of the thin-skinned or simple-minded variety, Myra is a creation for the ages. As America hurtles through a long night of false piety and political expediency, it's important to remember that this country is an on-going open experiment in creativity, not a closed hothouse of frightened, exclusionary in-breeding. And no single American work helps us remember that as well as does Myra Breckinridge.

The novel, which appeared in 1968, was greeted mostly by critical raspberries, Bronx cheers, and more than a few angry and vicious expressions of dismay, scorn, and plain old shock. In what follows you'll see lots of examples of the kind of frightened reaction that, to the careful reader, reveals much more about the critic than about the work at hand.

Two years later (1970) here came the movie bearing a high-level Hollywood imprimatur (20th Century Fox), with production values that came from what at the time was a big budget of $5 million. With a multi-generational cast that career-wise covered most of the century (from Mae West to John Huston to Raquel Welch to Farrah Fawcett to Tom Selleck), Myra Breckinridge the movie seemed to have everything going for it.

The critical reaction to the novel should've clued Hollywood in: a trans-sexual whose mission is the destruction of American manhood? A main character who starts out a man, becomes a woman, and in the end resumes life as a man, indulging in extremely vivid sexual dalliances of various blends along the way? And that, as you will see below, is just for starters.

The novel at least made it onto the best-seller list for a while. The movie came and went in a flash. A financial and critical disaster, the movie opened and closed in a matter of days, and then vanished. In Houston, it played one of the few surviving old movie palaces (now gone) downtown, and then--improbably--promptly re-opened at the Telephone Road Drive-in (also now gone of course) where it stayed for a week. I saw it eight times during its mini-run here. What you are about to read was written 30 years ago, after that encounter.

If the novel was ahead of its time, the movie was way ahead of its time. Michael Sarne, the young English director, was in the best Hollywood fashion, run out of town and only in recent years has begun to find work again.

Why dig such old stuff out now? Because just maybe Myra's time has finally come. Mr. Sarne was in Houston recently showing a print of Myra at the Rice University Media Center (a space where some decades back I had in fact presented what you are about to read as a lecture to a mostly stoned Media Studies class). My son Chris attended (see photo) and reported back that the auditorium was full of self-styled "Myra-heads," who knew both the book and the movie backward and forward.

I heard this and, in a time of unprecedented American veniality, hypocrisy, and aggression, thought, "Maybe there's hope after all..."

Having watched and read the reactions to the novel and the movie, I had long ago filed my own comments away, figuring why bother. Maybe the time has come to bother. Read, and decide for yourself.

Myra Breckinridge is a story about a trans-sexual gone awry, like Hamlet is a Baroque revenge drama about a prince gone awry. Both are genre pieces, and both, by transcending genre, become something more.

                                                                            --Douglas Milburn, Editor in Chief

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