Tablet
Notes on Jewish Camp
By Simon Doonan
September 3, 2024
Mister D: Miss M is a fierce reading champion, so I crafted my site in a blog format. Yes, you have to read—some of it might be a bit of fluff, but I also get to spotlight some truly amazing books connected to the fabulous Bette Midler. It’s up to you to take the plunge. If even a handful of you dive in, I’ll be over the moon! And so will Bette.
The New York Times once described me as “foppish and superficial.” Naturally, I was deeply flattered, and grateful. With one stroke of her pen, the old Gray Lady had catapulted me into the “Camp” firmament alongside King Ludwig of Bavaria, Boy George, and Liberace, proud superficial fops one and all. To use the naff parlance of today, I suddenly felt “seen.” But enough about me. Let’s talk about Susan Sontag.
This year marks the anniversary of Sontag’s famous “Notes on Camp,” published in The Partisan Review 60 years ago. Sontag dedicated “Notes on Camp” to mega-fop Oscar Wilde. An early draft of Sontag’s scribblings was titled “Notes on Homosexuality.” Back in the day, we homosexual fops led marginalized lives. Embracing our outsider status, we rejected convention, sentimentality, and seriousness while decorating our groovy pads with whicker peacock thrones, ostrich feathers in art nouveau vases, zebra rugs, and Beardsley posters. The Camp sensibility, the violet-tinted lens, the amused dandified gaze, and the urban sensibility we developed gave us a framework for survival and daily amusement. As Sontag wrote in note No. 58, “Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, not judgment.” Camp torpedoes conventional attempts to differentiate good taste from wrong and high culture from low. Carmen Miranda is hilariously fabulous, but so is Swan Lake. The Sistine Chapel is impressive, but how about Busby Berkeley movies?
While broadly researching the subject of Camp over the last two years—my sizzling new book titled, The Camp 100: Glorious Flamboyance From Louis XIV To Lil Nas X, about to hit the shelves—I was repeatedly struck by the ubiquity of Jews. Marginalized, smart, and intent on survival, the Jews were right there with us fops, most especially in Hollywood and on Broadway, the petri dish of the Camp sensibility. As Sontag stated—keep in mind this quote dates from 1964—in note No. 51, “Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in urban culture.”
Forced to decide whether to make their way through the world, either laughing or crying, Jewish creative outsiders, just like we gays, chose to laugh with intelligent irony. As the late great Joan Rivers, an OG of Jewish campiness, once said, “Nothing is funny unless everything is funny.”
In homage to super-Jew Susan, let’s take a moment to enjoy the contribution made by a selection of Jews to the strange and slippery sensibility of Camp. As we wade into this lagoon, I ask you to keep in mind that Camp is a slippery two-faced bitch. There are two main subdivisions: Camp and Campy.
Sontag saw campiness as less critical and appealing than Camp. I see them as equally fab but different. The former, Camp with a capital C, is unintentional and unwitting. The latter is intentional and knowing. Queen Elizabeth II is Camp. But Bette Midler, the whip-smart fiery Jewess from Hawaii who started her career belting out nostalgic faves in a gay steam bath, is knowingly and brilliantly campy.
“It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp,” states Sontag in her intro, adding,” One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.” J’agree. Ponderous prose tends to suck the life out of Camp. In order not to “betray” Camp, Sontag eschewed an essay format in favor of those 58 legendary notes. Following Sue’s example, I offer you one dozen “Notes on Jewish Camp,” which is a more appropriate number for the age of ADD. And, in keeping with our times, my notes are sprinkled with name droppings.
Yee-ha. Serious John Wayne Westerns are Camp, but ‘Blazing Saddles’ is knowing, intentional, and insanely campy. Jewish contributors to this cinematic gem—Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn—understood the Camp of conventional Westerns. After aggressively harvesting it, they served up a magnificently unhinged campy movie. Comedic Camp and campiness have taken many forms over the years, much of it Jew-generated. Jerry Lewis and Pee-wee Herman, aka Paul Rubens, gave us a new genre of campy Jew humor: anarchic mincing chaos. Totie Fields and Joan R. gave us Borscht Belt self-deprecation, a Camp genre that inspires the drag queens of today.
Achtung! Freud is a Camp icon, ditto Albert Einstein. When solving the mysteries of the human psyche and the universe, these unsuspecting dudes had no idea that their faces would adorn the pot holders and refrigerator magnets of a pop-Camp sensibility. (Exit through the gift shop, please!) Sig and Al also satisfy the expectation that true Camp icons—capital C—must possess an unflinching seriousness. Ditto Franz Kafka. Like a tightly coiled cobra, Camp waits in the wings to satirize that seriousness and slap it onto a tote bag.
Easy listening. The songs of Burt Bacharach + Hal David— ‘One Less Bell to Answer,’ ‘A House Is Not a Home’—earnestly overpromise a silky world of penthouse glamour, emotional longing, lurex hostess gowns, and adult sophistication. Sandra Bernhard, a campy Jew icon and a personal favorite, was among the first to recognize the Camp of Burt and Hal’s vision and integrate it into her oeuvre.
Streisand. In ‘What’s Up Doc’ and ‘The Owl and the Pussycat,’ Babs’ campy brilliance ignites the screen. On the other hand, her capital C Camp moments occur when she gets serious and sentimental. I’m talking, of course, about the soaring sincerity of her ballads, most notably ‘People’ and ‘Free Again.’ Let’s not forget that massive doll collection and toy-town street-of-doll shops in Babs’ Malibu basement. Aging divas who amass vast doll collections are their genre of Camp.
Toxins and chakras. Gwynnie Paltrow, the Jewish high priestess of the wellness movement, the founder of Goop, and the guru with the jade eggs and the vaginal steamers, is an exquisite example of a contemporary High Camp. With its relentless focus on crystals, detoxing, and ‘sexual wellness,’ the Goop universe (unintentionally) recalls the campy excesses of the Brit comedy hit show ‘Ab Fab.’ You will not be surprised to learn that Thorgy Thor, a Brooklyn drag queen, recently dedicated an entire evening’s entertainment to Paltrow parody.
Jews a la mode. The great fashion Jews, Calvin, Ralph, and Donna, are at Camp. During their heyday, they each spent millions crafting a compelling Camp persona: Donna, a beacon of women’s empowerment, marketed herself as a presidential candidate; Calvin embraced a Santa Fe fantasy in skull-strewn adobe settings shot by Bruce Weber, and Ralph wowed the world with his magnificently successful un-ironic adoption of an English aristocratic pose. The brilliant Jewesses of fashion—Diane von Furstenberg, Liz Lange, and Tory Burch spring to mind, but there are many more—have made a huge impact on fashion, but their oeuvre is neither Camp nor campy. The ladies focus instead on making garments that their customers need, wear, and adore.
Yaaasss, minister! England’s only Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) cultivated a High Camp dandified persona. With his ornate coiffure, velvet waistcoats, beringed, white-gloved fingers he appeared to have wandered straight out of the pages of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ published in 1865, three years before his election. Known for his campy comebacks, Benjy loved to throw shade at antisemites: “Yes, I am a Jew,” he famously responded to one detractor, “and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages on an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
Regarding excess, Sontag declared, “The hallmark of Camp is a spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress of three million feathers.” Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship to jewels—remember those White Diamonds perfume commercials?—is the stuff of extravaganza Camp legend. The centerpiece of her vast personal collection of door-knocker-size baubles was the Krupp diamond, which, according to Liz, was “previously owned by the famous munitions family which helped knock off millions of Jews.” Contemplating ownership, Liz mused, “… how perfect that a nice Jewish girl like me were to own it.” In 1963, Liz starred in ‘Cleopatra,’ billed as the most expensive movie ever made, forging a forever alliance between ancient Egypt and Camp. (See also Madonna’s entry into the 2012 Superbowl.) In later years, Liz settled into a comfortable knowing campiness, delivering tour-de-force performances in camp classics such as ‘XYZ,’ ‘The Mirror Cracked,’ ‘Secret Ceremony,’ and ‘Psychotic.’
Rehab? No, no, no! Amy Winehouse was the Camp Jewish Billie Holiday. The downward-spiraling beehived chanteuse created a self-destructive rockstar persona that came across, initially, as a campy schtick but, unfortunately, was not. It was a serious Camp and, as a result, had lethal consequences for the North London songbird. Her Campest moment: After winning her Grammy, a discombobulated Winehouse famously dedicated her award to her drug-addled boyfriend, stating, “This is for my Blake. (pause) Incarcerated.” We Camp followers immediately began adding the word “incarcerated” to all our utterances. The Winehouse beehive illustrates the power of a signature accessory or flourish in developing a Camp persona. Moshe Dayan had his eye patch. Moi, a shegitz nonpareil, would be nothing without my floral Liberty print man-blouses and would most likely never have scored my Camp 100 book deal.
If you didn’t look good, he didn’t look good. Vidal Sassoon, the most famous hairdresser in history, the rags-to-riches maverick who opposed Mosely’s Black Shirts and then fought in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, originated the archetype of the handsome swinging heterosexual hairdresser, paving the way for Warren Beatty’s studly character in ‘Shampoo.’ His autobiography takes pride in the Camp section of my bookshelf and is titled ‘I’m Sorry I Kept You Waiting, Madam.’
Paging the Collins sisters. The word Camp has its roots in the French verb ‘se camper,’ meaning to posture boldly. Sontag said, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp.’” Joan Collins was “an actress,” and Jackie Collins was “a lady novelist.” Camp personages do everything “as if” they are doing it, in quotation marks, boldly posturing, on a film set with cameras rolling. Joan will always be remembered for her legendary performance as Alexis in ‘Dynasty.’ She played a bitch, as if playing a bitch. In a similar thespian vein, Ben Stiller will always be remembered for posturing boldly throughout the movie ‘Zoolander.’ He played “a model” as if playing a model. Blue Steel!
“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny, or they’ll kill you,” declared six-time Oscar winner Billy Wilder. The films of Billy Wilder, most especially ‘Some Like It Hot’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ are key components of the Camp canon. Campologist Philip Core once described Camp as “the lie that tells the truth.” Wilder springs immediately to mind with his ability to mix Camp exaggeration and emotional depth. Edith Head, another great Jewish Camp icon, designed the insanely campy costumes for Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ Edith explained her thought process: “Because Norma Desmond was an actress who had become lost in her imagination, I tried to make her look as if she was always impersonating someone.”
We, gays and Jews, have historically spent our lives impersonating someone; someone assimilated, accepted, secure, and confident, all the while knowing the house of cards can come down at any time. In the meantime, we buy tchotchkes and schmattas, refining our taste and sensibilities. But we also struggle. As Oscar Wilde noted, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”
