TAN: Quick Bites | Director Nicholas Ray's (44) Sex with Actress Natalie Wood (16)

Caroline Howe related in her Daily Mail review of Shawn Levy's The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Art and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont that 44-year-old director Nicholas Ray had sex with 16-year-old actress Natalie Wood. 

16-year-old actress Natalie Wood & 44-year-old director Nicholas Ray

Consequently, actor Dennis Hopper went around the Chateau with a gun hoping to ironically 'beat the shit' out of Ray and "win over" Natalie.

I related in Teens Love and Want to F*ck James Franco: A Study of a Life and Works that James Franco composed the following two stanzas in the poem "Chateau Dreams" from his book of prose Directing Herbert White: 

In '54, forty-three-year-old Nick Ray

Fucked fifteen-year-old Natalie Wood in Bungalow 2

Thus, per Franco, Wood was 15 when she was "fucked" by Ray. And only God knows how many nymphets had sex in the infamous Chateau Marmont, but Glenys Roberts related in a Daily Mail post that: 

Scarlett Johansson and Benicio Del Toro

"A 19-year-old Scarlett Johansson was so overcome by its heady atmosphere in 2004 that she couldn’t wait to get upstairs with [thirty-seven-year-old] Puerto Rican star ­Benicio Del Toro and ripped off his clothes in the lift. ‘We were making out or having sex or something,’ she readily admitted later."

Frank Bidart’s “Herbert White”: A Nympholept Necrophiliac Serial Killer

Herbert White (2010), Directing Herbert White (2014), and “Directing Herbert White” are three James Franco pieces that are based on Frank Bidart’s poem “Herbert White”:

Here are some relevant excerpts from Bidart’s “Herbert White”, which is about a married, with kids, serial killer who kidnaps nymphets and rapes them - even after death. And when the nymphet’s bodies become too decomposed for necrophilia, Herbert  masturbated “letting it fall on her” :

When I hit her on the head, it was good,

and then I did it to her a couple of times,—[...] I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,

tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,

hop out and do it to her... [...] When the body got too discomposed,

I'd just jack off, letting it fall on her…[...] well, like I said, she didn't move: and I saw,

under me, a little girl was just lying there in the mud: [...] I got in the truck, and started to drive,

and saw a [new] little girl—

who I picked up, hit on the head, and

screwed, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, then

buried,

in the garden of the motel…[...] — About six months ago, I heard Dad remarried,

so I drove over to Connecticut to see him and see

if he was happy.

She was twenty-five years younger than him: [...] I kept thinking about getting a [new] girl,

and the more I thought I shouldn't do it,

the more I had to—

I saw her coming out of the movies,

saw she was alone, and

kept circling the

blocks as she walked along them,

saying, 'You're going to leave her alone.'

'You're going to leave her alone.'

Except for the part where the serial killer visited his father, whom married a woman “twenty-five years younger than him”, Franco’s Herbert White (2010) depicts that poem very closely; thus, let us take a look at “Directing Herbert White” where we learn that Bidart, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, wrote “Herbert White” while he was a student at Harvard and that Herbert White is based on “The Necrophiliac” - a medical case study in 21 Abnormal Sex Cases. 

Franco went on to share in “Directing Herbert White”: “James [Franco] knew after hearing the poem read in class at Warren Wilson [College] that it was something he wanted to adapt to film. These impulses are visceral.” Yes. The allure of nymphets does cause some men to have visceral impulses. 

Yet for some reason, Franco wrote: “Herbert has a secret - he’s a murderer of women and a fucker of corpses - which he can tell no one,” instead of: “Herbert has a secret - he’s a murderer of nymphets and a fucker of teen corpses - which he can tell no one.” 

Herbert White (2010)

Marie Howe's "Practicing": Pre-Teen Lipstick Lesbians in THE NEW YORKER

In preparation for a post, we're reading Sharon Lamb's The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt. Lamb writes that the purpose of The Secret Lives of Girls is to: 

"[...] to expose all of these acts that are going on in secrecy so that girls and women can feel less guilty about their sexual desires as well as their aggressive impulses, can learn to accept these as part of themselves and still love and honor themselves for them."

To give an example of what some girls do in secrecy, Lamb shared Marie Howe's poem "Practicing". But before sharing the poem, Lamb wrote:

Marie Howe [a State Poet for New York and National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellow], in her poem "Practicing" [...], writes of the power of the erotic, even in seventh-grade girls. In this poem, [...] we learn that what might have been called "practicing" was more than "just" practice. In somebody's "parents' house," [...] there are some things that go unsaid. And what remains unsaid is not a story of lesbian romance [...] It is a story of girls' bodies and girls' pleasure, their sense of power in that pleasure, a story rarely told [...]

"Practicing"

by Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and

one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our

nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,

plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs

outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d

shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,

just before we’d made ourselves stop.

Interestingly, "Practicing" was published in the August 25, 1997 issue of The New Yorker.

Seidel's PEACHES GOES IT ALONE: Poetry About Nude Schoolgirls & More...

We profiled the poet Frederick Seidel in The Allure of Nymphets and he continues to write about nympholepsy and age-discrepant attraction in his latest book Peaches Goes It Alone .. 

For example, the poem “Miss Charlotte” is about “undressed” schoolgirls “lying on top” of one another in a dorm-room of an all-girls boarding school, which caused aristocrats to take “cold showers”:

Bring back the all-girls boarding schools for pedigreed girls

Where, morning and night, girls dressed and undressed.

Luxurious lawns and trees rode to hounds.

Horses the girls owned waited in padded stalls. 

Think of the cold showers these aristocrates took.

Think of the dorm-room mirrors which sometimes saw

A cold girl lying on top of a warm girl

While a pretty girl with a pimply face on her bed on her back watched

The scene in the dorm-room reminded me of a scene in the controversial National Bestseller The End of Alice where imprisoned Chappy shared a story about his teen penpal:

She writes of the memory of one particular afternoon [...] The story is of coming into the cabin to collect her tennis racket and finding the two little girls from Louisville, Kentucky [...] lying across the top bunk, head to toe, the brunette’s narrow foot sweeping back and forth across the strawberry blonde’s nipple, the blonde’s jumpsuit unzipped and parted to the waist. When the lovebirds sighted the girl and smiled at her, there was a flash of light like an explosion, as the sun, reflecting off the brunette’s metal tooth-braces [...]

And I was reminded of a story that Humbert related in Lolita about one of Lolita’s tent-mates:

Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very select” one as she put it. The tent-mate [...] instructed her in various manipulations. [...] I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions? “Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo [...] 

In 2016, Seidel was approximately 80-years-old; thus, his reference in the first two stanzas of “Thanksgiving 2016” to a girl with a “charming” face, a charming voice and a “beautiful ass” who could cure “depression” is revealing:

The girl with the face

As charming as her voice

Has a beautiful ass

Filling out her tan pants.

Depression doesn’t stand a chance

Confronted with this one!

What planet are you on

In your beret, singing?

“Near The New Whitney” is about the poet being “moonstruck” by Emily, a “gently lovely” maître d’, at a “charming restaurant” in the Meatpacking District. But after discussing the transformation of American art, the poet ended the poem with a desirable double entendre:

I drank an after-dinner tumbler of whiskey

Not far from the new Whitney,

A present from the maître d’.

Sweet Lagavulin single malt filled me with infinity

Sixteen years old, while the girl 

Smiled softly

Emily appears again in the fifth and sixth stanzas of “Worst When It’s Poetry”. This time she’s referred to as a “maiden” and “so young”:

There’s an Emily I met downtown recently.

Dante’s Beatrice suddenly appeared to me!

I don’t know her last name.

Dante famously never was the same.

A maiden I don’t know transfigured me

In one brief moment for eternity.

From one brief meeting with someone so young,

Dante translated to a higher sphere and left our days of dung. 

And the book is lightly peppered with stanzas that allude to nympholepsy. For example, in “In Late December”: She’s reading a paperback of Lolita, stealthily, behind the sign. And in “Abusers”: The little girl whose father invaded her/Became a woman who could not outgun/The little girl inside her who’s her father’s wife.

Lastly, here's one of the blurbs from the back of the book:

"There had never been a poet like this one before: the poet of a new contemporary form, a highlight reel-one spectacular feat after another [...]" - Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books

Wilmot's "Song of a Young Girl to Her Ancient Lover"

The Poetry Foundation wrote that John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), "was the cynosure of the libertine wits of Restoration England." And that Wilmot "[...] was ranked as a poet second only to John Dryden, a judgment accorded as much to his genius as to his scandalous lewdness." 

Anthony Madrid shared in his post, "Porn Poetry" on The Paris Review, that the students in his poetry section were "squirming" after an undergraduate read aloud Wilmot's "Song of a Young Girl to Her Ancient Lover".

Song of a Young Girl to Her Ancient Lover

Ancient person, for whom I

All the flattering youth defy,

Long be it ere thou grow old,

Aching, shaking, crazy, cold;

But still continue as thou art,

Ancient person of my heart.

On thy withered lips and dry,

Which like barren furrows lie,

Brooding kisses I will pour,

Shall thy youthful heat restore

(Such kind showers in autumn fall,

And a second spring recall);

Nor from thee will ever part,

Ancient person of my heart.

Thy nobler part, which but to name

In our sex would be counted shame,

By age’s frozen grasp possessed,

From his ice shall be released,

And, soothed by my reviving hand,

In former warmth and vigor stand.

All a lover’s wish can reach

For thy joy my love shall teach,

And for thy pleasure shall improve

All that art can add to love.

Yet still I love thee without art,

Ancient person of my heart.

A LIT24 student aptly analyzed the poem on eNotes by posting that the: "[...] bawdy verses satirizes the desires of an old impotent man to be reinvigorated and aroused by the warm caresses of an imaginary young lover." 

Wilmot "[...] presents the desires of am old man to be fondled by the young woman as the desires of that young woman herself."

"The young woman is presented as being very submissive and willing to sacrifice all her joys and pleasures of being wooed by a young and virile lover for the sake of stroking her 'ancient' lover and kissing him to revive his dying sexual drive"

"The young woman assures her old and impotent lover that she will use all the sexual techniques ['art'] at her command to give him the maximum sexual satisfaction and thereby prove that she loves him all the more."

Famous Ephebophile: Lord Byron

I (temporarily) abandoned MacCarthy's Byron Life and Legend on page 217 for Gilot and Lake's Life with Picasso (Gilot met Picasso when she was twenty-one, and he was sixty-two.) specifically because MacCarthy didn't cover Byron's writing process. However, I did cull that Byron was an (acting) ephebophile. 

Initially, Byron's affection was for Lady Oxford but it "transferred from the mother to the daughters, beautiful, well read, [and] precocious children". Byron was "bowled over by attractions of the eldest daughter, Lady Jane Harley, then sixteen, describing her in his dairy as 'a delightful creature, but un pea libre'."

"[B]ut his favorite was her younger sister Lady Charlotte, at eleven, was at the age of promise which most moved him, the child on the edge of puberty."

Lady Charlotte as Ianthe

"Lady Oxford's daughter Charlotte is the subject of the famous and much anthologised five stanzas "To Ianthe," fragile flower of the narcissus [...] In these stanzas [...] Byron celebrates the girl's evasive charm and addresses the painful ambiguities of their relationship:"

"To Ianthe"

Not in those climes where I have late been straying,
Though Beauty long hath there been matchless deemed,
Not in those visions to the heart displaying
Forms which it sighs but to have only dreamed,
Hath aught like thee in Truth or Fancy seemed:
Nor, having seen thee, shall I vainly seek
To paint those charms which varied as they beamed—
To such as see thee not my words were weak;
To those who gaze on thee what language could they speak?

Ah! may'st thou ever be what now thou art,
Nor unbeseem the promise of thy Spring—
As fair in form, as warm yet pure in heart,
Love's image upon earth without his wing,
And guileless beyond Hope's imagining!
And surely she who now so fondly rears
Thy youth, in thee, thus hourly brightening,
Beholds the Rainbow of her future years,
Before whose heavenly hues all Sorrow disappears.

Young Peri of the West! — 'tis well for me
My years already doubly number thine;
My loveless eye unmoved may gaze on thee,
And safely view thy ripening beauties shine;
Happy, I ne'er shall see them in decline;
Happier, that, while all younger hearts shall bleed,
Mine shall escape the doom thine eyes assign
To those whose admiration shall succeed,
But mixed with pangs to Love's even loveliest hours decreed.

Oh! let that eye, which, wild as the Gazelle's,
Now brightly bold or beautifully shy,
Wins as it wanders, dazzles where it dwells,
Glance o'er this page, nor to my verse deny
That smile for which my breast might vainly sigh
Could I to thee be ever more than friend:
This much, dear Maid, accord; nor question why
To one so young my strain I would commend,
But bid me with my wreath one matchless Lily blend.

Such is thy name with this my verse entwined;
And long as kinder eyes a look shall cast
On Harold's page, Ianthe's here enshrined
Shall thus be first beheld, forgotten last:
My days once numbered — should this homage past
Attract thy fairy fingers near the Lyre
Of him who hailed thee loveliest, as thou wast—
Such is the most my Memory may desire;
Though more than Hope can claim, could Friendship less require?

Byron commissioned for Richard Westall to paint the nymphet's portrait, and he shared "I should love [Charlotte] forever if she could always be only eleven years old [...]" 

However, it appears that Byron's affections went too far. "Lady O[xford] detected him one day in an attempt upon her daughter, then a child of thirteen, & was enraged with him to the greatest degree."

Nabokov's Nymphets and Lolitas & D.H. Lawrence's Chits

There are a number of synonyms that are used for nymphets. For example, the terms lolitas and maidens are synonymous. D.H. Lawrence related an additional synonym in DRUNK.

DRUNK by D.H. Lawrence from Complete Poems

The enormous cliff of horse-chestnut trees
         Has poised on each of its ledges
An erect small girl looking down at me;
White-nightgowned little chits at me I see
        And they peep at me over the edges
Of the leaves as though they would leap, should I call
        Them down to my arms:
---But, child, you're too small for me; too small
Your little charms!---

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines chit as a pert young woman. The Free Dictionary defines chit as a saucy girl or young woman. And Dictionary.com defines pert as boldly forward in speech or behavior; impertinent; saucy. Therefore, a chit could be referred to as a boldly forward girl/young woman.

Some nymphets aren't boldly forward. For example, Katya Spivak in Joyce Carol Oates'  A Fair Maiden and Belinda in Anne Rice's Belinda weren't particularly aggressive nymphets. However, a number of nymphets are chits like Sue Lyons' character in The Night of the Iguana (1964) and the nymphets in Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971) [French: Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal].