Being 15 in 1965: “Billie” and “Inside Daisy Clover”
It was released in the second half of 1965. It’s sort of a musical, with a title character prone to bursting into song, though it never quite commits itself unashamedly to the musical genre. Its main character is a spunky scruffy-looking 15-year-old tomboy with an older sister. Can you name the movie?
Well, there are two correct answers: Billie and Inside Daisy Clover. Billie may be a mostly silly (even inane) family sitcom, and Daisy a so-called “serious” drama about soulless Hollywood, but while I was watching Billie I couldn’t stop thinking about Daisy. One of the reasons is that Billie looks like just the kind of gooey “uplifting” movie that might have starred the fictional Daisy Clover. And though Daisy is set in the 1930s, its musical numbers look every bit as “1965″ as the contemporary song-and-dance sequences in Billie.
Billie stars Patty Duke, billed solo above the title, in her first feature film since her astonishing Oscar-winning turn as young Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962). Based on the 1952 Broadway comedy Time Out for Ginger (1952), Billie was refashioned for the youth market of the mid-sixties, making it about as far from being a prestige picture as can be imagined. Duke plays Billie Carol, torn between perfume and running shoes, a high-schooler who not only becomes a member of the boys’ track team but its undeniable star. Her special gift is her ability to run to “the beat,” hearing speed-fueling music in her head. She not only runs fast but excels at the javelin, the hurdles, and the pole vault. Can any boy stand the competition? Will any of them want to date a superior athlete? For a while it looks as though Billie will continue to trailblaze, to topple all competitors, and there are even a few hints that this could turn into a groundbreaking lesbian coming-out story, but, alas, no such luck. Though equality is much talked about, and Billie is named “Athlete of the Day” at the big meet, the movie nonetheless eventually comes to an inevitable place for Billie: “Being a girl is so much fun, I’ve decided to give up track.” (When she says this, she’s wearing her pink party-dress and has a new hairdo.) Now some less-talented guy can be “Athlete of the Day” and everyone else can sigh with relief.
Billie is a lackluster vehicle for a young woman who had already proven her talent to Oscar voters. Duke seems distracted in it, as if she, too, knows she is squandering her potential on uninspired froth. It would have made much more sense if Duke had instead starred in Inside Daisy Clover. Not because Daisy is a better movie, because it really isn’t; it’s just bad in a more prestigious way. However, it would have offered Duke a more challenging role, one that might have allowed her to explore her talent, as well as her persona as a teen star. Duke’s big post-Oscar career move was her popular TV sitcom The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), which made Duke America’s sweetheart, memorably playing the dual role of identical cousins with opposite personalities. It was something of a lighthearted tour de force, but also the kind of image shaper that would make a picture like Billie seem to be perfectly appropriate big-screen fare for the nation’s favorite teenager. It also had the potential to translate Duke’s small-screen popularity into big box-office returns. A role like Daisy Clover would have been a real departure, and possibly too much of a career risk, though it was certainly more in line with what an Oscar winner would choose. After all, the odds were slim that another role as choice as Helen Keller was likely to come her way. (A year after the series ended, Duke starred in Valley of the Dolls, when it was safer for her to bust her squeaky-clean image.)
Daisy Clover was played by Natalie Wood, an actress on the other side of 25. Duke may no longer have been 15 but she was still a teen. An 18-ish actress would have made a far more convincing Daisy, but maybe the movie, with its sexual situations flung Daisy’s way, seemed easier to take (and certainly tamer) with a womanly actress in the role, rather than an actual teenager. Wood was coming off two recent Oscar nominations (for Splendor in the Grass and Love With the Proper Stranger) and a few box-office blockbusters (such as West Side Story and Sex and the Single Girl), which means that in 1965 she could have had any part she wanted. Why, at such a career peak, she wanted to play Daisy is a mystery to me, except for her chance to work with director Robert Mulligan (Love With the Proper Stranger) again.
Inside Daisy Clover feels no closer to reality than the forced cheer of Billie‘s sitcom suburbia. Daisy is a beach urchin who wants to sing (it’s her ticket out), then suddenly doesn’t want to sing from the minute she snags a Hollywood contract. The movie is a pointless, perplexing drag in which the Hollywood types seem like vampires, or maybe members of a secret cult. It’s a pretentious attack on the movie business, an assault by filmmakers who seem to have forgotten to pack any ammunition. This movie doesn’t get inside anything, lurching from one bizarre and uninvolving scene to another. As Daisy’s bisexual movie-star husband, Robert Redford is the only good thing in it, even though it seems that his bisexuality, only spoken about (by another character), was added after Redford was long gone.
Daisy is a girl with plenty of rebelliousness but little actual character. There are many big scenes with nothing underneath them, including a terrible, overlong, and “comically” interrupted attempted-suicide climax. And you’re always aware that Wood is “playing” fifteen. At least Duke still would have had some vestiges of that awkward age, some genuine uncertainty about the grown-up world, and a more recent connection to the challenges of youthful stardom.
Inside Daisy Clover is a head-scratcher, making its title seem ironic (which I don’t think was the point). And Billie is, despite a few glimmers of issue-raising, a disposable rehash of countless growing-pains comedies. Billie did nothing for Duke, and Daisy did nothing for Wood, making it not a good year for very talented 15-year-old female characters. Even with all my complaints about Inside Daisy Clover, I continue to wish that Duke had played Daisy. It would still be an awful movie, but it would be of more interest, with the right actress giving it a fair shot. Yes, it may have offended fans of The Patty Duke Show, and it probably wouldn’t have increased Duke’s box-office prowess, but it would have given her something to wrestle with, something to focus her actorly concentration upon, something at least more serious-minded than Billie in grooming Patty Duke into a possibly important young actress.
