By The Landlord
“Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time.” – Tallulah Bankhead
“I think every girl's dream is to find a bad boy at the right time, when he wants to not be bad anymore.” – Taylor Swift
“My father was a bad boy, a rascal. That's what him do for a living. He just go around and have a million and one children!” – Peter Tosh
“The bad boy: always more fun.” – Ian McShane
”She's a nice girl, but her bad girl's better.” – Jethro Tull
“I've been a bad, bad girl - I've been careless with a delicate man.” – Fiona Apple
“I want a bad boy in public, and a pussy cat at home!” – Christina Aguilera
“There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out.” – Mae West
“I wonder why it is, that young men are always cautioned against bad girls. Anyone can handle a bad girl. It's the good girls men should be warned against.” – David Niven
From the Greek god Dionysus to Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, from Jimmy Cagney to James Dean or Marlon Brando, from Lana Turner to Elizabeth Taylor to Courtney Love, of all the famous fictional and real-life bad boys and girls of myth and modern culture in film or music or books, I couldn't but resist a top picture of the one and only Tura Satana, the unmissable big-breasted but truly bad-ass star portraying Varla in Russ Meyer's 1965 girl-gang movie, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, whose life appears to be even more extraordinary than her film roles, however critically they are regarded.
More on her shortly, but to summarise, this week we're all about bad boys and girls in song lyrics and titles, those your mum or dad warn you about, but are often alluringly attractive. What does bad mean? It's a sliding scale. They could be out-and-out villains or rogues, but perhaps not so much serial killers, crazy criminals or psychopaths (that might be another topic) more those who get up to no good, and might date you, use you up and drop you like a piece of trash. In short, they seem to taste so good, but are inevitably bad for you. The warning signs are always there, but they're likely to have some redeeming qualities – often sexually attractive, but also charm, an element of danger, of mystery, a dark side, perhaps even a vulnerability, in all, a fabulous subject for any song topic, oozing emotions and suggesting all sorts of stories.
It's all subjective of course, so there's several more visitors itching to talk about this in our Bar, but first let's get back to Tura Satana. Born in Japan, as Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi to a Japanese silent movie actor father of Filipino descent, and a who mother was a circus performer of Cheyenne and Ulster-Scots background, so Tura was always going to be different. But her life was one of hard knocks and kicking back. When she was a child, the family settled in Chicago. Walking home from school just before her 10th birthday, she was reportedly gang raped by five men. According to Satana, her attackers were never prosecuted, and it was rumoured that the judge had been paid off She reports that this prompted her to learn martial arts, such as aikido and karate, and over the next 15 years, Satana tracked down each rapist and exacted revenge, presumably in the form of beating the living shit of of them.
“I made a vow to myself that I would someday, somehow get even with all of them,” she said in an interview years later. “They never knew who I was until I told them.” What scenes that conjures in the mind.
As a teenager she also formed a gang, “The Angeles”, comprising Italian, Jewish, and Polish girls from her neighbourhood. “We had leather motorcycle jackets, jeans and boots...and we kicked butt.” No doubt. Unsurprisingly she frequently missed school as a teenage delinquent, she was sent to reform school. Things just get even weirder. When she was only 13, her parents arranged her marriage to 17-year-old John Satana in Hernando, Mississippi, which lasted only nine months (1951–1952). What was that ever going to achieve but trouble?
Satana moved to Los Angeles and by age 15, using fake identification to hide the fact she was a minor, and began burlesque dancing. She was hired to perform at the Trocadero nightclub on the Sunset Strip, and became a photographic model for, among others, silent screen comic Harold Lloyd, whose photos of her appear in Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3-D.
Later in the 1950s, returning to Chicago, and while living with her parents, she worked as a stripper and performed at the Follies Theater. The story goes that after Elvis Presley saw her perform, they started a relationship, which reportedly led to Presley proposing marriage. She turned him down, but kept the ring anyway. Now that's what I call bad-ass - she broke the King's heart. By the 1960s she eventually got her break into film and the rest is history, but her real life seems more extraordinary than any of her sharp-witted, take-no-shit gang-leader or sci-fi roles, which beyond all the action, contain some fabulous one-liners.
So this week the aim is to capture as many songs about bad girls as bad boys. Sometimes the two come together. While in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist bad Bill Sikes (spelled Sykes in the movies) is an out-and-out bad character, he is fatefully loved by the prostitute Nancy, while pickpocket leader Fagin is a different kind of rogue. In real life, another Nancy – Spungen of course comes together with Sid Vicious, seemingly as bad as each other in all sorts of mental and chemical ways. When bad gets together with bad (Bonnie and Clyde for example), there's love and romance, but often also death.
Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), a film that caused bad boy shockwaves through American society
Bad boy situations? Nancy, Fagin and Sykes in Oliver!
Sid and Nancy: as bad as each other?
More on bad boys, then and what they're all about. Here's the ubiquitous Taylor Swift, who, with a broadly 'good girl' image has tried a few, her songs often inspired by them, and who points to the source of how this works: "I think there's something so attractive about mystery. There's something so attractive about the chase. And the bad guy ... bad boys know how to keep the chase going throughout an entire relationship because you never know if you completely have them or not. That's why they're so hard to get over."
I've done the bad-boy thing," chips in another big-seller, Ariana Grande. "It was fun for a good three months. But the thing about bad boys is, you have to keep in mind, you're never gonna marry a bad boy."
And who's this swanning to order a drink in a long gown dress? It's Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones. “I think I'm not really into the handsome, chivalrous knight; I like the bad boys. I find it quite easy to get in and out of character.”
And here's American singer and songwriter Stephanie Mills on the ever repeating error of judgement. “Most women don't like good men. They say they want a good buy, but most women always wind up with the bad boy.”
Carrie Fisher is also here by the magic of our Bar, tapping into a father-daughter psychology. All my life I've been seeing things through the culture. My father, for instance, was the press's bad boy. People really hated him. He was always a big flirt. He was always in trouble - going bankrupt, whatever." Carrie of course was the daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and singer and actor Eddie Fisher, who after that marriage went on to marry Reynolds' best friend, a certain Elizabeth Taylor, and later three other women.
Bad love triangle.: Carrie Fisher’s parents Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, with her best friend Liz Taylor (right), who Fisher later married
Attractive bad boys have always been around, from Ancient Greece and Rome to the culture of Renaissance Italy in the form of Machiavelli, and over in France, let's hear now from that political philosopher and man of letters, Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people. Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, who captures one double-edged nature of the bad boy, one who gives off mixed signals.
"I think the greatest rogues are they who talk most of their honesty," adds novelist Anthony Trollope. Does that remind you of any public figures in politics?
Meanwhile here's Alexandre Dumas on bad boys from a writing perspective. "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest."
Bad boys can sometimes confused friends as well as lovers. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff engages in much fun and banter with the young Prince Hal, but is also prone to trickery from him, and proclaims:
“I am bewitched with the rogue’s company.
If the rascal have not given me medicines
to make me love him, I’ll be hanged.”
Now back to the bad girls, and we have fabulous gang here in the Bar to tell you more about it's like to be one, for better or worse.
"Bad girl, drunk by six, kissing someone else's lips. Smoked to many cigarettes today, I'm not happy when I act this way," proclaims Madonna, desperate to first in line.
Some like to talk about being both sides. "Well, I was like the good girl, bad girl, there were no grey areas for me," adds Belinda Carlisle.
And here's Patti Smith: "We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark."
Katy Perry also likes to alternate: "I'm kind of a good girl - and I'm not. I'm a good girl because I really believe in love, integrity, and respect. I'm a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have sex appeal in my deck of cards. But I like to get people thinking. That's what the stories in my music do."
We've already heard from Fiona Apple making a confession, but now she adds more on the fatal attraction of being 'bad': “There aren't many poster children for cool angst. Everybody thinks it's cool if you're the bad girl.”
Bad apple or good? Fiona Apple
Crossing between music and film, here's Courtney Love, reflecting on her badly behaved drug-addled times. “When I stepped out from doing films and had a dark period, I never did anything dark on a set, so I never made enemies on a set. I never was a bad girl on a set; I always considered films a really sacred space, so when I had my problems, I had them very much away from the film community.”
Playing bad girls in film seems like an attractive prospect, but Olivia de Havilland is not so sure. “Playing good girls in the '30s was difficult, when the fad was to play bad girls. Actually I think playing bad girls is a bore; I have always had more luck with good girl roles because they require more from an actress.”
But back in the present, Kate Beckinsale disagrees: “I think I like playing the bad girl. I like complicated. I like flawed, messed up complicated. It's more interesting.”
Finally though, let's hear from the enigmatic acting star Chloe Sevigny, whose bad girl performances always capture ambiguity and nuance: “I am a Scorpio, and playing the seductress appeals to me. There are a lot of women throughout film history, like Marlene Dietrich or Mae West - those are the women I was always attracted to. The bad girls.”
Going West with Mae …
So then, who are the bad girls and boys that you might summon up on song, famous, fictional, public or personal, anonymous or otherwise? Judging these qualities, I'm delighted to welcome back to the Bar to weigh it all up, the tremendous tincanman! Place your songs in comments below for the deadline on Monday 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week. So bad, it's likely to be rather good …
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