November 19: Gene Tierney (1920-1991)

What did actresses Dorothy Dandridge (1922-1965) and Gene Tierney have in common, besides being considered among the great beauties of their generation? Both November birthdays. Both were directed by Otto Preminger in well-known roles (Carmen Jones, and Laura, respectively). Both women, in 1943, had daughters born with significant developmental disabilities. And both women's later lives were emotionally tumultuous. These latter two facts are often linked in brief biographies, whether or not they should be, just because that's the easy story. In fact, the pressures and temptations and health issues they faced were sure more a part of the general dysfunction of Hollywood life, with or without their daughters' disabilities.

I wonder if they ever knew each other--if they ever knew how much they had in common?

Gene Tierney (1920-1991) described her lifelong experience of bipolar disorder in her 1979 autobiography. She was institutionalized on and off through her thirties--not unlike yet another Hollywood beauty, Frances Farmer (1913-1970), had been a decade earlier. In her autobiography, she declared, "I have been subjected to electric shock treatments that deadened my brain, stole chunks of time from my memory, and left me feeling brutalized....Pieces of my life just disappeared." Tierney married her second husband in 1960, and more or less retired from making movies. She died in 1991, from emphysema (she had begun smoking at the beginning of her career, to lower her voice for film roles).

UCLA Taser incident has disability dimension

When UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad walked into a library on campus one night in November, the guard asked him for a student ID, as part of a random check. Tabatabainejad felt singled out on the basis of his ethnicity (he's US-born, of Iranian descent), and refused. He was told to leave the library, and he began to do so. On his way out of the library, he was stopped by campus police, and tasered. There's video of the incident, and multiple eyewitness accounts (a crowd of about 50 students quickly gathered at the scene); most of those seem to support Tabatabainejad's claim that although he was upset and shouting, he was not threatening the police, nor resisting their instruction to leave, before he was tasered. (At least one of the involved officers has a record of excessive force accusations.)

Tabatabainejad filed a civil rights lawsuit this week, against UCLA and the university police. Part of the suit says that the campus police violated his rights under the ADA. Tabatabainejad has a diagnosed bipolar disorder. "He told the officers he had the condition and the officers' response was to Taser him and hurt him rather than deal with him as a person with a disability," said his attorney Paul Hoffman.

Grimsley on academia and bipolar disorder

"Academics are nothing if not clever in conveying their prejudices," writes historian Mark Grimsley in "An Inappropriate Illness," a new essay at Inside Higher Ed. When a professor is upfront about a hidden disability with his colleagues, he finds a stigma still attached to it--because a stigma voiced in more polite or bureaucratic terms is still a stigma.