Wilde About Oscar

On the screen, on the boards and on the page, the 19th century aesthete emerges as a superstar

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Wilde, the movie, starring British actor and writer Stephen Fry, examines Wilde's life from a wider angle and puts more emphasis on the sex. Fry is an uncanny Wilde look-alike, all droopy languor and portly insouciance, but the scene in which he slouches in a chair watching Douglas make love to a young hustler is a cinematic invention that has already drawn boos in England. Writer Merlin Holland, Wilde's only grandchild (Wilde's widow changed the family name to Holland to avoid scandal following his death), has made the scene Exhibit A in his indictment of Wilde as "gay-obsessed." "This is a film which at best leaves those people unfamiliar with Wilde with an impression of him as a man who jumped in and out of bed with young men," Holland told a London paper.

Perhaps to correct this view of the wit who said, "One should always be in love. This is the reason one should never marry," and yet did just that and even fathered two children, Holland has contributed his own book to the springtime flood of Wildeana. Published in the U.S. this month, The Wilde Album (Henry Holt; $19.95) weaves a biographical commentary around a collection of drawings, paintings and photos, some from private family archives. Besides portraying the flamboyant fop (whom doltish period cartoonists caricatured sniffing flowers) as a closet homebody, the compact volume provides yet more fodder for the Elvis theory. It documents Wilde's American lecture tour of 1882, when he was mobbed like a pop star by eager fans while speaking on two less-than-galvanizing topics: "The Decorative Arts" and "The House Beautiful." Wilde might not have gone in for Presley's blue suede shoes, but he certainly rivaled him for charisma.

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