In Which Miss Jean Brodie Leads Me to a Once-Famous Singer Named Oliver

Reading Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, my pervading reaction for the first 80 or so pages was that if ever there was a novel tailor made for film adaptation, this was it. The plot follows a teacher (Miss Brodie) at a respected girls school in Edinburgh in her relationship with the six students she has chosen as “the Brodie set.” It is the 1930s and an unmarried woman in her forties struggles to define herself as something beyond a “spinster.” Miss Brodie succeeds, and she doesn't. Meanwhile, her chosen ones absorb her influence, to varying effects. In the end, one of them betrays her, and that betrayal is not sentimentalized.

It's the anti-Dead Poet's Society. With girls! It could be the quality alternative to Mona Lisa Smile. It could be a film in which progressive women born at the wrong time meet with disappointment and ultimate defeat, instead of tear-filled redemption, despite their perceived wit and determination.

I was picturing Rachel Weisz in the title role, and a herd of Dakota Fanning understudies for the Brodie set. I hadn't yet discovered that it had already been done; just once, in 1969 and with Maggie Smith in the role of Jean Brodie.



Smith won an Oscar for her performance. The film garnered one other Academy Award, for best song, which is where my analysis of Miss Brodie makes a permanent digression. The song, like all songs, is on Youtube. It's called “Jean,” and it's pretty terrible:



The singer of “Jean” was known as Oliver. He was, for probably not nearly long enough if you asked him, a famous entertainer. This, his second single, reached number two on the Billboard pop chart. Oliver performed on Ed Sullivan. He sold a million records. But then, his followup efforts were unable to duplicate his early successes.


People who were once famous are fantastically eerie. They are living ghosts: a shell of a one-time celebrity roaming the earth in the guise of an everyman. Oliver (real name William Swofford) became a real estate agent in Louisiana, and then a manager in a pharmaceutical company. He died of cancer in 2000, at the age of 54. Even Google doesn't seem to know much else about him.

It feels unnatural for fame to bear such little permanence. It seems like it ought to be a thing that, once achieved, cannot be taken away, like a college degree, or self-respect. Jean Brodie, I think, would not approve.