I love crazy women, and Joyce McKinney, formerly known as ‘Little Miss Perfect’ turned out to be Madder than the Hatter. This hilarious documentary from Oscar-Winning filmmaker Errol Morris (‘The Fog of War’) was a sheer delight from start to finish. When a blowzy blonde 60+ year old woman looks straight to camera in the opening scene and declares ‘ I was a very late developer, I didn’t even start dating until I was 16 years old’ then you sense that you are in for a good time, although not quite the same type Ms. McKinney evidently had. This former ‘Miss Wyoming World’ achieved world-wide notoriety in 1977 when she abducted London based Mormon missionary 21 year old American Kirk Anderson and held him hostage manacled to a bed and used him as her sex toy for 10 days.
When charged with kidnapping she maintained to the UK Court that Kirk was in fact her fiancé and a willing participant in all the sexual acts that she described in great detail much to the pleasure of all the Tabloid press, and something she relishes in repeating on camera now. I’m not sure what offended the Mormon Elders more, the fact that Kirk had ‘been forced to have sex’ outside of marriage, or the mere idea that Joyce had ripped off his
Sacred Mormon Underwear. Joyce sticks rigidly to her version of events even when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. She is a very convincing fantasist, delusional, manipulative, serial attention seeker, totally obsessive and is more ‘economical with the truth’ than even my late mother! She is both a ‘good time girl’ and a drama queen extraordinaire and every part of her hysterical (funny) past is larger than life. Some 20 years after being blasted as the woman who raped a Mormon she was back in the headlines with the bizarre story of how she had her dead pet pit-bull terrier cloned in Korea.
It all ended badly, not that you could tell from all the new interviews with a very chirpy Joyce. The tell-all book that she consistently insisted she was penning never materialized, and the enormous trove of press cuttings and photos that detailed ‘the truth about the real Joyce’, mysteriously disappeared in a robbery. We shall never ever know the true story of her life, BUT we get a damn good idea from this brilliantly filmed documentary.
One Tabloid Journalist who covered Ms. McKinney at close quarters over the years concisely summed her up as ‘barking mad’, and even if you are unfamiliar with this British colloquialism, you’ll so understand why this is a perfect description.
P.S. If you love movies like ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’, ‘Crazy Love’ or ‘Imelda’, you will so love this one. It’s high up on my list.
Posted by queerguru at 21:10
Labels: documentary
