My Family Romance

Edward Everett Horton and Jessie Royce Landis

One of my first memories of the movies is somewhat incestuous. I remember walking into my parents’ bedroom in our row house in Brooklyn, the black-and-white TV screen throwing light from a corner. My parents were supine, each on his or her side of their trundle bed. They were murmuring, talking in that affectless tone of remarking that people use when the tube is on and they’re actually watching it in a kind of listless way while also paying nominal attention to each other. Their heads were toward the door, and they couldn’t see me come in. I wanted to get closer to them, to hear what connubial words were being exchanged in the bluish TV-screen light. A movie was showing, something from the ’40s or ’30s, it seemed, a mansion, men in evening dress, women in dressy dresses. I moved closer and heard my father’s voice more clearly; he was saying things like Joseph Schildkraut, S. Z. Sakall, Marjorie Main, James Gleason, Patsy Kelly, Elisha Cook, Edward Everett Horton. He was naming the characters who swirled around the margins, never far from the lead actors but sometimes moved off-screen after one brief line, one double take, a short verbal effusion, or a bit of physical business. Whatever it was they did, it was something my parents noticed.

I looked at my parents, looked at the screen, back and forth; if I could magically transport back and see myself watching the scene, I’m sure I’d look like a child detective standing in the semi-dark, trying to solve a mystery. How could they know the names of such unimportant players? Why would they? Sometimes little grunts and groans of delight seemed to urge out of them at the mention of a particular name, like the noises I would learn to make at an amuse-bouche. I tiptoed out, and wondered how these people had spent their lives, and why—also, they didn’t have a door that locked.

Little did I know that I would find myself, decades later, engaged in a similar supine pursuit, although the room is larger, as is the TV, and in color, the mattress singularly firm and large and hypoallergenic, no one stepping up stealthily while I watch to hear me murmuring to myself, and miles from Brooklyn before I sleep.

Ward Bond, Beulah Bondi, Arthur Treacher, Binnie Barnes. Character actors all. Their names almost feel like musty passwords of a secret society. And a related category to character actors: the second leads, who may or may not be character actors; some of them were hacks who were just narrative place cards, but others were creatures of the bad break who studio heads didn’t think had enough wattage, or whose lead light had faded for whatever reason. One of my favorites was Lew Ayres, who started a star, but then was wrecked when he declared as a CO in World War II. He ended multi-medaled as a combat medic and was nominated for an Oscar for Johnny Belinda, but his career never fully recovered. I’ve always loved those second leads who stuck around long enough to take, or fall into, the lead, even if, or perhaps especially when, these vocational promotions were never quite convincing: Don Ameche, Eddie Bracken, Jack Carson. Of course, there is the occasional actor or actress who blurs the line: Van Johnson (I may be the only remaining Van Johnson fan under a certain age—his portrait of grief in The Last Time I Saw Paris almost unwatchably good, his line readings spoken with a kind of tartness that would get Tom Cruise slapped; beyond that, he’s always good), or Gloria Grahame, who won an Oscar, had a long career with name sometimes above the title, but never transcended a certain sultriness, other than perhaps in In a Lonely Place, a superbly modern and affecting performance, created under difficult circumstances (directed by Nicholas Ray, from whom she was separating), which is why she is in my pantheon of Hollywood sirens.

The character actor who becomes and stays a star is epitomized by Judy Holliday, who, in my fantasy life, I have escaped with many times to Tahiti or the Bronx. She is the only actress I know who can completely pull off a goofy sexuality without undermining either quality. On top of it, she adds a devastating vulnerability. Holliday pulled off a kind character actress coup de théâtre, winning the Academy Award for Born Yesterday, in 1950, over Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

Since I can’t run away with Judy Holliday, I may as well fantastically marry off my two all-time favorite character actors, my cinematic parents, who I hope have a sexy reaction formation: Edward Everett Horton and Jessie Royce Landis. But before we reach the nuptials, or the deepest part of my dreamwork, lest anyone object, perhaps I should explain why these two are, in my book, heroic, and why I hope they have a strange and delightful lifetime together in my mind.

They are heroic because I do not have much of an appreciation of conventional heroism. Hold that: I should say, instead, that it doesn’t interest me terribly. Rather than noble and inspiring acts, I am much more drawn to interesting and endearing people. Understandably, perhaps, the world lauds character as a signal virtue, but I tend to laud characters who are heroic to me in the way they expand the human franchise of individuality, even peculiarity, or embody qualities I find underrepresented or unique in combination. That is my idea of heroism, the bravery of expanding typologies of character, and as Eric Idle of Monty Python says, when asked what it is: it is mine. It is never easy to be different, lest you think I’m being glib.

My family romance will be united by a unique blend of sophistication and benign xenophobia, which is to say my fantasy parents will be well dressed but unable to speak French. They are savvy Americans in their way, Horton and Landis, these bewildered nouveaux riche, when ordering champagne. They have a general aversion to foreign culture, especially French, which they submit to out of a clear enough sense that it’s the thing to do—to do business. For example: managing the great Petrov (Fred Astaire) in Shall We Dance? in Horton’s case; or to show the world that one’s daughter is “finished,” as is the case with Landis in To Catch a Thief. You have to put aside your prejudices when you’re an American in Nice. In the former case, in Paris, Horton asks, “Ou est Petrov?” with the consternation of a man for whom language generally is a minefield and a foreign language a minefield that one must crawl across knowing that an explosion is inevitable nonetheless. In the latter, Jesse Royce Landis, in To Catch a Thief, at a surreally elaborate costume party on the Riviera, drops her sense of masquerade to ask a bartender, “Avez-vous bourbon?”—the third word inflected with the pique of a woman who is so comfortable being herself but so tired of being abroad that any pretense is a chore requiring a foolproof and homegrown tonic.

They move in heady circles, these two, and their clothes are tailored and expensive, but they are resolutely unpretentious. My mother’s fit better than my father’s, and yet I don’t want to really think about why that is.

My own father was rather ego strong, overbearing, so I sometimes think it would be lovely to have a witty, slightly befuddled, somewhat impotent father who could also do world-class double takes. He would, of course, be impotent in the right way: a de-testosteroned personality, if not completely lacking bite, gentle, neither overengaged nor underinvolved, with three-piece tweed suits that looked pretty natty despite the fact that his body was a bit hippy.

Their voices: his (Horton’s) has a squeak that comes and goes, a bit of patrician New York, with a steady waver, and an unexpectedly musical effect, up and down the scales, calibrated to enter a wisecrack or a surreally self-effacing moment at a strangely pleasing tenor pitch; her voice is mezzo, the accent hints at a lower class that has moved up, rounded out, a Boston Brahmin via Dubuque, and when she speaks you feel her sense of balanced certainty, and that this certainty is as qualified as anything else, which is to say rather. You know she’s been around: perhaps from the Orpheum Circuit to Famous-Players-Lasky to disappointing contracts at Warner’s or RKO.

He proves it is possible to be heroically flustered, as he indulges in epically neurotic concern for details that diverge from the expected; sometimes his own strange practices—the way he lives—follows a grammar of logic that he thinks is completely normal, but no one seems to understand. When he tries to explain, it’s like he’s explicating the mores of a country with one inhabitant.

She shows a heroically mature feminine sexuality, matched with a mocking wit. You can see in the twinkle of her eyes when she looks at Cary Grant, either as son or as her daughter’s lover, that she likes handsome men, even if she thinks they’re ridiculous.

His tie is askew, and his shoes come untied. “Oh, dear,” he might say. “First Calvin Coolidge, now this.” Her dress is satin, a strap hangs off one fifty-five-year-old shoulder. If she caught you looking, she might say, “It’s a fallen world, after all,” and give you a complex half smile.

Her eyes widen suggestively. His narrow perplexedly.

My heroic father does not wander like Odysseus, but he is very amusing while looking for his socks. My heroic mother does not sacrifice interminably, or wait by the window like Penelope, but she looks smashing in a long silk robe, with matching slippers that she mocks.

He’s slightly bent but looks good in a tux that he claims is uncomfortable, or a three-piece tweed that almost makes you want to wear a vest. His fedora is at an angle, and damn if he doesn’t look almost handsome, despite a complex nose that vies with his brim. And he moves with fluidity, which his awkward body would never suggest.

In To Catch a Thief, the Cat, Cary Grant, is under quiet threat of seduction by Grace Kelly, centuries younger than him, whom he initially resists—an absurd idea but perhaps the only possible response to such cool perfection. That, or prostration. The famous kiss outside her hotel room, the two having just met: she takes him head in hands and plants one on him, and he looks like the Cat who swallowed a canary. It’s the same look of sexual luck that Grant also flashes on the train to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, when she says that she never makes love before eating. But it is Grace Kelley’s mother in the film, Jessie Royce Landis’s seduction of the Cat for her daughter that I’m . . . more seduced by, her casual air of what’s wrong with you for not making love to my beautiful daughter? And while seducing the Cat as a suitor for her daughter, with the indefatigable air of someone who recognizes that the sexual arts have entered a decadent and altogether clumsy age, Landis flirts beautifully with Cary Grant herself, culminating in the moment that will always be for me the Ur-look of seduction: the Cat is searching Landis’s hotel room for signs of the copy Cat he is tracking, the jewel thief who is framing him. He turns to Jessie Royce Landis and says, “You must sleep soundly.” She says, “I do,” a matrimonial avowal, but with the flicker of a smirk and the slow closing of eyes saying so much more. Quite frankly, what they silently say is the word “fuck” in every possible permutation. It isn’t quite an invitation, although it verges. It’s much deeper than a boast but too confident for a come-on. It’s an unflinching assertion of sexual prowess, made to a potential son-in-law, who it just so happens is almost exactly her age. If Landis is a heroine of sexual self-knowledge and droll self-mockery, considering the situation, she would almost have to be.

To interrupt a laugh with a jolt of self-knowledge usually means you’ve learned the joke’s on you. One turns isn’t that amusing into aren’t I a fool. But to do so with a sense of comic dignity, to signal indignity with dignity, is the quality that holy fools possess. They can change laughs in midstream. Horton’s version of this, though, isn’t sentimental; it’s an urban version, and the ultimate message is that sophistication is an occasionally desirable quality of limited value. “Elia, thou art sophisticated,” Charles Lamb says to himself in a bemused moment of recognition in the essay “New Year’s Eve.” He was not wearing a tuxedo. In Edward Everett Horton’s case, we think, in gratitude, thou can never be really sophisticated, if we understand the use of sophistication to mean elegant, refined, well mannered.

His head strides into a room ahead of his body, the walking stick he carries looking more like a tail than an accoutrement.

She moves languorously and knowingly in clothes that few can afford and few care less about.

For Edward Everett Horton, the art of indignation usually involves a midair correction. He agrees, wholeheartedly, until he realizes that he disagrees completely. In Shall We Dance?, a classic example of how the simplest series of line deliveries can be riotously original, especially when spoken with a sincerity that belies any attempt to be casually pusillanimous, Horton says, in response to a question meant to elicit his guilt: “Yes. That is, not exactly. No.” These lines sum up the film’s ambiguities, the high and low culture, ballet and tap dancing, in a sharp distillation of comic confusion. Even though Horton wants his friend and client, the great Petrov (Fred Astaire), to continue with the art of the ballet, he makes us understand that no one as confused as he could represent a pure cultural ideology. His confusion liberates Fred Astaire to do exactly what he wants and sets in motion my hyperextended analysis of this piece of popular culture. Yes? Not exactly? No?

The scene of laughter and forgetting, in the elevator, in North by Northwest: Cary Grant cannot convince his mother—Jesse Royce Landis doing a more tart reprise of her role in To Catch a Thief—that he is in danger. Crowded into the hotel elevator with the men who want to kill Roger O. Thornhill, her son, Landis looks at the men and asks if they are trying to kill him. Her delivery of the line is the engine of the scene: very American in its directness, but with more than a hint of absurdity. She starts laughing, as does every other woman on the elevator. The laughter goes from a slightly giddy disbelief to a kind of hysteria, the killers heartily joining in. Landis throws her head back and you can see for an instant her distant background in silent film. Everyone is laughing but her son, Cary Grant. This is the stuff of nightmares, specifically Freudian ones. How else, after all, could one respond to a son’s public avowal that two men huddled close in a small room plunging downward are cold killers? It sounds like a joke, so it must be one. Landis-Mother’s infectious laughter is castrating; it’s one of our worst fears, a nightmare vision really, to be publicly humiliated by our mothers—and here Hitchcock’s mother fixation burns out of the screen as brightly as in Psycho—but Landis ultimately creates the dramaturgical extravagance of Grant’s exit, his escape. Her laughter is the indulgence of unalloyed skepticism, yes, extended by the hilarity in her eyes, their combination of innocence and experience—a particularly American marriage of naivete and knowingness. But this move lets him live. Lest a mother’s disbelief in her son’s turmoil, his potentially fatal mistaken identity, be perceived as unheroic, it is important to note that her skepticism is a function of his own character flaw, his failure to invest authentically in anything. What does the O. in his middle name stand for, he’s asked—“Nothing.” And despite her witheringly witty responses to the quagmire of confusion and danger he has gotten himself into, she can be cajoled into helping him, all along acting as though life were quite ridiculous, and her son absurd, and these particulars were merely an extension of life’s normally wacky vicissitudes. Landis is a heroine of the oedipally surreal. She is the perfect Hitchcock mother.

And surreal will describe her wedding to Edward Everett Horton (the ceremony performed, perhaps, by Jacques Tati? He’s French, but never speaks). It’s true that Edward Everett Horton was gay, part of the long history of closeted Hollywood, but since this is a family romance, my fractured fairy tale, there’s no reason I can’t arrange a lavender marriage. They’ll both take lovers but remain devoted. I can hardly wait to see Landis’s face, or perhaps to hear her laugh. Horton will murmur, “Oh, dear,” and she will look at him with muted, bemused astonishment, not quite sure of how she got there, not quite sure of why I’m doing this to her, but with a sense of the weirdness of fate. She’ll acknowledge she did something to put her in this predicament, perhaps being too interesting (that almost never seems to work), or she might just find the whole thing terribly amusing. Horton will announce himself as ready as he’ll ever be. I know that he can handle a strong woman, since his marriage with Susan (played by Ruth Donnelly) in Holiday is one of the great screen relationships, perhaps my favorite of all. I do feel a bit like a cinematic home-wrecker interjecting this, but this couple has inspired me for decades, much as it inspires Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in the 1938 film (the film was first made in 1930, with Horton playing the same role). What makes this marriage between Professor Nick and Susan Potter magical is what also makes Grant and Hepburn so good together: a sense of play suggesting a profound knowledge of one’s partner. It sounds simple until you realize that cosmic chemistry sets are almost never on sale. This is Horton’s best role because he gets to play to his intelligence as a professor, while also acting ridiculous, as unlikely as that combination may seem, as opposed to his delightful but more one-dimensional roles in many other films.

Wit and affection are the household gods here, and Horton invokes them with the élan of a seasoned practitioner. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the extraordinary performance of Jean Dixon, playing an older proto-feminist role model to Katherine Hepburn, and with sympathy and comic timing that matches Edward Everett Horton, she makes them believable as a couple. She was a favorite of George S. Kaufmann, and based on her timing, one can understand why, though her film career never really took off. Grant and Hepburn, Dixon and Everett Horton, and marvelous Lew Ayres as a sad young drunk, along with James Barrie’s play, and Donald Ogden Stewart’s script of the same, and George Cukor’s usual finesse with actors, make a usually graceful though sometimes heavy-handed attack on class pretensions; no actor displays this more amusingly than Edward Everett Horton losing his shoe in a galosh to an over-attentive butler at the entrance to a stately Fifth Avenue mansion and trying obsequiously, and then determinedly, to retrieve it as he limps around a grand foyer that impresses him as impressively unfamiliar. “It seems to have been a residence of some kind at one point,” he says drolly to his wife. She looks at him with killer deadpan, a non-acknowledgment that is the perfect familiar acknowledgment between long-together couples.

It is in Holiday that Horton is most heroic, in my terms, because he is an unusual man who insists on being himself, and his performance here, which was I’m sure the first of his I ever saw, has colored every subsequent performance I’ve seen. It is heroic because it is honorable and eccentric. He is amusingly, dedicatedly himself, devoted to those he loves, and free of institutional investment. Note some wishful thinking on my part? What are heroes for? After all, I find the idea of running into burning buildings a miracle of adrenalized fear-repression and have been unimpressed with most “great deeds” since I was eleven, finding in most a self-aggrandizing quality that makes me queasy.

Edward Everett Horton and Jesse Royce Landis will be quite happy together. I believe: they’ll talk about their sex lives after I’ve gone to bed, over a martini or two, fueled by good humor, and they won’t take any guff from anyone who pretends to more than their own very American, slightly kooky, occasionally sharp-tongued vision of character. I’m proud of my parents, and if this isn’t heroism pour me an epic and pass the ammunition, but keep the lights down low so we can still see the screen: my father in black and white, my mother in color.