LEDA & THE SWAN, OR THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

I love old films. I have a personal (though one-way) relationship with their character actors. I think, “Man, I’ve got a great part for Nat Pendleton”—or Takashi Shimura, the greatest actor who ever lived. He was the star of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, and the head samurai (the Yul Brynner role) in Seven Samurai.

Kurosawa’s rep company was also graced by Seiji Miyaguchi. In Seven Samurai he played the great swordsman (James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven). Miyaguchi copped to being 5'3", which means he was probably 5'2". I mention it because the camera sees only what you instruct it to see. Not only is a person’s height irrelevant, so is his behavior prior to “action.” The audience starts looking when one turns the camera on.

But we are curious. As we are about all heroes more nuanced than “a handsome prince” or “a beautiful maiden,” at bedtime. Celebrity inflames our hunger for gossip. The supermarket mag and Roman myths are both gossip about the gods. Our thirst for their modern equivalent is unslakable—else most contemporary media would curl up and die.

Why? We aren’t made insomniac by our online investigation of the private lives of classical musicians or dentists. But we see celebrities writ large, and we understand them as demigods, which is to say as improved versions of ourselves. How strong is our need for unity with those Immortals? It can never be assuaged.

And what is it we want to know?

A friend, a sexual profligate, told me of a similar irresolvable longing. “The problem with sex with two women,” he said, “is that when you’re watching, all you want to do is participate, and when you’re doing it, all you want to do is watch.”^I

Here his desire for some greater communion has doomed him to perpetual disappointment. As with King Kong and Fay Wray: the King is doomed not only to the agony of an unconsummatable love but to the denial of all unsexual intercourse, courting or flirting, e.g., “What’s your major…?” And we are doomed to disappointment of a consummation with Movie Stars; it’s just not taking place.

Our interest persists, inflamed by their remove. When it wanes they are no longer Fantasy Boffo and we graze in celebrity pastures new. Prior to that, you and I want to know all about them.

Online sites for the inquisitive have long featured lists of the stars’ amours. Our interest here is masochistic; while we enjoy the sexual gossip, it comes with the knowledge that they are cheating on us. For what in the world are they, up there on the screen, but sexual objects; and like the Priests of Ancient Israel, they must have no defect.

Stars, being actually human, do have defects, but the camera can frame them out. Hair, makeup, and lights skew the image just as infatuation and lust do in Real Life. So the camera sees with the eyes of love. How terrible, then, to find that this busload of critters named names to the FBI, or that that carload murdered their wives.

During courtship we do not want our beloved revealed as human. The human mind and physiology will flood us with endorphins sufficient to overlook both solecisms of behavior and the odd scrap of lettuce in the teeth. The appearance of the stars, their speech, and their behavior are all prepared for us. But we cannot get close enough to them. For any possible proximity destroys the illusion.

Michael Caine and Sean Connery are accepted as gods among the Mountain folk in The Man Who Would Be King. Sean wants to wed a local beauty. She resists, as congress with a god would mean her instant death. He tries to kiss her, and she bites him. The Tibetans see blood and realize Sean is not a god, and they kill him.

Sean himself was a lovely man. His first words to me (on The Untouchables), “I never made a penny off of Bond.”^II

And I spent an evening at Sue Mengers’s with Michael Caine, who was kind enough to respond to my request for inside info about Nigel Green. The odd, tough character actor played the Colour Sergeant in Caine’s first big film, Zulu, and the bad guy in The Ipcress File. Michael told me Nigel had committed suicide, and I was sad for his trouble, for the loss to film, and that I would then never have the chance to work with him. But as he had made his films when I was still in high school—the collaboration never would have been possible. My longing was no less real for all that my recognition of it revealed its impossibility.

Just like our wish for congress with Movie Stars—for what else are they selling? Didn’t Rita Hayworth inform us, “They go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with Rita.”

I fell in love with Myrna Loy on our afternoon together in 1980. I was married, and thirty-two, she was seventy-five, and I will flatter myself that the feeling may have been shared. But we recall Shakespeare’s “The course of true love never did run smooth; / But, either it was different in blood— /… Or else misgraffed in respect of years—”

I also fell in love, of course, with Audrey Hepburn, and I think I could have made her happy.

1. I. With the addition of Just One Extra Woman they could have played whist.
2. II. I beg pardon, for I’ve written this story before; but for the uninitiated, and as a public service, here’s what you should know about Sean: He was in Majorca, we were speaking on the phone about something or other. I’d just gotten off the phone with my sister, who was in the midst of a marital catastrophe. I told her I’d have to ring off, as I had a business call with Sean. She said, “Lucky you,” and “Please tell him I adore his work.” I called Sean and apologized for my unpunctuality. I explained that I was comforting my sister, and that I had promised to tell him that she adored his work. He asked for her number and, after our call, rang her up in Ohio and chatted for half an hour.