Let Me Finish (3 page)

There's a famous story by John Updike called "The Happiest I've Been," which ends in a long car trip. In it, the narrator, John, a college sophomore, is driving back to Chicago after a Christmas visit home in the middle of Pennsylvania. The trip back is a seventeen-hour haul and he shares a car with a friend named Neil (it's his father's car). Before heading west, they stop at a drunken party, and late that night John holds a girl in his arms on a sofa, mostly because they're both so cold. He kisses her a little and she falls asleep. Dawn is coming when the trip begins at last (the girls are gone), and Neil unexpectedly lets John drive the car. Then Neil falls asleep, too. As I read this story for the first time, in 1959, when it came out in
The New
Yorker,
my mind went back, as if on radar, to Barbara Kidder.

"When we came into tunnel country"—the last passage goes—"the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a long trip; many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter....And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me."

T
RACKING
shot, please, of a twelve-year-old boy running north on Lexington Avenue as a 1933 twilight begins to fall. He is sprinting for home, on Ninety-third Street, and guilt makes him fly. He must be there in time to get a little homework under his belt before his old man arrives from the office, and in time to assume the bored, everyday look of a kid just back from his school's afternoon rec program, instead of from
King Kong
at the RKO 86th Street, where he has really been. Panting, he lets himself in the front door, checks out the mail for a
Popular Mechanics,
checks out the dog, grabs a banana, falls on his bed, opens a math book, and gives himself over to thoughts of Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Fay Wray (Fay Wray!), jungle drums, aerial machine-gun fire, and the remembered velvety dark of a movie theatre in the afternoon. The thought
Lucky again
crosses his mind, and in time he may actually find a pencil and begin to write down fractions. The boy
(he is me) went on being lucky. No one at home or at school ever twigged to his stolen movie afternoons, and for the rest of that school year, as in the year before, he made it down to the Eighty-sixth Street casbah a couple of times a week, where there were five theatres to choose from, each offering a double feature, to deepen his budget of guilt and joy, make critical inroads on his allowance, and hook him, once and for good, on the movies. Afternoon ticket prices stood at an invariable fifteen cents, and another nickel covered a Milky Way, a Hershey's Almond, or a tube of chalky Necco Wafers, from which I discarded the licorice layers in advance. Now and then, one of these palaces would decide to enforce the city's "No Unaccompanied Minors" ordinance, whereupon I would hold out my sweaty dime and nickel to the nearest approaching pervert or dope fiend, and say, "Take me in, Mister?" as was the convention. "The kid's wit' me," he would say to the woman in the booth, as was also the convention, and we would walk in as family and wordlessly part forever.

What I saw on those stolen afternoons (and, on the up and up, sometimes on weekends) was a cross-section of early-thirties Hollywood, which was just then coming into high gear. Paul Muni in Howard Hawks'
Scarface
and
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
slip into view, as do Cecil B. De Mille's
The Sign of the Cross
(with Claudette Colbert as a Roman temptress bathing in ass's milk), the Barrymores in
Rasputin and the Empress,
Dick Powell in another Busby Berkeley musical, the Marx Brothers (with the dopey Zeppo singing "Everyone Says I Love You" to Thelma Todd), the vine-borne Johnny Weissmuller, Jimmy Cagney shot dead
in his pin-striped suit in
The Public Enemy,
and Laurel and Hardy forced to share their bed with a chimp and a flea circus. One afternoon, I found myself alone in the dark with Bela Lugosi's pallid, orally fixated Count Dracula, and realizing, even as I stared, that I wouldn't be able to call out for help that night, when he returned, in his cape and slippery hair, to break in on my sleep.

Mostly, I would turn up at the Orpheum or the 86th Street Garden while the second feature was in progress—a low-budget murder or a B-musical starring Lupe Velez, say, or a Wheeler & Woolsey comedy, or Leo Carillo's carefree gaucho act—and then wish for its ending to hurry along (as I tilted my wristwatch toward the screen), so that I might squeeze in a full main feature before my deadline. The better movies ran long, though, and I don't think I ever did learn the foredoomed end of Garbo's
Mata Hari
—although the moment when she leans over and blows out Ramon Novarro's bedside icon candle has stayed with me. I didn't know what this meant but zowie! Walking into the middle of movies was the common American thing during the double-feature era, and if one stayed the course, only minimal mental splicing was required to reconnect the characters and the plot of the initial feature when it rolled around again. The demise of the double bill has done away with this knack and has also expunged "I think this is where we came in" from the language—a better phrase, all in all, than "déjà vu," and easier to pronounce.

Quality was not much of a factor in my afternoon choices, but I had already noticed that although the flicks were clearly wasting my mind, as my father would have put
it, they were richly nutritious to some other side of me. One bathed in this scummy Ganges and arose refreshed, with surprising memories. Most of my friends still go to the movies, but not many of them are movie-goers in this sense, and while I sometimes wonder at the thousands of hours I have spent in the popcorned dark, there was an avid, darting kind of selection one learned there—a process at once ironic and romantic which plucks up scenes and faces, attitudes and moments to save from the rush of events—that felt like a saving knack of some sort, and passkey for later times.

When I moved along to high school and then college, I found movie-permeated friends waiting for me. Bigscreen dialogue and scenes filled our talk and if one of us unexpectedly held up an invisible lorgnette, like the dandified eighteenth-century spy Leslie Howard, and began, "They seek him here, they seek him there / Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. / Is he in Heaven," the rest of us in the room would join in: "Is he in—" (
lorgnettepoints downward
) / "That demned elusive Pimpern
el
?" I graduated and went into the Air Force and eventually off to the Pacific. At Hickam Field, in Hawaii, we'd check out the post theatre in the evening and, if we didn't like what was on, slip through a hole in the fence into adjoining Pearl Harbor and walk to the sector of docks where five or six destroyer escorts were tied up side by side. (The Navy always had the latest releases, for some reason.) Sailors on board would tip us about which ship had the best feature that night, and we'd step over—saluting the con as we came aboard—and settle down with the crew on the fantail, just in time for the Mickey. One night, late in 1944, while I lay
under the stars and watched Gene Kelly and Rita Hay-worth dancing to Jerome Kern tunes in
Cover Girl,
it came to me that this war might end some day, and there would be more life and movies to come.

Before that, much earlier in my time in the service, I had joined a reluctant audience in a sunstruck Army shack one afternoon, where we enlisted men had been assembled to watch another morale booster or sex hygiene film. The compulsory sex one-reelers had once been grisly, military-produced affairs, whose main effect was to breed some lifelong sexual repressives among their captive audiences of young farm boys and dropouts, but now Hollywood had got into the production end, with professional crews and actors. This time, the lights came down and on the screen a colonel looked up from his desk to talk to us about the Articles of War. "Men," he began in a manly, authoritative way, when he was drowned out by our shouts and clapping. "Hey, it's Mister Dithers!" we yelled. "Look—it's Dithers, the old fart got
drafted
!" The man up here on the screen—narrow face, pointed nose, fussy manner—was the character actor Jonathan Hale, here recognized in a flash as Mister Dithers, Dagwood Bumstead's boss in all those Blondie movies, back in peacetime. We talked it over afterward and said it was great casting. Dagwood—he was Arthur Lake, of course—would have beaten the draft, because of his kids and his dumbness, but Mister Dithers, with his chickenshit ways, was pure officer material. The movie had built our morale after all.

When I click on an old movie nowadays, on TCM or some middle-of-the-night back channel—it isn't the stars
who keep me awake but a dazzling pack of supporting actors: Frank Morgan, Patsy Kelly, Alan Hale. William Demarest, Billie Burke, and Douglass Dumbrille; C. Aubrey Smith, Andy Devine, and Edna Mae Oliver. "Hey," I murmur, "it's Roscoe Karns. And here's Lynn Overman again." These were all broad types, to be sure, notable for their quirks and reliable charm, and as soon as I name one, others leap to mind. Here's a heart-of-gold Claire Trevor—and Glenda Farrell and Una Merkel. Here are the bumbling Guy Kibbee and Eugene Pallette—and Raymond Walburn. If this is Spring Byington, can Fay Bainter be far behind? And here I recall a later moment, recounted to me by my
New Yorker
colleague Burton Bernstein, about the night when his brother Leonard Bernstein brought their mother along to a big Hollywood party on a Saturday night in the 1950s, and there introduced her to the blonde Anita Louise, an established second-level star. "Anita Louise! Anita Louise!" Mrs. Bernstein cried. "Why, I named my daughter Shirley after you!" Lenny understood his mom's mix-up in a flash, just as I did when the tale was told to me. She was thinking of Ann Shirley, of course, a different reliable blonde in another bunch of movies.

I had a family of my own, back in my movie-sneaking youth, but the addition of so many vivid and confidently eccentric faces and mannerisms to my store of adults was a comfort to me. Sig Rumann, Ann Revere, Jack Oakie, Franklin Pangborn, Eduardo Cianelli, and Porter Hall are still neighbors or perhaps cousins of mine: folks you can count on. I liked it when some of these friends began to
turn up in larger roles: they'd made good and done us proud. Mischa Auer, for instance, played the moody Balkan free-loader in the splendid
My Man Godfrey,
and then attained a unique niche of reference when Fred Astaire, singing to Joan Leslie in
The Sky's the Limit,
comes to the last verse of the Johnny Mercer lyric to Harold Arlen's classic "My Shining Hour":

 

This will be my shining hour,
Lonely though it may be,
Like the face of Mischa Auer
On a Music Hall marquee.

 

I began sneaking off to movies just when the successive earthquakes of the Depression and the Second World War were coming along, and there was a yearning for a broader and more sophisticated set of attitudes in this country. The movies did it for us; they were just the ticket. The great cresting tide of late-thirties and early-forties Hollywood—an Augustan era, when the studios were cranking out five hundred films each year—swept over us and changed us forever: Astaire and Rogers, Bogart, Judy Garland, Olivier, Cary Grant (wrestling with Irene Dunne's fox terrier, which has his—well, not his, it turns out—derby in its mouth); Gable and Tracy; the Joads and Rupert of Hentzau and Aunt Pittypat; Miss Froy's name drawn on the fogged train window, and David Niven, under fire in his Spad, wiping a spray of engine oil from his aviator goggles. Grant and Hepburn step into a waltz as the old year dies, von Stroheim
snips his geranium, and spoiled heiress Bette Davis has this brain tumor that brings about a brief, strange happiness with her brain surgeon husband George Brent.

Anyone who was the wrong age or in the wrong place for this stuff—my parents and my children, for instance, and even those who picked it up later from videos and American-studies classes—never quite caught up. We were the lucky ones, we first citizens of film, and we trusted the movies for the rest of our lives. We sat down in our Loew's or Bijou or Pantages as strangers to each other but together absorbed fresh gestures, new tones of voice, and different tones of mind and style, as taught by the dashing, elegant, or stricken figures up on the screen: the same wished-for, uniting experience that sends us out to the movies today but too often without reward. I still go to the movies, of course, and one of the overcrowded plexes I frequent—with their squalid queues and deafening trailers—is the same Orpheum, sans stage and soaring balconies, that I used to emerge from, guilty and entranced, into the speckled shade of the Third Avenue El.

E
VERY
night when I was a boy, I sat and read in our living room, listening to my father writing letters. He wrote on his lap in longhand, with the letter paper backed by one of his long yellow legal pads, and the scratch and swirl of his black Waterman pen across the page sounded like the scrabblings of a creature in the underbrush. There were no pauses or crossings out, and in time I realized that I could even identify the swash of a below-the-line "g" leaping diagonally upward into an "h" and the crossing double zag of an ensuing "t," and, soon after, the blip of a period. When he reached the bottom of the page, the sheet was turned over and smoothed down in a single, back-of-the-hand gesture, and the rush of writing and pages went on, while I waited for the declarative final "E" or "Ernest"—the loudest sound of all—that told me the letter was done. When the envelope had been addressed, licked, and sealed with a postmasterish thump of his fist, he would pluck a Lucky
Strike out of its green pack and whack it violently four times against his thumbnail, like a man hammering a spike, then damply tongue the other end before lighting up. By the time the first deep drag appeared as a pale upward jet of smoke, another letter was in progress. I went back to my book. Sooner or later, the letters would be over, and he would be ready to read aloud to me. "Finished," he would announce, picking up
Oliver Twist.
"Now, where were we?"