“Who’s that?” he said. Munch, munch.
“James Dean.”
Pause. “Cool-looking guy.”
We were coming up on that scene where Rock Hudson is trying to talk the fox-featured Dean into selling a tiny piece of property that he’s just inherited. There are three or four other men in the room, businessmen, jackets and ties, all wanting the same thing, wanting this punk to sell. (They suspect there’s oil nearby.) Hudson offers him a wad of money. No, says the cowboy, pulling his hat down over his eyes, he’s sorry but he kinda likes having a piece of land all his own. Not much but mine.
And while he’s talking, slumped down in his seat, peeking here and there, he’s fiddling with a piece of rope.
“Now watch this,” I say. “Watch how he leaves the room, what he does with his hand, like he’s sweeping snow off a desk. It’s like he’s saying ‘Fuck you’ to the business guys.”
It’s one of those moments at the movies, so odd, so out-of-the-blue, that the first time you see it, you can’t quite believe your eyes.
“Wow,” Jesse said, sitting up. “Can we watch that again?” (Awe may be the appropriate sentiment when considering Anton Chekhov, but “Wow!” is definitely the right call for James Dean.)
A few minutes later I had to go out. On the way out the door I said, “You should watch the rest of this, you’ll like it.” Which I imagined rather self-congratulatorily he would. But when I came back later that night (eleven dollars for the taxi, no job), I found him sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of spaghetti. Eating with his mouth open. I’d told him a dozen times not to do that. It annoyed me that his mother had let it go at her end. You’re not doing a young guy a favour letting him have bad table manners. I said, “Jesse, close your mouth, please, when you’re chewing.”
“Sorry.”
“We’ve been over this before.”
“I only do it at home,” he said.
I was going to ignore that but I couldn’t. “If you do it at home, you’re going to forget not to do it when you’re out.”
“Okay,” he said.
I said, “So what did you think of it?”
“What?”
“Giant.”
“Oh, I took it off.”
After a moment I said, “You know, Jesse, you’re not doing very much these days. You really ought to stick out a movie like Giant. It’s the only education you’re getting.”
Neither of us said anything while I looked for a way out of the little box of self-righteousness I had painted myself into. “Do you know who Dennis Hopper is?” I said.
“The guy in Apocalypse Now.”
“I interviewed him once. I asked him who his favourite actor was. I thought he was going to say Marlon Brando. Everyone says Marlon Brando. But he didn’t. He said James Dean. You know what else he said? He said the best piece of acting he’d ever seen in his life was that scene with James Dean and the rope.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Seriously.” I waited a moment. I said, “You know the story with James Dean, eh? Made three movies and then died in a car accident.”
“How old was he?”
“Early twenties.”
“Was he drunk?”
“No, just going too fast. Giant was his last movie. He never got to see it.”
He thought about that for a second. “Who do you think is the greatest actor, Dad?”
“Brando,” I said. “That scene in On the Waterfront. Totally improvised when Brando takes the girl’s glove and puts it on his hand. That’s as good as it gets. We should watch it again.” I went on to say, to repeat rather, what my betters had told me in university: that the second time you see something is really the first time. You need to know how it ends before you can appreciate how beautifully it’s put together from the beginning.
He didn’t know what to say, he was still in the doghouse about Giant, so he said, “Sure.”
At first I picked the movies arbitrarily, in no particular order; for the most part they had to be good, classics when possible, but engaging, had to pull him out of his own thoughts with a strong storyline. There was no point, not at this juncture anyway, in showing him stuff like Fellini’s 81/2 (1963). They would come in time, those films. (Or they wouldn’t.) What I wasn’t prepared to be was impervious to his pleasure, to his appetite to be entertained. You have to start somewhere; if you want to excite someone about literature, you don’t start by giving him Ulysses— although, to be candid, a life without Ulysses seems like just a fine idea to me.
The next night I settled on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), for my money the best Hitchcock film ever. Ingrid Bergman, never more beautiful, never more vulnerable, plays the daughter of a German spy who is “loaned” to a pack of South American–based Nazis. Cary Grant plays her American controller who falls in love with her even while sending her off to marry the ringleader. His bitterness, her faint hopes that he’ll call off the plan and marry her himself, give the story tremendous romantic tension. But mostly it’s a classic suspense yarn. Will the Nazis find out what Bergman’s real mission is? Will Cary arrive in time to save her? The last five minutes leave you gasping the first time through.
I opened things up with a brief introduction to Hitchcock, Jesse as always on the left-hand side of the couch, a coffee in his hand. I said that Hitchcock was an English director, a bit of a prick with a mildly unhealthy thing for some of the blond actresses in his films. (I wanted to capture his attention.) I went on to say that he made a half-dozen masterpieces, adding, unnecessarily, that anyone who said he didn’t probably didn’t love movies. I asked him to look for a couple of things in the film. The staircase inside the villain’s house in Rio de Janeiro. How long was it? How long would it take to go down it? I didn’t tell him why.
I asked him also to listen to the graceful, sometimes suggestive dialogue, to remember that this film was made in 1946. I asked him to watch for a very famous camera shot that starts at the top of a ballroom and slowly descends into a group of party-goers until it arrives, tight, on the clenched hand of Ingrid Bergman. What is she holding? (A key to the wine cellar where the results of the Nazi mischief are disguised in wine bottles.)
I went on to say that a number of distinguished critics maintain that Cary Grant may well have been the best actor, ever, in films, because he could “embody good and evil simultaneously.”
“You know what ‘simultaneously’ means?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
I showed him an article that Pauline Kael wrote about Grant in the New Yorker. “He may not be able to do much,” Kael wrote, “but he can do what no one else has ever done so well, and because of his civilised non aggressiveness and his witty acceptance of his own foolishness, we see ourselves idealised in him.”
Then I did what I wish all my high-school teachers had done more often. I shut up and put the movie on.
While a construction crew worked on the church across the street (they were making it over into a luxury condominium), this is what we heard:
Ingrid Bergman kissing Grant: This is a very strange love affair.
Grant: How’s that?
Bergman: Maybe the fact that you don’t love me.
Grant: When I don’t love you, I’ll tell you.
Jesse looked over at me a few times, smiling, nodding, getting it. We went onto the porch after; he wanted a cigarette. We watched the construction crew for a while.
“So, what did you think?” I asked in an offhand voice.
“Good.” Puff, puff. Hammer, hammer across the street.
“Did you happen to notice the stairway in the house?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you notice it at the end of the movie? When Cary Grant and Bergman are trying to leave the house and we don’t know if they’re going to get away or not?”
He looked caught out. “No, I didn’t.”
“They’re longer,” I said. “Hitchcock built a second set of stairs for that final scene. You know
why he did that?”
“Why?”
“Because that way it would take longer to get down them. Do you know why he wanted that?”
“To make it more suspenseful?”
“Can you guess now what Hitchcock is famous for?”
“Suspense?”
I knew enough to stop right there. I thought, you taught him something today. Don’t kill it. I said, “That’s all for now; school’s out.”
Was that gratitude I saw on his young features? I got out of the chair and went to go inside. “One thing though, Dad,” he said. “That shot that’s so well known, the one at the party when Ingrid Bergman has the key in her hand?”
“Everybody who goes to film school studies it,” I said.
“It’s an okay shot,” he said. “But to be honest it didn’t really strike me as that special.”
“Really?” I said.
“What about you?”
I thought about it for a second. “Me neither,” I said and went inside.
4
Jesse got a girlfriend, Claire Brinkman; she was a freckle-faced, upbeat charmer who adored her parents, liked going to school, was president of the classical music club, performed in amateur theatre, played field hockey, whipped around the city on in-line skates and may well, I worried, have disqualified herself from Jesse’s imagination because she didn’t fuck him around enough. Besides, you can’t compete with a ghost, and the ghost of Rebecca Ng crashed around the house at night like a poltergeist.
That June we went to Cuba, the three of us, Maggie, Jesse and me. A divorced couple taking a holiday with their beloved son. My wife, being the only one with a regular job, stayed at Maggie’s. To outsiders or to her occasionally unforgiving friends, it must have sounded a tad peculiar, this family trip, but Tina understood it, understood that the days of Maggie and me sneaking into each other’s bed were long behind us. Still, the fact of her remaining behind in my ex-wife’s house while the rest of us tootled off to the Caribbean—how odd life can be.
It was a last-minute thing. Just when I’d given up the ghost, when I’d spent a few minutes that very morning kicking impotently at the furniture and bleating my unemployment woes at Tina (the job at the documentary channel having floated, dead, to the surface), I got a message on the answering service. It was from a tubby, beet-faced, passive-aggressive South African named Derek H. He was producing an hour-long documentary on, get this, Via-gra, and wanted to know if I was interested in “fronting” it. Fifteen thousand bucks, travel to Philadelphia and New York with a few weeks in Bangkok where, according to Derek, old men were literally “fucking themselves to death.”
We “took a meeting,” I met the crew, picked out a hotel by the river in Bangkok and discussed a timetable. Early July. Shook hands all around. I went out that night, got ecstatically, knee-walking drunk and dreamed up the idea of Jesse, his mom and me going to Cuba.
Departure day, Claire Brinkman came by on her inline skates to say goodbye; got there just before the limo arrived. Her red-rimmed eyes worried me.
We took a couple of fancy rooms in the El Parque Hotel in Old Havana. Swimming pool on the roof, fat dressing gowns in the cupboard, a Roman-banquet buffet every morning. The expense made Maggie nervous—she was a prairie farm girl whose heart fluttered if a long-distance call went more than a minute—but I insisted. Besides, how many more trips did we have with our son? How much longer would he want to travel with his parents?
It happened on our third night there. That afternoon I’d taken Jesse to the Museum of the Revolution, looked at the boat that Castro and his sixteen revolutionaries snuck back to Cuba in, saw a photo of dead Che Guevara; had a boozy dinner on the balcony of a private residence overlooking the Prado; stumbled down Calle Obispo for a Mojito nightcap, the three of us, a band flailing and wailing in the boxy, fly-specked room; and then, my eyes closing from the heat and the booze, we returned to the hotel. It was nearly three in the morning. Maggie went to her room. Jesse and I watched television for a while. Then it was snoozy time.
“Can I keep the TV on with the sound down?” he asked.
“Why don’t you read something instead,” I said.
We turned out the light; I could feel him lying there, awake, restless. Finally I turned the light on. “Jesse!”
He couldn’t sleep. He was too excited. Could he go out and have a cigarette? Right over there, just across the street, that bench on the edge of the park? You can see it from here, Dad. Finally I agreed.
He dressed quickly and hurried out. I lay there for a few moments; turned off the light, then turned it on. Got up and went over to the window and opened it. The air conditioning stopped. The room went silent. Suddenly you could hear everything very clearly, cicadas, a few voices in Spanish, a car slowly cruising. A trolley passed by in the hallway outside the door, cups rattling.
I stood by the window, looking out over the dark park. Figures moved in the shadows. Hookers walking slowly through the trees; having a cigarette by the statue. Just beyond was the dome of the Museum of the Revolution.
Jesse stepped into my view on the sidewalk below, baggy pants, turned-around baseball hat. He lit a cigarette as if he was in a movie, looked this way and that (I caught a glance of his mirror face) and then started across the street to the park bench. I was just about to yell down to be careful when a dark-skinned man in a yellow shirt came out of the darkness. He made straight for Jesse, his hand extended. I waited to see if Jesse would shake it. He did. Mistake. Two other Cubans materialized, smiling, nodding, standing too close. Pointing up the street. Incredibly (I could hardly believe my eyes), they headed off with Jesse in between them, diagonally, across the park.
I put on my clothes and took the elevator down to the lobby. Big, high-ceilinged room, marble floors, chilly as a skating rink; canned music; a couple of security guys in grey suits and hand-held radios by the front door. They gave me a salute and buzzed open the door for me. The hot air hit me outside.
I crossed the street and stepped into the park. A hooker picked up on me. She rose like smoke from a park bench and drifted across to me. I said no thank you, and went through the park, looking here and there, for Jesse. He must have headed down some side street with his new pals. But which one?
I was moving down the east side of the park, near the taxis and three-wheel cocos, when I noticed, through the vegetation, a street heading alongside the city’s grand theatre. A bright light at the end. I followed it down till I came to the front of an open-air bar. The place was empty, except for Jesse having a beer, the three hustlers sitting close to him at the same table. He had a sort of worried look on his face as if it was starting to occur to him that maybe something wasn’t quite right here. I went over. “Can I speak to you for a second?”
The hustler in the yellow shirt said, “You his daddy?”
“Yes.”
I said to Jesse, “I have to speak to you.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said and scrambled to his feet. Yellow Shirt followed him out into the street, hovered nearby trying to hear. I said, “These guys aren’t your friends.”
“I’m just having a beer.”
I said, “You’re going to end up paying for a whole lot more than a beer. You buy these guys anything?”
“Not yet.”
The owner came out from the bar, a squat guy, very calm. Not surprised by any of this. He came over to Jesse and took him by the shirt sleeve.
I said, “What are you doing?”
The guy didn’t answer. He just kept walking back to the bar, holding on to Jesse’s shirt. I could feel my heart starting to thump unhealthily. Here we go. Fuck, here we go.
I said to him in Spanish, “How much does he owe you?”
He had Jesse back in the bar now. He said, “Ten dollars.”
I said, “That’s pretty expensive for a beer.”
“That’s the price.”
“Here,” I said, and put an American five on the table. “Let’s go.”
But th
e owner said, “He ordered a rum. I’ve already made it.”
I said, “You mean you’ve already poured it?”
“Same thing.”
I said to Jesse, “You touch that drink?”
Jesse shook his head, scared now.
I said, “Follow me,” and we started up the street. The hustlers came out after us. One of them came around and stood in front of me. He said, “He ordered a drink. Now he has to pay.”
I tried to step around him but he stepped in front of me.
I said, “I’m going to call the cops.”
The hustler said, “Okay fine.” But he stepped back.
We kept walking, the hustler bobbing around, pulling at my sleeve, his friends following behind, me saying to Jesse, “No matter what happens, keep walking.” We went across the park, almost running now, Jesse sticking very close to me and then, when we could see the hotel doors, I said, “Run.”
We ran across the street and under the facade and in through the night door. But they came in after us, into the lobby. Still moving, I said to the guy in the yellow shirt, “You better get the fuck out of here.” But he wasn’t afraid of anything. The elevator door opened; he tried to squeeze in with me and Jesse, his pals hanging back in the lobby.
The security guys came out of nowhere. There was a commotion in Spanish, the doors shut. We went up three floors, Jesse saying nothing. Throwing me little worried glances. Looking at himself in the mirror, making that face again. He thought I was pissed off at him, which I was, abstractly, but what he didn’t know was that I was experiencing a kind of elation. I had, corny as it sounds, got on my horse and ridden out to save him. Served him well, protected him, done my job. I was, in fact, privately happy at how things turned out. After a certain age you don’t get to do that much for your children; you’ve got all that juice and not enough to do with it.
The Film Club Page 4
