I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

by Mardy Grothe

  HAROLD MACMILLAN

  Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.

  ANDRÉ MALRAUX

  In an 1886 address at Harvard University, American poet James Russell Lowell said similarly, “If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.”

  Old age is like a plane flying through a storm.

  Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

  GOLDA MEIR

  Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for your old age.

  CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

  Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones

  run in packs like the primal horde.

  They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty

  between control by their mothers and control by their wives.

  CAMILLE PAGLIA

  Youth is the seed time of good habits, as well in nations as in individuals.

  THOMAS PAINE

  Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life,

  or else you go dowdy to the grave.

  DOROTHY PARKER

  Most men in years, as they are generally discouragers of youth,

  are like old trees that, being past bearing themselves,

  will suffer no young plants to flourish beneath them.

  ALEXANDER POPE

  Growing old is like being increasingly penalized

  for a crime you haven’t committed.

  ANTHONY POWELL

  It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution.

  The reverse is true. As one grows older one climbs with surprising strides.

  GEORGE SAND

  The country of the aged is a land

  few people think very hard and seriously about

  before the time of life when they sense that they’re arriving there.

  MAGGIE SCARF

  The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party,

  when the masks are dropped.

  ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

  Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage,

  or my house when I propose to take a residence,

  so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.

  SENECA

  Love with old men is as the sun upon the snow,

  it dazzles more than it warms them.

  J. P. SENN

  Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own

  LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

  Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war.

  All our friends are going or gone and we survive

  amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

  MURIEL SPARK

  Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Stevenson also compared the sweetness of youth with the bitter reality of old age in a memorable meal metaphor: “There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.”

  Childhood is the Last Chance Gulch for happiness.

  After that, you know too much.

  TOM STOPPARD

  For the unlearned, old age is winter;

  for the learned, it is the season of the harvest.

  THE TALMUD

  His cousin was now of more than middle age…

  She was lean, and yellow, and long in the tooth; all the red and white in

  all the toy-shops in London

  could not make a beauty of her.

  WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

  This passage, from Thackeray’s 1852 novel The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., contains the earliest appearance in English of the expression long in the tooth, now a popular metaphor for aging. A horse’s teeth become longer with age, as they are pushed out of the gums. Since ancient times, a person buying a horse has examined the teeth to estimate the animal’s age. With humans, teeth don’t grow, but the gums recede over time, giving the appearance of longer teeth.

  With sixty staring me in the face,

  I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure

  and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

  JAMES THURBER

  It’s true, some wine improves with age.

  But only if the grapes were good in the first place.

  ABIGAIL VAN BUREN (“Dear Abby”)

  In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII offered a similar observation: “Men are like wine; some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.”

  Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints

  which a man should catch young and have done with,

  for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  Like our shadows,

  Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.

  EDWARD YOUNG

  chapter 12

  An Actor Is a God in Captivity

  One of the most popular actors on the American stage in the nineteenth century was Edwin Booth (his statue stands today in Gramercy Park, near his Manhattan mansion). Born into a prominent acting family, Edwin and his two brothers carried on the family tradition. One of those brothers was John Wilkes Booth (yes, that John Wilkes Booth). After the Lincoln assassination in 1865, a cloud of infamy settled over the entire Booth family, and Edwin was forced for a time to abandon the stage.

  Edwin, a handsome man with dark piercing eyes, was often described as “the American Hamlet,” and many still consider him one of America’s greatest actors. Like so many actors of his era, he had an elegant air and a great facility with words, once saying:

  An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.

  In this observation, offered many decades before technological advances made it possible to preserve stage performances on film, Booth describes the world of the nineteenth-century actor. Unlike other artists, they worked in an ephemeral medium—their creations melting away as soon as they were created. In 1962, Shelley Winters updated the idea:

  Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues.

  Metaphorical observations about actors and acting are very common, and they often help us look at this ancient profession in a new way:

  Acting is like prizefighting.

  The downtown gyms are smelly,

  but that’s where the champions are.

  KIRK DOUGLAS

  Acting is like making love.

  It’s better if your partner is good.

  JEREMY IRONS

  Acting is like letting your pants down; you’re exposed.

  PAUL NEWMAN

  Actors are the jockeys of literature.

  Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

  RALPH RICHARDSON

  Directors have also offered intriguing analogical observations about the theatrical life. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who won three Academy Awards and was nominated for six more, was often asked about how he approached the myriad of decisions he had to make as a director. While he usually said he favored intuition over intellect, he once offered a fascinating description of how both were at work in his decision-making process:

  I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness.

  That is intuition.

  Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear.

  That is intellect.

  The relationship between director and actor has also been described in metaphorical ways. Billy Wilder, winner of six Academy Awards and the first person to win three Oscars in a single night (as director, producer, and cowriter of the screenplay for the 1960 film The Apartment), explained it this way:

  A director must be a policeman, a midwife,

  a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.

  A few years later, the Frenc
h film director Jean Renoir picked up on the midwife theme and took it to a completely new level. Writing in his 1974 autobiography My Life and My Films, he offered one of the film world’s most famous quotations:

  A film director is not a creator, but a midwife.

  His business is to deliver the actor of a child

  that he did not know he had within him.

  Kirk Douglas once said that movie making is a collaborative art, and the proof of his observation is evident whenever we see screen credits roll. In addition to actors, directors, and producers, hundreds of other professionals are involved in the making of a film—screenwriters, film editors, camera people, composers, musicians, sound technicians, wardrobe and set designers, and many others (including, of course, those mysterious grips and best boys). By contrast, writing is one of history’s most solitary activities. When novels get turned into films, these two very different worlds intersect, and sometimes collide.

  In 2001, the forty-nine-year-old Douglas Adams died of a sudden heart attack while working out in a gym in Santa Barbara, California. He had recently moved to California to complete a movie deal for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams, initially excited over the prospect of seeing his work adapted to film, became increasingly frustrated over what seemed like pointless meetings with endless numbers of people. The inordinate delays finally got to him, causing him to write:

  Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like

  trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people

  coming into the room and breathing on it.

  Adams never lived to see his work brought to the big screen—which might not have been such a bad thing if you listen to the experience of some other writers. John Le Carré, author of such famous spy novels as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, once summarized his Hollywood experiences this way:

  Having your book turned into a movie

  is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

  Not all writers have problems when their novels are turned into films, however, and the secret has something to do with the way the whole process is viewed. Rather than see the transaction as a precious transfer of artistic ownership, it might be better thought of as a simple property purchase. Rita Mae Brown recommended the latter approach:

  You sell a screenplay like you sell a car.

  If someone drives it off a cliff, that’s it.

  No discussion of acting and screen life would be complete without some mention of television, which has become so central to the lives of people that the veteran newsman Daniel Schorr once described it as “a nightly national séance.” But perhaps the most famous observation on the small screen came in 1955, when the American critic John Mason Brown said in an interview that he had recently overheard a noteworthy remark from one of his son’s friends:

  Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

  A year later, in another interview, Brown said, “So much of television is chewing gum for the eyes,” this time without mentioning the original author. As the years passed, the remark has been repeated innumerable times, sometimes as “Television is chewing gum for the mind.” Variations have been attributed to many others, including Fred Allen, Aldous Huxley, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But no matter who the line is attributed to, I’ve always found it fascinating that the original author of the observation—in my view, the most memorable words ever offered on the subject—was not some celebrated writer or wordsmith, but a simple schoolboy who in a momentary muse happened to notice a connection between two of his favorite activities, watching television and chewing gum.

  In the remainder of the chapter, I’ll present many more metaphorical musings for your enjoyment—all having to do with the world of stage and screen.

  You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood,

  place it in the navel of a fruit fly, and still have room enough

  for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.

  FRED ALLEN

  Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely.

  Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes.

  Comedy is rather like a dessert; a bit like meringue.

  WOODY ALLEN

  I feel like a father towards my old films.

  You bring children into the world,

  then they grow up and go off on their own.

  From time to time you get together,

  but it isn’t always a pleasure to see them again.

  MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

  What Einstein was to physics, what Babe Ruth was to home runs,

  what Emily Post was to table manners…

  that’s what Edward G. Robinson was to dying like a dirty rat.

  RUSSELL BAKER

  Here, a house without a pool is like a neck with no diamond necklace;

  a swimming pool is like jewelry for your house.

  DREW BARRYMORE, on life in Hollywood

  There is as much difference between the stage and the films

  as between a piano and a violin.

  Normally you can’t become a virtuoso in both.

  ETHEL BARRYMORE

  For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus,

  the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay,

  the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

  ETHEL BARRYMORE

  No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does,

  straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

  INGMAR BERGMAN

  Being a screenwriter in Hollywood is like being a eunuch at an orgy.

  Worse, actually; at least the eunuch is allowed to watch.

  ALBERT BROOKS

  Brooks, never a great fan of Hollywood’s decision-makers, also observed: “Ten years ago, the studio heads thought the audiences were sheep. Now, they think they’re snails with Down’s Syndrome.”

  A play is like a cigar.

  If it is a failure no amount of puffing will make it draw.

  If it is a success everyone wants a box.

  HENRY F. BRYAN

  Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.

  MICHAEL CAINE

  Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals

  with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine,

  and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

  RAYMOND CHANDLER, on Hollywood producers

  Chandler created one of America’s best-known fictional characters, the hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. Many of his novels and short stories were made into films, including the film noir classic The Big Sleep. He also wrote screenplays for many films, including Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia. He once said, “If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and…if they had been any better, I should not have come.”

  The movie actor, like the sacred king of primitive tribes, is a god in captivity.

  ALEXANDER CHASE

  The point is that members of the public worship actors but often feel as if they own them as well. The ancient gods of captivity—who were nothing special outside their little universe—were in some ways less important to the tribe than the tribe was to them. Today, many actors become like deities imprisoned in golden cells.

  A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

  JEAN COCTEAU

  Hollywood grew to be the most

  flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

  ALISTAIR COOKE

  Film music is like a small lamp

  that you place below the screen to warm it.

  AARON COPLAND

  This intriguing image of a film score warming the screen comes from one of America’s great composers. He also did the musical scores for dozens of Hollywood films, including Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Red Pony, and The Heiress, for which he won an Oscar. Two other composers added the
se thoughts:

  “A film musician is like a mortician—he can’t bring the body back to life, but he’s expected to make it look better.” Adolph Deutsch

  “Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano-playing in my living room has on the book I’m reading.” Igor Stravinsky

  Some young Hollywood starlets remind me

  of my grandmother’s old farmhouse—

  all painted up nice on the front side,

  a big swing on the backside, and nothing whatsoever in the attic.

  BETTE DAVIS

  The real actor—like any real artist—has a direct line to the collective heart.

  BETTE DAVIS

  When I talk to him, I feel like a plant that’s been watered.

  MARLENE DIETRICH, on Orson Welles

  The relationship between the make-up man and the film actor

  is one of accomplices in crime.

  MARLENE DIETRICH

  Hollywood is the gold cap on a tooth

  that should have been pulled out years ago.

  W. C. FIELDS

  Filmmaking has now reached the same stage as sex—it’s all technique and no feeling.

  PENELOPE GILLIATT

  Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call-girls.

  JACKIE GLEASON

  Gleason’s point is that any demonstration of modesty from an actor is likely to be insincere. The notion has been advanced by others, but never so well.

  The cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.

  JEAN-LUC GODARD

  This may be history’s most famous description of cinema. The allusion is to the speed with which the individual frames on a roll of 35-millimeter film pass through a movie camera. In another memorable metaphorical observation on his craft, Godard said, “A film is the world in an hour and a half.”

  That’s the way with these directors,

  they’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.

  SAMUEL GOLDWYN