by Tom Wolfe
Eyes averted, happy burghers. On Monday the ads start appearing—for Ford, for Plymouth, for Dodge—announcing that we gave it to you, speed such as you never saw. There it was! At Darlington, Daytona, Atlanta—and not merely in the Southern papers but in the albino pages of the suburban women’s magazines, such as The New Yorker, in color—the Ford winners, such as Fireball Roberts, grinning with a cigar in his mouth in The New Yorker magazine. And somewhere, some Monday morning, Jim Pascal of High Point, Ned Jarrett of Boykin, Cale Yarborough of Timmonsville and Curtis Crider from Charlotte, Bobby Isaac of Catawba, E. J. Trivette of Deep Gap, Richard Petty of Randleman, Tiny Lund of Cross, South Carolina; Stick Elliott of Shelby—and from out of Ingle Hollow—
And all the while, standing by in full Shy, in alumicron suits—there is Detroit, hardly able to believe itself what it has discovered, a breed of good old boys from the fastnesses of the Appalachian hills and flats—a handful from this rare breed—who have given Detroit … speed … and the industry can present it to a whole generation as … yours. And the Detroit P.R. men themselves come to the tracks like folk worshipers and the millions go giddy with the thrill of speed. Only Junior Johnson goes about it as if it were … the usual. Junior goes on down to Atlanta for the Dixie 400 and drops by the Federal penitentiary to see his Daddy. His Daddy is in on his fifth illegal distillery conviction; in the whiskey business that’s just part of it; an able craftsman, an able businessman, and the law kept hounding him, that was all. So Junior drops by and then goes on out to the track and gets in his new Ford and sets the qualifying speed record for Atlanta Dixie 400, 146.301 m.p.h.; later on he tools on back up the road to Ingle Hollow to tend to the automatic chicken houses and the road-grading operation. Yes.
Yet how can you tell that to … anybody … out on the bottom of that bowl as the motor thunder begins to lift up through him like a sigh and his eyeballs glaze over and his hands reach up and there, riding the rim of the bowl, soaring over the ridges, is Junior’s yellow Ford … which is his white Chevrolet … which is a White Ghost, forever rousing the good old boys … hard-charging! … up with the automobile into their America, and the hell with arteriosclerotic old boys trying to hold on to the whole pot with arms of cotton seersucker. Junior!
Chapter 9
Loverboy of the Bourgeoisie
ON THEIR WAY into the Edwardian Room of the Plaza Hotel all they had was that sort of dutiful, forward-tilted gait that East Side dowagers get after twenty years of walking small dogs up and down Park Avenue. But on their way out the two of them discover that all this time, in the same room, there has been their dreamboat, Cary Grant, sitting in the corner. Actually, Grant had the logistics of the Edwardian Room figured out pretty well. In the first place, the people who come to the Plaza for lunch are not generally the kind who are going to rise up and run, skipping and screaming, over to some movie star’s table. And in the second place, he is sitting up against the wall nearest the doorway. He is eating lunch, consisting of a single bowl of Vichyssoise, facing out the window towards three old boys in silk toppers moseying around their horses and hansoms on 59th Street on the edge of Central Park.
Well, so much for logistics. The two old girls work up all the courage they need in about one-fourth of a second.
“Cary Grant!” says the first one, coming right up and putting one hand on his shoulder. “Look at you! I just had to come over here and touch you!”
Cary Grant plays a wonderful Cary Grant. He cocks his head and gives her the Cary Grant mock-quizzical look—just like he does in the movies—the look that says, “I don’t know what’s happening, but we’re not going to take it very seriously, are we? Or are we?”
“I have a son who’s the spitting image of you,” she is saying.
Cary Grant is staring at her hand on his shoulder and giving her the Cary Grant fey-bemused look and saying, “Are you trying to hold me down?”
“My son is forty-nine,” she’s saying. “How old are you?”
“I’m fifty-nine,” says Cary Grant.
“Fifty-nine! Well, he’s forty-nine and he’s the spitting image of you, except that he looks older than you!”
By this time the other old girl is firmly planted, and she says: “I don’t care if you hate me, I’m going to stand here and look at you.”
“Why on earth should I hate you?” says Cary Grant.
“You can say things about me after I’m gone. I don’t care, I’m going to stand here and look at you!”
“You poor dear!”
Which she does, all right. She takes it all in; the cleft chin; this great sun tan that looks like it was done on a rotisserie; this great head of steel-gray hair, of which his barber says: “It’s real; I swear, I yanked it once”; and the Cary Grant clothes, all worsteds, broadcloths and silks, all rich and underplayed, like a viola ensemble.
“Poor baby,” says Cary Grant, returning to the Vichyssoise. “She meets someone for the first time and already she’s saying, ‘I don’t care if you hate me.’ Can you imagine? Can you imagine what must have gone into making someone feel that way?”
Well, whatever it was, poor old baby knows that Cary Grant is one leading man who, at least, might give it a second thought. Somehow Cary Grant, they figure, is the one dreamboat that a lady can walk right up to and touch, pour soul over and commune with.
And by the time Grant’s picture, “Charade,” with Audrey Hepburn, had its première at the Radio City Music Hall, thousands turned out in lines along 50th Street and Sixth Avenue, many of them in the chill of 6 A.M., in order to get an early seat. This was Grant’s 61st motion picture and his 26th to open at Radio City. He is, indeed, fifty-nine years old, but his drawing power as a leading man, perhaps the last of the genuine “matinee idols,” keeps mounting toward some incredible, golden-aged crest. Radio City is like a Nielsen rating for motion pictures. It has a huge seating capacity and is attended by at least as many tourists, from all over the country, as New Yorkers. Grant’s first 25 premières there played a total of 99 weeks. Each one seems to break the records all over again. Before “Charade,” “That Touch of Mink,” with Doris Day, played there for 10 weeks and grossed $1,886,427.
And the secret of it all is somehow tied up with the way he lit up two aging dolls in the Edwardian Room at the Plaza Hotel. In an era of Brandoism and the Mitchumism in movie heroes, Hollywood has left Cary Grant, by default, in sole possession of what has turned out to be a curiously potent device. Which is to say, to women he is Hollywood’s lone example of the Sexy Gentleman. And to men and women, he is Hollywood’s lone example of a figure America, like most of the West, has needed all along: a Romantic Bourgeois Hero.
One has only to think of what the rest of Hollywood and the international film industry, for that matter, have been up to since World War II. The key image in film heroes has certainly been that of Marlon Brando. One has only to list the male stars of the past 20 years—Brando, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Victor Mature, William Holden, Frank Sinatra—and already the mind is overpowered by an awesome montage of swung fists, bent teeth, curled lips, popping neck veins, and gurglings. As often as not the Brandoesque hero’s love partner is some thyroid hoyden, as portrayed by Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida or, more recently, Sue Lyon and Tuesday Weld. The upshot has been the era of Rake-a-Cheek Romance on the screen. Man meets woman. She rakes his cheek with her fingernails. He belts her in the chops. They fall in a wallow of passion.
The spirit of these romances, as in so many of the early Brando, James Dean and Rock Hudson pictures, has been borrowed from what Hollywood imagines to be the beer-and-guts verve of the guys-and-dolls lower classes. Undoubtedly, the rawness, the lubricity, the implicit sadism of it has excited movie-goers of all classes. Yet it should be clear even to Hollywood how many Americans, at rock bottom, can find no lasting identification with it. The number of American men who can really picture themselves coping with a little bleached h
ellion who is about to rake a cheek and draw blood with the first kiss is probably embarrassingly small. And there are probably not many more women who really wish to see Mister Right advancing toward them in a torn strap-style undershirt with his latissimae dorsae flexed.
After all, this is a nation that, except for a hard core of winos at the bottom and a hard crust of aristocrats at the top, has been going gloriously middle class for two decades, as far as the breezeways stretch. There is no telling how many millions of American women of the new era know exactly what Ingrid Bergman meant when she said she loved playing opposite Cary Grant in “Notorious” (1946): “I didn’t have to take my shoes off in the love scenes.”
Yet “Notorious,” one will recall, was regarded as a highly sexy motion picture. The Grant plot formula—which he has repeated at intervals for 25 years—has established him as the consummate bourgeois lover: consummately romantic and yet consummately genteel. Grant’s conduct during a screen romance is unfailingly of the sort that would inspire trust and delight, but first of all trust, in a middle-class woman of any age. Not only does Grant spare his heroines any frontal assault on their foundation garments, he seldom chases them at all at the outset. In fact, the Grant plot formula calls for a reverse chase. First the girl—Audrey Hepburn in “Charade,” Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief,” Betsy Drake in “Every Girl Should Be Married”—falls for Grant. He retreats, but always slowly and coyly, enough to make the outcome clear. Grant, the screen lover, and Grant, the man, were perfectly combined under the escutcheon of the middle-class American woman—“Every Girl Should Be Married”—when Grant married Betsy Drake in real life.
During the chase Grant inevitably scores still more heavily with the middle-class female psyche by treating the heroine not merely as an attractive woman but as a witty and intelligent woman. And, indeed, whether he is with Katharine Hepburn or Audrey Hepburn or Irene Dunne or Doris Day, both parties are batting incredibly bright lines back and forth, and halfway through the film they are already too maniacally witty not to click one way or another.
Because of the savoir faire, genial cynicism and Carlyle Hotel lounge accent with which he brings it all off, Grant is often thought of as an aristocratic motion picture figure. In fact, however, the typical Grant role is that of an exciting bourgeois. In “Charade” he is a foreign service officer in Paris; in “Bringing Up Baby” he was a research professor; in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” he was an enthusiastic suburbanite; and in countless pictures—among them “Crisis,” “People Will Talk,” “Kiss and Make Up”—he was in the most revered middle-class role of them all, exploited so successfully by television over the past three years: the doctor. Seldom is Grant portrayed as a lower-class figure—he did not make a good beatnik Cockney in “None but the Lonely Heart”—and rarely is he anything so formidable as the trucking tycoon he played in “Born to Be Bad” in 1934. The perfect Grant role is one in which he has a job that gives him enough free time so that he does not have to languish away at the office during the course of the movie; but he has the job and a visible means of support and highly visible bourgeois respectability all the same.
Grant, of course, has had no Hollywood monopoly on either savoir faire or gentility on the screen. Many suave, humorous gentlemen come to mind: Jimmy Stewart, David Niven, Fred Astaire, Ronald Colman, Franchot Tone. None of them, however, could approach Grant in that other part of being the world’s best bourgeois romantic: viz., sex appeal. It was Cary Grant that Mae West was talking about when she launched the phrase “tall, dark and handsome” in “She Done Him Wrong” (1933), and it was Cary Grant who was invited up to see her sometime. Even at age fifty-nine, the man still has the flawless squared-off face of a comic strip hero, a large muscular neck and an athletic physique which he still exhibits in at least one scene in each picture. Every good American girl wants to marry a doctor. But a Dr. Dreamboat? Is it too much to hope for? Well, that is what Cary Grant is there for.
So Cary Grant keeps pouring it on, acting out what in the Age of Brando seems like the most unlikely role in the world: the loverboy of the bourgeoisie. The upshot has been intriguing. In 1948, at the age of forty-four he came in fourth in the box-office poll of male star popularity, behind Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Bing Crosby. By 1958, when he was fifty-four, he had risen to No.1. This fall—when he was fifty-nine—the motion picture Theater Owners Association named him as the No. 1 box-office attraction, male or female.
Well, the two old dolls had left, and the next crisis in the Edwardian Room was that an Italian starlet had walked in, a kind of tabescent bijou blonde. Old Cary Grant knows he has met her somewhere, but he will be damned if he can remember who she was. His only hope is that she won’t see him, so he has his head tucked down to one side in his Cary Grant caught-out-on-a-limb look.
He can’t keep that up forever, so he keeps his head turned by talking to the fellow next to him, who has on a wild solaro-cloth suit with a step-collared vest.
“Acting styles go in fads,” Cary Grant is saying. “It’s like girls at a dance. One night a fellow walks in wearing a motorcycle jacket and blue jeans and he takes the first girl he sees and embraces her and crushes her rib cage. ‘What a man!’ all the girls say, and pretty soon all the boys are coming to the dances in motorcycle jackets and blue jeans and taking direct action. That goes on for a while, and then one night in comes a fellow in a blue suit who can wear a necktie without strangling, carrying a bouquet of flowers. Do they still have bouquets of flowers? I’m sure they do. Well, anyway, now the girls say, ‘What a charmer!’ and they’re off on another cycle. Or something like that.
“Well, as for me, I just keep going along the same old way,” says Cary Grant with his Cary Grant let’s-not-get-all-wrapped-up-in-it look.
But now that the secret is out, the prospects are almost forbidding. Think of all those Actors Studio people trussed up in worsted, strangling on foulard silk, speaking through the mouth instead of the nose, talking nice to love-stricken old ladies in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza Hotel. The mind boggles, baby.
Chapter 10
Purveyor of the Public Life
UP THERE IN the office at Broadway and 52nd Street during the last days of Confidential, the old Confidential (1952—58), the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world, everybody seemed to be ricocheting around amid the dolly lights and cracking up. Everybody, save one, namely, Robert Harrison himself, the publisher. Jay Breen’s liver had gone into its last necrotic, cirrhotic foliation. Jay Breen used to write half the magazine, but it had gotten to the point where Breen couldn’t stand to listen to the Reader anymore. Breen and his wife would come in and sit in the next room while the Reader read the stories for the next issue out loud. The Reader, whatever his name was, had a truly great voice, like Sir Ralph Richardson reading Lear soliloquies at a Bauhaus Modern lectern under a spotlight. Great diction, great resonance, etc. Harrison hired him just to read out loud. Harrison had a theory that if you read the stories out loud, every weak spot in a story would stand out. So there would be the Reader with a voice like Sir Ralph Richardson enunciating such works as “Errol Flynn and His Two-Way Mirror,” “White Women Broke Up My Marriage” [to a Negro entertainer], and “How Mike Todd Made a Chump of a Movie Mogul.” One of the writers would be in there muttering away because he claimed that the Reader had it in for him and was blundering over his best-turned phrases on purpose, thereby causing Harrison to throw whole stories out. But Jay Breen was long, long past all that, and presently he died, of cirrhosis of the liver. Meanwhile, Howard Rushmore, the editor, was beginning to look awful. He used to be such a big robust guy, and now he looked like a couple of eye sockets mounted on a piece of modern solder sculpture. Rushmore was an ex-Communist and a complex person. He had a talent for gossip stories, but somehow it was all wrapped up with the anti-Communist crusade he was carrying on. There came a day when Rushmore and his wife were riding in a cab on the Upper East Side and he took out a revolver and s
hot her to death and then shot himself to death. Harrison was the publisher of Confidential and he remembered that day very well. He had just come into Idlewild Airport from someplace and gotten into a cab. The first he heard about Rushmore was when the cabdriver said, “Hey, did you hear that? The publisher of Confidential just shot himself!”
“The publisher of Confidential,” says Harrison, the publisher of Confidential “Where did the publisher of Confidential shoot himself?”
