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Wednesday 9 July 2008

High life

Fifties glamour

New York

So there I was, at the Waverly Inn, Graydon Carter’s little toy, which has been the hottest ticket in the Big Bagel for two years, when the booth next to mine filled up with young people, all of them scruffy and dressed like the homeless, their girls rather plain and some of them even ugly. Par for the course, I thought to myself, then I noticed everyone looking at them. My son and daughter, with whom I was celebrating Greek Easter, set me straight. The boys were Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr, the last two unknown to me, Leo baby hiding under a 19th-century working-man’s hat. Truth be told, I was expecting the worst, but to my delight the large group was not only extremely quiet, but also very polite. I made sure no one at my table looked their way, but when I sneaked a look I was surprised how normal and undistinguished the group was. No glamour à la old Hollywood there, no one with looks like Bill Holden, stature like Gary Cooper or just plain allure like Burt Lancaster. No, this was real working-class stuff, salt-of-the-earth types, taller than those two midgets, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, but midgets nevertheless when compared to the stars of my age group.

Mind you, I’ve just read a harrowing piece about how nice it was back in the Fifties to be a movie star, that is. It was about Raymond Burr, who had just struck it rich with Perry Mason. Burr was big and burly and gay as they come. Back in those good old days to be gay was a big no-no, and the poor man was terrified about being outed once he became a pop-culture idol. He was a TV star, and did not have a big movie studio behind him to protect him, so he did the next best thing. He invented three deaths, one of his non-existent first wife, who, he claimed, had died in the same air crash as Leslie Howard, the death of his non-existent second wife, who supposedly died of cancer just after the birth of their son, and then, for good measure, he claimed his non-existent son also died from the disease after having spent a year travelling around the world with his father Raymond.

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