Out of the Blue
The Crush A Love Story: Act I
By Deborah Salomon
F
irst love, for girls at least, starts with a crush. Crushes include squeals, giggles, denials and innocent daydreams. In a kinder, gentler era when America feared only Commies and the atom bomb, pre-teen girls had crushes on movie stars. The crush protocol was strict. Your dreamboat could not be the same one as a best friend’s. He had to make enough movies (preferably musicals and romantic comedies) to generate Life magazine covers and blurbs in Photoplay and Modern Screen, the latter purchased by somebody’s older sister and hidden under the bed. While boys were still trading baseball cards, girls cut pictures from these magazines and pasted them in scrapbooks with self-aggrandizing captions: “There’s Tab Hunter escorting Deb to the awards banquet!” My situation made adherence to this protocol difficult. I came from a motley background, lived in a New York City apartment, had no older sister, attended a progressive girls’ school with small classes, an enriched curriculum and zero tolerance for pop culture. We were afforded not only the three Rs but field trips to films (never movies), museums, ballet, children’s theater and the opera. Before TV, for a fifth-grader the pageantry of Aida trumped any Lion King. What inspired our teacher to select Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Academy Award-winning Hamlet I’ll never know. The ghost scene scared the bejeezus out of one classmate, but I was enthralled, smitten, head-over-heels. Sir Laurence was gorgeous, elegant, eloquent, tragic. I listened carefully so as to follow the story. If only I could make him forget Ophelia I would gladly sew buttons on his doublet and hand-wash his tights. Then came Henry V, where I saw my idol’s high cheekbones and rouged mouth in Technicolor. In lieu of button-sewing, I dragged The Complete Works of William Shakespeare home from the library. I wanted to understand his pain, to feel closer. Secretly, I put together a Laurence Olivier scrapbook. I had a crush — a really bad one. Shakespeare reads hard the first couple of pages, but then it gets easier. By Act II, I was comfortable. So comfortable that after Hamlet’s demise I kept reading the easier plays, imagining him as the hero. After Olivier’s Heathcliff, I tackled Wuthering Heights. Then Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
36 O.Henry
February/March 2012
When I learned that Olivier was married to Vivien Leigh, in a fit of jealousy I devoured Gone With the Wind — not exactly on the summer reading list for 11-year-olds. But why not? I didn’t have siblings to play with, and polio kept kids away from the swimming pools. By sixth grade we had moved south. In order not to appear a total weirdo I needed somebody mainstream, but after Olivier, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum lacked gravitas. Gregory Peck was a double whammy except my cousin claimed him first. Then one hot Saturday afternoon I sat through The Great Caruso twice at the air-conditioned Imperial Theater. Its star — a musically unschooled Italian stallion from Philly with dark, flashing eyes, a curly pompadour and a heavenly voice — knocked me right out of the velvet seat. “Be My Love,” Mario Lanza sang. Gladly. Lanza stirred controversy in the music world. Stuffy old Metropolitan Operagoers considered him flashy, hyper-emotional. His acting was atrocious, his personal excesses even worse, which made for many, many movie-magazine stories. My scrapbook bulged. I bought all his records, mostly familiar arias. Before long, those matinees at the Met endured during fourth grade took on a new romanticism. I circumvented the language barrier by memorizing plots which were about as literate as a comic book. I listened to opera broadcasts pretending that Mario was the tenor and I, the doomed soprano. The lilting strains of Puccini and Verdi brought tears to my eyes. They still do. As you can imagine, I endured a lot of teasing, especially from Paul Newman, Monty Clift and Frank Sinatra crushees. I just wasn’t the Tony Curtis type. Eventually, I wised up, got off my high horse and went the cheerleader/ sorority girl/James Dean route. But I saw every one of Olivier’s films and, eventually, witnessed his talent on stage. Nothing stopped me from despising Vivien Leigh until the day she died, although I take no issue with his third wife, the talented but very plain Joan Plowright. Mario Lanza self-destructed at an early age, to resurface decades later as a joke on The Sopranos. Olivier’s darker side was revealed after his death. The Art & Soul of Greensboro