The Awful Truth: Cary Grant and Sex

My favorite movie of all time is His Girl Friday.  There are a billion things to love about it, some of them very deep, very profound, all about a moment in American cinema when . . . but never mind.  Let’s talk about Cary Grant.  He’s completely and entirely exquisite in His Girl Friday.   He’s so funny you could burst from the laughter.  So poised that it’s like that late-night diner trick where you balance a saltshaker on its edge.  So insanely, over-the-top, extraordinarily handsome that your teeth ache and you want to weep.  But your tears are as fruitless as Echo’s, when she is weeping for Narcissus. 

Not that Cary Grant comes off as a narcissist in his movies, because he doesn’t.  Part of his perfection is that ever-so-slight hint of self-deprecation.  After all, you know, he had a terrible – I mean a terrible – childhood.  Then, at the age of fourteen, he was kicked out of school.  He ran away and basically joined the circus.  He spent his teens with a vaudeville act as an acrobat.  Can you imagine?  The youth who became that elegant man, dressed in whatever shabby acrobat outfit he had to wear, all big brown eyes, flying through the air with the greatest of ease . . . before he shed his ugly name and pretty accent.  He must have been the prince of the Ephebes.   Can’t you just hear the cougars roaring?

Like all circus runaways, he made himself up out of broken pieces, and when he put himself together, he put himself together just a little bit wrong.  A little bit (perfectly) askew.  That made-up (perfect) accent (remember Tony Curtis lampooning Grant: “Nobody talks like that!”). That unbelievable handsomeness, a beauty that could crack heaven’s dome, put to the task of (perfect) slapstick hilarity.  It’s irresistible.  It’s immortal.

Here’s my question, though.  It’s irresistible, it’s immortal . . . but is it sexy?

On the one hand, that’s a stupid question.  Let’s say that Cary Grant knocks on your door and says “Hell-ow, how about it, you and me?”  Would you say, “no thank you?”  Obviously not.  You would say, “Come right in, Mr. Grant, and make yourself comfortable while I kick my true love out the back door with instructions to not come back for an hour and half.”  And your true love, if they have a soul, would wish you luck and check your breath and straighten your collar and be proud as punch of you.  Because come on: Cary Grant.

But still.  The question lingers.  Cary Grant.  Sexy . . . or is part of the secret of his manifold, fractal perfections the fact that . . . not so much?

Let’s pull back and look at the big picture.  Cary Grant made movies between the years of 1932 and 1966.   In those first two years of his career you could put a whole lot of sex in your movies, and actors and directors ladled it on.  Grant appears in ’32 and ’33 as the hunky young man whose dark good looks attract the attention of such smokingly sexy women as Marlene Dietrich and Mae West.  Those films – Blonde Venus, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel are amazing and they are hot as hell. And Cary Grant’s in them (third billing).  But is it Grant who stokes the flames?  Nope.  These movies are sexy because of Dietrich and West.  Grant is a pretty face.   You almost don’t recognize him, he’s so placidly gorgeous. 

Then, in 1934, a thing called “The Code” – short for “The Motion Picture Production Code” – changed everything.  It radically curtailed how sex could be represented in the movies.  Overnight, movies changed.  They got lighter, they got frothier, more flirty, less smoldering.   It was in the early days of the Code-era that Cary Grant went from being handsome decoration to being the sparkling, antic faun we know and love. His early hits, where we suddenly see that he’s a screaming comic genius – His Girl Friday, Topper, The Awful Truth – were all made immediately post-Code. 

So yeah.  Cary Grant the living, breathing man was married five times to women, and may or may not have also been lovers with men, most famously his best friend, the super gorgeous Randolph Scott.  Be that as it may, Grant, in his private life, was a sexual person.  The persona of Cary Grant, on the other hand, the genius, the enthralling perfection of Cary Grant the movie star . . . that Cary Grant came to flower in precisely the years of the film industry’s greatest prudery. 

He left films long before he died, claiming that he wanted to spend time with his daughter.  He was also getting along in years.  There is something a bit disturbing about seeing Grant opposite Audrey Hepburn in Charade, when he’s 59 and she’s 34. But whatever the reason, Grant left filmmaking as the Code was crumbling, just when sex was on its way back in. 

This is interesting to me for lots of reasons, but mostly because I am an inveterate reader of “vintage” romance novels, in which there isn’t any sex.  And I write genre mash-up novels that draw some inspiration from the Code-era screwball comedies I love, and from that old-timey romance reading I enjoy.  But my books have sex in them and my heroes and heroines need to be the kind of people who might get down to it at any point.  It’s funny how difficult it is to blend froth and steam.  In fiction as in cooking, they don’t really get along. 

All of which is to say -- can we imagine Cary Grant sans his high-waisted, pleated culottes?   Do we want to?

Last night the answer to that question slapped me in the face like a cold, dead salmon.  And I’m still in shock.  I watched a Grant movie I’d never seen before.  It’s not one of his best known, but it isn’t exactly obscure.  Maybe you’ve seen it.  It’s called I Was a Male War Bride. 

If you haven’t seen it, you should: I Was a Male War Bride is uproarious.  Sort of like Some Like it Hot (an amazing film) if Some Like it Hot actually had Cary Grant in it, instead of Tony Curtis pretending to be Cary Grant. It’s got this great leading lady, Ann Sheridan, who is totally bad-assed and she and Cary Grant get into all sorts of ridiculous scrapes, careening across Europe in the months after the end of the Second World War.  They’re just married and they can’t find anywhere to spend the night alone.  It’s an amazing portrait of women in the war, too – just at that moment when women were still Rosie the Riveter and not yet June Cleaver.  Fantastic stuff.   What could be better?

Except you will have to steel yourself for one particular scene.  In spite of the Code, this film manages to slip in a bedroom encounter that is obviously a stand-in for a sex scene.  And I’m warning you.  It isn’t pretty.  In fact, it creates a jagged rip in the magical silver screen, revealing the hairy-knuckled possibility that Cary Grant was . . .

It’s hard to type it . . .

Cary Grant was potentially – just potentially, mind you -- bad in bed.

Now I watched this film as a streaming video and no one has decided to post it on the internet, so I cannot share the trauma with you here.  I’m grateful.  I am simply warning you that, when you get around to watching I Was a Male War Bride, you will be subjected to the sight of Cary Grant straddling a woman in bed and giving her a “massage.”

I put “massage” in quotes because what we actually see him doing is awkwardly sitting on her as if she were a tree stump, and grasping fistfuls of her flesh as if she were made of play dough.  He squeezes, quick and fierce, then moves on to another fistful.  He isn’t even symmetrical in his movements, but just sort of clutches at her randomly.  You can see that she’s in agony – her body stiff even as she sighs and says “that feels so good.”  Meanwhile he is staring down at his hands as if in shock at his own ineptitude.  For a brief moment before the scene mercifully ends and the film leaves the horror genre behind and gets back to being hilarious, you look at his hands too and you think – or at least I thought – monkey paws. 

This morning I woke up and thought, “I must be wrong.”  I remembered that there’s another massage scene in the Grant oeuvre, but I couldn’t remember where.  I Googled it and, lo and behold, he gives Audrey Hepburn a foot massage in Charade.  That scene has been put up on the intertubes, and it’s interesting – you can hardly see him massaging her feet and my bet is that it’s because Stanley Donen, the director, decided to chop the film off and spare his audience the sight.  It’s been fourteen years since I Was a Male War Bride, and Cary Grant still can’t give a massage.  He clutches at Hepburn’s feet with quick, hard squeezes, as if they are a rope he is climbing.  

Perhaps he was repelled by Ann Sheridan, and perhaps by Hepburn too.  Perhaps he couldn’t stand to touch them.  But even if that were true, he was an actor.  Pretending was his job.  And Cary Grant was certainly familiar with massage: look how comfy-wumfy he looks here, receiving rather than giving.  That’s Doris Day, by the way, another superstar of Code-era films.  Doris Day, whom Oscar Levant knew “before she was a virgin.”   

One final piece of evidence.  Grant’s third wife, Betsy Drake, tried to deny that her ex-husband was gay by offering up the following piece of information:  “When we were married,” she said, “we were fucking like rabbits.”

Of course she meant that they had sex all the time, and I’m happy for them.  But as an English professor and a prurient so-and-so, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a deeper meaning to the metaphor.  I will spare you any of the many videos available online that reveal how lepus curpaeums has sex.  Suffice it to say, there is no foreplay, there is a quick piston-like action, and the lady bunny can quite easily continue doing whatever it was she was doing before the gentleman bunny got on board.  Chew lettuce, etc.  You don’t really want rabbit sex to be your high-water mark for fun in the sack.

OK.  So.  Three pieces of evidence.  That’s what we need, isn’t it, to make an historical truth claim?  1. Grant’s career was strongest at the height of the Code; he made a great asexual hero.  2.  He gave horrible massages.  3.  His ex-wife compared him to a rabbit.

Sigh.

But truth schmuth, right?  Who cares.  I don’t actually want to time travel back and jump Cary Grant’s lovely bones.  We don’t watch movies or read novels or have daydreams because we care about that miserly little thing called truth.  Not even one little tiny bit.  Cary Grant is still my fave.  He’s still the most handsome, the most hilarious, the most brokenly perfect.  In fact, I feel a Cary Grant film festival coming on.  Arsenic and Old Lace?  Amazing.  The Philadelphia Story?  Maybe even better than His Girl Friday.   North by Northwest . . . oh my God.  I mean, the man was incredible.

I just wish I hadn’t watched I Was a Male War Bride last night.  I wish I didn’t have that sneaking suspicion.  I wish I could get those paws out of my mind.

Bonnington Square -- An American Time Traveler in London

Recently I was asked to write a piece about Britain and why my time travel novel, The River of No Return, is set in that country rather than in my own.  It was a curiously difficult piece to write.  I’ve now spent nearly two decades shacked up with a Brit, I’ve lived in England for years on end, I’ve done the usual reading of novels that either romanticize or despise it.  It’s a complicated place for me. I ended up deciding to write about Britain as a fantasy space, and if you’re interested you can read that piece, here:

http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/the_penguin_blog/2013/05/my-fantasy-britain-by-bee-ridgway.html

David Young

But before I wrote that piece, I found myself thinking back to the first time I lived in London, when I was twenty years old.   Back when Britain really was brand new to me.  It was an amazing six months, partly because of my beloved English professor David Young, who took me and twenty other Oberlin students to London.   He introduced us to the theater, but more than that, to good living and a certain relaxed relationship to intelligent conversation . . . he showed us that a life of the mind is a life of joy.  

But my semester was also magical because of the accident of where I lived during those months.  Ten other Oberlin students and I were crammed into an old Georgian row home in Bonnington Square, in Vauxhall -- a London neighborhood on the south bank of the Thames.  We were all English majors, and we were spending a semester taking a class on the history of the “masque” and going to as many plays as we could fit in.

It was an incredible semester, and Bonnington Square was at the heart of it.  The old 18^th century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens -- so notorious, so perfectly naughty, and now dwindled to nothing but a bare, dock-infested expanse of lawn -- were 100 meters away.  We used to walk across that scrubby green and wonder if the sex, the thrills, the theater of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens had soaked into the earth, or whether they were gone –dissipated into the sky. 

 

A new garden – Bonnington Square Garden – was being crafted on our doorstep.  It had been a bomb-site, and then a wasteland of stinging nettles -- now neighbors were coming together to make it into something rich and wondrous.   Our neighbors to the left were squatters with the most amazing sense of style -- we watched as they transformed their house from a Georgian ruin into a grungy, post-industrial palace.  An array of caravans painted with mysterious symbols turned up each month at the full moon, disgorging druids and witches – apparently a “ley line,” an ancient path that some said was a source of magical power, ran through Bonnington Square.  Down the road the Bonnington Square Café, which had started as a squat café and which served up rib-sticking vegan treats by candlelight, drew us in at lunchtimes, and we would stay all day, wondering if there were anywhere like this, anywhere at all, in America. 

We adored Bonnington Square.  My friends and I, rolling out of bed late after a long night at the theater and then in the clubs, where we dressed like fallen angels and danced until we saw god, used to sit on the steps drinking our coffee and watching the square.  There the squatters would come, heaving some talismanic metal object they had found in the defunct marble factory around the corner, or discarded on the street.  There was the community coalition, digging in their patch of bomb-scarred earth.  A druid leaned against his caravan, sucking on a cigarette and watching us through narrowed eyes.  His girlfriend stuck an arm out a tiny open hatch, and he passed the cigarette through to her. 

It felt as if history were unhinged here in this little square, as if everything that had ever happened was being remade and repurposed, and even we had our place in it – for weren’t we the 18^th century pleasure seekers, so young and flamboyant, who came here from afar to a fleeting, lantern-lit masquerade, our eyes dazzled by fountain shows and fireworks, intent upon nothing more than play and dalliance?

 I found myself thinking about Bonnington Square again as I wrote The River of No Return, which is a big, genre-mash up of a time travel novel, set largely in London.  It’s part spy adventure, part sci-fi epic, part romance – and although my characters never go anywhere near Vauxhall, either in 1815 or in 2013 – the novel is also part Bonnington Square.   

In The River of No Return, the characters travel through time on currents of human emotion.  My time travelers, who all share a rare talent, are able to move with the undertow of human feeling below the still surface of the present. My characters are dislocated in time by the violence of war, and they try, perhaps fruitlessly, to rebuild beauty from the wreckage.  Because my characters exist in many various times, they have a somewhat Robin Hoodish attitude to property and to wealth.  And because they are dislocated, adrift, they are masqueraders, seeking what pleasure they can grasp from the always disappearing world around them, and from the warm, willing “naturals” who live their lives from day to day, without ever suspecting that time is malleable and that history itself is up for grabs.

If the ley lines and the squatters and the bomb garden and the pleasure gardens are all to be found threaded through The River of No Return, so is joy.  I have spent many semesters in London since then, but none of them so perfectly delightful.  As a scholar and a historian I have spent countless days thinking about the way that the past penetrates the present, but I have never experienced it with such picaresque sparkle as I did across those six months.  I wrote the novel to make myself happy – I intended to make a big cake layered up with the many pleasures of many genres and with the voluptuous details of many eras.  And I did make myself happy!  But perhaps I was simply remembering a happiness I already knew, writing a chronicle of that one, perfect semester in that one, magical square.

Bonnington Square – like the rest of London – has changed enormously since 1992.  But it is still itself.  It hasn’t been uprooted and destroyed.  The squatters are still there.  You can watch a video about them here:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2010/jul/06/sustainable-squatting-bonnington-square

  The café is still there.  The garden is still there.  Gentrification has happened and yet Bonnington Square has managed to maintain itself, at least partially, as a space that exists slantwise across that superhighway to bourgeois appropriation.  And I am so very grateful that I got to be there, fleetingly, like a ghost, for a brief moment long ago.

The Next Big Thing in Books, or, Passing the Buck!

Welp, I was tagged to participate in a blog meme entitled “The Next Big Thing in Books.”  My book is definitely the past, present and next big thing in my life right now, so . . . why the hell not?!  I was tagged by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, whom I met because she and I work with the same editor at Dutton – the magical Denise Roy.  Lisa’s novel is entitled Pastors' Wives.  Its pub date is April 30th, and you should all read it.  I thought it was a perfectly balanced exploration of the ties that bind women, men and the church together.  In this case a mega-church outside Atlanta, Georgia.   At the end of this blog entry I will tell you about the four fabulous (and generous) writers I have tagged to keep the meme going on their blogs, next week!

The following questions were posed by whichever genie of the interwebs began this meme.  I hope you find my answers interesting.

1. What is your working title of your book (or story)?

The original mock-up cover for The Guild is on the far left. The US cover is in the center, and the UK cover is on the right.

My working title was The Time Tutor.  My agent, the immortal Alexandra Machinist, felt it needed a different title, and it became The Guild.  Then when it sold, it was renamed again, this time by my Michael Joseph editor, the dashing Alex Clarke.  For him, the mood of the novel evoked a song he had loved as a teenager, by a band called Ghost Dance.   For me, that title -- The River of No Return -- evoked the 1957 western with Marilyn Monroe.  It took me a while to get used to the title, but now I like it.  

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

The idea came to me when I was living in Vermont in 2004.  The house was built in the late 18^th century, but it had been rehabbed around 40 years ago.  On the surface it looked like a New England farmhouse, but the rehab had injected some rather psychedelic modernity into it.  We called it the 1790s-1970s house.   So anyway, there was no light pollution out there in the woods, and one night I was looking out the window, down toward the beaver pond, which was all frozen over, and glowing in the light of a full moon.  Suddenly the distance between 1790 and 1970 seemed like nothing at all, compared with the millions of years that beavers have been farming the woodlands of North America.  It was then that the image of my main character came into my head, fully developed.  He is a reluctant time traveler named Nick.  I imagined him living in that same house, trying to negotiate a blank of 200 years in the middle of his life.  I wrote down a five-page character study of him, imagining him waking up from a nightmare memory of the Napoleonic War to just such a moonlit night in Vermont, and then going downstairs and receiving a letter from a mysterious corporation that controls time travel.  I had no idea what happened next, what was in the letter, anything . . . I put the character study away and forgot about it for seven years.  

3. What genre does your book fall under?

My novel is a deliberate mash-up of genres.  At its heart it is a time-travel adventure crossed with Regency romance.  But other, competing genres are duking it out in there, as well.  It is also a spy mystery, a swashbuckler, a speculative epic, it owes a lot to melodrama, and it is a story of impending apocalypse.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Rudy Youngblood

Since this is all in the realm of fantasy, I’m going to go back to classic Hollywood for some of them. I think of Nick as a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper.  A bit of Jimmy’s self deprecating innocence and a bit of Gary’s world-weariness.  I think of Julia as looking like Noomi Rapace, but her character is nothing like Lisbeth Salander’s.  The opposite. If we’re sticking with classic Hollywood she’d be fabulous played by Debbie Reynolds, though the look is wrong.  Leo would be fantastic played by Rudy Youngblood.  Alice would be great played by Akosua Busia, although she’s too young for the part.  Arkady is sort of Donald Sutherland-ish. There are plenty of other characters, but I think I’ll stop there!

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

 

Here’s what Lauren Willig, author of The Pink Carnation series -- in which you should all indulge -- has to say about it, using two sentences:

A compelling race through time in a historical world turned upside-down  --  the Regency as you’ve never seen it before. Take one nobleman and one gently born lady, add time travel, intrigue, a vast conspiracy and a wicked way with words, shake and serve.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book is coming out from Dutton, a Penguin imprint, in the United States, and from Michael Joseph, a Penguin imprint, in the UK.  It is also being translated into French, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, and there is an audiobook in the works.  It is represented by Alexandra Machinist of Janklow and Nesbit.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Ten weeks.  But it was very rough, almost entirely different than the book that is being published!

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

In true time-traveler style, I’m going to answer this question by talking about some older books that I admire, three British and three American.  Each one taught me something huge about popular fiction.  I hope my novel reflects my admiration for them in some way – though I wouldn’t say my story is like them.

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, by James E. Seaver.  “Captivity Narratives,” or stories of non-Native settlers being taken captive and adopted into Native American nations, were the first American best sellers, and dominated American book publishing for two hundred years.  Mary Jemison was taken captive before the American Revolution, then was adopted by the Seneca and spent the rest of her life Seneca.  Her story, written in 1824 by a man who interviewed her when she was in her 80s, remains an incredible read.  The genre of time-travel fiction has much in common with captivity narratives, and I found myself thinking about Mary Jemison now and then while writing my book.  One of my characters is even named after her.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.   My time-travelers use emotions to get around, and so does Alcott.  This 1869 novel is one of the pinnacles of the sentimental tradition in literature.  The power of that tradition to move both plot and readers is sneered at in many quarters – but it should not and cannot be denied.

The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie.  Romance is a tiny sub-plot in all of Christie’s mystery novels, but it is as necessary to their perfection as salt is to caramel.  She also adds characters throughout her novels to move plot along, so that by the end a symphonic group of people are arranged around to hear the solution – a brilliant trick for making stuff happen in fiction.  This entirely exquisite mystery is from 1935.

The Corinthian, by Georgette Heyer.  Heyer is the queen, and this 1940 novel is a confection like none other.   I love a hapless-but-handsome, harassed-but-heroic hero.   

Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse.  The myopic self-involvement of his characters, and the way they drive one another crazy, is endlessly hilarious – but these are also brilliant novel-building techniques.  This lesser-known 1958 novel is about a man who writes a novel in an unforeseen fit of creativity and then reaps the whirlwind – therefore it is quite close to my heart.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany.  This 1966 novel kept coming back to me as I wrote The River of No Return.  My novel is a happy love story, but it has an ominous strain that owes a lot to my childhood reading of science fiction. Delany's use of a language that can be deployed as a weapon was inspiring to me as I worked out the kinks in my own time-travel ideas. 

 9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I have always had admiration for anyone who writes a novel, and I never seriously suspected that I would.  But two years ago I desperately needed to do something that would make me happy.  I sat down one day with the character sketch I had jotted down seven years before, and the novel just spilled out.  I discovered reserves of joie de vivre I didn’t know I had. 

10. What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

I wanted the sense of time travel to be woven into the prose of the novel.  There are dozens of buried sentences and sentence fragments from other novels stitched into the fabric of mine.  Some are very obvious, most are pretty obscure.  I don’t want readers to notice them, at least not consciously.  I want a reader to have a few moments where they get the creepy-crawly sensation that there is another voice from another era whispering in their ear.

And those are the questions!  Now, on to the writers who have graciously agreed to carry this meme thingy forward.  They will each be answering the same questions I’ve answered, next week.  Read their blogs and their beautiful books!  Thanks, friends!  

Eiren Caffall is a musician, artist and writer.  Her third album,Shopping the Holdfast, will be coming out in 2013.  She is working on her first novel, an adventure story set in an environmentally devastated future.  Her blog is here: http://www.eirencaffall.com/news

Kim Fay is a novelist and food writer of extraordinary talent.  Her prizewinning cookbook Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam, has been followed by her recently released historical novel, set in Cambodia of 1925. The Map of Lost Memories is a 2013 Edgar Award Finalist for Best First Novel by an American Author. Her blog is here: http://literateinla.blogspot.com/

Dana Sachs is the acclaimed author of both fiction and non-fiction. The House on Dream Street, If You Lived Here, and The Life We Were Given precede The Secret of the Nightingale Palace, a marvelous fictional take on the American phenomenon of the road trip.  She is working on a new novel set in Budapest, a city she knows and loves.  Her blog is here: http://www.danasachs.com/index2.php#!/BLOG

Misty D. Waters is a writer of science fiction and fantasy.  You will be hearing more about her in the future – I can tell because of the time travel thing.  Her blog is here: www.mistydwaters.com

A Meditation on Makeup

Pussycat, Pussycat,
You're so thrilling
And I'm so willing
To care for you.
So go and make up your cute little pussycat eyes!

-- Burt Bacharach, 1965

A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman who lacks an eye.

-- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, ca 1790

 
This last week I did something I have never done before, in spite of the fact that I am a modern woman in the modern world.  I wore makeup.  A lot of it.

It happened because of THE RIVER OF NO RETURN.  I was filmed for a book trailer, and apparently you have to wear a full face of slap when you are on camera or else you look horrible.   So there I sat, in fear and trepidation, while the makeup artist opened her magical suitcase, pulled out her pots and potions, and began waving her wand.  After 45 minutes I had a whole new face.  Including false eyelashes – but not the kind that come in a strip.  She planted little sprigs of three lashes each in among my own meager crop.  When finally I looked at myself in the mirror I saw . . .

But let me back up.   

My mother doesn’t wear makeup because she was raised by a woman who thought makeup was for Ladies of the Night.  My mother doesn’t think that, but she never owned any and didn’t teach her daughters how to use it. 

Me and Andrea in our everyday girl wear

Also I grew up in New England in the 1970s, and the girl-boy thing was a little different back then.  The aisles of the toy stores weren’t divided by the Great Pink Wall of Gender. We all wore jeans and t-shirts and sneakers to school and they weren’t color coded, i.e., girls did not wear primarily and predominantly pink at all times.  Which is not to say we were all Baby X.  Our parents did their best to ensure that our genders matched our sexes, and we, ourselves, were belligerent little gender police.  Woe betide the girl with a GI Joe lunchbox or the boy who chose to play the flute.  No, I’m not saying gender wasn’t a thing – merely that it was a different thing in that place and time than it is now.  “Tomboy” was so much the norm for girls that it wasn’t even a word anyone used.  It was therefore perfectly possible to get through a girlhood without ever once thinking about lipstick.

But that all came to a crashing halt with the end of childhood.  Being thirteen is all about gender, and has been ever since the first cave children started seventh grade in the first cave junior high.

I hit seventh grade like a bird hitting a glass window, and one skill I did not have in order to pick myself up and start inventing myself as a teenager was the ancient and venerable art of using makeup.

Me at 13.  I've only punched one eye hole in my mask!

Why didn’t I learn to wield the brushes and pencils at that point?  I was only thirteen.  My brain was still a sponge.  My fine motor skills were still precisely tuned.  I wanted, like everyone else on the planet when they are thirteen, to fit in.  And like everyone else on the planet when they are thirteen, I didn’t realize that no one fits in and that all thirteen-year-olds are equally miserable, with or without strawberry flavored lip-gloss.

I think my excuses are unassailable.  I failed to achieve makeup competency because of physical disability and criminal tendency.

It was like this.  When I went to junior high my parents wanted me to have a job, so one night I agreed to babysit for the couple who lived behind us.  They had a very nice house:  he was a professor, she was a psychiatrist.  They introduced me to their angelically sleeping progeny and left.  Hours passed, they had no TV, they had no novels.  They were readers of newspapers and non-fiction.  I wandered from room to room, peering at everything.  Eventually I found myself in the psychiatrist’s personal bathroom, playing with her makeup collection.

Needless to say, it ended in mascara-stained tears.  Not only because I’d never learned how to put the stuff on in the first place, but because I am also blind in one eye.

Think about the impossible mechanics of that for a second. 

So the scenario is, a half-blind girl tries makeup for the first time, including eyeliner and mascara on and around and in both eyes.  She does so by stealing the supplies of a woman who has hired her in good faith to look after a six-month-old baby.  She fails to erase the evidence because she doesn’t know that soap and water won't wash off oil-based cosmetics. 

Needless to say I never babysat again.  Nor did I ever dabble in the cosmetic arts.  Until last week.

Which brings us back to the moment where, after being brushed and primped and false-eyelashed for three quarters of an hour, I looked at myself in the mirror.  I expected to see Tammy Faye Baker, may she rest in peace.  

Usually I would say of myself that my face has character.  I use it all day long to communicate what is in my head and my heart, and it does its job willingly.  I like my face, I wouldn’t trade it. 

Now I saw what that face might look like had I actually learned how to – and been physically capable of – using makeup.  I looked the same . . . but different.  I understood for the first time what people mean when they say that makeup makes them feel like they have their armor on.   With “my face on” I, who had been dreading the filming, was ready, indeed I was happy, to go in front of the camera.  The false eyelashes and eyeliner – which I had expected to make me look freakish – were the best part.  They made my brown eyes, which usually have a greenish tint to them, glow with a chestnut warmth that I really liked.  I had a fantastic day. 

I doubt I'll suddenly start wearing makeup regularly now.  There's the problem of the blind eye, and to be honest, I'm really just a bare-faced, roll-out-of-bed-and-start-the-day kind of son-of-a-gun.  But now I know what makeup is for, I know how it feels, and -- I like it.

Early the next morning, face washed (I knew to use makeup remover this time), eyelashes all mine, I sat in the little Pret A Manger that faces onto Trafalgar Square.  I was perched on a stool at the bar, looking out the window, eating porridge and thinking about not very much at all, when I realized that the roundabout, usually chock-a-block with double decker busses and taxis, was empty.  A motorcade was coming through the massive iron gates that lead to the mall.  Two motorcycles with blue lights flashing went slowly past, followed by a black Rolls.  The Rolls didn’t have shaded windows. There in the back seat sat Queen Elizabeth II.    

The big car sailed smoothly past, carrying the monarch in solitary state the wrong way round the deserted roundabout.  She was looking straight ahead, but then, like that moment in the subway when the person you are staring at looks up and catches your glance, she turned her face and it seemed that she looked right at me.  It was a shocking feeling. But why it should be shocking, I don’t know.  After all I was gawping at her, and if a cat can look at a king, a king can look at a cat.  Funnily enough, thinking back on it, the only detail I can really remember about the Queen’s face was the shade of her lipstick.  It was a very distinctive coral pink.  

I believe I could pick that shade out of the 64 pack of Crayola crayons I had back in the 1970s, back before I knew what lipstick really was.

 

Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?

I’ve been to London to visit the Queen.

Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?

I frightened a little mouse under her chair.

 -- Nursery Rhyme, first published 1805