Oh, Rosalita-With
Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur
Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind
By Zack James
Maybe it was something
in the drinking water but Louis Lyons was beside himself once he figured out
the real reason why he spent a couple of weekend nights watching a couple of
old-time flicks, films which he had gathered in from his Netflix service. Lou
had been on a long term kick about watching, or rather re-watching, films,
mostly black and white from his checkered seedy random youth. In those days he
would have viewed such films not on his HD television or via the stream of his
computer but at his local theater, The Majestic, in his hometown of Oxford out
in Western Massachusetts now long since closed where he would spent many an
ungodly Saturday afternoon viewing the
current fare. The “ungodly’ part for real his parents were devout Sixth Day
Anabaptists whose day of worship started midday Saturday and ended at dawn
Sunday morning and although they were liberal enough to see that Lou would have
snuck out anyway always cast that epitaph his way when he came sheepishly
through the door after being hunkered with a box of made last popcorn and some
candy bars purchased at Billy’s Variety and “snuck” in under the watch-less
eyes of the ushers. Later in high school, having grown out of kids’ clothing
and Saturday matinees about the same time, he let those epitaphs flow off his
back like water off a duck after coming in late on Saturday nights. Reason: or
one of the reasons, Lottie Larson who was the first girl who accepted his
invitation when he asked her the locally famous, locally high school movie date
night, question-balcony or orchestra? Orchestra meant maybe one date and out
but balcony meant promise of anything from a “feel” inside or out of some
girl’s cashmere sweater to a tight space blow job.
This trip, this
diversion down rural hills nostalgia road, has a purpose since it was on the
same track that was bothering Lou’s old mind. The eternal, infernal, ways of
sex which had one way or another bothered Lou’s mind since puberty, maybe
before if Doctor Freud and his acolytes were right. The association played out
this way. On Friday night he had watched for the umpteenth time one of his
all-time favorite films the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not starring Lauren
Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. One of the reasons that he favored that film is
that although he did not see it when it had come out since he was only a dream
in his parents’ way of life in 1941 when the film had come out when he saw it
in retrospective in college at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square he had
told his date, name now long forgotten in memory, that some of the scenes in
that classic were as hot, maybe hotter, between two people with their clothes
fully on than half the porno being featured in the Combat Zone in downtown
Boston. (Lou vaguely remembered that night was a hot date night with that
unremembered young woman when they had gone back to her place on Commonwealth
Avenue.) After that recent viewing though he had remarked to his wife, his
third wife, Moira, that given the best of it Captain Morgan, Bogie’s role, a
craggy sea salt, and Marie, the Bacall role, that he had to be at least twice
her age, maybe more. (He had actually looked it up on Wikipedia and found Bogie was forty-five and Bacall nineteen at the
time so the “maybe more” was definitely in play). That started a short
discussion between them about younger women being attracted to older men (as a
sign of some kind of distorted social norm older men being attracted to younger
women never made it to the conversation table). No conclusions were drawn at
the time by Lou.
Saturday night Moira was
out attending her weekly bridge party with some of her girlfriends and Lou
wound up watching the other film the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Misfits starring Marilyn Monroe and
Clark Gable (with serious supporting roles by Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach,
and Thelma Ritter). Once again maybe giving Clark, playing Gaye, a decided edge
in the looks department over Bogie and the fact of being a real cowboy over a
sea captain an older man was attractive to a younger woman, Rosalyn, played by
Marilyn Monroe. Lou, a little younger than the older brothers and fathers who
saw Ms. Monroe as the epitome of 1950s sexual allure and beauty, had seen the
film when he was in high school, alone if he recalled.
The question of younger
women being attracted to older men would not have stuck out as much it had
those nights on the first viewing of the films back in the day but since then
there had been Rosalita, his second wife, the wife that Lou had left for Moira.
The main reason, although not the only reason, had been the wide gap in age
between them, Rosalita had been twenty-five and he almost fifty when he spied
her one night in San Francisco at the City Lights Bookstore, the famous one run
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the big “beat” hang-out back in the 1950s when
being “beat” mean something socially unlike later when he tried to emulate them
and got nothing but laughs for digging something, a scene so passé. He was
trolling the place, literally, since he had just got divorced back in
Massachusetts from his first wife, Anna, and after the acrimonious settlement
decided he needed to head west and make a new start. Needed the company of a
woman as well and somebody he had run into at Ginny’s Bar in North Beach had
told him that if you were looking for a certain type woman, intellectually curious,
maybe a little off-kilter, maybe easy too then in San Francisco you hit the
bookstores and City Lights was a magnet. (That “custom” was not confined to
Frisco Town he had met Moira at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the
same imperative).
Lou had been looking for
a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl
(in a book which came with other poems as well) since that was one of
his favorite poems, if
not his most favorite then. Then this thin, brown-eyed, black-haired
good-looking young women whom he at first thought was Spanish, maybe from
Mexico given where he was came up behind him and started going on and on about
Ginsberg who had just died a few years before. (Rosalita was not Spanish at all
but Irish her mother just liked the name.) He was shocked that anybody under
the age of forty would know anything about Ginsberg and the important of his
poem not only as a break in the kind of poem that was acceptable in polite
society but the harsh social message Ginsberg was laying down. She, not he,
asked if he would like to stop at the café and have a cup of coffee. He figured
why not (he did not find out until after they had a couple of subsequent dates
that women, women of all ages, also trolled the bookstores looking for men, men
who say would be looking at something like Howl
which told them the guy could at least read unlike some of the beasts they
had run across in the bars or at some off-beat party).
That afternoon started
their affair but Lou was from the start apprehensive about their differences in
ages which came up often along the way, for example, when he mentioned that he
had been in Washington on May Day, 1971 and had been arrested in the dragnet
that the cops and military had set up that day she didn’t understand, could not
get around the idea that people would try to shut down the government if it did
not stop the Vietnam War. At times they could work through it like that first
day with Ginsberg (she turned out to have been an English major at Berkeley)
but other times, times when she tried to coax him into jogging which she was
crazy about they would fight civil war worthy battles. He always had the
sneaking suspicion that Rosalita was not telling the truth when she mentioned
that she had had trouble with her male peers, boys she called them, and had
been attracted to older men ever since her father had abandoned her family when
she was twelve. She had told him repeatedly that she was looking for the
maturity and security that an older man would bring. Lou could never really get
that through his head and eventually his tilted his behavior toward giving dear
Rosalita reason to boot him out the door. (On top of meeting Moira closer in
age to him at the museum when for one last effort to reconcile they had moved
to Boston).
That The Misfits movie night Lou had finally
figured out, too late like lots things in his life, maybe Rosalita had been
just like Marie and Rosalyn needing a safe harbor. Damn.
