Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind

Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind     

By Reviewer Zack James

[Frankly I was a little hesitate to approve the following piece by long- time contributor Zack James who I have known through the old neighborhood where we grew up by my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex. The reason for my hesitancy was my concern for the relevancy of bringing in old time film sex appeal women stars from the 1940s and 1950s in a piece essentially about the trials and tribulations of inter-generational sex these days if you come right down to it. For the most part this site has been populated by pieces and sketches done by members of the generation of ’68 that is post-World War II “baby-boomers,” more often than not male, who are now at an age where they have the time and inclination to wade through some reflections of the past. To keep them warm as they grow old I guess.

A look though at the demographics and the traffic flow provided by the producers of this blogging apparatus shows that the audience for this site is dipping toward a much younger cohort based on their devotions to social media, especially Twitter. Given the demographic trend I was not sure that readers would get the connection between 1940s and 1950s screen queen stars and what was bothering Lou Lyons, a certified member of the generation of ’68 with battle scars to prove the point, who Zack had interviewed for the piece. No question ‘68ers would know of Lauren Bacall if for no other reason than she would be familiar to those who craved those retrospectives revival theaters like the Brattle in Cambridge, the Aurora in the Village and the Majestic in Frisco who endlessly played Humphrey Bogart and pals films. In the case of Ms. Monroe she would be familiar from around the house as fathers and older brothers of that generation saw her as the epitome of 1950s American female blonde sex appeal. To ask Generation X and millennials to draw that same connections seemed fat-fetched to me. Then Zack challenged me to let the reader decide the value of the article and get over my faint-heartedness. So here it is. Peter Markin]      

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 youthful 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 and converted into a small tech company office park where he would spent many an ungodly Saturday afternoon viewing the current fare. The use of the “ungodly’ expression was for real since his parents were devout Sixth Day Anabaptists whose day of worship started at midday Saturday and ended at dawn Sunday morning. Although they were liberal enough to see that Lou would have snuck out to the movies anyway they always cast that epitaph his way when he came sheepishly through the door after having been hunkered down with a box of “made last” popcorn (there was a whole art to keeping an eye on the concession stand clerk to see when he or she would get ready to replenish the popcorn machine and avoid getting the last of the “stale” leavings maybe from the night before) and some candy bars purchased at Billy’s Variety and “snuck” in under the watch-less eyes of the ushers (who were usually high school kids who could using and expression common at the time as it turns out “ a rat’s ass” about what the audience did or didn’t do except throw stuff at the screen).  

Later in high school, having grown out of kids’ clothing and Saturday matinees about the same time, he let those “ungodly” epitaphs flow off his back like water off a duck’s back after coming in late on Saturday nights. Reason: or one of the reasons, Lotty Larson who was the first girl who accepted his invitation when he asked her the locally famous, locally famous 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. Lotty said balcony although Lou only got to cope a feel outside her sweater which kept him going for a while (of course he claimed Lotty “played the flute” for him, also a common expression at the time for a blow job to his friends but he, and they, knew he was lying, lying that first night anyway. Later, well, you figure it out).                

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 that recent movie freak 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 the wartime 1940s when the film had come out when he did see the film 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 although he did not think what she had seen on-screen had gotten her all horny. Probably the dope after the film did the trick)

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 the young if wayward 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, “dirty old men” a common way to put the proposition,  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 he had ordered from Netflicks 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 the last of the old-time cowboys who drank, whored and got saddled-sored with the best of them 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 as it had on those recent nights as it had 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 with black beret, logger’s boots and flannel shirt , and got nothing but laughs from his high school pals and worse from the gals for digging something so passe.

He had been trolling the bookstore, literally, since he had just gotten 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. Once he got West he figured he 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 paperback book format which came with other poems as well including Ginsberg’s homage to his tragic mother-Kaddish) since that was one of his favorite poems, if not his most favorite at the time. Then this thin, brown-eyed, black-haired good-looking young woman 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 importance 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-the-wall 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 effect to reconcile he and Rosalita had moved to Boston to get a fresh start).

That night after watching those two films and their messages Lou thought though maybe Rosalita had been just like Marie and Rosalyn just needing a safe harbor. Damn.