Beauty in a Mouse's Eye

Hedy Lamarr was beautiful. All the rest of the "stars" -- including many with more talent -- were (and are) almost beautiful. To the Mouse, some of the modern "beauties" don't even come that close. You take Uma Thurman and that gal whose name I always suppress -- the one who played Erin Brockavich and the "Pretty Woman" -- for my money, they're just actresses, not beauties. Something about the Thurman gal looks weird to me. And I don't mean her anorexic frame. And that other woman's mouth is so big it distorts her face into something resembling a harlequin's mask. [What's her name? If I keep writing sentences that ought to contain her name, maybe it'll come to me.]

I recall the first time I saw Hedy Lamarr's face on the big screen. T'was in a movie about a bunch of stage struck young ladies, the one in which Katherine Hepburn delivered the famous line about the jonquils. The director must have known that Hedy's beauty was the sort that would bore itself into every adolescent's eternal soul. He had the camera pause just for a moment, giving us a view of the back of Miss Lamarr's head. But then, suddenly, she turned full face -- not it seemed to the camera -- but to me and every male child in the universe.

Well, no ... it wasn't that movie at all. That was "Stage Door," a great flick, at least for the 30's. I don't remember the name of the movie in which Hedy Lamarr first turned her face into mine. Maybe it wasn't a movie at all, but a montage of a dream in which I selected the face that launched my ships and directed it to turn, just at the proper moment, to create an explosion of passion that would endure forever.

[Merciful heavens, Mouse! Have you no decency?]

It has been a different sort of week. Milady has been away at a get-together of Unitarians, down at VPI in Blacksburg. She attends every year, leaving me to tend the garden and feed the cat. [Hmmm, cat just heard her name, stuck a hand up and pawed my arm to remind me that it's about that time. She has yellowish eyes that can plead with the best of them.] I've been emailing old friends I haven't heard from in centuries, taking the edge off emptiness. Been trying to come to grips with growing old.

One of my friends -- of the younger type -- told me that the reason young people "don't like old people is because old people have forgotten how to have fun." Boy, that cut deeply. I'm sure she didn't mean that she doesn't like me -- everybody loves the Mouse! -- but that when young people and old people start talking about fun things to do, they find themselves talking about different things. [Hedy Lamarr died in 2000.] The beach, for instance. When I was young sand was a good thing, and sun, too. My friend Charlie and I used to hitchhike 60 miles (each way) to go to the Gulf beach. We'd come home tired and perhaps sunburned, but the beach was still fun.

But the beach must not have been a "thing of beauty," 'cause a trip to the beach now seems like anything but a joy. [My gosh ... it says here Hedy was born in 1913; was she that much older than me? Nineteen years?] He and I also used to go blackberry picking, out by Hartwell Field, where for some reason the city had dumped big slabs of concrete; the vines took over the place, and in no time we would fill our pails with the luscious berries. I cannot believe today that we actually did that for fun. Last week, while mowing the "back forty," I discovered a profuse growth of wineberries on our "estate." (They look like blackberries, but are red and smaller.) Milady and I picked several bowlsful of the things. They went well with our morning cereal, but picking them was a chore, not something I would do for fun.

Still, it does seem there ought to be something young and old people could talk about, or do together, that both would regard as fun. I'm tempted to think there might be the old standby, sex, but that's kind of forbidden territory, especially for old folks only a few years younger than Hedy Lamarr. Back in the 70's, when the practice of rich old men taking on "trophy wives" was just catching on, we less-than-rich types used a phrase to describe them. We called them "dirty old men." I guess, then, that even if we might admit that the pleasure of sex would hardly die in healthy old people -- I speak with more authority for the male of the species -- the whole glamorous experience that sex once was when we were young has lost at least a tad of its beauty. Hard to think we might still link the joy of sex with the romantic graces that only (it seems) the blush of youth can lend to the occasion. Still, I suppose the young and the old can speak of sex as if they were talking about the same thing. Some memories die only when we cease to be.

Hedy was supposedly married to the lecherous band leader, Artie Shaw. I refuse to believe it. (And it's actually not true. I had her confused with Lana Turner, an "almost.") Her beauty belonged to no one, and to everyone. It had "staying quality." I hope they never print a picture of her as she must have looked just before she died. She would have been 87. Beauty like her's should never be permitted to die.