The Body of Brooklyn

My Little Heroes

......................................................................... MyLittleHeroes ne of my first memories of the movies is somewhat incestuous . I remember walking into my parents’ bedroom in our row house in Brooklyn, the black-and-white TV screen throwing light from a corner. My parents were supine, each on his and her sides of their trundle bed. They were murmuring, talking in that affectless tone of remarking that people use when the tube is on and they’re actually watching it. Their heads were toward the door, and they couldn’t see me come in. I wanted to get closer, to hear what connubial words were being exchanged in the bluish TV-screen light. A movie was showing, something from the forties or thirties, a mansion, men in evening dress, women in dressy dresses. I moved closer and heard my father’s voice more clearly; he was saying things like Joseph Schildkraut , S. Z. Sakall, Marjorie Main, James Gleason, Patsy Kelly, Elisha Cook, Edward Everett Horton. He was naming the characters who swirled around the margins, never far from the lead actors, but were sometimes on and off after one brief line, one double take, a short verbal effusion or a bit of physical business. I looked at my parents, looked at the screen, back and forth. How could they know the names of such unimportant players? Why would they? Sometimes little grunts and groans of delight seemed to urge out of them at the mention of a particular name. I tiptoed out, and wondered how these people had spent their lives, and why they didn’t have a door that locked. Little did I know that I would find myself, decades later, engaged in a similar pursuit, although the room is larger, the TV in color, the mattress singularly firm and large, no one stepping up stealthily while I watch, and miles from Brooklyn before I sleep. O Ward Bond, Beulah Bondi, Arthur Treacher. Character actors all. And a related category: the second leads, who may or may not be character actors. I’ve always loved those second leads who stuck around long enough to take the lead, even if, or perhaps especially when, these vocational promotions were never quite convincing: Joel McCrae, Don Ameche, Eddie Bracken. Of course, there is the occasional actor or actress who blurs the line: Van Johnson (and I may be the only remaining Van Johnson fan under a certain age, his portrait of grief in The Last Time I Saw Paris almost unwatchably good, his line readings spoken with a kind of tartness that would get Tom Cruise slapped), or Gloria Grahame, who won an Oscar, had a long career with name sometimes above the title, but never transcended a certain sultriness, which is why she is in my pantheon of Hollywood sirens. The character actor who becomes and stays a star is epitomized by Judy Holliday, with whom I would gladly run off to Tahiti or the Bronx, were she not, unfortunately, dead. She is the only actress I know who can completely pull off a goofy sexuality without undermining either quality. Since I can’t run away with Judy Holliday, I may as well fully endorse a fictive turn of mind and marry off my two all-time favorite character actors, my cinematic parents: Edward Everett Horton and Jessie Royce Landis. But before we reach the nuptials, lest anyone object, perhaps I should explain why these two are, in my book, heroic, and why they are going to have a strange and delightful lifetime together in my mind. They are heroic because I do not have much of an appreciation of conventional heroism. Hold that: I should say, instead, that it doesn’t interest me terribly. Instead of the idea of noble and inspiring acts, I am much more drawn to interesting and endearing people. Others laud character, but I tend to laud characters who are heroic to me in the way they expand the human franchise of individuality, even peculiarity , or embody qualities I find underrepresented, or unique in combination. That is my idea, and as Eric Idle of Monty Python says, when asked what it is: it is mine. My parents will be united by a unique blend of sophisticated xenophobia . They are savvy Americans in their way, these two, the bewildered nouveau riche, and have an aversion to foreign culture, especially French, which they submit to out of a comical sense that it is where one goes if one has to — to do business, for...