How Rudolph Valentino and Nurse Ratched entered my life!

We take the Academy Awards VERY seriously in our house.  Printed ballots, serious snack foods and ruthless fashion critiques.  It's our family's super bowl and even now, as my girls are scattered around the country, we talk about our award picks and will discuss who wore the best and worst dresses the next day.  I feel sorry for my husband, don't get me wrong, he loves movies, but we've sort of taken it to a whole new level.  I'm not sure when it started exactly.  Everyone usually assumes it's because I love watching the red carpet, hoping an actress with her own sense of style with wear vintage, (always the right choice) but I think it's deeper than that.    




 When I was a little girl, long before the days of VCR's and  pay per view.. I had to wait a year just to watch my favorite movie. Once a year, I would climb into my parent's bed and sit still for 101 minutes (plus commercial breaks) just to see a little girl from Kansas sing about rainbows and travel through a land with talking scarecrows and little people. When the beautiful Glenda arrived with her fairy like gossamer pink gown and jeweled crown unlike any I'd ever seen, I knew that there would never be another movie like this one.

When my mom was 12 years old, she went to the Carthay Circle Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia to see Gone With The Wind.  She remembers the buzz and excitement around her neighborhood when the cast and crew came to town for the premier.  Though she didn't see them herself, she would describe everything they wore with great detail. She would tell me that story with her thick Southern drawl and I could almost feel the velvet theater ropes and smell the fresh popped popcorn.  Gone with the Wind was the greatest movie ever made, according to my mother, and 25, even 40 years later, she would still talk with envy about Scarlett O'hara's 17 inch waist and swoon over Clark Gable.  I was always confused as to where Scarlett and Rhett stopped and Clark and Vivien began.  They were all so real to her, and to me, they were all a part of my mother's imaginative world,  brought to life on the big screen. We would laugh out loud when Prissy talked about birthin' babies and sob hysterically when Bonnie Blue died.  But to me, personally, it was the costumes that kept me fixated on the screen.  The textures and colors were so amazing  that I could have watched the entire movie without sound just to see the hoop skirts, corsets and bonnets. No question, I was absolutely convinced that this was indeed, the most wonderful movie ever made.

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My mother absolutely loved movies. I think she believed that the life she was meant to live somehow ended up on the editing room floor, and that just maybe in the magic stillness of the cinema, it would somehow be perfectly spliced together and re invented in living technicolor.

Instead of telling me about the great depression , World War II, or the the world's greatest novels, my mother would tell me stories about Rudolph Valentino. I would imagine his breathtaking good looks, (sometimes my mind would wander as I tried to understand the weird sheik outfit),  But my mother would bring me back into the story with her dramatic tone and I would feel devastated when she would tell with great detail about how women killed themselves when Rudy died. I was sure from the familiar way she said Rudy, that she must have known him personally. I was positive that the life and death of Rudolph Valentino must have been the most important historical event of all time.  I imagined this tragedy happened just yesterday, as my mother shared the intimate details with such conviction.  I was totally unaware that Rudy had died even before my mother was born and that this was one of the movie stories that her mother told her.  This tale had become her own and had now become mine.  None of my friends had ever heard of Rudolph Valentino and I felt intellectually superior.

Most people in the South would call my mother a little eccentric.  But I believed that she was an undiscovered movie star just biding her time in Georgia until she could make it to Hollywood.  She was a remarkably beautiful woman and Vivien Leigh paled next to her in my little eyes.  She talked about Susan Hayward and other starlets as if they were here old college roommates and I expected them to stop by for dinner any day.  She didn't really know how to be a traditional mother but I didn't know that there was any other way a mother could be, I didn't know that I was supposed to question her unconventional ways, I just experienced them.  She wasn't always attentive, selfless,  or the definition of a caretaker, but she had a smile that lit up a room and I thought she was bigger than life itself.

My theatrical mother saw movies as a way to experience life, and they became a part of our reality.   I never really understood why the movies we watched together bored my friends.  When they were terrified while watching the first installment of Halloween, afraid that Jamie Lee Curtis would be slashed to bits, my mother and I were terrified for Margo Channing as Eve Harrington manipulated her way into her life.

Then, there was Natalie Wood.  We LOVED her..well, at least, I think we did, or maybe I only did because she did.  My mother told me daily that if I tried, I could look JUST like Natalie, (not even remotely true)  I never even tried of course, and sadly fell very short of that expectation. While my friends were lining up to see Jaws for the 5th time, I was watching Gypsy Rose Lee and Splendor in The Grass. I was mesmerized by the complicated characters, even though I was too young to really understand Gypsy's profession or to recognize the mental illness that plagued Deanie Loomis. But even my young heart understood the pain she so acutely experienced when she discovered that Bud had a new family. Her despair was palpable to me and I thought that Splendor in the Grass might just be the best movie ever made.  Years later, when she tragically died, I felt a tremendous loss.  We had experienced tragedy together in a way.

   

When I was 14, we saw The Way We Were.  My mom cried harder than I'd ever seen her cry in any movie.  I was too young to appreciate the complications of love,  and the pain of living in the reality of what "might have been", so I didn't have the same response.  I was too busy secretly hoping that Robert Redford would leave his new "girl" in the movie and be my first love.  But  somehow, even through my self absorbed adolescence, I could see that my mother wasn't just crying for Katie and Hubbell and that there was a part of her that knew quite a lot more than I about what they were going through.

It was in the mid to late 1970s that we discovered a shared love for mysteries and psychological thrillers.  I was more comfortable feeling my mother's nails dig into my arm than having to experience another emotional movie about unrequited, lost or misplaced love. It was during that time that we met creepy twins , psychotic nurses, and the mafia.  It was almost a relief to watch a film for pure entertainment and not have an emotional connection to the characters or their lives.  That's what I thought at least, little did I know that I would have nightmares about those little girls wanting me to play with them for quite some time.

      

When my children came along, I introduced them to the greatest movies ever made.  Recently, my daughter said to me, "Mom, did I really love Gone With the Wind or did I just love it because you did?"  I didn't really have an answer for her.  Sometimes the lines get blurred when it comes to the people we love and who loved what first and why.  It's as if we can't tell where one person's likes end and ours begin, we are so beautifully intertwined and connected.  I might have loved those old movies because they were revolutionary for their day, and Kirsten might have loved Gone with The WInd because it was the greatest movie ever made, or it might just be the fact that we shared them that makes them all the greater to us.  Because when Kirsten and I watch Gone with The Wind and argue over whether Melanie is kind or manipulative, or my husband and I rent a movie that we watch all the way through only to discover that it was the worst movie we've ever seen, or my nieces Sarah & Deborah make a pact with me to see every Academy award nominated movie even if we have no desire to see it, or Katie and I watch Kill Bill for the 18th time, or Erika forces me to watch the Lord of the Rings Trilogy AGAIN and tries to get me to appreciate the battle scenes, or Emma and I secretly watch Blue Crush or the latest teen Disney movie when no one is around, I'm just happy to be sharing whatever it is with the people I love . A movie is an experience and if we are lucky enough to have people we love to share it with, it really doesn't matter what the movie is about , whether it makes us laugh, cry, or  wins any awards.  When you think about it, movies are a lot like life that way...

Read my daily Countdown to the Academy Awards and discover the women and movies that have influenced the way we see fashion, our history, our culture, and ourselves.