“Once they get their faces up on the screen, I fall in love with all of them.”
There is no surer way to win me over than to reference Old Hollywood films and movie stars. Take Gone Girl, when Nick describes a reference to Love Finds Andy Hardy as “a 1938 Mickey Rooney movie pun only about twenty people would get.” I’m one of those twenty!
Laura Lippman’s novel Dream Girl has its fair share of studio era references. It’s patterned after Misery, the Stephen King novel that’s also a famous film starring Kathy Bates and James Caan.
In Dream Girl, author Gerry Anderson has had a nasty accident. He fell down the modern staircase in his Baltimore apartment, injuring his coccyx and is confined to bed-rest for the next several months. The novel frequently jumps back and forth through time: in the past we get glimpses of Gerry’s childhood, the unraveling of his parents’ marriage, and his career as a writing instructor.
Gerry vowed to be a better man than his father, but he hasn’t succeeded. In fact, he might actually be worse. He’s a painfully out of touch boomer but still likable. I mean, how can I not laugh at his internal monologues when he’s fretting about being offensive?
“The front desk was unmanned—unwommaned? unPEOPLED?”
He also might be hallucinating. A side effect of the pain killers and sleep medication? He keeps getting calls from the main character of his hit novel, Dream Girl. But she isn’t real. Despite all speculations to the contrary, Aubrey was never based on a real woman - not any of his three wives, not the colleague he had an affair with (he insists it was entirely consensual and she came onto him) and definitely not his clingy ex-girlfriend, Margot. “Even when he was besotted with her, she reminded him a little of a praying mantis, and everyone knows what they do to their mates.”
There are two women in very close proximity to Gerry now: his assistant Victoria and night nurse, Aileen. Victoria got the job precisely because she isn’t a writer. “The worst assistants are the little vampires who try to turn an essentially menial job into a mentorship. They’ll suck you dry, literally and figuratively, those young women.” As you can see, Gerry has a preoccupation with women preying on him. Aileen is a sturdy, no nonsense woman who treats the job as an imposition. She’s not much of a reader, preferring television.
One night in one of his hazy dreamlike stupors, Aubrey appears but Gerry thinks it’s Margot. She stirs a memory in him of Ghost Story, a novel by Peter Straub. I have to agree with Gerry that the 1981 movie pales in comparison. The book is so unwieldy and voluminous that a faithful adaptation is nearly impossible. It would probably work better as a mini-series.
And like Gerry, I don’t find the movie all that scary either. There’s just this very staid quality to it; it has none of the book’s fervor or urgency. The only real draw is the cast, which includes Fred Astaire and Melvyn Douglas. It would be the final film for both of them.
As Gerry says, “Fred Astaire is a name that brings only joy; one would have to be a soulless, heartless husk of a person not to smile at the very thought of Astaire, even those who (wrongly) preferred Gene Kelly.” Spindly, elegant, delightful Fred Astaire starring in a supernatural horror film with a deeply unpleasant story line. I don’t think Ghost Story was much of a departure for debonair, wry Melvyn Douglas.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the book either. It’s not an easy read — winding long passages and lots of irrelevant details. But it’s downright frightening. Reading it at midnight was not a good idea for me, personally. I’m glad I did read it though after it came so highly recommended in Dream Girl. Also, my favorite character was Sears James — I have an affinity for grumpy old men. And Ghost Story has a wealth of allusions to classic Hollywood. I knew I was in good hands when characters were compared to Orson Welles (that’s Sears), Peter Lorre and Cary Grant only pages and even paragraphs apart.
There’s one passage I found so enchanting, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The woman at the center of Ghost Story is the praying mantis or vampire that Gerry fears. She goes by different names, wears different exteriors, travels through time, and always she is hunting. How do you destroy a woman like that? How does Aubrey, a figment of one man’s imagination, become flesh?
“Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination. In the places of your dreams.”
Aren’t movies themselves ghost stories? Particularly the old ones where the people in them have died. But of course when I’m watching them, I’m not thinking very hard about the person no longer being on earth.
Do you know, Warner Baxter is one of my movie crushes, and he died a year before my mother was born. This is one pitfall to being a connoisseur of classic cinema. A lot of these people have lived entire lifetimes, and off screen, your time with them is very brief.
I can never write letters to Sidney Poitier and Olivia de Havilland now. There’s a bit of poetry in my unsent letter to Margaret O’Brien that I think would bring her joy.
I too fall in love with all of them once they get on the screen. Nothing else! Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!
All else fades, but those faces are forever.