Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939)
It took an Andy Hardy movie. I don’t know if I’ve ever really watched one from beginning to end.
I spoke about Mickey Rooney — as a sex object at age 24 (see blog #75)— but here at age 19 I became him, he was me. I guess it’s always spring fever where I’m concerned. It’s always love, because I have not entirely discarded the breathless wonder I discovered when I first came out, when every man I had sex with was the real thing; like Andy Hardy I mistook each puppy-like obsession — even simple body worship — for the fulfillment of a hidden longing. What never ceases to confound me is the notion that one must have a feeling of emptiness after a promiscuous encounter. When a pale, tall, handsome youth walked into my room the other night at the baths —and this young God acted as if our intimacy was the most normal thing in the world — I felt as Andy Hardy feels about his teacher, Miss Meredith. (Played by Helen Gilbert — she has the same name as my grandmother, and my grandmother too, was a teacher.) I’m touched by all this (I’m somewhat ashamed to say) -- by a friggin’ Andy Hardy movie. And it isn’t just the foolish, fond early forays into lovemaking, it’s the ridiculous bravado he displays when he imagines he has grown up. What a treat to see Mickey Rooney come bounding down to dinner in a suit and tie with a bad British accent -- because he has been chosen to write the school play, and suddenly thinks he's Noel Coward. The voice Rooney takes out of his back pocket is very odd and very funny — a forced baritone his sister describes ‘like molasses running down the stairs.” Later too, after Mickey comes to terms with his unrequited love for Helen, he swaggers about in a very wise and world-weary way. He waves a rose in Helen’s face saying: “I’m going to keep this all my life. When it gets old and withered it will remind me of you.” And when he turns up at a party with friends his own age, he intones “I hope you children are enjoying your games.” All this, even in its ridiculous exaggeration, is accurate. But that's not what made me cry. Mickey Rooney writes a play, and it’s called ‘Adrift in Tahiti.’ He plays a ‘Rear Admiral’ while his usual adolescent paramour in these movies — Polly (Ann Rutherford) — plays ‘Tahoolah.’ The details of the play are beyond imagining; the best part is when the Rear Admiral rejects Tahoolah and she jumps into a volcano. There is a moon — which a boy with the unlikely name of ‘Stickin’ Plaster’ (Terry Kilburn) — is tasked with guiding smoothly across the sky; he messes it up, and is contrite, and the audience laughs. Mickey calls his masterpiece a ‘spiritual play of loves and renunciations.” His inspiration for writing it is scorn and rejection (I identify). He says: “A man isn’t altogether to blame when he finds he’s developing into the sensitive type.” (Again, I identify.) Mickey’s biggest problem though is the burning question — are there actually volcanos in Tahiti? This kind of question has plagued writers from the dawn of time; but Mickey doesn’t let something as frail and unconvincing as reality stop him. It is right that Tahoolah should jump into a volcano, and so she does. It is a fantasy performed in front of other people; it is as far from reality as anything can be, except that when we experience that fantasy with others, it becomes a reality of its own. You see -- in 1939 people still did that. Nothing makes me sadder than theatres in Toronto sending out press releases about the latest digital performances — "The Resiliance Project, "Alone Together""Let's Stay Together." I saw an image from Toronto of a bunch of people doing Yoga — all separately of course, in little plastic bubbles, each bubble with its own fan and Kleenex box, it really was too tragic. I don’t mean to be funny about this, because it really is ominous; watching us abandon experience as a necessary and redeeming thing. At the end of Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever Mickey and Helen sit outside. and there are crickets. Yes, there is nature, yes, you can always go up to the cottage and sit by yourself and have that. (And at this time of year I eat dusk, because dusks disappear -- the change of light in the afternoon on a cold winter day is not the same). But because we are human real experience involves live human beings who are, yes, no doubt, spraying their infectious germs on us. Those videos we keep seeing (often they are animations) in which masses of particulate are expelled when you speak or sneeze — or especially sing (singing apparently is the worst, far more toxic even than the COVID itself) — these images teach us to fear embodied experience. But it’s not just closeness — it’s shared experience in time. May I briefly, mourn for it? That’s what a play is, it only happens once in that particular way, and you experience it with other people, and the actors never do it the same way twice. (As actors know, some nights you are carried away by the audience, other nights you fight them. Either way, it’s alive, like Rosemary’s baby.) Last night I was standing outside Stock, a gay strip bar in Montreal. It was ‘ladies night,’ my favorite. There was the usual old guy dancing by himself — he just does that — from ecstasy (the feeling, not the drug). Only this time some of the patrons were gesturing for him to move away (COVID, you know). But nothing could stop all the crazy-screaming-out-of-control women in tiny leather skirts and shorts. They were in their element — ‘this is our place, is our bar, we’ve scared most of the men out for once!’ (Except the brave ones like me.) And outside was one of the tallest drag queens I have ever seen, she wore nearly foot-high platform heels. And she was beautiful, and she had a Chihuahua. And then another drag queen — not quite as tall, or quite as beautiful — joined her — and she too had a Chihuahua, and they spoke of them. Of Chihuahuas. In Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever, early on, there is a discussion about how to spell the word ‘weird.’ Well, one spells it like this.
