Love in the Afternoon (1957)
Yes yes, he’s just too old. Gary Cooper was 56, and he was making love to a 28 year old Audrey Hepburn. The censors balked, and Billy Wilder added an uncharacteristic line for a Parisian playboy “I just can seem to get to first base with her” which is hard to believe after several scenes which fade on Audrey Hepburn dropping a piece of clothing onto the floor. But this is movie confectionary. However there is one lovely thing; Gary Cooper is the kind of lover who carries with him a four man gypsy orchestra, and the only song they seem to know is “Fascination.’ My favourite Noel Coward line ‘extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ applies here: indeed musical magician Franz Waxman has come up with at least 20 different way to bewitch us with that song; it says something about his artistry in a movie this inept that ‘Fascination’ sometimes moved me to tears. (Or it says something about me.) The movie isn’t really inept; but Gary Cooper is, and I never thought he could act. But Audrey Hepburn’s artistry is quite unique and indescribable. Everything she does is precious but somehow honest too. In Love in the Afternoon she seems to be auditioning for Breakfast at Tiffany’s — there’s a little girl smugness; a cute game she seems to be playing with herself, and it’s something we all do — that is, pretend that our emotions are important. And when we pretend in that way, they suddenly seem to be. The only vaguely interesting idea in this movie is also the only gay thing in it. I know — I’m on about that again. What has happened to me in these ‘late blogs’? Why am I going on about gay gay gay? Aren’t you sick of it? Well it’s because gay is over — and it ended long before COVID-19. The idea that there might be a way of looking at the world in a camp or queer way, is presently so old-fashioned it's embarrassing. I remember sitting at a gay bar beside some drunk in the late 80s, watching a video of Divine from Pink Flamingos, and the drunk said “thank God we’ve left all that behind .” (Am I repeating myself? I’ve written so many of these friggin’ blogs I’m not sure.) Well gay is plainly over and no one has any patience anymore for the idea we are oppressed, or that a culture has developed out of that oppression. But in case you haven’t figured it out, I'm clinging onto this sinking ship as if it was Cleopatra's barge, and when I’m dead my friends will say —'Remember Sky? He was so gay — even up to the very end —when gay was over — and absolutely no one was listening.' Well, the gayest thing about this movie is jealousy. It’s the only thing Love in the Afternoon has to offer really. Hepburn can’t get the elderly Cooper to fall in love with her. (Apparently Wilder used every trick he could to hide Coop’s age, at one point he photographed him through a curtain reflected in a window, and yes he looks better, but only because you can’t see him. Well let’s just suspend that disbelief, let’s say Hepburn has a grand-daddy fetish. Stranger things have happened, see blog #82) So Hepburn tries to make Cooper jealous. She leaves him a tape recording in which she recites long list of made-up and quite unlikely lovers, some of them quite fanciful (a Dutch alcoholic, a mountain climber with dimpled knees, etc) to drive Cooper crazy. He begins by laughing, but soon he’s sucked in and it’s not long before he’s getting drunk and breaking things. Of course straight people torture each other with jealousy too — but we homosexuals make a career of it. I think it’s partially because our relationships tend possibly to be open, whereas for straights that’s a nightmare not to be imagined. This was Albee’s betrayal in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Bette Davis wouldn’t play the role because she didn’t want to play a fag (and how wonderful it would have been to hear her quote ‘What a dump!” from her own movie Beyond the Forest!). But she got it right, George and Martha are George and Martin, and they are gay as the day — which Albee hated anyone saying — but he’s dead so we can say anything we want. You know the only way they could drag Albee out of the closet was to catch him doing it with some guy in a sand dune — and he claimed he was just shaking the sand out of his bathing suit. I should forgive him, and I do, for his personal difficulties; but not his authorial ones. It’s not like Blanche in Streetcar, she is a woman — don’t you dare call her a man in drag! But Martha is exactly that. We’ve all known blousy drunken loud horny women (some of my best friends…) but there is something about Martha that transcends the female gender. Or maybe it’s the sexist nature of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; for ultimately though she taunts her nerdy husband, she finally submits to him. If it had been the other way around I would have believed this was a straight couple, because we all know the dirty secret of heterosexuality is that women — although they have little or no power in the ‘real’ world, run everything else — which means the bedroom and the heart. If Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a gay play, then it wouldn’t be sexist when George dominates Martha/Martin, and their fantasy baby would make sense, since I think that’s what most gay men are doing now when they adopt children — is having fantasy babies. (Uh-oh, I’m going to get in trouble for that. I know a couple in Hamilton who bought two kids and then returned them — as the kids were too much trouble. I think straight people have children for all the wrong reasons, why should gay people be any different?) Anyway I was on about jealousy and I got lost in Edward Albee. Jealousy is the thing that makes me know that I love — the man I love —more than anything, because I can’t rid myself of it, even after all these years. But the thing you might not understand is that it’s not his body that I covet, but his soul. They can’t take that away from me, as the song says, or they better not, because it’s ‘all I got’ and all that matters really — or haven’t you figured that out yet? That’s it’s only the soul that matters? Oh by the way that's a gay thing that you might be able to ‘learn’ from us; but I won’t be so presumptuous as to presume you might want to — as gay is over, and in the gay sense, so am I.
