Fenced in, stuck on a rung of the social ladder, the Pang-bornian man has no appetite for change. Like most children he prefers sameness, routine, consistency. This, too, I understand. Repetition is the essence of meaning. Without it we are lost. But taken to its extreme, a love of system becomes absurd. Franklin Pangborn played a man who worshipped the system in which he found himself, a system ruled by that Manichaean American divinity, its God and its Satan: money. Money haunts Pangborns character in most of his movies. He does not have much of it himself, but he is victim to its charms, part of its overriding machinery, and overly impressed by its power. The quintessential manager, he’s a dupe of the rich. In another Preston Sturges film, Christmas in July, Pangborn plays the manager of a department store, eager to please the hero and his girlfriend, who falsely think themselves newly rich and go on a shopping spree. The manager shows them a bed, a piece of furniture outfitted with an elaborate mechanism that will afford them every convenience at the touch of a button. Pangborn unfolds this wonder of American consumerism, and then in a voice at once elevated, proper, and obsequious he says, “And then on the morrow, …” He presses the proverbial button and the bed collapses back into itseif.
I realize that it is not only the character of Pangborn that I am attached to but the fact that he appeared in Hollywood movies during an era when dialogue still played a prominent role in the making of films, when the archaic expression “on the morrow” could be written for a laugh, when W.C, Fields could throw away a line in homage to Little Dorrit, when a Weenie King could soliloquize on his love for dirt, cyclones, and disease. It is rare now that a studio movie gives us much dialogue of any sort, and when it does, it is inevitably a language without much history, a language afraid of reference lest its audience not understand, a language deadened by the politics of the committee and the test screening. And as I bemoan this, I know full well that studios ran then and run now on an idea that is populist at heart; to get the largest number of people into the theater to see a movie that will please all or almost all — eggheads and curmudgeons excluded. But even in bad movies of the Pangborn period, talk played a larger role than it does now. I miss talk in the movies.
And the fact is that when I leave my house in Brooklyn and I listen to people in the streets, to their locutions and their diction, to their phrases and sentences, they bear little resemblance to what 1 hear on-screen in “big” movies. People in my neighborhood are prey to all kinds of grandiose expressions, to malapropisms, and to flourishes of the tongue. The other day I heard a woman say to another woman, “He’s nothing but a little,” she paused, “a little blurb.” A man sitting outside the Korean grocery in my neighborhood was musing aloud about the word humanism. “You call that humanism, humanistic, human beingness,” he roared at anyone who would listen. Years ago, an old man sat in the Fifty-ninth Street subway station and sang out a sequence of beautiful words: “Cop-pelia. Episcopalian, echolalia. …” He had a resonant, stentorian voice that still rings in my ears. Once in La Bagel Delight, a local deli, I garbled my words and asked the man behind the counter for a cinnamon Reagan bagel. He looked at me and said, “We don’t have any of those, but I’ll give you a pumper-Nixon.” Wit and wonder live on in everyday speech. They merely go untapped in Hollywood.
The truth is that the world and our fantasies often overlap. Franklin Pangborn’s character, that meticulous, preening stuffed shirt, is not only a fiction of the screen. Once, with my own eyes, I saw his reincarnation. Several years ago, my husband and I were in Paris. He had some business there, and we were put up in a grand old hotel near the Louvre. It happened that the French actor Gerard Depardieu had taken it into his head to meet my husband, and a rendezvous was arranged in the hotel lobby. Depardieu’s name had well before then become synonymous with French movies. It seemed to me that every French film I saw had that man in it. His fame was incontrovertible. The actor entered the hotel. Unlike many movie stars, he did not disappoint off the screen. He is a very large man, a formidable man, and he burns with energy. Clad in a leather jacket, his motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm, he headed toward us, his gait determined but galumphing. Depardieu exuded nothing so much as testosterone, an unvarnished, out-of-the-street maleness that, to be honest, bowled me over. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the manager of the hotel notice who had just entered his establishment. Visible but controlled excitement could be seen on his features. His face made it eminently clear that the closer Depardieu came to us, the higher our status rose in that hotel. His sharp eyes never left the celebrity. The actor arrived at our table in the lobby. He greeted my husband, the two other people with us, and me. I remember that he boomed my name with pleasure, shook my hand with the powerful grip I had expected, and seated himself. The maitre d’hôtel rushed over. Posture erect, chin up, scrupulously attired in his expensive dark suit and elegant tie, he tried to maintain his equanimity. He did not succeed. In his joy he began to flap his arms just a little, as if he were trying to propel himself off the ground. Then, with a dignified nod of his head in the direction of the famous one, he asked him for his drink order. Mr. Depardieu casually ordered a glass of red wine. The manager turned abruptly on his heels and speed-walked off to get it. He did not take anybody else’s order. He forgot us.
As I watched him leave, I thought of Franklin Pangborn. Franklin Pangborn had been reborn in that hotel lobby, and I was there to witness his inspired silliness. The poor manager behaved in a ridiculous manner, but I felt sorry for him, too. He had breached his own rigorous standards of etiquette and had made a fool of himself. But then we all make fools of ourselves from time to time. And that, I suppose, is at the bottom of this rambling but sincerely felt tribute to the Pangbornian.
1998
Eight Days in a Corset
LAST SUMMER, I WORKED AS AN EXTRA IN THE FILM VERSION of Henry James’s novel Washington Square. I am not an actress. Agnieszka Holland, the director, is a friend of my husband’s and mine, and the person she was really interested in was our daughter, Sophie, who was cast as one of Mrs. Almond’s children. Under a blasting June sun, Sophie and I arrived in Baltimore for a fitting. Sophie was dressed first, and she looked as pretty as a young heroine in any book. One of the two wardrobe women handed me a corset, a hoopskirt, and a petticoat, which I put on, and then she tightened my stays. They searched for a dress long enough to fit me, and I climbed into it in front of a long, wide mirror in the changing room.
Within a few minutes, I felt faint. I began to suffer from the feeling I always have when I am faint — acute embarrassment. This time there was the added burden of fear: that I would crash to the floor in front of my eight-year-old daughter. I began to sway, dropped, but did not black out. I wish I could say that they cried, “Loosen her stays!” hurried out for smelling salts, and waved my ashen face with a fan. But they didn’t. They kindly brought me water and grapes as I recovered. I joked about filling the role too well, about becoming in a matter of minutes the classic image of a swooning nineteenth-century lady, and yet I don’t believe it was the corset. I had almost fainted in front of a mirror once before — in a yoga class. That time I was wearing dance tights and a sweatshirt. My teacher was correcting my posture, and without warning I collapsed and found myself breathing deeply with my head between my knees.
Mirrors are where I check myself — for parsley stuck in my teeth, for blemishes and dirty hair — where I ponder which shoes go with which dress. But every once in a while, they become something more than that — the site of a body I know will eventually give up the ghost. As in fairy tales and folklore, the mirror displays for an instant my ghost double, and I don’t like seeing her. It is a moment when I am a stranger to myself. But a foreign reflection in a mirror is not always a shock. There is something appealing about transformations, and clothes are the fastest route to leaping out of your own life and into someone else’s. The whalebone corset I wore for eight days catapulted me into another time and another aesthetic, and I liked it.