Gotham Diary:
Monty Python at home
4 March 2014
Even a day later, we were so traumatized by Kim Novak that we were still talking about “work.”
Kathleen and I know nothing about cosmetic surgery — nothing — except, of course, what we can see with our own eyes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We have drawn two inferences from this experience. First, that surgeons have gotten better at what they do (especially when this means that they don’t); second, that some people respond better to cosmetic procedures than other people do.
“Take Steve Martin,” I said last night, as we were rehashing the subject. Kathleen was getting ready for bed, slipping in and out of her bathroom. “Steve Martin looks better than ever.” It’s true. Mr Martin is really quite distinctly more classically handsome now than he was thirty years ago — a fact brought home with force by a recent re-viewing of an old Carol Burnett show. Over time, his features have grown more regular, his face more lean and fit. Perhaps he has no one to thank but Mother Nature. Assuming that this is not the case, we may conclude that the actor has benefited from a course of small, effective operations.
“What about Clint Eastwood?” Kathleen asked. “Do you think that he has had work?”
No, I did not. I didn’t think, that is. There’s no need, when you’re rehashing. Clint Eastwood is a member of my Pretty Boy Trinity. The others are Nick Nolte and Harrison Ford. When you look at photos of these actors taken in their twenties, before they became famous, they’re disturbingly baby-faced, almost queasily beautiful. It was only after time (Mother Nature) was allowed to rough them up a bit that their faces suited their otherwise manly personas. Now, of course, they are obviously reveling in being crusty old patriarchs.
“What about Paul Newman? He was really cute when he was young.”
“That’s true,” I replied. “But Paul Newman always had the eyes of a predator.”
What I meant by this, I think, was that Paul Newman, from the start, looked as though he had been transfigured by an encounter with the transcendent — in the form of a cosmic joke. He had only one way of sharing this joke, and that was to look at you with his still, dancing eyes. “Predator” wasn’t the right word, but perhaps it came to me because I was thinking of the woman with the ice cream in her purse. Have you ever heard the story about the woman who was so flustered by the sight of Paul Newman in person while waiting for an ice cream cone that when she paid and took her change, she couldn’t find the cone? Until the actor very gently told her that she had put it in her handbag.
What an exalted topic to be writing about! But that’s the glorious freedom of blogging, and I’m lucky that Kathleen is second to none in her belief that, if I’m writing about something, then it must be worth writing about.
At the same time, she clearly thinks that I’m a complete idiot, because she said, “What do you mean, ‘Paul Newman has the eyes of a creditor’?”
“‘Predator’!”
We laughed for a moment about that. I can’t believe that Kathleen thinks I say these things. “Well, it did sound a little odd,” she said. But what she never does say is, “I must have misheard you — could you repeat that?” She assumes that I have said something absurd.
“Paul Newman would have laughed at ‘creditor’,” I ventured, “given that his father ran a hardware store.” Don’t ask me why I thought any such thing. Standards are never very high in connubial rehashings.
Kathleen was half in, half out of her bathroom. “What do you mean, ‘Paul Newman’s father ran Harvard’?” She sounded alarmed. She might not have any idea what the eyes of a creditor would look like, but she knew a thing or two about Harvard.
Who needs work?