Dear Diary: True Love
As you know, I like to watch movies in the kitchen, while I’m cooking. And, because I’m cooking, “listening” would be a much better word. The movies are always so familiar that I don’t need to look at them, and, anyway, it’s the voices that stir me. But tonight, for editorial reasons, I was actually looking at the screen, and seeing something that I wouldn’t have heard.
Yesterday, I found myself watching The Philadelphia Story. I had been watching Cary Grant movies, but The Philadelphia Story took me off in a new direction: I wanted to see High Society next. High Society is the musical version of The Philadelphia Story, and I have always thought that Grace Kelly’s was incredibly courageous to take on the part of Tracy Lord. Impersonating Katharine Hepburn, the actress for whom the part was written — the actress who, being not so unlike Tracy Lord in real life that she couldn’t buy the rights to Philip Barry’s play — and in a musical in which she doesn’t sing much: either great nerve or dumb determination. I haven’t researched the matter, but one assumes that, if Katharine Hepburn owned the rights, then she must have approved of Grace Kelly. Which makes High Society impressive for Hepburn as well.
I was weeping during the Overture. The movie hadn’t even begun, and tears were pouring out of my eyes. But those tears were different from the ones that cascaded during “True Love,” the musical’s interpolation in which Tracy remembers her honeymoon with Dexter on the True Love. I have always thought that “True Love” is one of the most beautiful songs in the world, but that’s because I was a defenceless kid when I heard it the first time. Later, I came to find the scene sort of tacky. The color is too vivid, and the scene is too obviously shot in a studio, not on a boat. This is a charge that can be leveled at the entire movie, but “True Love” is extraordinarily romantic: you want it to be right. Tonight, though, I decided, that it’s just fine.
I changed my mind because what I saw on screen wasn’t some dream of love that it would be nice to encounter in some ideal world, but an exact impression of the wonder of being married to Kathleen for years and years. (You’ll pardon my taking the Bingle’s POV). I’m not going to say that Kathleen would be mistaken for Grace Kelly even when she was 26. But she moves just like Grace Kelly, and she always has. And she is in fact the smart loving woman that Kelly is pretending to be.
True love is the most delicate, breakable object in the world, and even after thirty years it cannot be taken for granted. Even after a hundred, I’m sure — could it be put to that test. But when true love has lasted for thirty years, you look at a scene like the one in High Society and you don’t say, “it’s just the movies.” You say, hey, this really happens. And the tears pour out of your eyes.
