Notes on Five Men
Erica Jong
Lets get it straight at the outset: I know none of these men as men. All I know about them is the image they project to me as a female moviegoer curled into her own fantasies in the womblike dark of the movie house. On the rare occasions I’ve met movie stars, the first thing that has always struck me was how much shorter they were than I expected. That enormous screen blows up one’s expectations as well as the celluloid images it projects. But these are five men who apparently trigger the fantasies of millions. So let me attempt to free-associate a bit from one woman’s point of view.
After sitting through Cat on a Hot Tin Roof no less than six times at the Radio City Music Hall when I was a high-school student, nobody has to explain Paul Newman’s charm to me. It was the scene where he kissed Maggie the Cat’s (Liz Taylor’s) bodiless nightgown that made me cream in my jeans every time. So near, yet so far. At fifteen, I understood. Or thought I did. All his winking at Redford in The Sting never did that for me. Oh for a man who’d hug my nightgown when he couldn’t hug me! And oh for some more movies with enough females in them to warrant nightgowns! Anyway, thank you, Paul Newman, for that particular objective correlative.
H e looks like a wily street kid, the kind who’d survive any war or famine. Tender, tough.
You feel he’d sell his grandmother for an idea—if it was an idea whose time had come. Still, he’s hard to type. Pacino has what Keats called “negative capability”—that knack for slipping into other souls: the earmark of a great artist. Witness his transition in The Godfather from sensitive Michael Corleone to Mafia chieftain. Will he ever slip into my soul, that is the question.
Wo has the bluest eyes: Newman or McQueen? It’s difficult to say, but McQueen’s twinkle more. He makes me think of all those leathery-necked cowboys at remote truck stops in Nevada. Does he wear pointy boots? And does he take them off when he screws? I have never had experience with boot men, so I can’t tell. He seems to have a lot of teeth—a set and a half at least— and I like that. Men who bite are okay, as long as they bite with their own teeth. Gently.
JL he Ur-Wasp manqué. Where would Redford be without his moles? They make him almost human. If he had a pimple, I might even believe he was real. A sweet man, a martyred star, thoroughly beautiful, and (to me) virtually sexless. He is the best kind of star: he doesn’t act like one. But on the screen, I never forget he is Redford. His Gatsby was so wrong it sent me back to reread the book. No decent novelist would invent anyone that blond, that beautiful, that beamish, that perennially boyish. Only God (who is a second-rate novelist, after all) would dare.
WJometimes I think he is the hero of all the Polack jokes. Sometimes I think people love him like they love s-m novels. Yet, in his films, he has the animal grace and magnetism of a younger Brando. One part Neanderthal. One part Super Daddy. One part little boy lost. Truly a man of parts. Why did people stand up and cheer when he killed those muggers in Death Wish? Defending the honor of the bourgeoisie? God knows we bourgeoisie could use it. Charles Bronson is the only man in the world who can murder twelve men and still seem sweet
