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We are twelve, and these are some of our choices: “Dawn of the Dead,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Hair,” “The China Syndrome,” “The Champ,” “A Little Romance,” “Superman,” “Love at First Bite,” “Blazing Saddles.” All options are on the table, even though I’m small for my age and obviously box in the PG weight class. But this is Manhattan, April, 1979, and the rating hardly matters. Pick any adult in line, ask them to be Mom or Dad for a minute, and they’ll oblige. “Hardcore” with George C. Scott? Sure, kid, why not? And you think the person in the ticket booth cares, at the Beekman, at the Quad? This particular era of New York isn’t exactly rules-based. In our pockets we carry a couple of bucks, offerings for the privilege of walking down the street, a.k.a. mug money, while tucked into our socks is the real deal: the ten-dollar bill our parents gave us for the weekend—Here you go, now disappear. Two-fifty will get us in the lobby, plus another three for the large bucket of buttered popcorn and the Coke and the carton of Milk Duds that we’ll dump into the popcorn because we understand the finer things. But what to see? That’s the question.
Most of my friends are already future men, so they’ll vote for “The Deer Hunter” (and, for months afterward, they’ll impersonate the horrific Russian-roulette scene by screaming “Di di mau!” at one another). But me? I’m still recovering from “Burnt Offerings,” which my older brother had somehow convinced me was a Burt Reynolds retrospective instead of a creepfest starring Oliver Reed and Karen Black, with a frightening assist from Bette Davis. I discovered that I am not made for scary stuff. This is hardly a surprise, since I’m a well-known wimp who has long assumed that his cause of death will be axe-murdered in bed. No, I know what movie I’m going to see, and—sorry, fellas—it doesn’t involve Vietnam.
Cue Vivaldi and me scampering down Lex.
•
I am heading to the neighborhood I remember as Burger Heaven, as Bloomingdale’s, as Disc-O-Mat, my goal being the Sutton, on Fifty-seventh, where “A Little Romance” is on the marquee. I am here because our art teacher from Buckley School, Mr. Hill, is an extra in this movie, showing up in the background of an early Parisian-café scene: he sits with a woman, and the two of them have to pretend to be deep in conversation, though neither spoke the other’s language. That’s what Mr. Hill reported back to us, how they had to mime understanding and drink a hundred cups of prop coffee. He’d never been so jittery and so awkwardly bored.
Mr. Hill has a sneaky sense of humor, what we will come to recognize as dry—or droll, if we’re feeling fancy—but back then is confounding in the most delightful way. Is Mr. Hill being serious? we often wonder. Because he appears serious, with the stone-faced elegance of Buster Keaton as played by Fred Astaire. His posture is pinky-raised, his chin never dipping below the horizon. When we misbehave, he calls us wretched children, which is thrilling since we are wretched children. Farts are the ne plus ultra of our repartee. Burping on command also slays. And, when in doubt, there’s always violence: a dead arm or a dead leg, a grind of knuckles, a well-rendered slap. Pushing someone down the stairs is the height of hilarity. Since we are Buckley boys, our uniform is blazer and necktie; we are businessmen in miniature, baby bankers and baby lawyers. We know in our Upper East Side hearts that forty minutes a week with Mr. Hill means nothing in the grand scheme except for a few rolled-up sheets of paper that we will use as swords and then hand to Mom like runners in a relay race. Mr. Hill knows this as well. He’s no fool, with his pomaded hair, pocket-combed. He’s no tyrant, either, though the art studio is most definitely his domain: the shelves loaded with bottles of precious paint that we activate with a very specific number of shakes; the industrial-style sink with multiple faucets and explicit instructions on how to properly clean the brushes (never use hot water and always rub the bristles instead of stabbing them against the basin, our preferred method); the desk tucked in the far corner with its turrets of clothbound books—this is Mr. Hill’s private garret, invitation only. At the beginning of class, he’ll put on a cassette of classical music and then scan our faces, trying to decide who he might pick as his model. The pause can seem endless until:
Adam, come back here.
Robert, come back here.
William, come back here.
We are all desperate to be called.
•
“A Little Romance” is about the budding love between a rich American girl (Diane Lane), living in Paris and a cinema-loving French boy (Thelonious Bernard) from La Garenne, i.e., the wrong side of the voie ferrée. These impressionable young teens befriend a kindly widower named Julius (Laurence Olivier), who we later discover is a minor con man and pickpocket. Over hot chocolate and pastries, he recounts the sweet, if fraudulent, story of his marriage—the girl is charmed, the boy less so. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is also mentioned, along with an old Venetian legend which says if two lovers kiss in a gondola under the Bridge of Sighs at sunset when the bells of the Campanile toll, they will love each other forever.
It is during this scene that Mr. Hill looms behind Laurence Olivier’s left shoulder. He’s onscreen for less than a minute.
•
Mr. Hill is in “A Little Romance” because his older brother directed “A Little Romance.” His brother is George Roy Hill, and he’s directed some modern classics, like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting” (which won him an Academy Award), along with the lesser-known gem “The World of Henry Orient.” When “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was rereleased in the summer of 1974, I went with my friends and my older brother and his friends, all of us Buckley boys, our existence as tightly sealed as a can of Wilson tennis balls. I was seven. It was my first grownup movie. My mother prepared me, not for the gunslinging or the kissing but for a word I would hear when Butch and Sundance, in order to avoid certain capture, jump from a cliff into a river below. They’re going to scream something, my mother told me, something naughty and for adults only. (She had my attention.) Shit, she said. They’re going to scream “Shit,” which means poop, but you’ll never hear a nice old lady say, “Oh, look at that dog shit on the street.” I nodded, duly warned. So in the theatre, when the posse has our heroes boxed in and Sundance is scared because he can’t swim, and, boy oh boy, can I sympathize and am curious if he’s also petrified of moths and bees, and then Sundance gets ready and starts to go Ooooohhhhhhhh, and I get ready because I know that this naughty, for-adults-only word is fast approaching, a word that dummy me has already forgotten, but all I hear as Butch and Sundance run and leap and fall is a regular old yell. Wait, did I miss it? This important word I was promised? Because I needed all the words I could get.
But the George Roy Hill movie we Buckley boys really adore is “Slap Shot.” To us, this ice-hockey comedy is a masterpiece. The Charlestown Chiefs. The Hanson brothers. The bench-clearing brawls. And all those naughty, for-adults-only words, some in unimagined combinations, others in need of further clarification (the rare time we happily consulted the dictionary). It seems impossible that our Mr. Hill could be related to this fabulous filth, our Mr. Hill who is far more Windsor knot than shoulder pads. We tease him about his degenerate brother and threaten to quote a few choice bits. You should never be crude for crudeness’s sake, Mr. Hill once told us. Use words wisely, particularly the bad ones. He also informed us that the human body has no straight lines—whatever that meant we had no idea, since most of us trafficked in stick figures, but Mr. Hill is a mystery, like the ghost of a boy who has grown up in a world we cannot see. He is strange without being strange. Ephemeral-seeming. A figure of immediate distance.
When Mr. Hill appears, around the twenty-five-minute mark of “A Little Romance,” it’s a thrill: there he is, in a stylish tan suit, a crisp white shirt, and a silk tie, cornflower blue. He’s almost fifty, though for us that number has no significance; his age is simply Old. In about three years, when we’re in the ninth grade, Mr. Hill will get sick. Cancer, we are told. A classmate’s mother will suggest that he draw something for the poor man, you know, to cheer him up, and, decades later, this classmate will discover the drawing—a maudlin picture of a sunset—among his late mother’s personal effects. (Moms and how they try to save us.) But in “A Little Romance” Mr. Hill is alive and in the pink, talking without talking to that woman who will never understand him.
•
“A Little Romance” comes after “Slap Shot” in the George Roy Hill canon, and it’s hard to imagine two movies less alike. Where “Slap Shot” is explicit and unrestrained, “A Little Romance” is sweet and earnest, a tale about a lovestruck girl and boy, precociously matched in their adolescence—ugh, how my pre-teen self hates that word, much like I hate commercials for acne, or any mention of “pimples” or, by far the worst, “puberty,” what with its pubic connotations. Most of my friends seem already halfway to hairy, and I know this summer I’ll be confronted with armpits and those enviable wisps and tufts, as these friends take any opportunity to hang from something, shirtless, just hang there, these monkey boys, and I’ll try not to notice, but I’ll notice, and I’ll feel strange for noticing, and feel even stranger for noticing those trails that lead down from their belly buttons, like smoke signals from the land of dick. It is a confusing envy.
•
Lauren is the name of the American girl. She’s first seen, Balthus-like, in a chair, reading Heidegger, meaning she’s super-smart—she’s also bored, because her superficial mother has dragged her to watch a movie getting filmed at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte. Lauren wears a kilt and blazer and sports long hair that falls with spaniel cuteness—my God, is Diane Lane beautiful, a spark made flesh. She resembles so many of the private-school girls in my zone of interest, those Chapin girls, Spence girls, Brearley girls, whose complexions glow with just the right blend of Noxzema and Stridex, the Jennifers and Melissas and Amandas who wait on certain corners for certain boys, angling their bodies the same way they’ll soon hold cigarettes. They’re worldly within forty blocks. Come eighth grade, they’ll talk about going to the Studio or Xenon while I might mention catching the latest Kiss video on MTV.
Diane Lane herself is a native Upper East Sider, and maybe that’s why she fits the bill so well—in fact, she grew up not far from the Sutton Theatre. But she’s more bohemian than brat, living in a residential hotel with her dad, an acting coach turned cabdriver, and starting her stage career at the age of six. By twelve, she was in “The Cherry Orchard” at Lincoln Center with Irene Worth and Meryl Streep; meanwhile, I was learning the foxtrot at the Knickerbocker Cotillion with Andy King and Teddy Whittemore. “A Little Romance” is Diane Lane’s film début. She squints when she smiles, her slightly adenoidal voice and pallid complexion giving the impression of her being allergic to everything but you. Seeing her, I feel dopey. A slight scar cuts near the far corner of her right eye; the injury seems almost prenatal, like a tear dragged over from the other side, bluntly shimmering. How I wish I were that boy from La Garenne.
•
There’s a moment in the movie “The Philadelphia Story” (the moment also occurs in the film’s musical doppelgänger, “High Society”) where Dinah, the younger sister of Tracy (Katharine Hepburn), tells reporters from Spy magazine that her early childhood was spent in Paris, where her father worked at a bank, “the house of Morgan.” Dinah stretches the pronunciation of “Morgan” into obnoxious lockjaw territory; in fairness, she’s trying to be repellent, prancing about with all the charm of a finger slipping down a throat. One of the Spy reporters (James Stewart) calls her an idiot. Well, Dinah, c’est moi. I was born at the American Hospital in Neuilly, my father, a Buckley boy himself, having been transferred to help open the first European office for Morgan Stanley. My family lived on the Villa Saïd, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, for almost three years, but, unlike Dinah, I never did learn the language. By all accounts, I wasn’t much of a talker. Once we returned to New York, it became clear that I was delayed, partly from those years abroad, but mostly because I was dyslexic, which was eventually discovered, though not before a certain narrative became established in my mind: I was indeed an idiot. Perhaps a big one. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t spell. I was easily confused and often embarrassed. I seemed to do everything wrong.
•
Thelonious Bernard is Daniel, the boy from La Garenne. This is also his first movie (and will end up being his second to last). Reportedly, he was spotted while playing soccer and George Roy Hill decided that he’d be perfect in the role, even though Thelo spoke little English and had never acted before—no matter, he’d stay at the director’s home for a month and learn both. “A Little Romance” begins with Daniel in a theatre watching a movie, and not just any movie but “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and not just any scene but that scene where Butch and Sundance jump from the cliff into the river below—merde. Daniel is entranced. And later on, when Daniel and Lauren, with Julius’s help, have run away to Venice in order to enact the legend of that sunset kiss under the Bridge of Sighs, the pair seek refuge at a matinée of “The Sting.” Daniel is entranced once again, but this time he has a partner with him. When we see them next, they’re rising from the floor of the balcony, awakened from a nap by pistol shots, and there’s a flash of blood on the screen: Robert Redford dead/not dead. The two of them are not postcoital, but perhaps they’re post-cinema. Because what are movies, after all, but a means of seduction? It’s practically a cliché. And what are we to make of these George Roy Hill productions embedded within the universe of “A Little Romance”? What does this say about Daniel and Lauren’s existence? Are we to imagine, by extension, or by possible future reduction, that “A Little Romance” will someday screen in front of their own eyes? Will they wonder, What were we? What are we now? And we, the audience, grin. We’re in on the game, this meta house of mirrors, where Newman and Redford are just flickering personas of Newman and Redford. But this girl and boy are in the middle of their story, still sincere to themselves, and, for the moment, they’ve made this small fiction their absolute truth. As Heidegger didn’t say, “How one encounters reality is a choice.” Daniel’s ideas about masculinity have been formed in dark rooms with large screens, but now the sun is setting and the bells are about to ring. It’s all a performance, until it’s not.
From my seat in the Sutton, I find myself coveting Daniel’s suède coat with fringe, a fashion choice I wouldn’t dare. And, as Daniel confidently maneuvers around the streets of Paris, I conjure a version of myself, the me who might have been switched at birth. (Who knows the maternity-ward protocols in France?) Maybe I’m in the wrong family, and this makes sense since I can feel so different—too sensitive, too silly, too self-conscious. I can’t recognize myself in others. It’s like I’m living in exile. Maybe my family back in Paris is warmhearted and expressive, poets and painters and singers who are familiar with wrong turns, their sense of direction a disaster. Maybe their odd son is a serious student who gets excellent grades and has no issues with “there,” “their,” and “they’re” and never sweats multiplication or division, let alone addition and subtraction. Maybe Daniel’s smile is my smile—and it is a tremendous smile, cuddling into that soft pillow of a face, pleased in its own comfort. This idea of being switched at birth lingers long after the Sutton Theatre has been demolished for condos and Diane Lane has become a huge star, Thelonious Bernard a dentist in Nantes; truth be told, the fantasy stops only a few years ago, when I get the results from 23andMe and discover the obvious: I am, undeniably, me.
•
Mr. Hill was born to a well-to-do Roman Catholic family in Minnesota, the youngest of three brothers. George and his other brother, Jim, went to the Blake School, in Minneapolis, and then to Yale, but Mr. Hill seems to have gone down a separate path. His short obituary in the New York Times (“Frederick Murphy Hill, 53, A Painter and an Educator”) mentions Sunnyside Academy, in Pittsburgh, followed by the University of Pittsburgh. I think the obit writer might’ve mixed up Sunny with Shady since Shady Side Academy is a respected prep school in the area. Funny, those kinds of associative inversions, like dawn and dusk, which I can still confuse. My quick response is often the opposite of what I mean. Either way, I wonder about this academic divergence between Mr. Hill and his brothers. It seems notable.
At school, I know nothing of Mr. Hill’s past when I put on my smock and prepare my metal palette tray with five careful pours of red, blue, yellow, black, white. But I can see how Mr. Hill stands apart from the other men in my orbit, Buckley and otherwise. Reserved. Fastidious. Obviously artistic and cultured. Pleasant-smelling. We hardly know what gay means beyond the easy taunts, and those harder ones, whipped back and forth like crab apples. And who knows if Mr. Hill is gay and if Pittsburgh was the price he paid. I stand in front of the easel and begin to plaster a landscape on my sheet of paper. Always paint the sky first, Mr. Hill tells me too late.
•
The reviews of “A Little Romance” are far from kind. The Times deems it “so ponderous that it seems almost mean spirited.” The Washington Post pities poor Venice: “So much adoring goo adheres to the setting that you don’t care if you ever set eyes on those canals and piazzas again.” Roger Ebert gives some credit to the young actors, who are “pretty good, if you can separate how they act from what they’re acting in,” but otherwise complains that the story is “so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy.” Believability appears to be the core complaint, as if the story should be a hard look at the devastation of early teen love, Cassavetes on the Seine. Sweetness seems to be a sin: too fresh-faced, too innocent, the girl and boy too clever. Give us the real, the critics insist, and for the real to be real it has to be grubby and it has to suck. Stomping on the fraudulence of “A Little Romance” is like stomping on a ladybug that’s landed on a bunny rabbit—perhaps enjoyable as a hard-bitten provocation, but Jesus Christ!
But forget about it, David, it’s the seventies.
•
The memorial service for Mr. Hill is held on a Friday at 11 A.M. in St. Vincent Ferrer, on Lexington Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. It’s late January. We ninth-grade boys leave Buckley together and walk the eight blocks to the church. Next year, most of us will head to boarding school, so we have a sloppy swagger, like marionettes testing the tension of the strings. We’ve known Mr. Hill since first grade, but we haven’t known many adults who have died, so we’re uncertain about how to behave, and by behave I mean feel. Sad, of course, but soon all these teachers will be in our rearview mirror.
Mr. MacGarvey.
Mr. Bazarini.
Mrs. Hawes.
I don’t recall the details of Mr. Hill’s memorial service, but I must be sitting with my class, probably bored yet pleased to be free from school. I’ll likely meet my mother at J. G. Melon afterward and have a bacon burger and cottage fries, our Friday ritual (and maybe we’ll get the table where that scene from “Kramer vs. Kramer” was filmed). I listen to the Latin of the Mass, and maybe I catch a few words, since I’m taking Latin instead of French because Latin is supposedly helpful in terms of dyslexia—deus and ex and qui and tempore. As I try to pluck meaning from the priest, maybe I remember when Mr. Hill called me back to his desk, so delighted that he’s finally picked me after not picking me for so long. He spends a minute adjusting my position in the chair, his hand directing me just so, brushing aside a few floppy strands of hair, after which he regards me as he sharpens his pencil, the shavings collecting on his lap. Don’t move, he tells me, and I won’t because I’ve heard him get annoyed with the boys who do move, so I will be the boy who remains frozen. This is something I can do well, almost to the point of disappearance.
And then he starts. I can hear the graphite scratch against the Strathmore paper, Mr. Hill’s eyes alternating between me and the me he’s creating. Occasionally, he lifts the pencil to take some enigmatic measurement, almost touching my cheek with its straight edge. I’m desperate to have a glimpse at myself, as the minutes go by and more of me is scratched onto that paper. Classmates come over and peer over Mr. Hill’s shoulder, amazed at the likeness he’s producing. Because Mr. Hill is talented. An actual real-deal artist. We all know that. I can almost feel the stroke of my eyelashes being reborn, their length the envy of my mother’s friends. I’m barely breathing under the gaze of this creative act. I have never been so seen, so paid-attention-to. When Mr. Hill is done and he turns the pad around, I’ll ask him for the drawing—please, I’ll say, like we all say—please, please, Mr. Hill, can we have ourselves, please. And Mr. Hill will return his chin above the horizon and say no, like he almost always does. He must have a portfolio of us Buckley boys somewhere. But once in a while he’ll give the drawing to a boy, and I’ll wonder why him and not me, who sat so motionless, as though hiding in plain sight—Mr. Hill, this background player in my life, meaning so much to me and I have no idea why.
•
More than four decades later, I will discover a lump on the left side of my neck, which isn’t just a lump but a door that leads to a series of other doors which will finally open up onto squamous-cell carcinoma on the base of my tongue. The course of treatment will involve a combination of thirty-five radiation zaps and seven chemo drips in the course of seven weeks, from late February to mid-April. The good news: this type of cancer has a high cure rate. The bad news: the journey there is searing. I’ll spend fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, strapped under a linear accelerator, which looks like it might make the world’s greatest espresso. It doesn’t. My taste buds will get blasted, leaving behind a palate that toggles between metallic and fishy. Swallowing will become near-impossible, thrice-daily high-calorie protein shakes consumed in a marathon of firestorm sips. I will lose more than thirty pounds and will be too weak to do much of anything except absorb protons and cisplatin, sleep or try to sleep, and, with my girlfriend, who will soon be my wife, watch movies, preferably from my youth. Sometimes I will wonder what all of this will do to my face. I have nightmares of my jaw blown to smithereens.
•
The second I hear the music for “A Little Romance”—Georges Delerue’s Academy Award-winning riff on the Baroque—my vision begins to soften, or the space behind my vision begins to soften, as with a memory forgotten but the feeling persists. It’s a primed sadness, mostly agreeable. I know Mr. Hill is coming, younger than I am now but still spied through my wretched Buckley School self. I’ll tear up over Diane Lane’s eyes and Thelonious Bernard’s smile, and I’ll really cry when they’ve hijacked that gondola and are desperately pushing themselves along those wooden pilings in order to get under the Bridge of Sighs as the bells from the Campanile ring—and, by God, they’ve done it, and they take up their positions side by side and share a brief look that seems to break through some internal fourth wall that belongs only to them. Then they kiss. Lauren and Daniel/Diane and Thelo. And it’s a good kiss. A genuine kiss. Young and honest and bold, forever beyond reach. I can cry just thinking about them. And this is only the beginning of the end, since soon we’re back in Paris and Vivaldi’s Concerto for Lute and Two Violins plays, and Lauren, leaving for Houston, says her goodbye to Daniel and they exchange promises they know they’ll fail to keep, their time together already slipping into the past, at least for Lauren, who imagines that when they next meet they’ll be like everyone else, and Daniel, red-eyed, tells her no, he doesn’t want her to be like everyone else, not now, not ever, they are different and he is glad, and I’m a mess, weeping more than seems warranted, almost beyond repair, and we still have Lauren hugging Julius, and, of course, Daniel running after the car as Lauren and her family leave for the airport, Daniel waving at Lauren, who waves back from the wide screen of the rear window, waving, waving, until a car pulls ahead of Daniel and now Daniel has to leap and wave, leap and wave, in order to see Lauren as she pulls farther away—the movie, having started with Daniel watching Newman and Redford jump into that river, finishes on a freeze-frame of Daniel mid-leap, mid-wave, a whole life captured in a regular old snapshot, the camera moving in tighter on Daniel’s still face as time stretches further back into the hope for one more glimpse.
I almost want to lift my hand and wave. ♦
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