It’s his birthday today. I discovered him when I was 10, 11, and everyone in my very small weird generation knew who he was. He was a teen idol. Something about him GOT to me. The obsession burned – in a grade-school way – I was barely prepared for the TUMULT of feeling he inspired. For me, it was the Afterschool Specials. I “followed” him as best I could. He died in 2023 and I had to take a moment. I had never written anything about him before, except in passing as this golden boy of my pre-adolescent dreams, so I decided to pay tribute on my Substack.
I was Googling around looking for recent interviews with him, and found a really good one. He tells some great stories about all the people he worked with – these famous legends who were all still around in the 70s: Mitchum, Glenn Ford, etc. I loved hearing how he – a child at the time – thought about what he was doing as an actor, and why he liked being an actor.
It’s a good day to think about unchecked power. Power needs people out there to check it. It’s a good day to acknowledge that the world – its money and resources – is dominated by a multi-national cadre of fat cats who don’t care about regular people, or the environment, or, hell, ethics and morals. One of the ways we CHECK these assholes is with the printed word. And so it’s also a good day to pay tribute to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, as embodied so ferociously by the woman often referred to as “the mother of muckraking journalism”, the woman whose birthday it is today, Ida Tarbell.
“Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.” – Ida Tarbell
“There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.” — Ida Tarbell
Ida Tarbell was the bane of John D. Rockefeller’s existence with her explosive series of scathing articles about Standard Oil’s unsavory and rapacious practices, published in 1902. Those articles brought down a monolith.
Theodore Roosevelt called out Tarbell by name as a “muckraker”, and of course she didn’t care for the name. It didn’t matter though because … Standard Oil left a lot of MUCK in its wake, and so damn right she was going to rake it up. In the journalistic free-for-all of her day, she was tireless and single-minded, rigorous in her research techniques (like digging into long-forgotten dusty archives). She is often referred to as a pioneer of investigative reporting, if not THE pioneer. In her era, journalism was wild and irresponsible, more interested in pumping up emotional frenzies (xenophobic, patriotic, whatever) in their readership than getting to the truth. Big Money tarnished everything. The newspapers were in the pocket of Big Money too. (As always, the past gives us lessons for our present moment, for our future). Tarbell resisted the pull of emotionalism, even though she despised Standard Oil. She was all about primary sources, and she painstakingly went through stacks and stacks account ledgers, line by line, entire rooms full of archives – something very few had the patience for. The truth would be in the numbers. She knew that. She wrote: “There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiment than figures.” “Going after” Standard Oil was David vs. Goliath. (Ron Chernow’s biography of John D. Rockefeller is fantastic, if you haven’t read it.)
Tarbell is withering in her attack on Standard Oil, and on John himself:
“And he calls his great organization a benefaction, and points to his church-going and charities as proof of his righteousness. This is supreme wrong-doing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it — hypocrisy.”
When the magazine publishing her articles was under attack, threatened by litigation on all sides, Tarbell didn’t care. Her attitude was practically, “LET them have a go at me. I’d like to see them try.” Tarbell’s articles were eventually compiled in a book, and the book was so widely read and discussed it led to the Supreme Court’s decision to intervene, and crush the monopoly of Standard Oil.
She was one of the most important journalists of the 20th century.
And, lest we forget: she did all of this at a time when she, a woman, couldn’t vote.
“A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.” — Ida Tarbell
I learned about her in a class I took in college (the best class I ever took, by the way). It was an entire class on the Industrial Revolution, taught by Maury Klein (look him up, he’s a bigwig in the field, especially in regards to the railroads). We had to read Tarbell’s articles, compiled under the title The History of the Standard Oil Company.
It’s an invigorating read. Her prose LEAPS and CRACKLES. She’s got the facts, but she’s also pissed. You can feel it.
“We must organize men and women for labor as if for war. Watch the perfection of the training and the movement of the masses that at this moment are meeting in unspeakable, infernal slaughter in Europe. See how the humblest is fitted to his task. With what ease great bodies wheel, turn, advance, retreat. Consider how, after standing men in line that they may be knocked to pieces, they promptly and scientifically collect such as have escaped, both friend and foe, and (oh, amazing and heart-breaking human logic!) under the safe sign of the cross, tenderly nurse them back to health. If this can be done for War, should we do less for Peace?”
Ida Tarbell was a courageous and pioneering women who didn’t let society dictate to her who she should be, did not ask for a seat at the Big Boys Table – because asking means you still think you need permission (i.e. and thinking you need permission is internalized patriarchy). You still hear stuff like: “Why don’t men let us do such and such?” LET us?? Who made them BOSSES of the world. Fuck THAT. Who are THEY to LET us do anything? All I ask is that men take their foot off my goddamn neck. Ida Tarbell barged into “the room where it happens” – uninvited – unwelcome – and didn’t sit down at the Big Boys Table, oh no, she walked in and kicked the table over.
“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”
Ida Tarbell changed the course of the 20th century by going after a monster company, a many-tentacled behemoth which had insinuated itself into every layer of society. One woman went up against free-wheeling brutal capitalism. Her work continues to be relevant today. (Hello, Facebook. Hello, Disney. Hello, companies acting as mini-Nation-States.) But also she became the standard-bearer for a new kind of journalism, giving journalists jobs beyond purple prose, hearsay and rumor. She paved a pathway for others to follow. (As this post shows, her work is still taught in college classes.) Her articles led to the Anti-Trust laws, fought in the courts, with the sensational trials dominating the economics/politics/all-of-America in the early decades of the 20th century. I still believe in the Ideals of who we should be – and so often aren’t – and I love the people who fight for those Ideals. We need to fight. We can’t just accept the status quo, just because the opponent is rich and powerful. You can’t re-set history. What can be done about the here-and-now?
That was what Ida Tarbell cared about.
.
“There was born in me a hatred of privilege, privilege of any sort. It was all pretty hazy, to be sure, but it still was well, at 15, to have one definite plan based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one.” – Ida Tarbell
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
I always knew Ralph Macchio was something special. I knew it before Karate Kid. I knew it from Eight is Enough. I clocked him as awesome from the beginning. I felt territorial. When everyone else figured out his awesomeness in Karate Kid, I felt jealous. He was ALL MINE for a brief time! I SAW HIM FIRST.
Before we begin, here is the trailer for a gripping new documentary about Ralph Macchio, searching for a comeback, called Wax On F*ck Off.
You never forget the celebrity (actor/musician) who first launched you into the world of imagination and fantasy. Ralph Macchio was that for a lot of people.
Here’s a piece I wrote many years ago about Ralph Macchio and the impact his performance in one episode of Eight Is Enough had on me. (Not for nothing but: the year in which this all happened – 7th/8th grade – is when I had my first what I would call nervous breakdown. Sorry to say, but it was ignored. They – the “they” in charge of my mental health – think this was when bipolar first introduced itself, along with my first period – this is how it happens for girls a lot of the time. It’s a LOT. And so the story I describe below has even deeper meaning for me. Yes, it’s sad, that one episode of Eight is Enough is all I had to hold onto in that wretched year of almost near-total anguish … but it’s not really sad. I made it through and Ralph Macchio helped.)
How Eight is Enough Saved My Life
I am a big fan of celebrity crushes, it was part of how I first fell in love with the movies. I have fine-tuned the “celebrity crush” into a work of art. I should give seminars about how to do them properly.
My first crush? It’s a toss-up between Ralph Macchio and Lance Kerwin, but the Macchio crush was more transformational. I say that with zero exaggeration.
Now I am talking about pre–Karate Kid Ralph Macchio. Very important distinction. I am talking about his stint on Eight is Enough. When he hit paydirt with Karate Kid, and was suddenly on the cover of every teen magazine on the rack, I felt oddly jealous about it. Like I was losing him. I had been with him back then, Before it was cool. I somehow liked it better when he was just my little secret.
Some people don’t even remember his one-season stint on Eight is Enough. Ah, but that is probably because they gave up on the show long before he arrived. Macchio was obviously brought on as “young blood” to draw in an audience like me, horny love-sick pre-teens. The ratings were down. Bringing in a troubled cute teenage boy was an obvious ploy to jumpstart the show again. It worked.
To me, at 12 years old, when the show was in its heyday, the older siblings (David, Mary, Susan, Joannie, Nancy, Elizabeth and Tommy) were too sophisticated, too slick, and also a little bit ikky, frankly. David, the oldest, was a particularly disturbing individual, I thought, with his pearly whites and feathered hair, and his part-time jobs. He had too much of a fake-tan sleazoid veneer. His teeth didn’t fool me. The guy was a creep.
The girls all wore shiny lip gloss, shoulder pads, or frightening workout outfits involving spandex and lilac leotard ensembles. The push-up bra was not in existence in the Bradford house. The sisters all had droopy sloopy-shouldered silhouettes that made me feel very uncomfortable.
Cars pulled in and out of the driveway. There were teenage problems of the 17- and 18-year-old variety. I was 11. I could not relate.
And Bowl-Cut Nicholas did nothing for me. He was a CHILD. I was not a CHILD, thankyouverymuch. I found him plain old nauseating.
I needed something else. Someone who hit my demographic in its sweet spot. Someone … a boy … who was just the age I needed him to be …
Along came Jeremy Andretti, played by Ralph Macchio. Jeremy was the random orphaned nephew of Abby (played by Betty Buckley, of course). The Bradford family opened their hearts and their home to the troubled teenager, who was sullen, uncommunicative, and to-die-for. The first time I laid eyes on him, I was gone. He was everything I found attractive, although I didn’t know it then, being only 12 years old. It was this weird awakening, watching Jeremy in action. My heart fluttered. He was sensitive, but he covered it up with a tough outer shell. His shyness plus his toughness were a killer combo.
I wouldn’t realize until later that that shy/tough thing, that hard-shell-yet-sensitive thing he had going on was part of a long continuum of movie stars who made careers out of mixing those two qualities. Tough-yet-sensitive hard-boiled-outer-shell guys. James Cagney. Cary Grant in Notorious. Humphrey Bogart. Jeremy Andretti needed to be tough, not because he was mean, or callous, but because he felt too much. He was too vulnerable.
Almost immediately, with Jeremy’s arrival, I became addicted to Eight is Enough. I was crushed when Jeremy’s storyline was not the featured one. I suffered through the ikky-lipglossed-leotarded storylines of the older siblings, and the sickeningly sweet Bowl-Cut storylines, waiting, waiting, week after week … for Jeremy to step into the spotlight.
My crush was a secret. It was so powerful that it actually embarrassed me. It was a runaway train, and this is now a familiar sensation to me, years later. I still get embarrassed sometimes, when I get swept away like this, but I figure there are worse things in life than this habit of mine. It has brought me great joy. It is one of the ways I revel in movies. It has an art to it. It comes from somewhere very deep, and it has to do with fantasies (not just sexual), and dreams, and the “substance of things hoped for”. It also is how I stumbled my way into a writing career, because what else am I doing here, but writing about things that matter deeply to me, that move me, that transform me? Granted, crushes are a little different, but only in context, not in form. I still get those crushes. I’m an old-hat at them by now.
The crush arrives usually at a low moment when I need fortitude, when I need to perceive a light at the end of the tunnel. The crush helps me to hold on, to hold out hope that someday, someday, the closeness I yearn for will manifest in real life, and not just in re-runs of Eight is Fucking Enough. This is what actors can give us, potentially. This is what certain actors (and certain performances) have given me.
Movies are great company.
I discovered Ralph Macchio as Jeremy Andretti when I was at the lowest of the lowest of points. I was in junior high. I didn’t really take to adolescence, shall we say. I was a fish out of water in the machinations of junior high. I was bruised and battered very quickly from rejection from boys, and not just rejection, but outright laughter in my face, when I would ask them to dance, what have you, at the first dances I ever went to. (I was “that girl”, the pariah of the school, for one awful year). I was pudgy. My clothes were all wrong. My Xena jeans didn’t look the same on me as they did on Cris D., the goddess of junior high. Kids crank-called my house and shouted insults about my clothes into my ear. I sat alone in the cafeteria. I was in a very deep depression and didn’t even know it. I found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. I had thoughts of going to sleep forever. I would cry on the way to school.
In the middle of that howling wilderness, one particular episode of Eight is Enough aired, and that episode I can say, without too much exaggeration, saved my life.
I remember that episode almost shot for shot, and I have not seen it since it was on that first time in the early 80s, so that gives you some idea of its lasting impact. I’m not sure how many people out there yearn for a box set of Eight is Enough – such thing does not exist and I’m not sure why – but I would buy the whole damn thing just so I could see this episode again. But maybe it’s best that I only remember it and remember what it gave me.
Here’s how the episode opened:
In a movie theatre. We can see that the movie being shown is an old Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers movie. There they are, dancing across the marble floor, floating, across, her dress graceful, light, he elegant, lithe. Then we cut to the audience in the movie theatre, and there is Ralph Macchio, with his beautiful face, watching, totally engrossed. He’s eating popcorn, and he is totally into the movie.
And two seats away from him sits a teenage girl, also by herself, also engrossed, also chomping on popcorn.
A sort of G-rated True Romance.
After the film, the two of them somehow strike up a conversation in the lobby and they both rave, unselfconsciously, about their love for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and how much they love old movies and how cool it is that the local movie theatre would run them as matinees.
Our first clue of the HOOK of this episode (and why it hooked me so hard): the two bond over old movies. I loved old movies, too. I did a paper for my Drama Club about Fred Astaire when I was 11 years old. I researched that thing as intensely as if I were writing an actual book. I was like that girl, sitting in the matinee, watching Top Hat, and losing myself utterly in the fantasy of its dream-world.
The girl reveals that she just moved to the town, and is a little nervous about starting at the high school on Monday. Jeremy is very excited that she is going to be going to his school, he feels a bond with this girl. They part, him telling her that he will keep his eye out for her on Monday. Teenage romance shivers in the air!
But what was so deadly for me watching it, what hooked me in so deeply, was that their connection was not based on lust or desire. I couldn’t relate to those things yet. No: it was a shared interest in something, a common passion. This was devastatingly effective.
They see each other at school. They have sweet encounters in the hall. They meet up “by coincidence” at the next Saturday matinee of a Fred Astaire movie. Only this time, they sit together, side by side, sharing popcorn, grinning at each other.
I died a million deaths watching all of this. I ached! I yearned! I burned up inside like a pubescent Tennessee Williams character. I had so much to GIVE, so much of myself to share but nowhere to put it yet.
I knew those words sounded familiar …
Holding all of the feeling back actually hurt. (It still does.) So I put all of that feeling and yearning and hoping into Ralph Macchio.
Then, inevitably, conflict arises. Turns out that Jeremy’s interest in Fred Astaire is something he hides from his friends. He could never admit to liking old movies with DANCE NUMBERS to his buddies. As long as his little Saturday-matinee romance was kept secret from his friends, he was cool with it.
Of course, one day she comes up to him in the cafeteria, where he sits with his group of friends. Oh, the hostility of the high school cafeteria! The caste system! The Darwinian brutality! She says to him, in front of his friends, with a big friendly smile – “Hi! What are you doing Saturday? They’re playing ‘Swingtime‘!”
She just broke the unspoken rules. She didn’t even know it was a rule. She was like me. I found myself in the world of junior high, with all these rules suddenly, social rules, all these boundaries of what was acceptable behavior – none of which was in operation in grade school – and I most certainly did not get the memo. She didn’t know that he was ashamed of that part of himself, that he needed to keep it secret from his buddies.
He makes believe he doesn’t even know what she is talking about. It is a complete and utter betrayal of their bond. His friends snicker. Ruthlessly. She stands there, alone, shamed. She walks away, mortified, with the taunting voices of his group of friends imitating her: “Swingtime is playing! Swingtime is playing!”
I knew her pain! I was snickered at! My intensity was scorned!
And yet, watching. I wanted to crawl through the television and yell at her: NO! He does like you! He’s just embarrassed! He can’t admit to liking those movies in front of his friends! He does like you – and that’s why he rejected you!
And so, I ached for him as well. He was deciding to NOT be himself so he could fit in with the group. He was choosing cool indifference (and therefore loneliness) over unafraid involvement. Not just with her. But with who he really was. This was a tragedy.
I saw people making those choices all around me every day in junior high: suppressing the unacceptable parts of themselves to fit in with the pack. It was “the thing” to do but I found it painful. I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t manage it.
Jeremy feels horrible about how he treated her. He tries to talk to her in the hallways. She rejects him. He tries again. She ignores him. She is a stony wall, an ice princess. She was a real hard-ass, that one. I didn’t think that I could withstand his heartfelt apologies. I knew I would cave. In other words, I was a sucker, I was weak, I was desperate. And so I learned something from watching her: No one should shame you the way he shamed her. Especially if he had opened up to her in private. His behavior was unacceptable. A girl has to set her own standards for how she wants to be treated and she shouldn’t accept anything less. A man needs to be able to stand up to his friends and say, “This is who I am. Deal.” It is not okay any other way. My response to this came from my loneliness. From feeling left out. I was so eager for attention from any boy that I would take the scraps from his cafeteria table … rather than wait for someone willing to eat a whole meal with me. I watched the girl on Eight is Enough say “no” to his scraps, and I was in AWE.
This was a mind-blower. Truly. I am still learning that lesson. She would not allow him to compartmentalize her, and only acknowledge her existence on Saturday afternoons.
Finally came the climax of the episode. After watching it, I lived it over and over and over in my head, I obsessed on it, I fixated on it, I held onto it, knowing instinctively that this is something I need to remember.
She was walking along on the sidewalk in front of the school. The campus was crowded with students. His declaration (when it came) needed to be that public. This is a well-known formula, of course, used in countless movies to great success: the public revelation of emotion, the declaration of love made in front of a crowd. The final expression of commitment is not just made between two people privately, but involves the whole world. It has to. It’s like a wedding ceremony: the bond between two human beings is enough of a big deal that it must be made publicly to have any real weight.
Jeremy runs up to her and tries to talk to her. She staunchly keeps walking on, clutching her books to her chest. He walks along beside her, apologizing, ignoring the rejection. He has lost the indifference. Now it matters more to him to tell her the truth and he doesn’t care who sees.
She finally shouts at him, “Leave me alone!!” She marches off without him, leaving him standing there with a crestfallen look on his face. People stare. The two of them are making a scene. He doesn’t care anymore. And now he is the one who has been publicly rejected and shamed.
And in that moment, the transformation occurs. He leaps into the unknown, he tosses himself off the cliff.
I have no empirical evidence of this, no quote to back up my theory, but I would warrant a guess that this next moment could be responsible for Ralph Macchio’s enormous success a couple of years later in major motion pictures. If I had been a casting director, and I had seen this one scene in Eight is Enough, I would have thought: “That kid could carry a film.” There was a seismic shift during the scene and by the end of it, he became a viable leading man. You think I’m kidding? I’m dead serious. Why else would I remember the scene so clearly decades later?
She walks away, with an air of finality. He stands, helpless, and then, on impulse, he jumps up on a nearby bench, and blurts out, in tune, at the top of his lungs: “I won’t dance! Don’t ask me!”
She stops dead in her tracks and slowly looks back at him, shocked. All the watching students start snickering, giggling. He doesn’t care. He stays up on the bench, and sings out at top volume: “I won’t dance, don’t ask me! I won’t dance Madame with you! My heart won’t let my feet do things that they should do!” He starts to dance around up on the bench, even as the small mocking crowd gathers. She stares up at him, dumbfounded.
He leaps off the bench and dances toward her, still singing the song. She’s embarrassed, blushing, she doesn’t know what to do. Then she gets her nerve back, and turns her back on him, starting to stalk off. (I gasped, watching. The fortitude! The strength of self! To resist!!)
Eventually, of course, his singing and dancing breaks her down.
But it was more than that, it was more than just him breaking her down so she would like him again. It was more about his fearlessness in publicly admitting his feelings for her, but it goes even deeper than that: the moment was about him finally admitting and claiming who he was. That’s what the scene was about. Falling in love is not just about declaring yourself to the other person. You also must say, “Here. This is who I am. This is me.”
He dances around her, serenading her in front of the whole school. I was too young, watching it, to realize what a cliche it was. Finally, he takes her in his arms. Suddenly it seems like he is wearing a top hat and tails, his movements are graceful and yet forceful. It is startling. The crowd gasps. He waltzes her around, awkwardly, and she’s laughing now, she’s melted, and he finishes the song with a flourish, dipping her body over backwards, like an old pro.
The crowd (naturally) bursts into applause.
I thought about the episode for days. I actually wrote it out into short-story form, so I could elaborate on the feelings of both parties. I wanted to live it.
The message was, obviously, that being yourself, and admitting who you are, not changing yourself for other people, is superior to belonging to the crowd. This sliced through me like a laser.
This was especially true, it must be admitted, because it was the boy making these declarations, it was the boy who had the real struggle. It was the boy who had to give up his public persona, and be fearless. In my limited and very painful experience in junior high, boys traveled in packs, were aloof and cruel to me, and acted embarrassed when I asked them to dance. I was always in such a state of uncertainty and pain when it came to the boys I liked. (I know now that boys had their own brand of hard time during those years but that only came with perspective, and getting older. While I was in it, I had none of that. Boys were on another planet. A planet I so wanted to visit. But they didn’t want me there. It was very painful.)
The thought that a boy my age could be interested in me the way Jeremy was interested in her, and that a boy could throw caution to the wind in front of his peers, was so attractive to me, so powerful, that I basically melted into a hot quivering puddle of longing and hope that lasted for months. It blew my mind.
What it said to me was (outside of the celebrity-crush aspect of the whole thing): “Don’t just look at the surface of things. Don’t passively accept the aloofness of the boys you like. They might be afraid, or shy, or don’t want to seem goofy to their firends. Differentiate between who they were with their friends and who they were when you got them alone.”
But also it said to me: “Do not accept being treated cruelly. Even if he’s cute and you like him so much. Do not chip away at yourself. It is forbidden.”
And here is where it gets global, here is why I still remember the episode shot for shot, even though I have never seen the episode since: What the episode said to wildly unhappy 12-year-old me:
Hang on. Just hang on.
There may not be a boy in your life right now who would leap on a park bench for you (i.e.: get you, love you, celebrate you), but hang on. There will be. (I mean, there wouldn’t be … but … I didn’t know that at 12.)
The loneliness you feel right now shall pass. This, too, shall pass.
The girl Jeremy fell for in the episode was not a hot babe. She had long straight hair and wore long skirts. And so: You didn’t have to change who you are for a boy to be interested in you (the lesson I learned from the ending of Grease). You just had to be yourself, and be true to yourself and continue shining your own particular light with its own particular wattage and someone would see that light eventually and be drawn to it. If you tried to change yourself, and fit into what you thought was the ideal, if you tried to adjust yourself to what you thought guys wanted, then you would not be being truthful, and the right kind of guy for you would not be able to find his way to you.
That one episode of Eight is Enough got me through many dark hours in junior high. It burned me up inside, a fire that eventually went out, but a fire I have never forgotten. That one episode helped me not be ashamed of my own individual passions (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies being one of them), to not put pressure on myself to fit into the round hole of the junior high social agenda. Maybe if I stuck to my own path, and kept cultivating my own personality, and expressing my own individual interests, fearlessly, without apology, then a Jeremy type might be in my future. (There wasn’t, not really. However: the following year, I met a bunch of people who are still my friends today. Way more important than any man has ever been.)
The episode said to me something nobody else was saying to me, not teachers, not parents, not anyone:
Keep going, Sheila. You’re okay as you are. You’re doing okay. Everything is going to be okay.
Thanks, Ralph Macchio, for what you gave me in your wonderful performance in that one episode.
And thanks, too, to the creators of Eight is Enough for realizing that eight kids were actually not enough.
It’s his birthday today. Joel McCrea had a long career, with many different phases. He did it all, although he is primarily associated with Westerns. It was what you might call a “classy” career. Steady, successful, no scandals, and he seemingly had a very practical and healthy relationship to acting, to being a star. He was great in Sullivan’s Travels – he and Veronica Lake make a great pair.
My favorite of his is The More the Merrier, with Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn (who won an Oscar for his performance). This film is one of the sexiest films ever made. The kiss Arthur and McCrea share on the steps is more erotic than any sex scene featuring totally nude bodies. Her shoulder-less dress, his handsiness – he’s literally an octopus – but he knows she wants it – and then there’s the moment where she takes control, grabs his face, and SHE kisses HIM. Here’s the scene and take note of the long long LONG take, with all that talking, and all that dialogue, and all that fiery-hot subtext …
Joel McCrea is so good in this: laconic, flat-affect, non-dramatic (as compared to Jean Arthur’s overt sadness and freaked-out-ness) … so that when he admits his love for her, and calls her “dear” in the quiet scene where they’re both lying in their single beds, in separate rooms, and talking to each other through the wall … it takes your breath away.
“That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst.”
We were in the San Francisco airport, rain against the windows, we sat next to each other, we were beyond speech. It was good-bye, we both knew that, but the words would not come. They were caught in our throats, not even to be acknowledged or admitted. Neither of us could speak of what was actually happening. A certain amount of denial was necessary. “Oh, absolutely we’ll see each other again … this isn’t FOREVER …” I was getting on the plane, headed to Chicago. He was seeing me off. I was starting up a new life.
We had sucked down two margaritas each at dinner, rain on the windows, on the city streets, and we got into the kind of sloppy hilarity that only margaritas can bring. We made each other laugh so hard that messy tears streamed down our cheeks. We staggered down the rain-wet sidewalk, guffawing over this or that private joke.
But now we were at the airport. It was time for me to board.
This was it. It was over.
We clutched each other. It was almost frightening, the power of the emotion. I didn’t think I would be able to bear it. I am not exaggerating or using that language as a cliche. I know it IS a cliche, but cliches are based on truth. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to bear my own emotions. I heard him and felt him start to cry, choking back tears, in my shoulder.
It was the worst sound in the world.
I wrenched myself away from him, my face covered in tears, tears rolling down my cheeks, off my chin, an Alice in Wonderland river, and walked to the stewardess to give her my ticket.
He stood back, in the waiting area, watching me go. I walked down the corridor towards the plane, holding onto my chest, feeling like it was going to burst out of my skin, and kill me. I turned around to look back at him only once. I had to. I had to see him one last time.
I knew. I knew in my heart, even though I maintained the facade that this was just a “break”, we were going to “stay in touch”, this was just for “a while” … I knew it was over. This was it. The end. I knew it as well as I knew my own birthday, my address. It was over.
And it was that secret burning knowledge that made me turn around. To look at him one last time.
He stood there, at the doorway of that long corridor. The light was behind him, and he looked like a black-paper cut-out. His form in shadow, become two-dimensional, already receding, and his arm was lifted to me, in a frozen farewell.
I raised my hand to him, too. And then turned to walk into my future without him.
He was married within the year. It turned out I was right: it would be over ten years before we saw each other again. My last image of him a black-paper silhouette.
Silhouette, Part 2
He was 1st generation Irish, and made me laugh so hard I would cry. We met while working together at a weird startup in the building across from the Winter Garden. It was winter, a bitter season – a winter so cold it is still discussed in New York. He and I would careen across Houston Street to get pizza, teeth chattering, shouting about our frostbite, bundled up against the wind.
He had to ask me out three times before I actually realized he was asking me out on a date. The signs of interest he was giving would have been completely obvious to anyone who HAD A BRAIN IN HER HEAD, but I was coming out of the grad-school cloister, unused to picking up on pheromonal firefly signals.
“I really want to see Shakespeare in Love,” says he.
“Yeah, me too.” says I. Oblivious.
3 days pass.
“Have you seen Shakespeare in Love yet?” says he.
“No. You?”
“No. I really want to.”
“Yeah, me too.” says I. Oblivious.
4 more days pass.
Finally, poor man asked said. “I really REALLY want to go see Shakespeare in Love. Have you seen it yet?”
I laughed. “No. You’ve asked me that, like, 10 times.”
He said, as though he were dealing with a half-wit (which, in fact, he was), “I know. Have you seen Shakespeare in Love?” Said with direct meaning and significance.
Then came the long-overdue “A-ha” moment.
“Ohhhhh!” I said. “You want to see Shakespeare in Lovewith me??”
He shouted at me, “YES.” He had had it. During the Shakespeare in Love date, we started laughing about my cluelessness and how hard I had made him work (inadvertently) just to get me to go to the movies.
My overriding memory of it is how friendly we were together, in the brief period we were “going out”. We went to Ear Inn (a great pub in New York), drank Guinness, played hangman, and talked and talked and talked. He had the Irish gift of the gab, and also the pro-active humor thing that I love. I still remember some of his stupid jokes. For whatever reason, the silliness of his humor really appealed to me. He “got” me and I “got” him. During this period, I was hired full time at another place, and we kept in touch with a stream of AOL Instant messages through the day. We literally “talked” all day long.
He bought tickets for us to go see Brian Dennehy in Death of a Salesman on Broadway. He had never seen the play, and everyone was talking about Dennehy, and the production, so I was thrilled to go. He bought the tickets, set the whole thing up, it was our night out. He wore a suit, I wore a dress, heels. The night was frigid and cold. We sat high up in the nosebleed seats, hunched forward, watching the play. We didn’t speak much. Afterwards, he walked me to my subway stop and we stood there for a second talking.
All I remember is him saying, “It’s weird. I’m thinking about my dad right now. I guess that play made me think about my dad.”
We said good night, and I went down the subway steps into the drafty tiled station. I stood alone, my mind and heart full, thinking, contemplating, reliving the evening, the play. Also being present to the novelty of … huh, I guess I’m actually dating someone now? And it doesn’t feel weird?
I glanced across the subway tracks to the station on the other side, the uptown station. And there he was, glimpsed between the pillars, standing alone, head down, thinking about … was he thinking too about our night together? His dad?
I called across the tracks to him. He looked up, saw me, and we both started laughing. I said, pretending I didn’t know him, “So what did you do this evening?” He said, picking up on the game, “Oh, you know. Saw a play. It was a comedy.” Death of a Salesman a comedy? I can’t explain why he was funny, I can just say that he was.
My train thundered down the tunnel, and you could see the beam of light coming out of the darkness. I waved across to him, and he raised his hand to me in farewell. And because he had turned his back to the light, he suddenly looked like a black-paper cut-out. With one hand raised.
I felt a sudden soul-chill. I didn’t know where it came from. We had had a wonderful night. But suddenly I felt a sense of foreboding, of something being not quite right. I had no idea why the black-paper cut-out would make me uneasy, make me shiver. That’s the worst feeling – when something is not quite right, only you can’t locate the source.
I came home that night, and drew a picture of the black silhouette in my journal. I didn’t know why I drew it. I didn’t ask myself why. I just drew it.
Over the next week, I couldn’t get in touch with him. He wouldn’t respond to my AOL Instant messages or voice mails. He was gone. I didn’t know what happened or what I did. This brought on what I have referred to as my “winter of discontent”. We only dated for six weeks but it took me forever to get over it. Part of the reason why it took me so long is because of how embarrassed I was to be so upset in the first place. I felt like I was going mad.
We went out maybe 5 or 6 times over a month and a half. We went to the movies, saw a play, we went to a workshop production of a new opera at Juilliard, directed by a friend of mine. We made out on his couch. We were still getting to know each other, and we had fun. The Death of a Salesman night was special, a real date-date, dressing up for each other, dinner and drinks before, etc. But a memory jogged loose in my brain when I saw his arm-raised black-silhouette pose, and although I couldn’t locate the memory – and couldn’t for some time – I knew.
Somehow, on an unconscious level, I knew it was over (before it even began). That’s why I drew it in my journal. The words I wrote in my journal probably were all “I really like this guy. I guess we’re dating and I like him” but the illustration told the real story.
The drawing was a message from 5 days in the future: This will be the last time you see him. It was.
2026 thoughts
Ugh. 2005. Pretty dark time in a dark decade, and I really feel it in this writing. I was haunted by those two silhouettes, they seemed so ominous. And to look at some guy I’d been going out with for 6 weeks – waving at me across a subway platform – and feel this ominous feeling … well, I know it’s a lot, but I was right, wasn’t I? Since that Irish guy pursued me, I was really surprised when he “vanished”. There was another moment which, honestly, I still wince when I think about it. Silly. But whatever. I keep saying this: I never “get over” anything. His was a complete and total ghosting and I went fucking insane. I wouldn’t get my mental health diagnosis for 8 more years. The mid-2000s … I’m just lucky I’m still here. I always had the blog, so that was good. And so I could write pieces like this and share them even though I’m surprised at how open I was. To me, the mental illness is so GLARING when I read stuff pre-2013 … I’ve had the urge to re-write things, but I am fine with having documentation of how I thought.
Rather amazing that in the last year I re-connected with Silhouette #1, my first boyfriend. I hadn’t seen him since 2011, when our mutual friend Brett died. We live (sort of) close to each other, or close in New England terms, and he reached out and we got together twice. And there was something healing about it. The LAUGHTER. We talked about everything. He brought “relics”, things I didn’t even know existed. Handing me back pieces of my past. He is eight years older than I am, and we started dating when I was 20, so you can do the math. We just weren’t in the same life stage when we met. And the memories aren’t painful anymore – or, not really. There was so much to laugh about. We got together, sat outside by the ocean, drank Bloody Mary’s, and HOWLED with laughter.
And Silhouette #2? No word of a lie: I don’t remember his name.
That last photo is Walker Evans’ innovative perspective of the parade for Charles Lindbergh after Lindbergh successfully crossed the Atlantic in 1927. It’s one of the first photos Evans took, and shows that he had a “good eye” from the start. A conventional photographer would have shown the parade, the cheering crowds, the scope and size of the event, Lindbergh himself. Evans, however, was struck by the backs of the marching band, and the carnage of ticker-tape. The empty aftermath.
And the photo above that one I love in particular, since I love Carole Lombard, have that movie poster on my wall, and Carole Lombard with a shiner was my Twitter avatar from the moment I signed up until the day I de-activated.
Walker Evans captured America at a certain time of upheaval, gigantic events which had wide-sweeping consequences, for the world, yes, but more importantly, for individuals. It was a time of both technical innovation and abject poverty. He focused on American’s homes, the objects in the homes, the rusty bed-steads in the shacks of the poor and destitute, the stoves in the corner, the kitchen utensils. Beds were important. Beds represent a respite for the economically-ravaged people he photographed. But Evans, too, just had an eye for the detail, the one essential thing that would make a photograph pop. It is a remarkable record of what America looked like at the time, its cars, its billboards. Ordinary life was what he was after. You can feel the dust in the air from the unpaved roads, smell the sugary soda from the fountains, the quiet of those small towns. But he was also an urban street photographer, taking pictures of women on subways wearing little hats, gossiping, collapsed against one another during the commute, lunch rooms crowded with office workers, the vast bustle of city life. It’s an amazing archive, an incredible historical record.
In 1936, James Agee, film critic, novelist, reporter, asked Walker Evans to come down to Alabama with him to document the life of sharecroppers for Fortune magazine. Hard hard times in America, all around. Evans’ photographs (Agee and Evans stayed with three tenant-farmer families, so you get to know the faces) are haunting. The direct gaze. The dirty children. The hovels. The gaunt cheeks. The hard-bitten eyes. Evans initially felt uncomfortable with the assignment, photographing people in such misery. He worried he was exploiting them. A common issue with photographers who go into terrible areas. But the issue is two-fold: documenting horrors brings news of events to the world, makes it palpable, energizes people to “get involved”, whatever that might mean. (One remembers Kevin Carter’s horrifying photo of the starving child in the Sudan curled up on the ground with a vulture crouching nearby. While there are conflicting reports on how that photograph came to be, Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for it. It was one of those photos, like the “napalm girl” that sears into your brain once you’ve seen it. The horror of humanity. Carter committed suicide. He had photographed many horrible things, executions, torture. His suicide note spoke of not being able to bear all of the things he had seen, they had blotted out the possibility of joy. AND, as a photographer, his job was not to change things, or provide aid. It was to document, to bear witness. That’s it. This is an ethical struggle that Walker Evans felt acutely as he photographed these families in dire straits.)
The collaboration with Agee eventually became, of course, the classic of American literature/photography, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee’s prose is incantatory and emotional, free-flowing and high-flung, tapping into the human condition and the terrible beauty of our drive to survive. Here is an excerpt:
Each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:
Moreover, these flexions are taking place everywhere, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:
Each is intimately connected with the bottom and the extremest reach of time:
Each is composed of substances identical with the substances of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars:
All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.
Walker Evans’ contribution to the 20th century cannot be measured.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Lois Smith, who turns 96 years old today, made her film debut in 1955, playing a young prostitute in East of Eden. She has a small scene with James Dean, and then exits the film forever. But the memory of her lingers.
In 2021, 66 years later – let me say that again – 66 years after she made her film debut – Lois Smith won a Tony for her performance in The Inheritance. She was – at age 90 – the oldest Tony winner. Her speech was amazing. Unfortunately it’s not on YouTube. The speeches of all the YOUNGER winners are on YouTube. Typical. Let us honor our history. The video is here. She was so happy, and so was the audience.
While I lived in Chicago, my friend Ted and I went to go see Lois in a new play (The Mesmerist) at Steppenwolf (she’s a company member). Ted knew Lois, so the three of us went out to dinner afterwards. I was SO starstruck because of East of Eden, and so wanted to ask her about James Dean. At first I sat there, silently, just trying to put together the images: the beautiful white-haired woman sitting next to me, and the girl at the bar in East of Eden – but Lois was so friendly, so nice, such an interesting person, I soon forgot about being starstruck. We all just discussed the new play, its problems, what worked and didn’t, the process of development, she wanted to know what we were working on, it was regular shop talk among theatre people. I’ve always loved her, but ever since that night I had dinner with her, she is a role model for me for what it means to be a working actor.
Success – or at least the regular meaning of the word – is truly irrelevant. It’s just work.
Four or so years after that first encounter, I was involved in a project where we workshopped a new play about the artist Joseph Cornell. Ted directed the workshop, and we worked as of those giant airy studios at Juilliard. We played around with format. We envisioned the play taking place IN one of Cornell’s boxes. I played the young woman who came into his life late – one of those aimless Automat girls he loved so much – and he gave her money and was obsessed with her. She ended up stealing a couple of boxes and – like a dummy-dumb – tried to sell them to New York galleries. Cornell was famous. Everyone knew him. So they called Cornell to report that a raggedy strange young woman was trying to sell his boxes. Horrible. He was devastated but refused to press charges. She had a horrible end, murdered in a hotel on the UWS. Some of the details are hazy, my research was a long time ago. A sad episode in JC’s life.
Cornell’s boxes are magical, whimsical, sometimes disturbing, fetishistic tributes, escape routes. They’re pure magic. He made boxes “for” actors and ballerinas etc. whom he adored. (I did not know that Eve Babitz corresponded with Cornell for years, since she was a late teenager starting to make collages.) Cornell loved Lois Smith, knew her casually, and made a box for her. It was 1955, and she was on Broadway in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Young and the Beautiful. This was before East of Eden. Lois Smith actually has the box (unlike, say, Lauren Bacall – the box Cornell made for her is probably priceless at this point). The Cornell box hangs in Smith’s hallway. In a New Yorker article, the writer, Michael Schulman, gives a description of the box:
Cornell, who knew Smith through the writer Donald Windham, cut out her image, in a white tulle gown, from the Playbill cover. “The back of it is wonderful,” Smith said recently, flipping the box to reveal papier-mâché text. “It has a quote from Hölderlin: ‘Home, poor heart, you cannot rediscover, if the dream alone does not suffice.’ ”
Fast forward to the Joseph Cornell workshop, run by the aforementioned Ted. Lois came on as an adviser for our project. She opened a lot of doors for us, including getting us into the private screening room at MoMA to watch Cornell’s chopped-up and now-famous films. We were shown the JC collection, including the ones not on display. One quick phone call from Lois, and we were in.
As I said, when I met her I kept seeing her defeated pose at the bar in East of Eden, the movie that “turned me on” to acting and also moviemaking as an artform. I saw East of Eden at age 13. I remember wondering who she was. She made an impression, even in the bombardment of James Dean on my psyche. I memorized the name. “LOIS SMITH.” And there I was, an adult, so many years later, having dinner with her, and then, a couple years after that, talking with her about Joseph Cornell in a huge rehearsal studio at Juilliard, and it all seemed perfectly normal, a straight line between then and now. As though 13-year-old me cleared a space for the moment.
The rarest kind of experience.
Thank you Lois for all of your work, for being a role model, for opening up the possibility for others what a good working career looks like – success doesn’t matter, keep doing the work, keep striving, it’s the work that matters – and also for showing an interest in our experimental open-ended project – and not just an interest – but actually HELPING us achieve our goals (one call to MoMA by Lois Smith and we were in). Thank you for taking the time out of your busy career to meet with a ragtag group of young actors to tell us stories about this artist who loved you so much.
And we loved you right back.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Really pleased to announce I’ll be presenting three films at the upcoming Silver Classic Film Weekend, an annual festival hosted by the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland. It will be a jam-packed four days, with some old favorites – like Three on a Match, Rain, What Price Glory? – being programmed, but also some harder-to-see films. The full schedule can be viewed here.
The lineup includes rarities and restorations, silent animated films (with live accompaniment), and a series of pre-Codes. The festival will include talks and QAs, plus an introduction for each film. Archivist and historian David Pierce has been the fearless organizer.
The closing night film, which it will be my honor to present, is Letty Lynton, the Joan Crawford film so bogged down in legal confusion that it has been basically un-seeable for 90 years. Earlier this fall, the Paris Theatre ran Letty Lynton in an afternoon matinee, which I attended, and it sold out. Over 500 seats, an all-ages crowd. Many of the younger crowd – early 20somethings – showed up in vintage clothing, and they all looked amazing. There was such a sense of excitement, like you wouldn’t believe. We have all heard ABOUT this movie but no one’s been able to see it.
Joan Crawford: still selling out theatres 90 years later!
Letty Lynton is terrific, based on a true story, and has all the earmarks of a classic Pre-Code, including … the lack of punishment when someone does a “bad thing”. Sometimes people get away with things. You can have murder AND a happy ending. Once the “code” was enforced, circa 1933-34, such ambiguities were no longer allowed. In Letty Lynton, Joan is right at the tipping point of her real fame, and it’s great to see. Joan’s costumes – by the incomparable Adrian – are worth the price of admission, including of course the famous “Letty Lynton dress”, all ruffles and chiffon.
Along with Letty Lynton, I’ll be presenting two films on the first day, 1932’s Wild Girl, starring Joan Bennett as a tomboy girl living in the redwood forest, and the plot involves vigilante justice, brothel girls being hustled out of town in a stagecoach, and every man in sight is an absolute sleazebag. Ralph Bellamy and Eugene Pallette are also in it!
I’ll also be presenting 1930’s Man Trouble, a film long impossible to see, incomplete and in degraded condition. The film has now been restored by the UCLA Film Archive.
The other presenters are Farran Smith Nehme (a friend, incredible writer and historian, plus a novelist), film preservationist (and television writer-producer) David Stenn, and author/historian Scott Eyman. Eyman has written a number of excellent biographies. His celebrated biography of John Wayne is one of the best “entertainment” biographies I’ve ever read (and long overdue), and he also wrote a biography of Cary Grant. This year, he published the first biography of Joan Crawford (another excellent read). I’ve admired Eyman from afar for a long time so I am looking forward to meeting him.
If you happen to live in the DC area, maybe this would be a fun event to attend! All Access passes are $200, but you can pay $15 per movie too. We’re expecting a lot of the films to sell out since so many of these screen so rarely. I love Three on a Match but have never seen it on the big screen! All films are playing in the AFI Silver and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you end up attending, find me to say hello.
I saw Patrick Stewart do Macbeth tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was a lovely evening. It’s freezing today and I trekked out there, emerging into the utter chaos of Atlantic and Flatbush. A couple was having a screaming fight about a drug deal gone awry on the sidewalk. The girl shouted, “There’s fuckin’ police all around us right now. They’re already curious about what we talkin’ about – let’s get the fuck outta here!”
I thought it was so funny. Here I was, going to see the Scottish play and there, on Flatbush Avenue, was the Brooklyn version of “Unsex me here”!
I had a glass of wine in the lobby, warming up, and people milled about. Wonderful atmosphere. At intermission, a couple struck up a conversation with me about the play, and it was great fun. They actually had never read the play or seen it, they were there for the Patrick Stewart of it all. We were trying to figure out where the hell Banquo was going when he ran off before intermission. I get he knows he will be killed, but where the hell you going, bro? The couple were wondering who MacDuff was. They hadn’t caught his name. “Who was that man with the wife and kids?” “That was MacDuff,” I said. “he’s a nobleman who was really close with Duncan. I hate to break it to you but … don’t get attached to the MacDuff family.”
This production, highly acclaimed in England, and now here for a run, takes place in Stalinist Russia. It had a more chilly quality than some other productions I’ve seen. The set was stark and bare and there were no scene changes. They used video projections during certain sections, like the forest moving, things abstracted, becoming more and more fragmented, as Macbeth and his wife slowly went mad. There were a couple of moments when I thought it was over-produced.
The play itself, just as a work of literature, is terrifying and one of the most gruesome in all of Shakespeare’s plays. The monologue that reports the deaths of MacDuff’s family, you get the picture in your head of children screaming and being slaughtered. You really don’t need to add TOO much to it. For the most part, I thought the video projections were awesome (the visions of enormous totalitarian armies marching, with Soviet-esque banners waving) but a couple times I was pulled out of it.
Stewart was incredible. His voice! His voice goes right through you. I had a moment when he was doing the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” monologue where I almost got disoriented and I didn’t know what to focus on. First of all, his performance of it was quiet and bitter, and totally underplayed. He just SAID it. He didn’t ADD anything. You just lost yourself in it. Because of his quiet approach, I was allowed space to really listen to him, to hear those famous words, as though for the first time.
It’s easy to take Shakespeare for granted. And to hear – really HEAR – that language, so well-known now, so damn famous … you realize, as though for the first time, how damn brilliant the writing is. It’s like being in the actual presence of God, or a higher power, or something like massive, like seeing the cosmos in one glance. Whatever you want to call it. The language is beyond “good”. It is an emanation of deep and human truth, passed down through the ages … and here it is. Before us. Being spoken simply and clearly by a marvelous actor.
A human being wrote this.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Kate Fleetwood played Lady Macbeth like Eva Peron. She thirsted for power and emasculates her husband like a pro. Fleetwood is much younger than Stewart, which added to the sexual tension. (To be fair, Stewart is a little old for Macbeth. But here, it worked: an older man with a younger hot wife might be a little … anxious … about satisfying her.)
Stewart’s body language in response to her “are you a man?” comments was subtle, and eloquent. He kind of collapsed, a little bit. Just a little, a subtle deflation of energy and stamina. Coming from the inside.
He strutted in in their first scene together, and she embraced him, and they were kissing and passionate as they said their opening lines, eating each other up, his hands all over her, her breasts, her thighs … and then she starts going off on what she thinks needs to happen next, and she is so far beyond him at that point, she is so much further down the path … he was struck dumb, in response. He looked a bit helpless. And seeing Patrick Stewart look helpless is very disorienting. He was wearing military garb, combat boots, he was the picture of a virile strutting man. But Lady Macbeth unmasks him, disarms him … He was helpless. Stewart is so strong a figure you felt the world shake a bit seeing him not know what to do, seeing him hesitate, helpless.
I have seen so many terrible “Out damn’d spot” performances. The actress uses it as an opportunity to become a gibbering gleaming-eyed maniac. Kate Fleetwood was real, and because it was real to her – she WAS out of her mind. Her hands writhed about, and there was something about the moment where I actually started feeling the sticky blood all over MY hands. This was no kitchen-sink acting. She rose to the occasion, but without any fanfare. Just like Stewart with “tomorrow and tomorrow” … she just said the lines. There they were.
The play is horrifying in its action, but even more so it is horrifying psychologically. The two of them cannot stop their ambition, and for a moment all seems possible. They might get away with it. But to live with the repercussions, to walk through life knowing murder got you there … neither of them are up to that.
The relationship those two created was intricate, codependent and twisted. The chiding, the sex, the way they knew what the other person was going to say even before the words were out … Loved seeing them in their scenes together.
My favorite part of the whole production was how they handled the witches.
Those witches are tough, man. It’s tough to play one of the witches (and I should know, since I played one of them once, in a production so bad it still makes me shiver – post about it here, and photos here, here, here … I heard some of my lines come back to me in the play at BAM and felt a shiver of shame. “Doubtless it stood …” ACK!). When playing the witches it’s so easy to go over the top. It so easily can just be SILLY.
The witches in this production were truly frightening. They were omnipresent. They weren’t isolated out in a wild heath (the way I’ve seen it done in many productions). They weren’t cackling and rubbing their hands over a froggy-filled fire. They all wore grey institutional dresses, with white aprons, and white veils on their heads. They were either nurses on the battlefield, or workers in the kitchen. They were in disguise. They took on many guises. They were all of the same physical type: young women, thin, almost girlish, probably 22, 23 years old. Little thin women. You couldn’t tell them apart, they were identical. They scared the SHIT out of me.
I have never before seen a production of Macbeth where the witches were actually frightening. These girls had the bodies of teenagers, but they were dressed as rigid identical Stalinist matrons. Black tights, black shoes. They chopped up food in the kitchen, wielding knives, slashing at bread, and then carrying it to the table, holding the knife behind them in a clenched fist. The action went on around them, but they were always there.
Occasionally, Stewart would glance up at one of them, and hesitate for a bit. Something about her would give him a start. Do I know that girl? Have I seen her before? She ladles soup onto my plate … but there’s something about her … she seems familiar …
It was a trek for me to get out there but I am so glad I went. I’d heard so much about this production and I really wanted to see it for myself. Getting to see Stewart in person, swaggering and collapsing and speaking so quietly but you heard every word, every syllable, every consonant … I won’t forget.
2026 thoughts
Rest in peace, Patrick Stewart. Your career was so vast and you were so loved. I am forever grateful I made the trek out to Brooklyn on a freezing night to see you play Macbeth. It was an honor to get to see you work. Out, out, brief candle!
. 
. Agee’s prose is incantatory and emotional, free-flowing and high-flung, tapping into the human condition and the terrible beauty of our drive to survive. Here is an excerpt:
