Scholar; gentleman; scoundrel; cad.
So there’s this thing my grandfather used to say. My mother’s father, who ran away to Canada when war first broke out in Europe (for the second time, last century, but who’s counting?) and lied about his age, because the States weren’t in the thick of it yet, and he wanted more than anything else in the world to fly airplanes. Which he did: Spitfires, among others. Then he did a lot of editing and writing. For a while, he managed a department store: Gaylord’s, it was called. He was active for a good long time in one of those men’s clubs that make public service fun by layering it with secret handshakes and weekend barbecues, and he was a fanatic about playing golf at the local VFW, and he was a diabetic. Smoked like a chimney, too.
But that’s neither here nor there: this is about what he used to say, or rather, I was going to use what he used to say as a starting point. I’d do something he’d asked me to do—brought him the remote, say, or a glass of water, and he’d beam. “You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman.”
“Thank you, sir,” I’d say.
“No, no,” he’d say, “what you should say back is, ‘And there are damn few of us left in this world.’” And he’d bust out in this hoarsely infectious laugh, hack hack.
—Of course, he’d also set up his accoutrements for his morning insulin shot, syringe and vial on the table, sleeve rolled up, and he’d load up the syringe and peer at it in the morning light and then beckon me over. “Time for your morning shot, young man!”
“No, sir,” I’d say, shaking my big solemn head, as he busted out laughing again, hack hack.
It seems there’s a subset of our friends hereabouts who, upon discovering Jenn and I had not yet seen All About Eve (an oversight, we readily admit it, but we have seen The Lady Eve, so there, neener), were downright eager to see my reaction to it. Or not to it, per se; wondrous movie that it is, it has been sufficiently steeped into the public pop-consciousness that it’s impossible not to thrum with deja vu when the battle of wills begins between Margo Channing and Eve Harrington. —No, it was specifically the character of Addison DeWitt that they wanted to see me see: coldly scheming theatre critic and manipulative sonuvabitch par excellence, that coolly silky voice edged with menace like a velvet nap, wrapped in fine black suits like he just stepped out of those Arrow shirt ads from the ’20s and ’30s. A fop with an iron will; a fop with power, with a taste for power like a good brandy or a fine single-malt. I’d take to him instantly, they swore. A new Excelsior, a non pareil; a new paragon. I had to see him.
One is not entirely sure how to take that.
(Oh, I loved him. Indeed. Want his wardrobe and his cigarette filter. Still: one doesn’t like to be quite so—obvious?)
Having read a bit now about the actor who played him, I’m eager to rev up a George Sanders film festival. Rather like the Barbara Stanwyck bender we went on a while back—though Sanders doesn’t seem to have had quite Stanwyck’s luck in landing the classics. Still: it’ll be nice to get a shot of him in the system, to be able to have and to hold a clear picture of him: in evening dress, in an archetypal Stork Club, say, a quivering ingenue or slighted husband standing affronted before him, voice in high dudgeon: “You, sir, are a scoundrel and a cad!”
And he’d smile, just so, his eyes—sad? You wouldn’t call them that, but that’s the impression they’d leave, when you went over it after the fact—and this is what he’d say right back in that voice, that voice: “And there are damned few left of us in this world.”
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