Forget plot. Plot is not important. What was Omar Sharif crossing the desert for anyway? Five minutes into The View from Pompey’s Head, we are made to see the gambit, the reason Richard Egan has been spit into our faces. He steps off the train and Dana Wynter is there, waiting. It is the fifties, and there are all these beautiful women to be fucked. Susan Hayward. Grace Kelly. They can have careers, but in the end it is their bodies that have to be soothed. Don’t ask why, we can’t go home until we’ve seen that done. And there are a limited number of believable practitioners of the art: Holden, Lancaster, Cooper, Cagney in a pinch, though he’s getting old; Bogart, but he’s dying. So Richard Egan, whose face may be familiar to us from supporting parts, steps up to the plate.
There is, at first, that exhilaration of possibility, of the new. Except that he is ugly. Still, he wears his own ugliness well, with confidence. He has a good profile. He moves, and waits to speak his lines, with extraordinary calm. Also, he is good at listening. We weigh these things, as we take him in, the way we might weigh similar gestures if we were speaking to a man at a party. We are holding something in reserve: a judgment, a willingness to continue the conversation.
When he finally gets to hold Dana Wynter, it is shocking how expert he looks, the way his hands go to the exact places a man’s hands might go. He pulls her to him in such a manner, we wonder why the actress doesn’t slap him, doesn’t say, “This is acting, fool!” But she doesn’t; instead, she responds, and the moment is achieved.
Leave it at that, and he becomes a star. But Richard Egan, in this movie, is a married man. Dana Wynter is not his wife, but an old flame; he has come back to the South to reclaim not only her but his own lost youth, and it will never do, it cannot be done, not now, not in this decade. We know he will have to get back on the train, in time. Still, it’s easy to imagine the way Cooper would have handled the moment of renunciation: mouthing the penitential lines, allowing the deep familiar crevices to appear in his face, and still winking at us: I fucked her, man. I got in.
The great, enduring stars are careful, and take things on the journey that will protect them. But Richard Egan, at the beginning, looks as though he believes solely in his own luck. He is like a boy going off to college, or a bridegroom, as he steps on the train and waves good-bye to Dana Wynter. Nothing separates him from the story he has begun to tell.
You were five years old that year, sitting, in pajamas, in the backseat of a car at the drive-in. None of this was evident to you as you looked at the face, large and red on the white rectangle in the woods of Natick. In the front seat your parents, stolid, young, watched. About them you were certain, too, that luck would attach, and only good things happen.
Seven Cities of Gold (1955)
In 1955, no one lost sleep over the casting of Anglos in ethnic roles. Richard Egan’s concession to the verismo of his part here—a soldier in the Spanish cavalry, in the 1760s—consists of a ponytail and the name he has been given. Still, when someone calls “José!” we expect him to turn around, confused, wondering where the hell José might be.
He looks good on a horse, though, and he has mastered the trick of appearing as though he belongs up there. We can breathe a little, those of us who are rooting for him. That confidence is really something.
He is even allowed, for the first time, a moment of fun. The soldiers, on their way to the mythical seven cities, have pitched camp for the night, somewhere in the vicinity of San Diego Harbor. There are campfires, guitars. A song about Rosalita. Leaning against his own bedroll, propped on one elbow, he sings along for two bars. He wears a big wide smile that is wonderful to see. All hope for himself is in it. The young actor anticipating a lifetime of adventure.
Within five minutes, though, we begin to suspect that the sexy swaggering of Richard Egan and his pal Anthony Quinn isn’t really what this movie has on its mind. A priest, Father Junípero Serra, has come along on the expedition; he has begun converting Indians. He smiles beatifically and dreams of missions in California. Almost as soon as Richard Egan takes Ula, the Indian girl, into the surf with him, we know, we know what must happen.
They have given him a scene, lines to speak, a credo to hold up before the priest after the Indian girl has thrown herself off a cliff, following his attempt to dump her. “I have neither guilt, nor shame, nor fear” is not a line he should ever have been asked to speak, so patently does he not believe it. When next we see him, he is reciting the act of contrition, and turning himself over to the heathens.
The Indians return his body to the mission, and a soldier reports, “They tore out his heart. It was a great one.” But we already knew that. We may even suspect, at this point, his heart is too great, and therefore of no use to us. Closer to our own hearts would be a hero who cut out of the situation, claiming he only kissed her, he promised nothing, they stood in the surf, his hands went to the good places, she responded. He is no fool. He knows this. Knows, too, that, very soon, he has to begin to ally himself with the world as we want to perceive it. That is, if he wants to stake his claim. Even as he recites the act of contrition, we can see him planning a meeting at Fox, the words he will use, which he hopes will not reek too heavily of desperation.
Love Me Tender (1956)
“Let me get the girl,” he suggests, not long after, in the office of an executive in charge of casting at Twentieth Century-Fox.
It is not that they have given up on him, he has been assured, but the first two pictures have failed commercially, as has a third, Violent Saturday, released briefly and unceremoniously the same year. The right project has to be found, that’s all.
A silence follows his proposal. The executive crosses his legs, sucks a mint. Richard Egan experiences one of those gut-clenching moments when he perceives himself on the verge of being ignored, passed over, and that no second chance will follow this. So he repeats the suggestion, elaborates on it.
“I feel I can make contact with the public. With a large public. But they can’t always see me as somebody who loses.”
It is like a speech he might give in the movies. He says it that way, exuding confidence and calm. Briefly, he sees the executive as Father Junípero Serra, as a man who will send him to have his heart cut out. But the man sitting across from him is pocker-faced. He uncrosses his legs.
“Nobody’s interested in typecasting you, Dick,” the man says.
To prove it, Richard Egan is given a Civil War picture in development. In it, he will not be asked, for the third time, to deny himself. He will, instead, get the girl, and turn things around, become an established star.
That, at least, is how he proceeds, with that assurance. But a man who has failed enough times begins looking around for ways he might fail again. Not through his own fault, but through circumstance, mismanagement. No one on the set, at any rate, appears to be a threat, least of all the hillbilly singer cast as his younger brother, the one who loses this time out.
But midway through filming, something awful happens. The mint-sucking executive shows up, watches a day of shooting. In the evening, the director disappears. There are new scenes the next day. Not scenes, precisely. The hillbilly singer is given songs, numbers. He is asked to swivel his hips at the postwar pie bake-off and make girls in bonnets swoon. Watching this, Richard Egan can convince himself for only a day or two that this does not alter the plan, it is still his film, the one where he gets the girl.
In the rushes, watched in the evening, he begins to see it, to understand something about the movies he has not understood before. It is nearly ontological in its weight. He is doing his best acting, he can see that. His performance has depth and gravity. And it counts for nothing. The hillbilly is a terrible actor. He has everything to learn. But when he is on-screen, something quickens. It is that simple.
Richard Egan looks, through much of the ensuing film, like a man on whom something is slowly dawning, the inadequacy of his own heavy body, the unchosen trick of forcing plot and circumstance to give way to a separate compact
with the audience. But there are still the lines to be said, gestures made. They must still be invested in, though the film he thought he was making has stopped being made, another film has replaced it, a far sillier film that will bleed into history and leave people asking: Who was it, remember, in the film with Elvis, you know, the other guy?
A Summer Place (1959)
A three-year interval. Other movies, unremarkable ones. Then the role of his career, the one he was born to play. There are chances and chances. For a moment, in 1959, he must have felt the world opening to him, as though, in spite of all the hard luck that had preceded this, he really couldn’t fail.
He is so good in this. He found his audience, too, women in their early forties, women just around the corner of possibility, women as old then as Dorothy McGuire, the love interest, the woman he has come back to the Pine Island Inn in order to see; the woman who dumped him once, years before, when he was the poor lifeguard, in favor of the rich boy who has since taken over the inn. He is coming to her now as a self-made millionaire, while her husband, the rich boy, drinks and runs the inn into the ground. “I’m not putting on any dog,” Richard Egan says to his uppity wife, on the yacht they have chartered, and we love him, right away, for the poor boy’s way he has of saying “dog.”
Then he has his moment, the one for which he will live forever. A heavy rain is falling over the Pine Island Inn, and the roof is leaking. An old woman, bothered by the dripping in her room, approaches Richard Egan, remembering him from years before. “Lifeguard,” she says, “how about fixing my leak?”
Richard Egan cocks his head, takes a masterful pause, and asks, “Just where are you leaking?”
In theaters all over America, the line got a laugh. But it was not a joke, not entirely. You were nine years old that summer. Your mother dragged you and your brother to see the movie three times, and quoted the line to her friends, and wore a particular look when she quoted it. So you knew, just from watching, it was a question a woman of a certain age deeply wanted to be asked. And you knew, too, because of this, that your father had stopped being what he was, that your mother needed now to seek out others, in the dark.
Earlier, at the dinner table, Richard Egan listened to Dorothy McGuire tell of a dream she’d had. Women’s faces aren’t shot that way anymore, in that kind of soft focus. Dorothy McGuire looks beautiful as she tells of her old plan, the quest of the early days of her marriage, to walk naked on the beach in September, after all the summer guests had gone. “What happened?” he asks. “I simply woke up, I guess.” She smiles, and then he just looks at her, a look stripped of everything but compassion, merely comprehending. For a moment, that look puts him up with the greats. And he is rewarded for it, too, allowed a consummation previously forbidden him. In the attic, wet from fixing the roof, he takes Dorothy McGuire into his arms and kisses her. This time, we know, he will not be asked to renounce, or to give his heart to the Indians in payment. This time, no singer waits offstage to nullify his efforts. We rejoice with him in the kiss, those of us who have stuck with him to this point. His wife won’t sleep with him, he has stayed with her only for the sake of his daughter, Sandra Dee, just as Dorothy McGuire has endured a nightmare marriage for the sake of her son, Troy Donahue. Those blond, impossible figures hover over the kiss, those twin gods we will be forced to watch again and again in the next few years. But not yet, please. For now, at least, we are watching the restoration of the lifeguard and the rich, ungraspable girl. Dorothy McGuire must get her naked walk on the beach, and the man capable of restoring Eden given the right to do so. Just where are you leaking? Here, your mother said, with two sons beside her, and a part of her life past. And here.
Pollyanna (1960)
Consider it. An actor comes this far, stakes his claim to an audience, to the hearts of women of a certain age. The world ought to open now. Everyone knows this story, we’ve all read it enough times. A man suffers long enough, pays his dues, then he gets to not suffer anymore.
But in 1959, on a drizzly day in November, Richard Egan sits in a bar in New York, drinking with his agent, who has come east on business and who, at the moment, is trying to convince him to accept an offer from Disney. Disney wants him to play a supporting part in a new picture, the story of a little girl; the studio, it seems, is determined to make a star of Hayley Mills.
He thinks: Hayley Mills. He is drinking bourbon. New York in 1959, autumn, in the rain. Men in hats and the women who love him, under umbrellas, on their way to buses. A Summer Place has been a huge hit. All summer long the theaters were full. Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue have been signed to long-term contracts. The theme song reached number one. He is too reticent to mention any of this, to say, “My name came first.” In the rain, the uptown bus, the wrong one, splashes the legs and raincoats of women waiting. They are far from the place where they can appreciate him, though he has the sense that if he went out now and stood there, a small crowd might gather. But it is too risky to chance.
He tells his agent he’d like to do another movie like A Summer Place, and his agent, looking past him, briefly melancholy, says, “There aren’t going to be any other movies like A Summer Place, Dick.” Everyone with bad news now calls him Dick. “They’ve just found out the kids are going to the movies more than the adults. So there are going to be movies like Molly and Johnny Get Married. And Molly and Johnny Have a Baby. Of course there are still going to be a few other kinds of movies made, because Lancaster and Douglas, they’re getting old. And Liz Taylor and even Paul Newman. They’re passing thirty, forty. So they’ll find stories for them.” He leaves the rest unsaid. There is that kind of moment with an agent, where you’re told delicately, in the ellipses, where you stand. Such a person would not lie to you. Still, it is a great mystery why, with his last movie a hit, it has come to this. The bus arrives and picks up all the women. He sees across the street, in a lighted haberdashery, a bald man with glasses on the bridge of his nose staring out into the rain. And he has his epiphany: they have no power, these women, his fans, to make anything happen. He is trying to understand the world before it is too late for him, but he can only comprehend the fact that power has shifted, gone elsewhere. He is drunk enough to want to go out and hit someone. Someone young.
The 300 Spartans (1962)
As suddenly as it began, it is over. His trajectory. His gamble with himself: how high can I rise? And with the world: how about, consider, this kind of hero? It was vanity, yes, to throw himself out that way, but the war was over, there was that sense for a while. Possibility. It lasted seven years.
He has signed, already, to do a TV series. Empire. When a movie star does that, you know he’s gotten afraid. By the time he arrives in Spain to don his battle gear for The 300 Spartans, he is capable of nosing out the potential success or failure of a project, and this one stinks of failure. Though the script is good. But the budget is low. All over Spain, there are movie sets grander than this one. The Moors’ castle from El Cid. Pilate’s temple from King of Kings. They are a small company. The director shot some of the best films of the forties. He was Rita Hayworth’s favorite cameraman. But he is an old man now. So all right.
Ahead of him are long years as a throaty, nervous CIA operative, the captain of a tuna boat, secondary roles in which he will support the likes of George Chakiris, Christopher Jones, younger stars whose time in the sun will be even briefer than his own. Empire will fail to catch on, as will Redigo, his second series. After that, an even deeper descent, into the bus-and-truck companies of plays, sharing one- and two-night stands, and drinks afterward, with Eva Gabor, and Pat O’Brien. Then, the last stop, a daytime soap.
He knows all this, or some form of it, as he prepares to don the battle dress of King Leonidas. For the last time, his name will go above the title. There is at least that to consider, though by the time the movie opens, a multi-theater “dump” in September, his name will, in fact, be buried at the bottom of the ads, and boys lured into theaters with the promise of “The Flying
Wedge—cleverest strategy in the history of warfare!”
Let it be. He sits now, on the edge of a hill in Spain, staring at a blood red sunset, reading Herodotus. He is alone, preparing for the next day’s shooting. The English contingent of the cast—Ralph Richardson and the others—tend not to mix. The American actors are younger than he is. He sits with a drink, looks up from the book, a little drunk, thinks, grants himself the thought: Not bad. To have come this far, at least. To Spain. From San Francisco. From the war, from a California boyhood. Not bad.
He is caught up, too, in Herodotus. The stories are great. From Herodotus, he learns that the Persians, seizing a Greek boat, chose for sacrifice not the fiercest warrior but the handsomest. That Xerxes, when a storm over the Hellespont destroyed his bridges, had the waters whipped in punishment. And then the best: when a spy came to observe the Spartans, expecting to find, on the eve of their destruction, fear and trembling among the small band, he saw, instead, men combing their long hair, and took such vanity as a sign of weakness.
He looks up when he reads that. The light is about to go entirely, and he has to squint to stare into it. He has a tumbler of bourbon in his hand, and his breathing has changed, gradually. He is startled, though in a quiet way, by what he has just read. All these years, and he has waited to figure out a way to say something other than what’s in the lines, how to make the separate compact all the greats knew how to make. And now it comes to him, this late, on a hill in Spain.
Late September, 1962. School days. Baseball in the afternoon has come to seem inappropriate. The grass is like straw now, and Saturdays are for the movies.
Someone knows this. The hunger of pre-adolescent boys has been prepared for, a steady succession of masculine adventures made ready. Gladiators, foot soldiers, men in prison. Grimace and forearm and sinew. The world presented to boys as an inheritance this second autumn of the Kennedy administration still comes down to a desperate choice, to be made in tight quarters, by a man with a weapon in his hand.
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