Authors: True Believers
A
tribe
? In a big city in modern America? “Like the Lost Boys in
Peter Pan
?” I asked.
“Yes,
exactly,
” my father replied with a smile.
Notwithstanding my antiestablishment precocity, I became a member of pep club, the same as every girl at Locust Junior High School in Wilmette, Illinois, in the early 1960s. My cheering was always just this side of pointedly unenthusiastic. Our uniforms—black tights, black skirts, black gloves outdoors in cold weather—made the whole business easier for me to rationalize, as did the fact that we were the Locust
Wolves.
Wolves seemed like a beatnik animal.
Near the end of eighth grade, for the entire week before the last baseball game of the school year, Chuck Levy had been going on and on about how I was going to go
bananas
when I heard the band play at the game. He and Alex Macallister had written the arrangement with the music teacher. But neither Chuck (sax) nor Alex (percussion) would tell me what their surprise song was, which finally irritated me so much that on the morning of the game I lied and told them I might skip it and go to a ban-the-bomb rally in Chicago with my mother and father.
My parents thought it was important to keep an eye on what Dad called “even the reasonable war machine.” He’d grown up in Denmark and had been involved with the Danish Resistance as a young man, then spent a year as a political prisoner in a Nazi camp at the end of the war, which made our Republican neighbors cut the peacenik foreigner some slack.
“You’ll regret it forever if you’re not there, Viv,” Chuck told me. His big smile made the nickname even more annoying.
“I’ll regret it more if World War III starts and I didn’t do everything I could to prevent it.”
Alex had a big grin, too. He was dying to spill the beans. “It’ll be a cooler experience if it’s a surprise, trust me.”
“
‘Cooler’
? We’re talking about the
band.
” I tried guessing while simultaneously pretending I didn’t care.
“You have got to come, Hollaender,” Chuck said, sounding a little desperate. “Seriously. It’s going to be amazing. For
you.
”
For me? Maybe “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” But the band had already played that at the Thanksgiving concert after the Cuban Missile Crisis. “Blowin’ in the Wind”? They shook their heads. I couldn’t keep guessing unsuccessfully and maintain an air of omniscient ennui. “Well, enjoy yourselves. I’m late for study hall. Bye.”
I don’t remember the opposing team that afternoon, or who won, but I remember with absolute clarity the first song the band played during the seventh inning. As the musicians lined up and readied themselves, I noticed Chuck wasn’t among the other saxophones and clarinets, which worried me. Then I caught Alex’s eye, and he was grinning and excited, drumsticks at the ready.
I didn’t recognize the tune when they played the first four long, low notes, the tuba squeezing off a quick blast between each one, nor when the same sequence repeated—a kind of dohhh,
wah,
rayyy,
wah,
meee,
wah,
rayyy,
wah.
But when the electric guitar broke in with the loud, twangy eighth notes, however, I shrieked and jerked my hands and knees up as if I’d gotten a shock. Tears formed, and I started giggling. All of which would’ve been a major embarrassment if the song hadn’t also startled all the other pep club girls, who were smiling and murmuring and glancing around.
It was the theme music from
Dr. No.
Not many of the other kids knew the song, since the movie had come out only a couple of weeks earlier, and it was the first James Bond film. But an electric guitar played fast and loud at an official school event in the daytime in 1963 was unprecedented, subversive, thrilling. And the big amplifier was right beneath us, under the bleachers, with the volume turned all the way up. We felt the sound hitting our thighs. There had never been a more glamorous moment at Locust Junior High.
I was in the top row, as always, and a girl nudged me to turn around and look down. Standing on the grass behind the bleachers was Chuck Levy, in his band uniform, long legs slightly apart, staring down at his right hand, willing his fingers to pick out the correct notes at super-speed, he and his silver Stratocaster awash in the pink light of the late-afternoon sun. He was the soloist, but he was offstage, an anonymous star; how cool. Near the end of the song, as the trombones and trumpets blared their final, rising notes, and Chuck prepared to strum the big final chord, he looked up and saw me and smiled.
By the time he unplugged and trotted out onto the field to take a bow with the rest of the band, my fond, sisterly, quasi-adversarial regard for Chuck Levy had changed.
I had a history of going a little nuts for certain adventure novels. The first was
Alice Through the Looking Glass,
back in fourth grade. When I got to page six, I felt as if some new section of my brain had been activated. I shivered with a pleasure I hadn’t known. “ ‘Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow,’ Alice said to her cat as she stared at herself in the mirror. ‘Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through.’ And the glass
was
beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. In another moment Alice was through the glass.” Then I read
The Once and Future King,
and for most of a year I
was
young King Arthur, Dad was Merlin, and it was my destiny to create the perfect kingdom of Camelot somewhere beyond northeastern Illinois.
Chuck and Alex and I were not just James Bond “fans.” We were in thrall to Bond. It started the summer after sixth grade. On one of those summer-vacation days that waver between luxuriously open-ended and achingly dull, I happened to pick up my mom’s pink hardcover copy of
From Russia with Love,
which I figured was some kind of soft-on-communism Soviet-American romance. Around the same time Alex read his father’s brand-new hardback
Thunderball.
When we discovered, one afternoon at Centennial Park swimming pool, that we had independently discovered and fallen in love with the world of James Bond, we (as my mother enjoyed saying for the rest of her life) bonded. Up until then I hadn’t known Chuck Levy well, even though the three of us and two girls and Jimmy Graham had been the Smart Kids in our class. But Alex and Chuck were already best friends, and Chuck took Alex’s lead in many things cultural—abandoning Ricky Nelson in favor of Duane Eddy, skipping the second half hour of
Route 66
on Friday nights in order to watch
77 Sunset Strip.
And then James Bond.
At the beginning it was just a book discussion group, like the Hobbit Fellowship my little brother Peter and his friends started a few years later. But when the Wall went up in Berlin at the end of that summer, our interest in Bond spiked—the books seemed more legitimate, like extra-credit reading for social studies. Alex and I had a head start on Chuck, but in the fall he caught up quickly and then passed us, since every member of the Levy family was a certified Reading Dynamics speed reader. By Christmas vacation we had acquired all nine Bond books, and each of us had read every one—although just to make sure, I created, typed, and carbon-copied a hundred-question exam covering the minutiae of the eight novels and five short stories.
We didn’t have formal meetings, but that first year, all through seventh grade, when we were alone at lunch or walking together to and from school, we’d fall into discussions of characters and scenes and plot points. Even basic facts were open to debate: we once spent days arguing over what year Bond had been born and whether he aged. Alex loved the wordplay titles (
Live and Let Die
and, later,
You Only Live Twice
), but the books he liked best were
Doctor No
and
Thunderball
because the villains had nuclear ambitions, whereas stealing gold or smuggling diamonds struck him as ordinary uninteresting criminality. Chuck’s favorite was
From Russia with Love
because he thought it was the most realistic—the way, for instance, it says professional assassins start feeling guilty about killing people. What I loved about
Moonraker
was the fact that Sir Hugo Drax, a British industrialist, is actually a secret Nazi madman, and that the Special Branch operative who figures out Drax’s nuclear missile plan is a young woman, Gala Brand.
We all loved Bond’s line in
Casino Royale
after Vesper Lynd’s suicide, “The bitch is dead now,” which became a jokey private catchphrase, employed whenever we were angry at one of our sisters or mothers or the crone who served as Locust Junior High’s Rosa Klebbian assistant principal.
It wasn’t exactly a secret club. I didn’t hide the books or my extreme interest from my parents. They were entertained, I learned later, by the contradiction between the softhearted politics I’d inherited from them and the ruthless Cold Warrior fantasy life I acquired from Ian Fleming. The Macallisters wholly approved of Alex’s Bond hobby, his mother because
Life
magazine had reported that
From Russia with Love
was President Kennedy’s favorite novel, his father because it seemed like hopeful evidence for his son’s fundamental manliness. One of Chuck’s mother’s Hadassah friends had told her that
Goldfinger
was anti-Semitic, which gave Chuck a new opportunity to remind her that she drove a Volkswagen.
But for various unspoken reasons, we conducted ourselves discreetly. We were discreet because we were twelve-year-olds—two boys and
a girl
—devoted to books that depicted sadism and boozing and nakedness and unmarried amoral strangers (including women with strippers’ names—Pussy Galore, Honeychile Rider) having sex. And, of course, committing cold-blooded murder. As junior high began, we were already considered geeky—especially Alex and I—so why advertise this peculiar new strain of oddness to classmates already primed to be suspicious?
But our secrecy wasn’t mainly about avoiding ostracization, either.
It pleased us, in those days before we had many important secrets to keep, that our devotion to this fictional world of conspiracies and ciphers and agents and weapons remained unseen and shadowy.
We had reached a new level of obsessiveness the summer before eighth grade, right after
The Spy Who Loved Me
was published. I loved it because the narrator/heroine is an ordinary twenty-three-year-old American girl who happens to meet Bond (and then has screaming orgasmic sex with him). Alex hated it because its narrator is an ordinary American girl, not a foreign spy or killer; Bond doesn’t appear until halfway through, then disappears; the villains are run-of-the-mill thugs; and the whole thing takes place at some crummy American motel. Chuck was torn: he approved of the realism (ordinary girl, ordinary crooks, chance encounter, motel), but the romantic stuff seemed to him so entirely un-Bond, he argued for weeks that maybe Ian Fleming had paid someone else to write the book for him.
“Hollaender, I mean
seriously,
come
on,
” he said the first afternoon after we’d all read it. We were at Bob’s, our burgers-and-ice-cream place on Wilmette Avenue. Chuck put his palms on his chest and tried to coo girlishly. “ ‘Every smallest detail would be written on my heart forever.’ Don’t tell me you take that kind of crap seriously. I thought the
tough
chicks were your heroes, like Gala Brand.” Chuck’s use of “chick” was one result of Bond immersion.
“I just think the first-person point of view is really interesting. Like in
On the Road.
”
“Oh, I
see,
Miss Maynard G. English Teacher,” Chuck said, “let me take some notes on that.” He went to get his french fries.
Alex was smiling. “I figured one of the things you liked about Gala,” he said softly, “is that she, you know, isn’t a slut.”
Alex was right, which I hadn’t realized until that moment. Gala Brand and Solitaire (in
Live and Let Die
) were the only major female characters who didn’t have sex with Bond. I liked Gala Brand for her seriousness and professionalism, and now I liked Vivienne Michel because of her shameless capacity for both lust and love. Which, needless to say, I couldn’t say.
“Do you think,” Alex asked, now in a whisper, no longer smiling, “that women really do like to imagine they’re being raped when they’re having intercourse?”
He was referring to Vivienne’s theory of female sexuality. “All women,” she says in the book, “love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.” Until that moment at Bob’s, our group discussions of the books’ sex had been vague and glancing.
“How would I know?” I said.
“But what do you
think
? Seriously, like imagine if you and Rob Norquist were taking a shower together—”
“
Stop,
Alex.” Smiling giant tanned blond Rob Norquist was the smartest and nicest of the jocks, and Alex had delighted in telling me that his pubic hair was the most luxuriant of any boy’s in gym class. In
The Spy Who Loved Me,
Vivienne’s first sexual encounter with Bond takes place after he surprises her in her shower. “James
saved
Viv from being raped by the bad guys, okay?”
“
James?
”
We always called Bond “Bond.”
“What Viv likes about Bond,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t blush, “the ‘sweet brutality’ or whatever, is because he isn’t
really
raping her. It’s a make-believe thing, only in her mind. And I guess maybe his mind, too.”
“But which is it, the feeling, make-believe or real? That’s what I don’t get.”
“It’s both. I guess it’s both. I mean, soldiers in war probably have all kinds of make-believe ideas in their heads while they’re fighting, imagining they’re John Wayne or something. Okay, so with Viv, when she’s, you know … with Bond, she’s herself, doing what she’s doing, but in her
mind,
she
also
turns it into a make-believe scene.”