At twenty-two – with a
magna cum laude
degree in hand and a rent-controlled studio apartment on Amsterdam and 118th Street – he was poised for a big life in the Big City. In fact, Columbia offered him another full scholarship to complete a doctorate in Film Studies. UCLA also contacted him, letting it be known that they too would like him to accept a doctoral scholarship and a teaching position in their cinema department.
‘I had all these offers and wanted nothing to do with them,’ he said. ‘Call it a lack of ambition – as several of my college advisors did – but I just wanted to program movies for a cinema.’
So he accepted a gig being the chief programmer for the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. ‘One hundred and fifty dollars a week and I was happy as hell, especially as you could get away with anything at the Film Archives. I mean, it was the ultimate cinephile wet dream – a truly “out there” place where I could organize an entire season of East German musicals and get away with it. The work absolutely suited me. I could report to the cinema at noon and work until eight or nine in the evening without hassle. And then I could stay up the rest of the night watching movies.’
For five years he happily kept his zombie hours and created strange ‘out there’ seasons for the Film Archives: obscure Czech animators, forgotten anti-Communist B-movies from the McCarthy era, the great goofy classics of Japanese science fiction, every James M. Cain adaptation ever made . . .
Theo would reel off his film knowledge with rapid-fire delivery. He was a motor mouth, yet the spiel he spieled was always so spirited and erudite that I quickly came to accept his mile-a-minute repartee. Passionate intensity can be very seductive.
He only stood five foot six – and had a big unruly mop of black curly hair, a Frank Zappa goatee and a slight pot-belly (he abhorred all exercise). He always dressed in size 36 black Levi’s 501s, a black T-shirt and an old black leather bomber jacket. Though he wasn’t conventionally handsome, the interest he showed in everything to do with me wowed me. Ever since David I’d always dreamed of meeting another verifiable intellectual. So what if Theo tended to eat crap food and never took vitamins and insisted on getting up to watch a movie after we made love . . . He was never less than interesting.
For such a physically unruly person, he was surprisingly fastidious about certain elements in his life. He was fanatical when it came to flossing his teeth, and showered at least three times a day. His apartment in Cambridge was small – maybe 300 square feet – yet it was amazingly orderly. The hundreds of films that dominated all the bookshelves weren’t just alphabetized, they were also organized with library-style dividers. His bed was always immaculately made and he insisted on changing the perfectly ironed sheets every other day. Just as his black jeans were always perfectly pressed, as well as the boxer shorts that he would only buy from Brooks Brothers. That was another thing about Theo – he had certain rigid consumerist choices from which he wouldn’t deviate. His black T-shirts came from the Gap and once a year, so he told me, he’d rent a car and drive the two and a half hours to Freeport, Maine where there was a Gap outlet. Once there he’d buy thirty size large black T-shirts for $5 a shirt and then go to the Brooks Brothers outlet in the same town and purchase eighteen pairs of boxer shorts for $155 – he was very specific when it came to recalling prices. Finally he’d move on to the Levi’s outlet and buy eighteen pairs of black 501s at $25 a pair. Purchases complete he’d drive north to the village of Wiscasset and buy a lobster roll and a root beer at a famous take-away shack called Red’s. He’d plonk himself down at a table facing the bay, look at that widescreen vision of coastal Maine at its most bucolic, eat his lobster roll, drink his iced tea, and then turn his car around and head south for Boston, arriving back to catch at least three movies that evening
chez lui
.
‘That would take care of both my clothes shopping and my view of the Great Outdoors for another year.’
Now I know all this sounds just a little quirky – because he really didn’t buy another shred of clothing for the rest of the year and he resisted all my attempts to get him to spend a weekend somewhere outside of Boston that
didn’t
have a cinema. But there was something strangely compelling about his quirks, just as I liked the fact that he was outside the mad consumerist dance that characterized so much of modern life. He got his DVDs free from all the distributors he knew. He ordered any books he needed from publishers or libraries. He did all his own washing and cleaning and cooking – and largely subsisted on a diet of Cheerios and frozen lasagne and instant soups and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And when he awoke every morning at noon, he’d start the day by writing for two straight hours before heading off to his job at the Harvard Film Archive.
Theo ended up in Cambridge after getting tossed out of the Anthology Film Archives for failing to maintain budgetary control over his programs and running up an annual deficit of over $200,000. One of his old ‘film geek’ buddies (his term), Ronnie Black, had landed a job running the Harvard Archive and Cinema and was looking for a second-in-command. ‘You’re the best programmer this side of Paris,’ Ronnie told him, ‘but you like to be deliberately profligate. So here’s the deal: you get the job on the proviso that you cannot spend a penny of our money without me signing off on it. You try to play games with me on this front, you’re out on your ass and that will be the end of your career. But if you play by the rules, together we’ll be able to run the show in Cambridge and do exactly what we want to do at Harvard . . . within reason.’
I met Theo at a dinner organized by an old Harvard friend named Sara Crowe. She was the very model of a New England Brahman, with one of those lean angular faces that put me in mind of the sort of Massachusetts
grandes dames
painted on commission by Whistler. She combined a certain ascetic
noblesse oblige
with a horror at the tawdriness of most human endeavor. She was considered perhaps the most important colonial historian since Perry Miller. Her book,
American Theocrats: New Journeys into the Puritan Mind
, won her considerable critical attention, not to mention a tenured professorship at Wellesley. Just to augment the manifold accomplishments of her life she had also married disgustingly well. He was a mutual fund star named Frederick Cowett: Princeton, Wharton, a big family compound in Wells, Maine and their very own townhouse on Beacon Hill, where they lived in upholstered elegance with their two young sons.
Sara was a marvel. The woman never put a foot wrong, never seemed to juggernaut down the wrong street, moving steadily from achievement to achievement. When I got the call at New England State to come over for dinner, she was completely warm and upbeat, telling me she’d heard from her spies all about the way I had stood up to Ted Stevens over the jock issue, and how proud she was of me for ‘being moral at a time when careerism takes precedent over everything else’.
‘Anyway, it’s clear that New England State is nothing more than a way-station for you before you find your way to grander things.’
Translation: What’s a Harvard smarty like you doing teaching at a third-tier university like that one?
Then she changed the subject by mentioning the dinner party to which she wanted to invite me two weeks from Friday.
Yes, her house was magnificent and decorated in subdued but immaculate good taste. Damn her, Frederick didn’t even turn out to be a bore. Instead he came across as charming in a well-bred preppy way, reasonably literate, and not averse to the eclectic group that Sara had assembled for the evening.
That was the other intriguing thing about Sara Crowe – for all her apparent Brahmanism, she did cultivate eccentrics and people who did not dress in Brooks Brothers shirts and bermuda shorts. Which is why, during our Harvard years, she got chummy with Christy – even if ‘
La Poète
’ (as Sara always referred to her) was the antithesis of Sara’s button-down style and had this habit of shocking her friends by drinking far too robustly and then launching into a scatalogical stream of consciousness.
I often thought that Sara needed such extreme friends as a way of informing the straightlaced world in which she dwelled that she was not totally one of them; that her circle would include artists and writers and even a mad film archivist like Theo Morgan.
Sara knew Theo because she sat on the board of the Harvard Film Archive, and because she also spotted him early on as a
premier cru
oddball.
‘Don’t think I’m trying to fix you up by seating him next to you,’ Sara told me in a fast whisper in a corner of her living room, before we all entered the very formal dining room to be served by two liveried waiters. ‘But I promise you that you’ll have a far more entertaining evening with Theo at your side than if I sat you next to Clifford Clayton – who will trace back his lineage to the
Mayflower
for you and also talk at great length about the derivatives market.’
Sara was right. Though I had to readjust my thought processes to tune into his mile-a-minute delivery, Theo Morgan proved to be excellent value.
‘Know what this place reminds me of?’ he said loudly as he sat down next to me. ‘
The Magnificent Ambersons
.’
‘Didn’t know anyone read Booth Tarkington these days,’ I said.
‘The movie is better than the book – which is upmarket soap opera.’
‘It’s rare that a movie betters a novel,’ I said.
‘You mean Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather
is a masterpiece and the movie is pulp?’
‘Ooops.’
‘And how about
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
? I mean, the B. Traven novel isn’t the worst, but Huston’s film . . .’
‘Remind me never to challenge you on a film question again.’
He shot me a mischievous smile.
‘But I like being challenged,’ he said.
As I quickly came to discover, I too liked the challenge of being with Theo. At the end of the dinner – by which time I’d barely spoken to the man on my other side – he asked me to write down my number in a small black notebook that he pulled out of his jacket pocket. I really didn’t expect him to call after this evening. But he surprised me and phoned the following Monday.
‘Now I do hope that you approve of Howard Hawks.’
And he invited me to a screening of
Only Angels Have Wings
the next evening at the Brattle in Cambridge. We went out for a pizza afterwards – and started that first-date ritual of telling each other about ourselves. So I learned about his less-than-happy childhood in Indianapolis and he heard about my less-than-happy childhood in Connecticut. When I dropped the fact that my father was currently on the run from the law, his eyes actually widened.
‘Now that’s what I call classy,’ he said.
‘I never thought of it that way,’ I said, sounding just a little defensive.
‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘A dad who is a fugitive. You should be writing this story, not telling it. I mean, it’s irresistible stuff – especially since he can’t have left you feeling all warm and cuddly about him.’
‘You know, my mom always used that expression, “warm and cuddly”.’
‘But not with the emphasis on heavy irony that I bring to it.’
We saw each other again that weekend – a Bogart double-bill,
The Maltese Falcon
and
High Sierra
– and dinner at some cheap hamburger joint. On the third date – two Rohmer talkathons and a cheap Chinese place that was rather good all the same – he invited me back to his apartment. I accepted without hesitation.
Naturally I was nervous. So too was Theo. But when he finally made the move, we both responded with a fervor that was surprising.
Afterwards he put on a Miles Davis album – ‘Great post-coital stuff.’ Fetching us a decent bottle of wine he let it be known that he was seriously falling for me.
‘Now I know that, strategically, this is a dumb thing to say – because I’m supposed to play diffident and stand-offish and “don’t crowd my space”. But I’m not going to assume some role I don’t want to assume. I’m going to give it to you straight, Jane: you’re wonderful – and I’m a tough critic.’
When we have a need, we generally try to fill it
. Theo Morgan did just that for me – and his declaration of intention didn’t push me away. On the contrary I was ready to be in love again, ready to give up the isolation and solitude that had been so much a part of my life since David’s death. For years I couldn’t even imagine the embrace of another man. I had shut down in that department (not that there were men flinging themselves in my path). But here was a guy who was singular and different and so comfortable in his own quirky skin. I loved his wit, his mental gymnastics and the fact that he could riff wildly on any subject – from George Bush’s ineptness in the English language, to an avant-garde jazzman of the 1950s named Jimmy Giuffre, to Joseph Strick’s film versions of Joyce (of which he was a big fan), to a forgotten Miami crime writer named Charles Willeford, whom Theo considered on a par with Chandler.
The range of his interests was dazzling. I sensed he so loved and needed these private passions because they masked a terrible loneliness. A few weeks after we became lovers he admitted to me that he hadn’t had a proper girlfriend for years, and that the one big love in his life – a performance artist named Constance van der Plante – had unceremoniously dumped him after he lost his job in New York.
‘You know, I almost didn’t go to that Sara Crowe dinner,’ he said. ‘Lucky me that I did.’
Sara was more than surprised when I told her that Theo and I were now an item.
‘Well, this was certainly not what I had planned when I put the two of you together.’
‘Don’t sound so shocked. He’s wonderful.’
‘Of course he is,’ she said, not sounding as though she meant it. ‘The thing is, Jane . . . well, I just wouldn’t have guessed that the two of you would have hit it off like that.’