TORYBURCH
Who was your first crush? Was it the flush-cheeked boy who rode past your house every afternoon, or the freckled girl who sat in the front of the class? Or… was it a high-wattage figure, staring out at you from the silver screen, bedroom posters and the latest issue of Tiger Beat?
Cathy Alter and Dave Singleton’s Crush (William Morrow) spotlights the latter with 38 essays from your favorite writers waxing on about their own celeb swooning. Here, read a trio of excerpts: an award-winning poet is smitten with a certain Blondie, a horror maestro is captivated by another blondie (this time Hitchcockian) while a journalist and NPR cohost graduates from a teen icon to a music legend.
David Keplinger on Deborah Harry
It is 1979 and I am in the seventh grade and I am watching American Bandstand, where, center stage, Deborah Harry stands behind her stiff steel microphone, slightly smiling, singing. It is the song I heard at the Skate Ranch on Route 309, a driving “One Way or Another,” and she is like all the girls I loved then and all the girls I will love and there’s something else: she doesn’t really look at the camera; she doesn’t really look at the microphone. Her eyes are just rising a little ways behind me to a place about four feet off the floor. Wherever I am watching her from, that spot is just behind me. Which leaves me, twelve years old and five feet tall, hair “feathered back” (as my mother would describe to the beatician), feeling decidedly unsuitable, like I should look back over my shoulder at the lucky guy who is.
Deborah Harry doesn’t dance. She might throw a red scarf around like a giant, ridiculous handkerchief. But no dancing. The scarf accentuates the fact. She is teasing as she reprimands. Then she throws the scarf over her shoulder again.
I see her now, 37 years later, in videos from that period, old television spots that appear on YouTube. This Bandstand episode is one of them. In this one, her boys in skinny ties strum Gibson guitars or bang at the drums. Her post-punk/pre-New Wave raunch kind of flaunts the fact that this is as far as it’s going to go, boys and girls; you will float here in this blue-ball hell, it says to me; you will live in this light between fighting and fucking. It’s excruciating. It’s exhilarating to be between so much, such joy and frustation, anger and ecstasy. It is a feeling I would have described then as “good.” That’s how it was in 1979. It felt good to watch Deborah Harry on American Bandstand. To be her five-foot-tall voyeur. To stand just a little in front of the real guy she’s looking at. To watch the video on my computer. And I feel it all roiling in my gut again. Only now do I see her largesse and intelligence and the sculpted cheekbones, the unblinking eyes, the nearly emotionless challenge — feel good? — rising out of her expression. Only now do I see how beautiful she was then. She won’t dance for you. She is herself.
Only now do I see it: the look that Charlize Theron, to name just one of her emanations, has drawn from Deborah Harry’s early glamour. In the Bandstand appearance Deborah Harry could be Theron’s twin. Only now do I see how those subtle turns of the hip, that resistance to actually dancing, that I-won’t-dance-don’t-ask-me- kind of dance, is sexier and more suggestive than the real thing. There’s something reasonable about it. There will be no fighting, there will be no fucking, but I understand that if there must be something, her momvements say, there will be this.
So it happens all over again. It is 1979 and I am in the seventh grade and I am watching American Bandstand, where on the wide stage Deborah harry stands in a gold miniskirt with yellow stockings on, and she is taking the microphone out ofthe socket, and she is doing a little circle around the metal pole saying: I’m gonna meetcha meetcha meetcha meetcha. The guitars never blare into the squealing solo. But there is the option, the promise, always. There is the possibility. Everything is possibility. It is 1979 and I am in the seventh grade and Deborah Harry wears her new short hair like Elizabeth, whose parents are from Hungary, and whom I say hello to at the seventh-grade Get to Know Ya Party. The girls are sitting on one side of the gymnasium. The boys are sitting on the other side of the gymnasium. The oys are always jumping on top of each other, trying to make the other one flinch. I always flinch. Elizabeth is looking at someone just behind me. The boys are on the verage of fighting. The girls are laughing and watching one another. Everyone — and here is the wonderful thing — is in love with someone in that room. Blondie on the radio. Nobody, nobody dances.
Stephen King on Kim Novak
My first celebrity crush was Kim Novak, in Picnic. There is a scene where she and William Holden stare at each other, clapping their hands to some fairly hot music. They don’t dance, just clap and stare. What was I doing in that movie theater, watching that movie? I can’t remember, but someone must have just hauled me along. One of my aunts, maybe, stuck on babysitting duty.
Novak was so heavy-eyed and feral. It was the first time I really noticed a woman’s breasts, I think — at least coupled to a desire to touch them. I feel deeply in love, although she was adult and terrifying. I could imagine a kiss from her as being a prelude to ingesting me whole, but that would have been okay. Just fine, in fact.
I measured beauty by Kim Novak for years. Some girls were beautiful and some were desirable, but none of them combined the two in such a volatile mix. I have just checked on the web, and that movie was released in 1955, which would have made me just eight.
Hanna Rosin on Mick Jagger
I came across an old diary recently. Its first page was a list of questions, perhaps designed to east the newly minted confessor into the art of revelation: Name, Age, School, Favorite Color, and then the last question, Crush. It didn’t specify “real crush” or “celebrity crush,” if that was even a term back then. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the question was the one game of sprin the bottle I’d played in my friend Carl’s basement. Did I have a crush on anyone I’d kissed? No, and this was largely my best friend Kim’s fault. We lived in an immigrant ghetto in Queen’s, full of Dominicans, Jamaicans, working-class Jews. But she was German, and beautiful in the exact way the Seventies revered — blond, feathered hair, blue eyes. In the sea of mongrels she stood out, a prepubescent Daisy Duke
I knew it was her the boys really wanted to kiss, so that blocked me from feeling anything for any of them. I was her sidekick, the funny one, the tomboy. When we staged fake weddings at the school playground, I always volunterred to be the usher. She was in the game, but I was still just watching. So on the dotted line in the diary I’d gamely written “Sean Cassidy” (yes, I spelled his name wrong). Shaun Cassidy. He of the silky hair and the pinkish lips, always smiling, so sexually unthreatening that in a photo wearing a white cap, he looks like a little girl posing for picture day at tennis camp. I’d seen him sining on TV a few times, a song my mom liked to listen to: “I met her on a Monday and my heart stood still. Da doo ron ron ron.” I saw a magazine with his face on the cover at the pharmacy and spent my ice cream money to buy it. I don’t remember feeling exactly swoony, like the girls watching Elvis. It was a crush that in retrspect looks more like a proto-crush, a happy discovery that boys’ faces can be smooth and pleasing and prety as poies, without the knowledge that sometimes looking at them can feel like getting stabbed in the gut.
Sometime between my 10th and 11th years I put a big “X” over Shaun Cassidy’s name. BY that point I had another best friend, Michal, and her house was my refuge. My parents were Israeli and felt like a different generation. Hers were divorced and lived solidly in the Seventies, in an apartment building with a pool that operated something like Studio 54. One day Marilyn dyed her hair red and changed her name to Raven. The next day Raven was dating Robert’s father, Sam. The next day Sam was holding hands with Jim, and so on. At the pool someone was always playig “I Will Survive” on a boom box. Michal had an much older brother. I couldn’t see what he was doing behind the closed door of his room, although I occasionally I saw a girl walk out in her underwear. But I could hear it, and in my memory he was listening to the Rolling Stones song “Angle” on an endless loop. One night, I went home from their apartment and in my diary replaced Shaun Cassidy with Mick Jagger.
I don’t explain why in the diary but I suspect my new crush also had something to do with getting my period that year, which I did write about. I recalled in the diary that it was an “angry” day. I had gone on a day trip to go horseback riding with a friend’s family I didn’t know all that well and I had no idea what to do, beyond stuff the toilet paper into my underwear. In my diary I’d also noted that the Boomtown Rats song “I Don’t Like Mondays” was playing on the radio on the car ride home. The song still makes me nauseous to this day.
That year I put a poster of Mick Jagger above my bed, a black-and-white showing him in a white T-shirt and a black vinyl jacket, and cocking his head to one side. He, too, looks like a girl; in fact now in that picture he looks to me a little like Lily Tomlin. But at the time I only focused on his lips, which I imagined were saying something like: Stop hiding. You can come out now. I bought the album Goats Head Soup and started to listen to “Angie” alone, at home. I’d heard the rumor from Michael that in a couple of the verses he said “Andy” instead. How thrilling, how transgressive, that seemed to my soon-to-be-eleven-year-old self, that Mick could love a girl named Angie one day and a boy named Andy the next. What did that mean? Was there a girl in there? And if he could be that shape-shifty then that meant at the very least I could stop being the usher and change places with the one about to be kissed.
To this day, it’s the first thing I do when I meet a man: I look for the girl in there, even if she’s deeply hidden.
