WWJD?

I was born in 1967, smack in the middle of the Summer of Love, one year behind my brother and one before my sister, so you’d think my mom was a proper, horny hippie. But she was born of a woman born in 1898, a Romanian gypsy who was forty-five when she had my mother. And because she was raised by an ancient ethnic, my sister and I were raised by a younger version of an old nana. While our friends roller-skated backwards and ate toxic Fritos, we were taught to can, bake, sew, embroider and crochet, and remained clueless about the fact that we were the only family on the block deeply involved in the ceramic arts. We felt culturally pickled, two generations behind my classmates, to whom I wasn’t being ironic when I showed them my folkloric 78s, or my Vivien Leigh paper doll collection.
     For entertainment, my sister and I raced home from school to watch a local Detroit show called Bill Kennedy at the Movies. In winter, the featured film was preceded by a lecture delivered from the cheesy glory of a lounge chair next to the pool of a retirement villa in Miami Beach.
     “This is Joan Fontaine week," Bill Kennedy announced one Monday afternoon, cocktail tinkling. “But every week should be Joan Fontaine week."

Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, Suspicion and Jane Eyre

     Bill Kennedy loved Joan Fontaine, therefore my mother loved Joan Fontaine, therefore so did we. That week, my mother helped my sister and I out of our heavy coats like we were visiting girlfriends, chatting us up on all the plots. “Okay, girls, this is what’s happened so far in Jane Eyre. Joan’s an orphan and her aunt won’t take care of her. She had to go to Lowood school but she doesn’t want to teach there, so Joan just got a job as a governess in a mansion — oh, look how handsome Orson Welles was before he became a fat drunk.”
     My mom, her own drink in hand, would save us some folding. My sister and I would shake out clingy leotards and warm hand towels in front of the TV, making temporary stage curtains to bug each other.
     The next day, hurriedly pulling off our mittens, my mother’s favorite movie would come on.
     “So. Joan Fontaine doesn’t have a name in Rebecca. She just married Laurence Olivier, who she thinks still loves his dead wife. I think the maid’s a lesbian, girls, so this movie’s a bit scary.”
     My mother always said it was easy to love Rita Hayworth or Vivien Leigh or even Olivia DeHavilland, Joan Fontaine’s actual older sister. It was easy to appreciate famous faces playing iconic roles like Gilda, Scarlett, or Melanie Hamilton Wilkes. But Joan Fontaine was a hard lady to love because she was ethereal, playing the plain and proper with a kind of glow we associated with the Virgin Mary. She was good and kind and strong and righteous, and my mother wanted to be just like her.
     If her most famous roles — in Jane Eyre, Suspicion and my mother’s favorite, Rebecca — have anything in common, in each, Joan Fontaine plays characters who are elusive, virginal, and shy. More importantly, in each of these films, Joan Fontaine falls for insane, depressed, shackled men, and she loves them unconditionally, with the kind of freaky serenity that borders on religious. The men, however, force Joan Fontaine to behave uncharacteristically, criminally even, using her for their own selfish means.
     She stays probably because she’s having great sex, which is often the case with fucked-up people, the evidence of carnal satisfaction always splayed across her placid face. In Rebecca, the crushing kisses before her marriage to Maxim De Winter leave Joan Fontaine looking stoned, a silent grin belying her dirty mind. When she is no longer the hired companion to an overbearing lady, but the new wife of an important man, she greets Maxim like a cocker spaniel in desperate heat.
     But it is her innocence — or more importantly, her ignorance of her own innocence — that makes Maxim De Winter first crave Joan Fontaine as his next bride. His life’s been complicated by the ghost of his ex-wife, the dead whore, Rebecca. This is the second wife’s wet dream: your own good character juxtaposed against the backdrop of the first’s shoddy behavior. But Joan Fontaine never entertains this common urge because her own motives are pure. She loves him for who he is: a haunted jerk who requires bovine simplicity from his young bride. When Maxim proposes from the bathroom of his hotel room, while Joan Fontaine is trying to say goodbye, her pained expression switches to the unabashed ecstasy of the chosen. You find yourself wanting him for her because only she can save Maxim from his shuddering sadness.
     You root for Joan Fontaine again in Jane Eyre. When Rochester proposes to Jane in the middle of a lightning storm, fully aware that his first wife is rotting — alive and unwell — in the belfry tower, a bolt cleaves a willow in two, symbolic of Jane’s own selfish thighs. But Joan Fontaine plays a woman willing to love her way into inherited grace, while ignoring every instinct that something’s wrong.
     Suspicion finds Joan Fontaine with more power, the daughter of upper-middle-class gentry, no orphan here. But her parents threaten to disown her for her choice in Cary Grant. She’s not helpless, but she proffers the same message: Love your man no matter what. Love him even if he’s a gambling, nutty drunk, who might tip his best friend over a cliff for a bit of insurance money.
     She seems to say that hot sex with unstable men shuts up a good girl forever, and her movies made me reluctantly understand my own mother’s love for my father. He suffered from crippling mental illness for most of his life. He could be self-pitying and moody like Orson Welles in Jane Eyre, unreliable and manic like Cary Grant in Suspicion, or obsessive and selfish like Olivier’s Maxim in Rebecca. Like Joan Fontaine, my mother tried and failed miserably to love my father, no matter what, believing she could change him, snap him out of his stupors with the simple application of consistent and passive faith. Perhaps she could make him better, stronger, kinder, happier, just by staying, trying hard to be no bother herself, until she was.
     If it’s true that your father is the template upon which you choose men in your life, I have dated and loved some whose axes have rotated around these selfish themes. But being nothing like Joan Fontaine, they’ve left me bereft, confused, and pissed off. Because love is contingent upon two people’s ability to express themselves, not upon you subsuming your ideals in lieu of his. If it’s all about his band, his magazine, his documentaries, his art, mind and growth, and never yours, you need

to let him go to try and do those things. Especially if you have music, art and books to make yourself. Otherwise you’re locking yourself up in a belfry tower of your own making.
     That’s what my mother did. She never taught kindergarten, learned yoga, or oil-painted rural landscapes. She never finally nailed the perfect poem that summed up what it must have been like to deliver mail, in the dead of winter, for twenty-odd years, though I discovered a crumpled attempt in the garbage pail in her apartment, where I paced sleepless and nosy while she had her left breast and eleven lymph nodes removed.
     When my mother died, my stunned father sat vigil at her unquiet deathbed, and I inherited her Joan Fontaine library. On occasion, I might pop in one of her films while canning pickled beets or cleaning my windows with newspaper (to prevent streaking), finally feeling the clear measure of irony that eluded me when I was young. I learned to be like my mother, who was trying to be like Joan Fontaine. And because I believe that phony selflessness and mock stoicism were what cancered themselves though my mother’s every vulnerable organ, I was angry to learn that, at age eighty-eight, Joan Fontaine herself is still alive. And I was shocked to know that she has been, variously, in life, a licensed pilot, a champion balloonist, an expert horse rider, a prize-winning tuna fisher, a hole-in-one golfer, a Cordon Bleu chef, an interior decorator and an adoptive mother to a Peruvian runaway. Joan Fontaine was simply a very good actress faking all that serenity and light, only playing a fleeting role, the one thing my mother might have had in common with her after all.
     These days my father lives in a home where kinder people care for him, and I’ve lost interest in the Rochesters of my youth. But if my mother’s quest to be my father’s Joan Fontaine wasn’t what killed her, it certainly turned her daughters into a couple of keening Rochesters, both on the lookout for our own Joans, in the form of kind, stable men, with few ghosts and nothing too awful rotting deep inside their own mental attics.  n°

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