WHETHER IT WAS “WATER LOO BRIDGE” (1940) or “Hiroshima Mon Amour” thirty years later, it was the scenario’sgeometry playing out.… Ocean Parkway benches & Avenue ‘H’in Brooklyn, Champs Elysees “on Paree’s right bank , ma Cherie.”
The Sorbonne is within the Grand Hotel de France on the left bank , across from Gertrude Stein’s book store. ’Shakespeare and I’, the Opera de Paris, across the Louis XIV Square.
”If they want bread, give them cake.” Marie Antoinette’s empathy, King Louis’s mistress
II
Coming off her “Gone with the wind” Scarlet O’Hara destiny, Myron Selznick, her agent, Vivian Leigh pressed Tarzan’sgrowling lion’s higher uppity ups….
“There’s a jungle out there, Scarlet.”
III
Producer Sidney Franklin and director Mervyn LeRoy.(“My so,n my son” Tavern on the Green’s proprietor) “Larry (her husband Lawrence Olivier of the Old Vic) is ideal foridentifying with the Colonel’s falling in love with me. Our rendezvous at Waterloo is predestined, isn’t it gentlemen?Larry’s mutual attraction with Sir Aubrey Smith and **MariaOuspenskaya is casting out of Heaven. Believe me, gentlemen. I should know. ” (her first ‘H’)
But the MGM state of mind, saw fit to caste Robert Taylor asthe Colonel, going off to war, but meeting his twin soulballerina, portrayed by Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara,metamorphosed as the Radio City Music Hall ballerina in her past life, across the pond.
IV .
“Love at first sight?” who knows. But a higher power spelled out their chemistry for a box office smasheroo. But not on the same level as ”Gone with the wind”. Still and all Robert Taylor living a lie with Louis B. Mayer’s “Fantasy” marriages. Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck (Brooklyn’s Ruby Stevens) living a lie, in a trumped up alliance. Notwithstanding Norma Shearer and her ski instructor ‘H’. .
Greta Garbo’s “I vant to be alone,” ripping off her Camille s disguise, retiring to East 56th Street on the Big Apple ‘s East Side.
Taylor saying in “Waterloo Bridge” he realized high standards for the first time. Coming off theWW2 in real time, he married a German beauty, buying a spread off Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills… ”to live happily ever after”
V
But its neither here nor there as this corner captures a spread sheet of unholy alliances at Waterloo Bridge, the 1940 version that manifested itself at Coney Island Avenue’s trolley trackKent theater in 1940. A 12 year old knot hole urchin, living o n Avenue H and 14th Street, in an elevator apartment house…
Art Carney, Jackie Gleason’s alter ego, living on the oppositeside, above Bohack’s, on the corner, our classmate Leonard Schnitzer. , opposite 5A’s twin,… playing out his own role as an usher at the Kent.
Leonard and his brother, Elmer, their pap a dentist, his mother and ours, into the shopping spree…Ira Waldbaum’s mother ‘spot cheese s grocery store between J and k on Coney Island Avenue.
VI
The Avenue ‘H’ mothers navigating the Avenue J grocery storescene and Dubin and Elfenbein’s bakeries on Avenue. Or the Aand P’s competing with Kubrick’s market under the Avenue J subway station. The Dym’s yellow cab dynasty… post WW2 waiting in the subway’s exit, at curb side.
Stanley Kubrick a chess player on his own ego grip into the lion’s “Space Odyssey”(Boremwood Studio, outside London), “Mister Novak” carrying out our short lived notoriety…3seasons on ABC tee vee., searching for originality in the “Blackboard Jungle” of Los Angeles’s secondary schools.
The studio leasing a Jaguar, driving us to George Bernard Shaw’s digs in Ayot Sate Lawrence, a village where he composed his original plays., Stalin’s image on his pianokeyboard..
His “Androcles and the Lion” filming at RKO Studio, Alan Young (“Mr. Ed” Midwood High School’s Argus) in the lead, Charles Laughton directing , Shaw’s’ alter ego Gabriel Pascal,producing.…pre Desi Lu.
VII
In the meantime, fast forward from those adolescent yearningsof the Kent theater…P.S. 217 schoolyard Midwood High School at Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn College’s Campus Road, a half mile down Avenue ‘H’
On a Spring day, the young pros, strutting the opposite way to the Avenue H subway and the Big Apple’s “monyah honyah” their own ”Waterloo Bridge (Brooklyn’s own) playing out.
Vivien Leigh last seen at New Haven’s Schubert theater, on the old phone off her dressing room, near Yale University’s Chapel Street, the Bard’s facsimile, Stratford on the Avon, across the pond..
Robert Taylor ,his own English Colonel to her ballerina, “Waterloo Bridge” long since gone. From the Metro Goldwyn archives. But the Kent theater still survives on Brooklyn’sConey Island Avenue ”too be continued” on our minor planet’s cyber space screen…
**Maria Ouspenskaya of the Stanislavsky Moscow acting school “The way you walk is thorny, though no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Now you will have peace foreternity.”
April 7, 2015 The City that never sleeps.
