When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in
for cowboy flicks. I usually went with a
pack of boys my own age; we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The
National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest. There were usually one or two cartoons, a
serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels. I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy
Rogers. I liked Randolph Scott, I guess
because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t
sing. But I’ll talk about the male stars
of my past at another time.
Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want
to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush. I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams [left] was hot. It was her
swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced
some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up
girls. Esther Williams could swim. That
was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a
swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a
necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on
screen. That is, with the exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a
kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely
that.) I should also mention Betty Grable [below right: the GIs' favorite pin-up girl in WW II], who does a terrific solo in “The Gay
Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as 
many as
ten years after they first appeared. It
wasn’t simply Rogers's athleticism
that got to me, it was her energy, her perkiness. That’s it: she was perky,
despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.
Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan
Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say
what effect she would have on me now, but I recently 
watched “Flying Down to Rio”
and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers [left] but was not overwhelmed. More
overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an
ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio [below] to
whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy.
Ah Dolores! I ran into her once
in an elevator in Mexico City back
in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically
fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19. She was still beautiful, but not the way she
was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous,
which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the
elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the
playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true
beauties next time.
-- Mark Strand
Mark Strand is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently New and Selected (Knopf, 2009) and Man and Camel (Knopf, 2008). Read more about Mark Strand here.
