Dana Andrews Dream Suite, by Lev Raphael

I fell in love with a Forties movie star when I was about nine or ten and dreamt that he was my father.

I was watching the classic film noir Laura where Dana Andrews plays a hard-boiled, tough-talking, New York detective investigating the murder of a glamorous advertising executive played by Gene Tierney. Andrews falls in love with the dead woman while staring at her portrait; I fell in love with Andrews while staring at him.

This was in New York City where TV stations played films like Laura in frequent rotation, so I eventually learned many of the lines of the cast members who included Clifton Webb, Dame Judith Evans, and Vincent Price–as a gigolo.

I had no idea as a kid that Clifton Webb was gay in real life, but I sensed something unusual in his manner, his sharp wit, his elegance.  Something I had no words for. Just like what I was experiencing every time Dana Andrews was on screen.

The black-and-white film on our little TV dazzled me with its lustrous, wealthy Manhattan interiors.  Everyone in Laura, no matter how bitchy or combative, was wealthy or clung to someone who was. The massive walls of books in one apartment and the glass shelves of precious vases and bibelots in another were like an alien planet to me, living as I did in a Harlem apartment with hand-me-down furniture from relatives who seemed to have brought my parents over from Europe to show off their charity, then proved themselves to be anything but charitable once they were faced with the reality of survivors.

In the backstory of Laura, vicious gossip columnist Webb unexpectedly takes young Tierney under his wing and teaches her how to walk, talk, and dress. She becomes sophisticated and infinitely more beautiful–and this Pygmalion story of transformation meant more to me than any fairy tale I grew up reading. After all, hadn’t both my parents become different people during WWII and the Holocaust? 

***

My mother was born in Russia, lived in Poland in a city that briefly became Lithuanian, then Russian, then German before she was swept up into the world of concentration camps. After the war, the woman originally named Leah-Helena was the mellifluous Hélène in her Belgian papers and ultimately the rather pedestrian Helen in the U.S.

My father had his own set of changes: the Carpathian hamlet he grew up in was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, then Czech between the wars, then Hungarian again in 1939 as Czechoslovakia was dismembered, then Ukrainian (and thus Soviet) after WWII. He was born Schlomo, which is Yiddish for Solomon, but the Hungarians renamed him Szandor in 1939 when that country seized Ruthenia, the eastern province of Czechoslovakia. This name morphed in Belgium after the war to Alexandre, then devolved into good old Alex in the U.S. thanks to a Belgian ID where his name was listed as Aleks with a period after the “s.” 

There was a lesson here even if I couldn’t enunciate it: your name, your identity, these core things were actually subject to change by enormous and often deadly forces—or maybe just the pen of an anonymous official.

***

I was in love with storytelling, especially on film, and enraptured by these old-time movies I devoured because they were somehow connected to the world my parents had survived and escaped. Or maybe I just wanted to block out the war years and replace them with Forties glamour.

But more than that, I had a profound crush on Dana Andrews. He was handsome, sarcastic, relentless, the hard center of a movie all about desire and dreams. My father’s English wasn’t very good but he had a thick New York accent too, one he picked up in the Garment District working with native New Yorkers, and I could easily imagine him talking as tough as Andrews if he were an investigator.

Well, he was. He investigated me.  Interrogated me. Scrutinized me. Humiliated me. We lived on the corner of 151^st Street and Broadway in a run-down Gilded Age behemoth apartment building until I was twelve and my father would demonstrate to me on that mica-gleaming pavement his bold, pounding feet-forward walk which I was supposed to imitate. It was like a march or some form of punishment—at least that’s how the whole experience felt to me.  Walking the way he demanded wasn’t easy for me because I had flat feet and though I had heavy metal arch supports, my natural response was to turn my feet outward, for balance I suppose. This was apparently taboo and just plain wrong. “Walk like this,” he would say. “Why can’t you walk like this?”

Clearly I was a failure, and years later, my mother told me my father had wanted a girl to be named after his mother who died of TB back in Ruthenia, so I don’t think walking like him would have been enough. I was the wrong gender to begin with and his attention to me was microscopic. Nothing I did was right…. He could complain about the size of hanger I used to hang up a shirt, or mock me for not putting a shirt away. My technique of emptying an ice tray was beneath contempt and though I can’t remember what his strictures were, when I started drinking heavily sweetened coffee in my teen years, I did that wrong too.

***

My father tried teaching me how to drive when I took Driver’s Ed in high school, but every moment was torment because nothing I did was right. It was like being a lab rat shocked with electricity when it made the wrong move.

Worst of all, I was noisy at home in his view, and had “a mouth like a garbage can,” because unlike my sullen older brother who retreated into silence under the barrage of criticism, I talked back. This was unforgivable and demanded spanking with a belt. Luckily I yelled so loud it made him uneasy, according to my mother, and he eventually gave up on corporal punishment – but being the focus of his constant withering criticism was in many ways worse than taking some stripes with a belt.

What never failed to stun me as a kid was people telling me what a great guy my father was, how kind and generous. It made me feel that I lived in an alternate reality. And that lasted for decades until his recent death at 102.  His caregivers uniformly thought he was a sweetheart. 

I have always had a different story to tell. I wanted to disappear from my father’s grasp, his glare, his gaze and vanish into Laura. As tough as Dana Andrews’ character Det. Lt. Mark McPherson might be, he was human and he was kind. I couldn’t imagine him ever treating his son as a suspect who needed to be bullied until he confessed.

What, after all, was my crime?

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Lev Raphael is living his childhood dream of being an author, with twenty-seven books published in many genres and translations of his work in over a dozen languages. He escaped New York to live more than half his life in Michigan and is the proud guardian of two Westies.

© 2023, Lev Raphael