TCM Remembers... and so do I

I don't really want to be sitting here doing this tonight. It's New Year's Eve after all; I should be out-- No, forget that. It's too damn cold, I'm too damn broke, and as I replied to that e-invite to Obama's Inaugural Ball (actually an e-invite to a Chicago "Inaugural Ball" celebration) I'm not in the mood to party. My mood was brighter earlier when the day was younger and sunnier and I was puttering around the house, cleaning the closets and tweaking the placement of chairs and book shelves and speaker units. There was in the background a cop flick on Turner Classic Movies, a mostly forgettable John Wayne actioner from the seventies, and after it ended, and following clips of coming attractions, TCM's tribute to the notable artists and performers who died in 2008 came on. I stopped distracting myself, turned up the volume, and sat down to watch.

You've seen it by now I'm sure, on YouTube if not on TCM, that poignant black and white video Farewell, silent but for Estelle Reiner's wryly funny throwaway line from When Harry Met Sally ("I'll have what she's having") and that song--Joe Henry's profoundly moving and elegiac lament, "God Only Knows"--that perfectly underscores the montage of famous and not so famous faces, beginning with tough guy actor Richard Widmark (who shocked 1947 audiences as Tommy, the giggling baby-faced psycho who kills an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman by gleefully shoving her down a flight of stairs in Kiss of Death, his film debut);

continues with "sexpot" actress Edie Adams (whom I vaguely recall as the sultry Muriel cigar girl in sixties TV commercials and whom to this day my mother remembers fondly as the drolly moniker-ed "Barbara Seville" in the Steve McQueen-Natalie Wood drama Love With the Proper Stranger);

and along the way includes dancer Cyd Charisse, whom the great Astaire called "beautiful dynamite" and so she was, those skyscraper legs and flashing eyes vamping him in The Band Wagon's "Girl Hunt Ballet," Gene Kelly in Singin' In the Rain's "Broadway Melody", and pretty much everyone else in one of two of my absolute favorite Charisse numbers: the erotic, alluring "Two-Faced Woman" (stupidly cut from Band Wagon and the India Adams-dubbed vocal handed to Joan Crawford for her outlandish, drag-queen turn in Torch Song) and the ethereally beautiful Silk Stockings Ballet in the movie of the same name;

directors Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella;

Carol Burnett's second banana extraordinaire Harvey Korman;

both Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn, leading man and leading lady, respectively, of the haunting world cinema classic, Black Orpheus;

Hot Buttered Soul icon Isaac Hayes, composer of the much imitated "Theme From Shaft;"

director-choreographer Michael Kidd (who must be forever celebrated for his athletic, imaginative staging and/or choreography of Golden Age of Hollywood classics Li'l Abner, Guys and Dolls, The Band Wagon and most memorable of all, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers);

and bawdy, whiskey-voiced beauty Suzanne Pleshette, now and forever Emily Hartley, Bob Newhart's raven-haired spouse on the The Bob Newhart Show, but also immortalized as the earthy, ill-fated schoolteacher Annie in Hitchcock's The Birds.

Charlton Heston is dead, lost to Alzheimer's and decrepit old age, a major star (Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Major Dundee, A Touch of Evil, El Cid, The Agony and The Ecstasy, Richard Lester's splendid Musketeer films and, oh yes, Planet of the Apes) and once a Big Hollywood Liberal who somehow, somewhere along the way morphed into a spokesman for the National Rifle Association.

The realization that these luminaries were now a memory (Lois Nettleton? Roy Scheider too? And Brad Renfro--? When did Brad Renfro die? What happened?) startled and saddened me, but I really choked up at the sight of the shining face of actor-comedian Bernie Mac, gazing upward and lost in a moment of thoughtful contentment near the end of Steven Soderbergh's splendid Ocean's Eleven remake, the gifted, way-too-young-to-be-gone Heath Ledger, on horseback as the tortured Ennis Del Marr in Brokeback Mountain, the rascally stand-up comic turned cultural curmudgeon George Carlin (if his Take-Offs and Put-Ons and Occupation Foole are no longer my all-time favorite comedy albums they're still right up there in the top five), and the biggest heartbreak of all, the Big Male Superstar crush of my girlhood, the great Paul Newman, actor, director, activist, race car aficionado, Newman's Own philanthropist, family man, cool dude. (I was only flirting with Redford, you know that, right Paul? A passing fancy, nothing more) I knew he was old now, and heard he was ailing. And my grown-up, logical mind understands full well that no one, even the greatest of the Great Stars, will live forever.

But still. Paul Newman.

And Eartha Kitt has left us--the sleek, sensational siren of stage, screen and the supper clubs of a more glamorous (and, alas, segregated) entertainment era, the actress-singer an infatuated Orson Welles once declared "the most exciting woman in the world," died of cancer on Christmas Day, her passing too recent for her to be included in TCM's 2008 tribute. Like Kidd, who actually died December 2007, Kitt will no doubt be featured in next year's edition. Very possibly Eartha Kitt will be remembered best by a younger generation for her amusing voice work as the evil (and wonderfully sarcastic) Yzma in Disney's superior animated feature The Emperor's New Groove, but I will always love her for the languorous purr of songs like "Just An Old-Fashioned Girl," "Lazy Afternoon," and especially the teasing, sultry "Santa Baby" (ignore the juvenile and truly awful Madonna effort), the version featured on her MCA "Best of Eartha Kitt" album, without the gulping backing vocals.