Leading Ladies

So my wife drops an earring and it rolls under the bed. We can’t find it, not even with the help of a flashlight, so we have to roll the bed away from the wall. Let me tell you – what a treasure trove! There’s my pull-up bar! (Protection against home invasion.) There’s my favorite t-shirt, missing for two or three years! Hey, I remember that copy of Astronomy! And that Scientific American! There’s our wedding proofs!

Now, I don’t want to give the impression we’re messy people. We’re tired people. Cleaning under the bed just doesn’t rank very high on the list of the eighty or ninety different household tasks that have to be done on a monthly basis.

But – hey! – that’s my handwriting on that Fit Pregnancy subscription card. Must’ve been when the wife had li’l Patch in her belly, three years or more ago. I reach down and snatch it up. There are a list of names on it. Leading ladies’ names.

It all comes back to me. We’re huuuuuuge TCM fans. Not so much lately, though there’s always something black-and-white on the DVR. But back in the day – when Patch was belly-bound and going way back to our dating days – we were big connoiseurs of classic films. Anything, oh, pre-1965 or so. Over the years, together, we must have watched a hundred or more together, each and every one sandwiched between Robert Osborne commentary.

So it was inevitable that we’d ask each other who our favorite actors and actresses were. Apparently, I got so into this little exercise I felt it necessary to write down my list on a Fit Pregnancy Special Savings card just laying around.

I’m a little embarrassed speaking about this, so, naturally, I’m writing about it. Those who know me may scratch their heads over my selections. All I can say, blushingly, is that it is not all about physical attraction. Sex appeal and all that. There’s an indefinable quality that’s part intelligence, part confidence, part lightness, part self-respect, that makes a woman – in person or on the big screen – attractive to me. There’s also an idealized component to this list, too, which I’m having trouble putting into words. If Plato’s ideas of Forms are true, then for “Woman,” the Form may look like any of the following leading ladies:

In no particular order, other than the order I wrote them down –

- Sophia Loren

- Janet Leigh

- Olivia de Havilland

- Rita Hayworth

- Jean Simmons

- Audrey Hepburn

- Ingrid Bergman

Looking over the list three years later, I can’t think of a single classic actress to add, and wouldn’t remove a single name.