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So I'm moving to New York 'cause I've got problems with my sleep
After two increasingly, appallingly bad days, I finally passed out last night while it was still dark and slept for nearly nine hours. In that time, I dreamed first that I was sharing the role of Clara/Marie in a kind of ballet-with-speech of The Nutcracker being staged somewhere in Boston; it was semi-modern dress and minimal sets, but still much closer to Hoffmann's original even than Balanchine's choreography. All the dialogue was in German. I remember hanging out between scenes with the boy who played the seven-headed Mouse King, a tumbler and puppeteer with a flamelike vertical script I didn't recognize tattooed up and down his thin, wiry forearms. It follows as reasonably as anything else that later on in the dream I was visiting partly nonexistent friends in D.C. and ran into Claude Rains in a coffeeshop so post-historically ironic, the chai-type drink I was buying to go with my grape-and-azuki-bean cake (does anyone actually eat these?) was named after one of the Etruscan Dodecapoli. He wasn't a ghost; he was small, courtly, silvery, outrageously flirtatious, with more lines in his face than I'd seen in any of his movies. We got him a ticket to the show we were seeing that night, the touring production of the musical Sondheim didn't write between Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd; I don't remember any of it except a catchily disjointed, full-company number that anticipated "God, That's Good!" Hanging around the theater afterward, I think somebody suggested that we should rent My Favorite Year (1982), but we never got around to it that I recall. Also I wrote some erotica, but not to Claude Rains. It was more feline than anything else.
Honestly, this sort of thing does make me feel better about my mental state. I'm sure actually sleeping more than two or three hours a night doesn't hurt, either.
Honestly, this sort of thing does make me feel better about my mental state. I'm sure actually sleeping more than two or three hours a night doesn't hurt, either.
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I keep meaning to make an icon out of this photograph. I think it must have been taken when he was still a stage actor; he really didn't hit cinematic stardom until his mid-forties. And then his persona was so ironic and urbane, I'm not used to him looking rakish, but it's that comma-fall of hair. He looks like he's auditioning thirty years too early for James Bond.
I've loved him ever since I was a kid and HE was the Phantom of the Opera.
One of my father's best friends as a kid on the Upper West Side was the younger son of Susanna Foster, the soprano who played Christine to Rains' Phantom.
I discovered him—like many people, I think—with Casablanca's Captain Renault, one of my earliest identifiable favorite characters in a film. He did not disappoint after that.
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Oh, that's cool about your dad! I never did see Susanna Foster in anything else. I should IMDB her.
The first thing I saw him in was Phantom (about a hundred times). And then, many years later, as that vile little man in "Notorious." And only a handful of years ago, when I finally saw "Casablanca" did I associate him with that one. I should really see Casablanca again. All of them! I should have a Claude-a-thon!
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Well,
And then, many years later, as that vile little man in "Notorious."
I think he's marvelous as Alex, actually; the charming, cosmopolitan villain is a Hitchcock staple, but not necessarily the villain who is shyer and more vulnerable than the hero. (Again, Notorious feels like the logical, less simplistic progression from Foreign Correspondent.) He's not a strong character—the best thing about him is his love for Alicia, which is not more powerful than his fear of being found out—but there are ways in which he's the truest, and it kills him, and I love that sort of reversal.
I should have a Claude-a-thon!
You totally should. And then you should write about it.