16 SEPTEMBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

Phew! We can happy to have finally passed that milepost.

Considering how kind she had been to me—and how kind she would continue to be, so long as I knew her—I was as shamefully cavalier in the way I treated Debbie as I had been with Jeannine. We did continue to go out together, sometimes for dinner at one of those inexpensive Indian restaurants where you could get a delicious, spicy, satisfying meal for no more than half-a-crown. I don’t know what that would be in today’s money, maybe something like a couple of dollars.

Or we’d go to the flicks. Perhaps it was with Debbie that I saw “East of Eden”, the first time I saw James Dean, and the first movie that he made. After which, before he died in a car crash in his Porsche at a remote California crossroads, there were “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant,” the one about the Texas oil man in which the (for many, eternally) young actor aged, none too successfully, into a nasty, rich old drunk. I mention James Dean because like so many other young men at the time and at that age, I identified so keenly with both the actor and his roles; with the easy, boyish surface charm that covered a hornet’s nest of insecurities and anger; with the lost, mumbling man-boy, so anxious to please the father for whom he was never good enough and earn the love of the mother he could never reach.

I was James Dean. Well, a self-conscious, reedy English public schoolboy version of the same.

How many of us James Deans were out there on the streets with our nervous tics, mumbling away and grinning quick, angst-filled grins, and brushing nervously at our hair? We were, as they say, legion.

You of all people, Harry, with your love of Freud, would doubtless spot the Oedipus lurking in our psyches. But then I can be sure you never saw any of those films I loved so much. You were never a serious movie-goer, as I recall, and in any case their whole ethos would have been “too American” for you and Peggy.

For what it’s worth, my favorite line from a James Dean movie is this one: “Well then there now…”

Riddle me that, you wise old man.

Your son, Peter