For Snow Queens
Excerpt
For Snow Queens
By Darryl Pinckney
An excerpt from Darryl Pinckney’s essay “For Snow Queens Who Have Considered Suicide Because Paul Newman in the First Twenty Minutes of Paris Blues Is Too Much.”
Paris Blues screens at Metrograph on Sunday, July 10, introduced by Darryl Pinckney, presented with The Paris Review.
And then one night, Paris Blues was on Channel 4. I sneaked upstairs and watched the whole thing without being disturbed (commercials were a part of life). It was 1964 and here was this film, the sound turned down way low, that showed me clearly, cross-legged on the floor in the television’s light, the white man to come, the vulnerable buddy waiting for me in Paris, the companion of feelings that had no bedtime. Even the Beatles were just boys to me after seeing Paris Blues for the first time. Enough with childhood and Hayley Mills, I wanted to be a grown-up. I’d never heard this music before. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, I know now.
Paris Blues, released in 1961, was directed by Martin Ritt and adapted from a novel by Harold Flender. For some reason it aired a lot, twice a year maybe, as my faulty memory would have it. I was still catching it on Channel 4, the cheesy but daring low-budget TV station, into my adolescence. Every time I saw the film, I noticed more details and appreciated the score. “Mood Indigo.” My family’s address had changed (1092 West Fifty-Sixth Street, 46208; 317-255-0626), as had the television models in the social rooms of the new house. The powerful dreams remained: musician friends in a smoky basement jazz club called Marie’s Cave.
It’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” in the opening credits of Paris Blues. Paul Newman is Ram Bowen and he kicks it off by stretching the range of his trombone to hit the high G above the treble staff. Sidney Poitier is the saxophonist, Eddie Cook, and also Ram’s arranger. With the two horn front men on the small stage: a guitarist, drummer, pianist, cellist, and scatting Marie herself. Swing energy on the dance floor, waiters in white dinner jackets deftly threading around tables and twirling, jumping pairs.
"Even the Beatles were just boys to me after seeing 'Paris Blues' for the first time. Enough with childhood and Hayley Mills, I wanted to be a grown-up."
I could tell even at the age of eleven that Marie’s Cave was a haven for misfits like me. The camera pans along zonked-out, immobile listeners and zonked-out listeners still able to snap their fingers. Among the clientele are interracial couples, black people by themselves, a man who might be Arab, two white women nuzzling and hanging on each other at the bar, a bopping Greek-looking boy toy restrained by the hand of an older woman; a well-dressed blond man and a younger blond wearing a rough sheepskin jacket, in their own world.
When the song is finished, the credits over, Ritt cuts to a silent, panoramic view of Paris, the Eiffel Tower in the misty distance. The rooftops are at first in silhouette, but as morning comes, toward the end of the shot, buildings emerge. Gradually, we hear high heels on pavement, because this is Paris. (Or maybe by now it’s not; it’s like an opera set, because the camera slides from the outside shot over to some window scenes that would fit into Zeffirelli’s La bohème.)
The camera finds Marie and her basket of baguettes down in the narrow, waking street as she returns to the club. On her way to the kitchen she clicks by Eddie, shoes up on the upright piano, pencil in mouth, listening to Ram pour a sad melody down his trombone. Silence. Eddie is going over Ram’s score, but Ram is waiting. He’s going to lose it with Eddie and snap at Marie, because Eddie hasn’t praised his work sufficiently. What’s bugging you, Ram? I like the music, man. I like it fine. Ram is insecure, volatile, gifted, and, being a good man at heart, on his way to the kitchen to say sorry to his girl.
Channel 4 let me relive the moment of joyous recognition in the teenage solitude of my own room, now with my own television, and my parents out and my sisters gone. I think you want what I want. Paul Newman, Ram, has put the question to Marie: No?
Darryl Pinckney’s essay about Paris Blues appears in the current issue of The Paris Review, and his memoir, Come Back in September, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall.
