Let`s hear it for the kiss.
Rich or poor, we endure all manner of privations in life-the poor lack money and designer clothes; the rich lack happiness and bowling leagues-but can you imagine even the most otherwise fortunate of lives, without kisses?
Whether in the rituals of St. Valentine`s Day, or on some dull, ordinary day when you`re doing the laundry or watching ”Divorce Court,” a kiss unexpectedly, genuinely and generously bestowed can make for a moment transcendent, a rapturous if always too fleeting instant of bliss.
When life is at its grubbiest and meanest and scariest, when awesome events are raging around one and ”the concerns of two little people don`t amount to a hill of beans,” there is always the kiss, free of charge. As Rick and Ilsa and Sam the Piano Player taught us in ”Casablanca”: ”You must remember this: A kiss is still a kiss; a sigh is just a sigh. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.”
First Lady Barbara Bush has noted: ”I married the first man I ever kissed.” Liz Taylor seems to have married every man she ever kissed.
Lips don`t give out
As we grow old and gray, and seek to warm the cold of aging bones and spirit with rekindled cherished memories, it`s a certainty that at least one of them will involve a kiss.
Witness the reverie of the incurably romantic if occasionally ribald English poet Leigh Hunt-an endearing fellow who had a rose trellis installed in his cell after being jailed for slandering the crown prince:
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I`m weary, say I`m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I`m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
But another magic of kisses is that, for the old, they don`t have to be just a memory. Lips don`t give out. Maurice Chevalier was bringing ladies`
fingers to his lips into his 9th decade, and enjoying every millimeter of them.
And this aging boulevardier, plunging now into decade six, was strolling along a boulevard on a recent springlike day with a beauteous, raven-haired Irish film actress, when, on some Gaelic impulse brought on by the balmy weather, by way of parting, she kissed me. I sailed thence through six lanes of traffic and into the midst of some trees and bushes across the way before regaining my equilibrium, and for the rest of the day felt as vigorous as a lad of 20-or maybe 6.
Geritol can`t do that. One thousand-proof Stolichnaya vodka can`t do that.
Better than a handshake, sex
Kissing can be most eloquent, expressing what myriad words cannot. What image better defined the end of World War II than that famous Life magazine picture of a sailor kissing a nurse-apparently a complete stranger to him-on a New York street on V-J Day? What says more to a ”goodfella” who`s run afoul of the Brotherhood than a kiss of the Don?
Unlike much of human congress, kissing, though simply a joining of moist membranes, is actually a profoundly beautiful act-much more so than the handshake, or even all that sweaty grappling that goes on in NC-17 rated movies-a human activity once described by author Mary McCarthy as ”either comical or grotesque.”
More than marble sculpture (Rodin`s ”The Kiss”) or paintings (that fetching Tabu perfume ad), nothing has so vividly captured the wonders and glories of the kiss than the motion picture. Just in time for Valentine`s Day, Citadel Press/Turner Publishing has just published a lushly and lustily illustrated book of great movie kisses, aptly enough titled ”Kisses”
($22.50) and assembled by Lena Tabori, daughter of one of the great screen kissers of the `40s and `50s, Viveca Lindfors.
Lip reading
The book`s pictures actually include a steamy shot of a tight-sweatered Viveca in hot embrace with none other than the nation`s 40th president, Ronald Reagan, in a scene from the 1949 throbber ”Night Unto Night.” (Though his lips are pursed, the Gipper looks a bit puzzled, as though wondering who Viveca is, just as he wondered who his Housing and Urban Development Secretary Samuel Pierce was upon encountering him at a White House meeting.)
But there are much better and far more classic and great kisses in this glossy treasury. For example, the jacket cover carries a languorous photo of the famous screen kiss between the legendary Greta Garbo and John Gilbert (the darkly handsome celluloid lothario who turned millions of female hearts to fluttering until talkies revealed that he had a high-pitched, squeaky, Kermit the Frog voice). Both kisser and kissee are horizontal, but are coming at the point of impact from opposite directions. Garbo seems both immersed in ecstasy and on the point of laughter, as though about to say, ”Why are you upside down?” or, ”You have a silly voice.”
There`s also the famous still from ”Gone With the Wind,” in which Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O`Hara are frozen on the very brink of a kiss. He says, ”There`s a soldier of the South who wants to love you, Scarlett, who wants to feel your arms around him, who wants to carry the memory of your kisses into battle with him. Never mind about loving me. Scarlett, kiss me. Kiss me.”
It`s no wonder they aren`t any farther along than that, actually. Gable, a heavy drinker with false teeth and stomach problems, had notoriously bad breath. In the picture, he`s having to grip her head quite strongly as his mouth nears hers.
The naughty and the nice
There is not, for some neglectful reason, a picture of Deanna Durbin`s first screen kiss-bestowed by a pre-toupee Robert Stack and a moment breathlessly awaited by an entire nation. But one does find the naughty kiss from the 1934 film ”The Merry (I`ll bet) Widow,” between Chevalier as a young boulevardier and, yes, goody-goody Jeanette MacDonald, who obviously had no time for Mountie Nelson Eddy at this heavy-breathing point. Chevalier is only kissing her shoulder, but he`s also pulling down the bodice of her dress and whispering, ”Now, Fifi, if you feel in the mood for a banker, the door is not locked.”
The legendary Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr ”From Here to Eternity”
seashore kiss (from which they doubtless emerged feeling rather sandy and salty) is in there, as is the Grace Kelly-Bing Crosby wedding day kiss from
”High Society”-though not the epochal Grace Kelly-Cary Grant hotel room kiss from ”To Catch a Thief” that set off all those fireworks over the Riviera.
No one in recorded history put as much of herself and so much oomph into a kiss as did Marilyn Monroe, and the book includes a drooly array of action photos of MM approaching the peak kissing moment much like an atomic pile approaching critical mass.
The great trainboard kiss between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint from
”North by Northwest” is included-a kiss remarkable in that it occurred during a conversation about advertising, though not so remarkable as Faye Dunaway prattling on about network television office politics while, er, going far beyond a kiss with William Holden in ”Network.”
Happily, the book also has my very favorite kiss in all screendom, the Main Line out-by-the-gazebo kiss between the young Jimmy Stewart and stunningly fresh-faced Katharine Hepburn from the 1940 flick ”The
Philadelphia Story.” It`s what we in my ”our kind, dear” hometown of Bedford Village, N.Y., used to call a Westchester kiss-soft, affectionate and inviting, of course, but quite definitely closed-mouthed and all very well mannered. Afterward, Kate says, ”Golly molly,” which is not what Madonna says afterward. (My second favorite all-time kiss is the Jeff Bridges-Michelle Pfeiffer ”Fabulous Baker Boys” kiss, in which the merest touch of his lips makes her dress fall off.)
A lost art
Not all kisses are so inspiring. Lately Hollywood has taken to giving us facial couplings so open-mouthed and suction-like that the actors and actresses look like parasitical fish cleaning each other`s scales.
Equally as dreadful are the various forms of social kissing so rampant now among the inhabitants of New York`s once-glittery but increasingly ratty Upper East Side. These include the French army officer two-cheek kiss (a favorite between fashion designers and their richest customers), the brushed- cheek missed kiss (which makes the participants look like they got their earrings entangled) and the across-the-crowded room blown kiss, which I think was inspired by the folks who inspired ”GoodFellas.”
No one seems to know exactly how kissing evolved. The word is derived from the Greek, and other species who do it seem to be parakeets and octopuses. Though they can`t possibly be having as much fun. –
