The demise of perfection or the day I read Dropped Names by Frank Langella

The demise of perfection or the day I read Dropped Names by Frank Langella

There have ever only been two perfect men in the history of humanity:  my grandfather and Frank Langella.  My grandfather, because he died when I was 14 before I had found fault in him.  If he had lived a few more years and I had known him when I was 16, perhaps his perfection would not have endured the onslaught of the rite of passage we call adolescence and its ravenous disinterest in everyone and everything.  And Frank Langella because when I was 17 I rented a VHS tape and at the exact moment my interest in the movie was about to be consumed by my newly found ravenous disinterest, the heroine was startled by a man in her hotel room, and there on the TV screen was the most beautiful, the most handsome man I had ever seen or imagined. I had to rewind the tape (yes, VHS tapes had to be physically rewound and phones had cords!) to discover the name of this Adonis.  Once I eliminated Lesley Ann Down and John Gielgud as possible candidates I was left with Frank Langella.  At 17 you are able to reach absolute conclusions with absolute certainty without the tiresome bother of consideration and critical thought. It’s a gift we lose with age. At 17 my absolute certain conclusion was that any man who looked like that had to be perfect.

Over the years I lost my ability to jump to absolute conclusions, which is probably for the best, though I miss it occasionally.  Without that ability I never again deem any man perfect at first glance, that particular super-power faded and was gone by the time I was 20. Furthermore, I realized that Mr. Langella couldn’t possibly be perfect, no man is, and that his claim to perfection was solely based on the warped workings of my 17 year old brain.  But I enjoyed having that one perfect thing, there are so few perfect things that even imaginary perfection is in short supply, so I kept it. Why not? In the private universe of my mind, the scale of male perfection went from Pewee Herman to Frank Langella, all men fell somewhere in between, including Paul Reubens and Frank Langella.

I’ve watched most of Frank’s movies and I’ve been privileged to see him on stage a few times.  And that was the extent of the information available to me about the real Frank Langella. I’m not inclined to read gossip magazines or search for information on the lives of people I think should be left to live their lives in privacy. So I knew absolutely nothing about him, until he moved in with Whoopi Goldberg.  I heard about that. It couldn’t be helped, though there were unconfirmed rumors of an aging Yupik Eskimo in Siberia who knew nothing about it at the time.  Complete lack of information is extremely conducive to imaginary perfection, as you might imagine.  So he remained perfect over the decades. 

I just finished Dropped Names by Frank Langella. It’s a very well written, interesting and clever collection of stories about encounters with people who are now dead.  Needless to say that by the time you amass a “collection of stories about encounters with people who are now dead”, you’ve probably done some introspection and analyzed your relationships and existence, so there is some of that in the book as well.  If you’ve read this far, I highly recommend the book, for whatever that recommendation is worth.  And I’m sure that the devastation it caused in my life will not befall other casual readers.

While I was reading the book responsible for the complete eradication of my imaginary standard of male perfection, I often found myself looking up from the book and around the room as if I had been reading something subversive that could somehow compromise my good character and feared that someone might be watching.  The book describes relationships and expounds on the author’s opinions and impressions of some well known people.   It felt much too intimate to be proper.  It wasn’t the intimacy Mr. Langella shared with the people described in the book that felt inappropriate to me.  It was stranger than that.   It was a sort of unshared intimacy.  A unilateral intimacy, if you will, derived from an insight into the personal thoughts and relationships of the author, things I was never meant to know. It was as if I was peering into his relationships with these people, into his thoughts and opinions; that he was sharing moments and situations I never sought to know.  I felt an intimacy unbeknownst to the other person in the intimate moment.  I’m sure the peculiar feeling was a result of the remnants of some warped conclusions of my 17 year old brain.  But my present brain paused to consider the situation.  What would you call that? Unilateral intimacy… After some thought I realized that anyone with any moral fortitude would call it voyeurism.

Not only has Frank Langella managed to loosen my extremely fragile hold on imaginary male perfection, he has made a voyeur out of me, obliterating both a treasured delusion and whatever moral high ground I held over the average peeping tom. Next time I run into a peeping tom not only will I be completely unable to gage his masculine wiles, I won’t be able to toss my nose in the air and leave in a huff of superiority. This is obviously a very serious problem that will impact my daily life. But I really should have known that nothing good could come from reading this book, since years ago Frank Langella nearly had me arrested for groping.

It was an off Broadway play and he was playing a Cyrano de Bergerac sans panache, which I found an odd choice because without panache Cyrano is just a guy with a sword. But any way, where was I? Yes, groping.  In a scene too boisterous to be restricted to the stage Mr. Langella and his rival came down the aisle in some well rehearsed sword play.  At a specific point in the interlude they were fighting right next to my aisle seat. In a lunging motion Frank Langella’s butt was mere inches from my shoulder.  The butt of the only living perfect man was literally inches from me.  My mother, sitting next to me, in her infinite wisdom realized the rarity of this once in a life time opportunity and verbalized the fleeting magic of the moment with the whispered words “grab it”.  I doubt Mr. Langella remembers two women desperately trying to contain a most inopportune and inappropriate guffaw inches from his butt during a performance. But I’m sure the subsequent police report would have contained the words ‘groping in a public venue’.

Somewhere in the rules of depravity there must be a loop hole that provides absolution of guilt associated with present day voyeurism if the object of the voyeur had in the past also been the intended object of groping in a public venue.  It’s the old stand-by “I can’t be a voyeur, I’m a groper” defense we’ve all used at some point.  You haven’t? Really? So it’s just me then.

The point I’m trying to make is that this book will not shatter your frail grasp on delusional male perfection, it will not make you question the quality of your character and it will not remind you of judgment calls that might have landed you in jail and banned you from Broadway audiences.  That’s just me.  Most people will find it a beautifully written, perfectly entertaining, insightful and memorable collection of stories.

Even if you are not delusional and living in an imaginary world where Frank Langella is perfect, go read the book! It’s called Dropped Names.  You can get it here: Amazon Don’t worry, it probably won’t make you want to drown your morally weak, reality recognizing self in a glass of wine, that’s probably just me again.