Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair

Author:Gilbert Adair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1990-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Since Ronnie was just out of his teens, even if crucially older than I had assumed him to be (but ages, I had come to understand, had to be judged by criteria different from those in force in my own young days since ‘age’ itself seemed meanwhile to have been rejuvenated), the so-called ‘biographical’ material that the magazines traded in tended to be of a deliriously self-duplicating and self-perpetuating type. It was merely the rubric that changed. In the first it was ‘20 Facts We Bet You Didn’t Know About Ronnie’; in another, ‘Ronnie – The Hottest Rumors Whispered in Tinseltown’; in another, ‘His Dreaminess, R.B.’ (which had for me an incongruously Firbankian ring to it); and if, in a fourth, the form adopted was that of a straightforward interview, just the sort of interview, indeed, that I myself had been willing to submit to only a few weeks before, its subject uncannily assumed the same exclamatory tone of voice as the (uniformly feminine) gossip-mongers when writing about him. Time and again (for this initial investment of mine was to be only the modest foundation stone for a collection of what I might term Bostockiana or even Ronniana that would be the envy of many an adolescent girl) I would read of Ronald Sr’s prosperous real estate business; of Ronnie’s own secretly entertained hope (a secret divulged in at least three of the magazines without any of them heeding the paradox of calling it so) that he might one day be cast in a movie as the son of his favourite actor, one Jack Nicholson; of his idea of the ‘perfect date’ (’a Mets game followed by a candlelit supper in an intimate and romantic French restaurant’); of his sentiments towards his ‘legion’ of fans (’tho I mean to graduate soon to more serious parts, I won’t ever forget that they made me what I am today’); and of his attitude to R-rated movies (’Yes, I guess I’d do a nude scene, but only if it was tasteful and essential to the story. But I’d take a lotta persuading. I mean to have a whole litter of kids someday and I wouldn’t want them to see their dad pawing some half-nude woman’). How often, too, did I read – with something of the doting complacency of a fond father for whom such stale trivia has become the source of inexhaustible, ever replenished pride – about Ronnie and marriage (’Will I ever marry? You better believe it!!!’), Ronnie and drugs (’Never touch ‘em. Never have, never will’), Ronnie and smoking (he had lit up a cigarette just once in his life and it would never happen again ‘except if a part called for it’), Ronnie and success (he believed it was every actor’s duty to work for charitable causes ‘to pay his dues to the world that had dealt him a winning hand’) and Ronnie and the commercial failure of Tex-Mex (‘I was devastated. This was one movie I really believed in and wanted to get its message across’).

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