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twentieth century, plays a
second-rate vaudeville entertainer in a dreary English resort
town—Brighton?—who, from time to time, onstage, in the spotlight, amid burlesque
routines of stultifying banality and vulgarity, reveals flashes of genius.
    Olivier was so compelling in the role of Archie
Rice, so utterly convincing, both my father and I sat in silence, enthralled.
Roland Marks could not think of any clever remark to underscore what we were
seeing—the saga of an aging, hypocritical, hollow-hearted vaudeville comedian
who connives to make a comeback by exploiting his elderly father, and finally
killing him. Yet Olivier’s character is so very human, my eyes filled with tears
of sympathy. He’s a fraud, but “charming”—women continue to adore him! He’s a
heel, and a cad, and a drinker, yet it was love I felt for the man, impersonal
as sunshine.
    There is a particularly poignant scene midway in
the film in which the young Joan Plowright, in the role of Archie Rice’s
daughter, tells the “entertainer” that he can’t possibly be serious about
marrying a naïve young woman who has been seduced by his charisma—“She’s my age!
The age of your daughter!”
    Archie Rice is chastened, embarrassed. But his
daughter’s scandalized plea makes no difference: he’s determined to marry the
second-place beauty-contest winner just the same, in order to borrow money from
her father.
    Dad began to laugh. Dad had been picking at his
Thai food, that was too spicy for him though he’d insisted on ordering hot . And now something pleased him mightily.
    â€œHere’s a fact, Lou-Lou: Olivier married that very
actress, Joan Plowright, within a year. He divorced Vivien Leigh and married
Plowright who was young enough to be his daughter.” It was a curiosity, how
Roland Marks seemed to know so much of popular culture, which in his books and
lectures he disdained as drek . Now Dad laughed his
loud Rabelaisian laugh, that made me shudder.
    Though he hadn’t had any wine, Dad was very sleepy
by the time the movie ended. (The final scene of The Entertainer , when Archie Rice is disintegrating
onstage before a sadly diminished audience, had made him laugh, initially; then
cast him into a bleak mood I thought it most prudent not to notice.) I helped
him up the stairs, said good night to him and cleaned up downstairs; it gave me
pleasure to darken the rooms of the house, preparatory to leaving, and returning
to my condominium in Skaatskill.
    Except: before I left, in Dad’s study I looked for
a note-sized piece of paper. I knew it was there somewhere, and finally I found
it in plain sight beside Dad’s shut-up computer: Cameron S., 212 448 1439, [email protected].
    Crumpled it and took it away in my pocket.
    Thinking This will do no good, probably. But I will have tried.
    *
    It was my vocation: to spare my father
from rapacious females.
    I hadn’t done a very good job of it, you might say.
And you’d be correct.
    I tried to protect Dad from harm. At least when he
wasn’t traveling abroad and far off my radar. I was the constant in his life, I wished to think.
    Swarms of women, of all ages, tried to attach
themselves to Roland Marks in one guise or another. Some were wealthy socialites
eager for celebrity-writers to perform—“For zero bucks,” as Dad said dryly—for
their charity fund-raisers; some were young like Cameron Slatsky, relatively
poor, unattached and, who knows?—desperate, if not deranged. No one is so alert
to the dangers that beset a famous man than a daughter.
    It’s true, Dad might have been seeing quite
reasonable women, divorcées or widows just slightly younger than himself, yet
not embarrassingly young —except that Dad wouldn’t
have been seen in public with any woman within two decades of his age.
    In Washington, D.C., a few years ago, where Dad had
been honored by the