Exploding Into Life

Reading my journal entries for 2004, I ran across this from February 27

I took a few days off and just worked out and read and smoked cigars. I am reading a bio on Katherine Hepburn. When I was a young man I loved her in Bringing Up Baby (with Carey Grant), Woman of the Year (with Spencer Tracy), The African Queen (with Bogie), The Lion in Winter (with Peter O’Toole). She was such a beautiful young woman and her stage personality was always unique to her—sui generis. What a fascinating life.

I have always been intrigued with her generation’s great actors. My mother once told me that she thought I was shaped far more by the movies of the 40’s and 50’s than I was by the events of my own generation. Men like John Wayne, Bob Mitchum, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Charlton Heston, Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable… women like Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Maureen O’Hara: They were all so larger-than-life. It wasn’t merely that they were on large screens, but also how they threw themselves both into their art and into living.

Living with abandonment, they took such big chunks out of life. Many had the same fears, insecurities and personal demons that plague others who then choose to run from life, to never “take the stage.” These people took those weaknesses and were motivated in other directions. They may have felt powerless at times but they refused to allow such feelings to define them. (Generalizations, for sure: just go read about Spencer Tracy who could never get out from under his guilt and fear -- and did allow these emotions to define him.)

The tragedies that cripple so many people—all of the suicides in Hepburn’s family, for example—drove these people to create and recreate themselves, on stage and in life. The risks these people took to create a character, the vulnerability that is required — yowzer, do I admire that.

The gusto of a Hepburn, a Wayne, a Huston and a Gable: How many of us explode into life as these people did? How many of us allow our anxieties and despair to cripple us, rather than spur us on?

Dear God: Whatever mistakes in judgment I make, may they be from weakness or temperament, never from shallowness of soul.

Copyright, 2008, Monte E Wilson