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John Garfield was a movie star in the 1940's and 50's, a counterpoint to Humphrey Bogart, a poster-man for the joyous angst, the
bewildering urban stew of New York and its steaming boroughs, more actor than movie star. My small-town Mother from the region of the Black Sea loved the movies and particularly
John Garfield. His images, his anxious voice resonated within her, touched her. She truly loved him and dreamed about a life the two of them could share. She dreamed good... she
had to.
She escaped from the pogroms in 1911 at the age of thirteen and then escaped from the New York sweatshops two years later. She
came from an educated family—her father was a Rabbi and a scholar, her grandfather was also a scholar and a respected
university professor. She breathed-in the freedom of opportunity. She wanted experience and education. She wanted to be...
someone. Instead, the "old country" community swallowed her up: she married and became... noone, the voiceless, voteless
typical wife of a man who considered her mindless. But her mind and her dreams were all she had, and she dreamed good.
In 1947, Garfield made Body and Soul, one of the most beautifully blended (script, direction, acting, music, the breath-taking
photography of James Wong Howe) and by far the best boxing film (collaged against the wet oils of NY,NY)... ever made... ever!
Garfield was 34 (dead five years later), and one of his co-stars, Hazel Brooks, was 22. In 1947 there were no teenagers, no tweens
, no adolescents, no pre-teens. When you reached a certain age or a certain type and level of activity you were no longer a child... you became a man or a woman, or both.
Look at Hazel Brooks then, she could be 40 today or 50 or 30 or even 20. Then, in that film, at 22, she was a woman, not a teeny
bopper, not a hip-hopper, not a "who am I? girl-gone-wild", not a single girl who can't wait to grow up and yet can't disrobe from
her over-the-head hand-clapping teeny-tweeny costume.
In the film, Brooks is a beautiful, desirable woman, ruthlessly ambitious for her age. Yes, it is a film, her first by the way, in
which she reflected a woman of her time, reflected by Abraham Polonsky's script, Robert Rossen's direction and the sensibility of
John Garfield. She didn't do much after that. Garfield did.
The American Civil War had ended only 82 years prior. 1947 was plagued by Red-scare witchhunts (which contributed to Garfield's
early death), and plagued with racism, segregation, the continuing extermination of Native American culture.
Women, Black, White, Red and Brown, suffered from wide
-spread discrimination as they struggled to become at least 2nd-class citizens.
I cite this to fuel a belief: unconditional equal rights for women, in
employment, healthcare, the "law", everything. Equal rights for everyone in everything. Whatever a straight, white man can
expect and do, everyone should be able to expect and do the same. Within their conflicted lives and broad hypocrisy, that's
what the framers of the American constitution apparently envisioned.
Achieving that goal is a slow, agonizing process, probably unachievable before the humanoid species on this planet evolves
into a cybernetic state in which none of these concerns will be relevant.
I cite Hazel Brooks because there is a price to be paid for the necessary rise of feminism. Define femininity and feminine as
you will, the qualities from nature and nurture that are gifted to half of the human species have always been a mystery to the male half of the species. He cannot capture She even with costumes
and surgery and hormones. And as She becomes more transparent, as the mystery of She fades, the price to be paid is the loss of the magic of that mystery.
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