Posted Dec 23, 08 10:59 AM
“The Stately Lady in the Rose Red Dress”
My college job was working at the Earthquake attraction at Universal Studios Florida. Shipping 200 tourists off to face an 8.3 every five minutes kinda gets old after the first ten minutes. Experimenting with the ride controls, however, never does.
During the phony quake, a fake semi screeches down a fake slab and fake-breaks a fake column. An air cannon goes off, simulating the sound of concrete shattering. At that moment, two hundred tourist heads simultaneously wince. During the ride cycle, you could actually refuel and let off the air cannon three times. The tourists never knew what hit ‘em. Give people more bang for their buck, you know.
Forgotten on the lot – between the Amity wharf of Jaws and the Back to the Future simulator complex – was my favorite pass-by: the Bates house from Psycho. Never mind that nothing happened there. It sat neglected, quietly radiating a movie aura that the theme park surroundings never understood. In my last few months of employment, I finally said “hell with it” to the Do Not Enter signs and climbed those fateful steps to the Gothic mansion. Inside was only bare dirt and catwalks. And Christmas lights – it was that time of year.
Not that I was expecting to find anything. Just to feel… something. Like on a previous evening a few months before.
The Hitchcock Sound Stage was still around then, a cool pre-show with a 3-D take on The Birds, and an interactive area where you could be blue-screened onto the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur or have Robert Walker try to kick you off the merry-go-round in Strangers on a Train. And a pure cheese soundstage “show” whose sole redemption was a forced perspective mock-up of the Bates house.
On a hint, I left work early after closing and walked over to the Hitchcock Sound Stage. Next to the curb, a coal-black limousine was parked. Not unusual. Christian Slater, Alice Cooper, and a slate of WCW wrestlers had come through our attraction.
I went inside, staring at the hackneyed shower set in the soundstage. There were a lot of tour guides and higher-ups congregating, and a stately lady in a rose red dress. A security guard turned and nodded at me. I remained in the back rows. “Go on,” a Guest Services employee urged.
I ventured closer – still not knowing what I was venturing closer to. And then I really saw the stately lady in the rose red dress: Janet Leigh.
Janet Leigh. The woman, arguably (but not from me), in the single most famous scene in film history. No longer an image on celluloid or a name in a textbook. She personified the Golden Age of Hollywood, and that’s not just channeling a cliché. To stand by her was to feel luster, mystique, grace, class, elegance, and adrenaline. I always say that I don’t get star-struck – I get talent-struck. For the first time, I got both.
Wrapping up a publicity stint, the Universal employees huddled around Janet Leigh for a photo op. I was beckoned to the front – crouching down, very out of place in jeans and a Morocco sweatshirt while everyone else wore their work uniforms. But then I felt warm hands on my shoulders, keeping me there. Her hands. Hands that worked with Alfred Hitchcock. Hands that raised Jamie Lee Curtis, forever linked to her own horror classic, Halloween.
Six degrees of separation lost six degrees in that instant. A classic film wasn’t just that anymore: it was work that an icon, now a woman in front of me, had made.
The picture was taken. The group was about to move on to the next stop on the tour. And for a second in time, it was just me and Janet Leigh.
“This is so incredible,” I said. “I was just reading about you last night.”
She smiled, like an actress on stage trying to spread contact with hundreds of faces in the crowd. “Oh. That’s interesting!”
And that was that. A rare foray for me into awe-struck fandom. But a brushstroke on an era of film-making when those who made the images were America’s royalty. And a gentle reminder that without pedestals, people whom we put on them really do stand as tall as ourselves.
Janet Leigh has since passed on. But she’ll always have a pedestal saved for her in my movie lover’s heart.
Posted by Mike Kalvoda at 10:59 AM