Watching Old Movies: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
by Jack Simons
When I attended Baylor University in 1962, I had to choose one of three dormitories: Penland: the newest and most expensive; Brooks: the oldest and cheapest; Kokernot: twelve years old and middle-priced. I reasoned I didn’t want to live with the rich, nor did I wish to live with the poor — I chose Kokernot. (As it turned out, I would have despised Penland for the same reason most of the world despises Americans: rich, soft, and entitled. Despite relative poverty, Brooks’s residents had an attitude, a style, and a way of carrying themselves that attracted respect all over campus.)
Kokernot was a three-floor brick dormitory that accommodated 230 male students. The building stood between Minglewood Bowl (the school intramural field) and the corner of 7th Street and Dutton Avenue. A small reception office containing a switchboard and mailboxes was tucked into one corner of a spacious first-floor lobby, located in the center of the building with large entrances front and back.
Each wing of the building looked like a large backward capital L. A short lawn fronted the dormitory; a minimal parking lot occupied its backside.
The year before I arrived, Mr. Myers, the dorm director who pursued graduate studies in psychology, performed an experiment: he put the most intelligent incoming freshmen of 1961 together on First North Kokernot. It was a big mistake. The brains concentrated on one wing discovered one another and immediately began to dismantle peace, harmony, and the dormitory. I was assigned to First North Kokernot the next year, but I am sure brains had nothing to do with it — Mr. Myers had learned his lesson and was trying to dumb down the wing. Nevertheless, it worked for me, because the boys of First North were the best university I ever attended.
As I rode into town that first night on a Greyhound bus from Fort Worth, I saw three scenes I would never see again in Waco:
1. A large line of ghostly headlights spilling onto Highway 81 from a boxy wrestling arena on the north side of town, where middle-aged wrestlers scowled down from billboards at the entrance.
2. The segregated Greyhound bus station in Waco was mostly empty on the white side, but the colored side jumped and jived with noise, laughter, smoky cigarettes, and steamy coffee mugs. The men dressed in showy, striped suits, and the women, wearing tight, well-made skirts, flashed bright smiles at one another. I had never experienced segregation in Indiana, so I sat alone with a cup of coffee on the white side and observed the happy uproar of the other side.
3. A Yellow Cab driver helped me with my bags. We drove off down 8th Street and then cut over to 7th. The road deteriorated fast from potholes in the concrete to unpaved gravel. The smell of freshly crushed cottonseed oil filled the air. Behind a cotton processing plant, Minor League Baseball teams played a game — the batter in my vision hit a ball just over the outstretched glove of the second baseman — a Texas-Leaguer — then flashed from my sight: the field, the game, the players.
When I looked later in life, the baseball team had left town forever — the field a weedy open lot; the Greyhound bus station was abandoned, and I never could find the wrestling arena.
The cab jay-parked in front of Kokernot, and the driver delivered the family’s cheap, blue plastic suitcase and my new Samsonite to the sidewalk. I paid him off, and was left all alone.
A few moments in young life stand out as significant, and one of them has to be going to college for the first time. The event has two parts. The first part is leaving one’s family. I left mine in Chicago at the Dearborn train station. My mother, grandmother, a young brother, and my girlfriend took me to the station. The moment came to say goodbye. I shook hands with my brother, kissed Mother, Grandmother, and girlfriend, then turned to pick up my suitcases to board the Texas Chief to Fort Worth. I felt the strangest sensation of my entire life — as though I had left one continuum in the universe and had entered another. It passed. Mother later told me I briefly turned a deep shade of green.
The second part is dragging suitcases into one’s first dormitory. A broad sidewalk led from the street to Kokernot’s front doors — which were all flung open revealing a brightly lit lobby. I had arrived early, before most other students, and the lobby was as empty as it would later be full. Shadows and sharp lights, a close, warm summer night, dark grass for a lawn, and darker bushes planted close together along the dormitory wall filled me with dread of the strange universe that I would enter.
I lugged the suitcases up the broad stairs, through the gaping doors. A young man with a large head and broad shoulders sat absorbed in a biology textbook in the dorm office to my left. I handed my dormitory assignment paper to him. He took it, read it, and exploded: “Gary, Indiana!? What the goddamn hell would anyone from Gary, Indiana come to Baylor for?”
I had been under the misapprehension that Baylor was a Christian school as I understood the term, and now I knew it was not. I played it straight: “My uncles graduated from Baylor.”
“What the hell does that have to do with it?” His eyes showed genuine surprise.
“I was born in Texas.”
He was looking at his papers. The spasm had passed. Still muttering to himself, he told me to sign that I had arrived. He handed me a key: “107, First North.” His thumb waved to the left. I thanked him. He shook his head and said: “Gary, Indiana.”
The young man and I had scant dealings while I was at Baylor. He was large, loud, and opinionated, as I had experienced. He also was pre-med and a serious student, triple-majored in biology, chemistry, and history, and made his career as a brain surgeon in Houston.
Polished, nine-inch-square, brown vinyl tiles comprised the floor of a narrow hallway that turned right after the water fountain. The odd numbers were on the left, and I found 107, the fourth room from the end of the hallway. A monster window fan sat at the end of the hall. My room had a small closet next to the door followed by a metal desk and chair and a bed, then the window. The other side mirrored it.
In the space between the beds, two young men could just go about their business of dressing for class in the morning without touching one another. My roommate had not arrived. I chose the right-hand side.
Someone had supplied the closet with plentiful cheap hangers, and I was hanging my shirts in the closet when a loud knock came on my door. I opened the door, and a young man with a burning cigarette in his left hand stuck out his right hand to be shaken. I grabbed the offered hand.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Glen Pearson and I’m from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.”
He wore a purple, short sleeve velour shirt with the sleeves rolled once, tan Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops. He smiled and asked me who I was.
“I’m Jack Simons and I’m from Gary, Indiana.”
He did a small double take.
“You’ve come a long way,” he said.
“I was born in Texas.” I guess that was my story.
Pearson kept up a short, friendly welcome to the dormitory and then allowed me to return to my unpacking. He would become one of the most important people I ever met in my life — though I lost touch and have spoken to him only once in more than forty years. He also was the first of a small cadre who would define my early college experience, and thus the beginning of my adult life.
The first time I saw Mike Matteson, I had to stop and look again. He appeared to be the image of Elvis Presley — better looking, actually, with less face fat, a more chiseled profile, but the same high cheekbones. He was slender, six feet tall, a young man with limp, dark hair who came from near San Antonio and spoke with a refined Texas drawl. At Baylor University he majored in psychology — no, he believed in psychology the way I believe in Jesus Christ.
He showed bright eyes when he wanted to, but much of the time his eyes remained distant, meditating. He could be an aggressive talker, or a sideways talker. He might stare an adversary right in the eye or shift his gaze around the room to avoid eye contact; you never could tell. When he thought no one was looking, he often walked about with a settled unhappiness on his face. I identified with that look. Mostly, though, he brought a wry wit to all discussions and often helped make up a foursome for bridge.
Mike and I both may have suffered from a disturbance experienced by young men when they leave the nest — the title of a 1966 movie summed it up: “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I didn’t know what it was ‘all about,’ and it paralyzed my studies, though it didn’t seem to interfere with partying, gossiping, reading books and magazines — anything not assigned for class — or exploring new vices.
Mike had a sign taped to the ceiling over his bed that read: “Get up and go to class; if you don’t, you know who will be sorry.” I didn’t have a sign and I didn’t often go to class, but Mike’s sign must have worked, because he continued his psychology studies at the University of Houston graduate school and earned a Ph.D. I left Baylor my junior year to join the army.
Reed Starnes would have looked good dressed in Puritan clothes — he already had the character down pat, but that may have been my imagination, because he dressed like the rest of us, just neater. He wore the dormitory uniform: a generic T-shirt, cheap Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops — but he still somehow managed to appear more formal, tidier. He was slender, but also tall to the height of six feet.
Reed’s father pastored West Asheville Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, which to any native Baptist (as I certainly was) meant a middling-class congregation, an adequate to comfortable church plant, a deep appreciation for Baptist beliefs and the Bible, and a completely civilized approach to living as a Christian in this godless world. Reed also had the benefit that came from generations of middle-class ancestors, meaning his proper grammar had been learned in the ear from his mother; his disciplines of toilet, dress, posture and poise, personal work ethic, and self-confidence resided in him as an invisible inheritance that no government could diminish through taxation.
Acne had ravaged Reed in his youth, and it had given his face a rough, uneven look. I noticed the scars when I first met him, but soon decided that he didn’t notice — so I stopped seeing the scars. He spoke with a soft North Carolina accent that effectively soothed his hearers while he reasoned his way through our late night conversations. Reed often complained about the weakness of the mathematics department (his major), and at the end of the year transferred to the University of North Carolina to study with a stronger faculty.
Pete’s College Inn occupied the corner of 6th Street and Dutton Avenue on a direct diagonal from my dorm and became another pole of my small universe. Pete’s was a small eating place that specialized in serving a hamburger in a basket (in Pete’s strong Greek accent: “Hamboorrger en-a-basquet”), and chicken-fried steak. Pete possessed a few plastered strands of hair running down the center of his cannonball head. He was short, cheerful, sympathetic, and could take a joke. (I once yelled at him during a busy lunchtime when I couldn’t make the ketchup bottle pour. I held up the bottle for all to see and said: “Pete — here is a bottle you forgot to water.” His face turned red and sheepish, but he laughed along with everyone else in the eatery.) I never saw him at work when he wasn’t completely wrapped in a dirty-white, full-length apron.
The kitchen hid behind the eatery’s right wall, and cooks shoved food to diners through a yard-square opening. The restaurant’s cheap plates, coffee cups, worn utensils, and plastic glasses must have all come from a failed restaurant owner’s garage sale. But Pete served good food. I savor it to this day.
Edna, an old lady with rheumy eyes, who reminded me of my West Texas relatives, assisted Pete by taking orders and delivering food, and sometimes by working the cash register. Strong black women cleaned the tables, swept the floor, and washed the dishes in the kitchen. On Sunday they wore church clothes that bore dark identification badges identifying them as a Second Deaconess or Third Usher at a nearby black church. I was taking sociology at the time and had been taught that excluded minorities had little access to status, so they had to invent their own measurements to identify their place in the world. It felt pleasant to be so learned.
Under the influence of my newfound adulthood, my freedom from parental restraint, the example of my older, much-admired peers, and general youthful stupidity, I had decided to learn to smoke. I regret the decision, but at least I possessed the cunning to know that one should learn to smoke privately, not in front of witnesses. I chose Pete’s because it was often empty after 7 p.m.
Up to then I had resisted the urge to smoke for the usual good reasons: smelly, expensive, and detrimental to health. I had even campaigned with high school friends who took up the vice. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child-man, and I cast my former sense behind. I must have lusted for the apparent sophistication that wielding a cigarette seemed to impart to the smoker. The sight of Glen Pearson taking cigarette smoke into his mouth, blowing it out his nose in two thin streams, and then drawing it back into his mouth and lungs must have impressed me in some mysterious way. It seemed so worldly, so sophisticated, so uncaring of consequences — three stances I earnestly lusted after.
Mike Matteson kept Pete’s open in its final, empty hours. The kitchen was closed, so he only sold warmed over coffee, candy bars, pop, and potato chips. I entered the darkened diner on a Monday night and found it lit by a single bright bulb hanging above the back-wall counter. The darkness and emptiness pleased me: Foolishness should practice itself away from the light as well as from witnesses. Matteson leaned over the counter reading a newspaper. He didn’t look up. When I came to the counter, he glanced at me with the tops of his eyes and then turned twenty degrees sideways toward the kitchen wall and asked me: “What do you want?”
I took no offense, as I was a freshman two weeks into my first semester, and he a lordly sophomore. We had mutual friends, but barely spoke, even in crowded Kokernot dorm rooms.
“I’ll take a Coke.”
He drew the Coke in one of Pete’s cloudy glasses. I paid the fifteen cents and found a booth near the darkened front. There I lighted my first Winston. The mouthful of smoke revolted my tongue. I took a drink of the Coke to wash away the taste. The Coke reminded me of copper pennies rolling on my tongue. I persevered.
Each night that week I repeated the training at Pete’s. Mike had an off-putting way of ignoring the presence of people he hardly knew and probably disliked. He would do a near-perfect Elvis Presley pout as he kind of asked me what I wanted, and never really looked at me early on, but night after night I was his only customer. He must have decided I was worthy of observation as part of his psychological studies. Wednesday, he asked what I was doing. “I’m learning to smoke,” I replied. Ever the scientist, he did not interfere with his subject by either encouraging or discouraging. He invisibly shrugged his shoulders and handed me my Coke. I caught him studying me from behind the counter a few times, but he still never said anything to me when we passed in the dormitory.
Reed Starnes didn’t smoke. He spoke quietly and correctly with that persuasive North Carolina accent. I learned, after a fashion, to play bridge from Reed and Glen, and became a steady participant in the evening bridge games played in their room. Mike and I often filled out the foursome, so he began to include me in conversation. The games attracted others who came in to smoke and gossip and observe the bridge games, whose four players sat on the floor Indian fashion.
The talk in the room ran from the banal, to local interest, culture, literature, history, and manners. Reed showed surprise when he found out I had read David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd while in high school. He held his eyes on me in quiet contemplation for a moment or two after. To my parents’ pride and then ultimate dismay, I had read pretty much nonstop since the second grade, and where general knowledge was concerned, I felt no inferiority to anyone in the room — I was just greener.
Reed said one evening that there could be no special group of males who could be compared with the female malady of nymphomania — since all males are equally maniacal. I had to look the word up to understand his point. I also labored long in the OED and other dictionaries to understand another Glen Pearson/Reed Starnes word: “epistemology.”
Glen returned to the dormitory one day proclaiming that Carson McCullers was the greatest writer of the 20th century — so I read her short stories. “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” interested me the most, since I had worked for many youthful years as a newspaper boy. I decided Glen was wrong. On another day I listened while Glen and Reed discussed the insights to be gained from Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” I read the essay and found it a long slog: A hedgehog has one big idea — when in trouble, it rolls up in a ball; the fox has many ideas when in trouble — it runs away, hides in a culvert, etc. In the fullness of life I have read most of Berlin’s essays and find him a provocative thinker. I have not reread “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” I seem to remember a long, tedious number of pages dealing with Tolstoy and his theory of history.
Another time Reed used the word “predicated,” as in “your idea is predicated on a false premise.” Predicated became the word of the month on First North Kokernot. We all took to using it as often as we could work it into a discussion. I grew tired of the word and have rarely used it since, but I told myself in the midst of the “predicated” mania that this was the way a young man learned and grew his vocabulary.
My life confined itself to the dorm wing, eating at Pete’s, watching movies at the two local theaters, attending football games on the weekend, and spasmodic forays to class. I adhered to the dormitory rule that if one missed a class, one copied the notes from a student who had attended, thus, trying the patience of many polite acquaintances. I did show up for the regularly scheduled exams. My life represented an adjustment to the university that I am sure no combined committee of professors and student counselors would have wanted to imagine. In my own private fashion I was tunneling through the school — refusing to take advantage of all it had to offer to those who lived under its tutelage. In the middle of the semester I had the soul-destroying realization that if all students at Baylor acted as I did, there couldn’t be a Baylor University.
I knew that Baylor had established a famous theater arts program under its head, Paul Baker, and I knew its student actors would perform Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night that fall. A Baptist minister decided to attend, and took with him several nine- and ten-year-old boys, members of the Royal Ambassadors as the Southern Baptists call them. All were equally ignorant of the play’s language, story, or moral message. I don’t know that the Baptist boys and their shepherd fled the play in a howling retreat from the infamy they had just witnessed, but they might as well have. The next day Baylor’s President Abner McCall closed the play.
I had no interest in Long Day’s Journey into Night. The performance took place in the university’s theater, and that was clear on the other side of campus, but notoriety stimulates importance — creates mobs. We loudly denounced the closure in the hallway and rooms of the dorm: “A bunch of fundamentalists.” “It was medieval.” “The church has again forced Galileo to recant.” Then, the story made Time Magazine.
We had become Bob Jones University.
I knew I must see the play. In Glen and Reed’s room I listened while they explained the disaster in softer voices than I would have used, saying that we attended a Baptist university that possessed no gumption and practiced a great deal of hypocrisy.
After all these years, I still don’t know what President McCall was to do. The Baptist preacher threatened to attack him at the state convention and ask it to pull all financial support from the university. The preacher would make the case that the swear words in the play, its moral stance, the darkness and gloom of its presentation, and the unregenerate hopelessness of person presented in the play were anathema to the foundational principles of a Christian school. What McCall did is considered the worst decision of his career at Baylor, but no one has made a rational case for what he should have done — kept Baptist preachers and young boys away from such plays? — ridden herd on the drama department to make sure controversial plays were not performed?
Sidney Lumet directed the movie version of the play that was released that fall. Katharine Hepburn starred as Mary, the mother; Sir Ralph Richards played Tyrone, the father; Jason Robards played Jamie, the older brother; Dean Stockwell played Edmund, the younger brother. A young actress named Jeanne Barr played the maid — she died young in a New York City hospital the same day I turned twenty-four in Vietnam.
In October, Long Day’s Journey into Night showed in Waco at the 25th Street Theatre [sic] — a faux modern, pretentiously labeled second string movie house on the other side of town. Reed had a car, and Mike and I rode with him to see the film.
Local entrepreneurs had built the 25th Street Theatre in 1945 in the new part of town, which by 1962 had become the old and run-down part of town. Situated on a corner formed by an alley and 25th Street, the theater made its own contribution to the neighborhood’s decay: The brightly lit marquee missed several bands of neon tubes as the light flashed up and down the theater name; add to that the peeling, dirty-white plaster exterior, the worn red carpet in the lobby, the torn seats in the auditorium, and wall lamps that looked like they had been purchased from a Flash Gordon movie set — nothing fancy — just false torches held to the wall by ascending plaster half-rings. We had our choice of seats in an empty theater and chose the middle of the auditorium.
The film’s story was darkly written, darkly played, and darkly shot. André Previn provided the dark music. I have read the play several times since that day. It has moved me as one of the finest plays I have read, but with its family disintegration, four people who constantly sink their fangs into one another and can’t find peace or hope, the play is a grueling experience, no matter how well done or performed.
I cannot make myself watch the movie a second time, but I remember the despairing way Hepburn touched her disheveled hair as she spoke her lines, and the caustic hostility that existed between Tyrone and his older son, and the failed hope of Edmund. The wounds and sorrows I remember from watching it that day remain even after the scores of intervening years.
Each character has its own arc of personal failure. The father was an actor of much promise in his youth, but greed and a single role that provided the money he loved caused him to perform that one part year after year, and thus to lose his gift. The older brother, wise and sympathetic in many ways, but foolish in the ways that mattered most, had squandered his life on alcohol, prostitutes, and sloth; now, because he had failed at all things, he had decided to fail at acting. The younger brother (who stands for O’Neill) had still not found himself, but had worked on tramp steamers, had told everyone he wanted to be a writer, and was sure that the doctor would tell him that day he had contracted tuberculosis. The mother had become addicted to the laudanum form of opium as the result of a pregnancy, and had just returned from the last of many incarcerations in a clinic that specialized in curing such addicts. When the play begins, the men suspect correctly that she has returned to her addiction.
Within minutes of the film’s beginning, Mike and I began to squirm in our seats, moving our hands and arms as though warding off blows. We muttered and commented in solitary, broken words and fragmentary exclamations that could have been heard several rows away. Reed sat between us, shushing us at times, trying to concentrate on the film, and stoically enduring our ill manners.
Mike and I did not speak to communicate sense as much as to mingle our voices into a Greek chorus of regret, sorrow, and woe in response to the unfolding despair on the screen. I cannot speak for Mike, but I will speak for myself — and his words and body language mirrored my own. Three hours of dark misery concerning personal collapse was more than my threatened and fragile spirit could take. I experienced the movie as a mirror of my own personal failure. So recently on my own, so frightfully disorganized and incapable of meeting the demands of my new world, so curious and longing for the very ills that had their grip on each of the movie’s principals, I writhed in self-loathing and despair.
Young Edmund stood for me. He was at the beginning of life, already fearing he had failed, and knowing he faced the certain diagnosis of a dread disease. The father had failed through cowardice and greed. The older brother had failed through sloth, lust, and envy. The mother had failed through pity for herself, because she had made vows to a deceiving dream that would never provide her with a home and had not followed her true calling by vowing herself to Christ. The story seemed like a diamond, each prism flashing back at me.
We returned to the dormitory in silence and separated in the hallway without speaking.
The next day I found a typed note on my desk informing me that I was rude, boorish, unmannered, and had ruined a great movie for its writer. The note was signed with a large capital ‘R’ that took up half the page. I suffered a moment of confusion. Who would write such a note? Then I said, “Reed.” I found him in his room and apologized. He gave me a precise lecture on manners. I said I would do better, and we parted friends.
In my long-term attempt to understand what had happened, I finally learned to identify myself as a version of Wile E. Coyote. On coming to college I had just dashed off the mesa top into thin air — one part of me was full of triumph at my talent, my hopes, my attainments, but another part of me knew I was on my own with a thousand-mile fall yawning beneath me.
And I had no idea what to do.
