I knew it wouldn’t work, him and I. To begin with, his dress sense would be weird in public – all those skimpy loincloths and armor. But that didn’t stop me fantasizing. What is it about gladiators? Their reckless bravery, the sexual charge of survival against all odds?
You will of course be thinking Russell Crowe. Nice body, great special effects. But my admission is much more shameful – my gladiator was old enough to be Crowe’s father.
But then we are talking pre-pubescent passion here. I was about 11 when I first saw Spartacus. Kirk Douglas must have been pushing 40. If I press the right button in my memory I can still taste the excitement and hopeless longing of it all. Maybe you have similar memories? The first teenage crush that gets out of hand and threatens to drown you. A trial run for the adult experience. Sweet, terrible, obsessive love…
It all started in the front room of our house in London. When, at the end of his magnificent, doomed slave rebellion, Spartacus died on the cross, I cried for hours. Family legend has it that I was inconsolable.
When they repeated it again I cried from the opening credits – we’re talking a three-and-a-half-hour epic here – because I knew what was going to happen. My mother described it as high-voltage hysteria, but I loved every minute of it.
I didn’t see it as obsessive, of course. I probably didn’t even understand the word. But obsessive it was, in its own nauseous, teenage way. Within a week I had written a groveling letter to the film company, which duly sent me a set of stills from the movie. My room became a shrine to the doomed slave rebellion of 73BC.
I saw the movie a dozen times, until I knew Douglas’s scenes by heart. When I wasn’t watching it, I was reliving it. I sat in school daydreaming of Spartacus. I read and re-read the Howard Fast novel on which the film was based. At night I would fantasise about him in the cell where he was given a woman for the night, but is too chivalrous to touch her. “We’re not animals.” “Oh I don’t know, Kirk, I don’t mind.”
I wanted so bad to be Jean Simmons, his co-star, that for months I went to bed every night repeating over and over, “I have high cheekbones too”, because someone told me about the power of suggestion. Was anyone ever so young? It appears I was.
My passion seemed to last for ever. I think the corners on the photographs started to curl around the time Paul Weller tore into the early 1980s music culture, sweeping me and a generation of pre-pubescent girls with him. No false chivalry there.
Looking back, I feel a certain fondness for all that passion, all that lack of control. The sweet pain of unrequited obsessive love. Because that’s just what it was. A dress rehearsal for the real thing. A rite of passage as important as boys’ wet dreams.
By the time it passed I was exhausted and post-pubescent. If I couldn’t have sex with Kirk Douglas I could at least have sex with someone else. It’s a strange thing, obsessive love. On one level it’s a state to aspire to. Glamorous. Poetic. Dramatic. Technicolor – the stuff of art. While you probably wouldn’t want to end up under the 11:15 to St Petersburg, who hasn’t had just a touch of envy for Anna Karenina? Or wished to experience the kind of love affair where the voltage is so high you singe the world around you as you burn?
Except Anna was lucky in some ways – at least Vronsky loved her back, even if he couldn’t live up to it. But then, who can? That’s the built-in fault line of this kind of love. Where obsessive love is truly reciprocal it moves into another genre altogether.
Troilus and Cressida, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet – not a lot of happy endings there. Equally obsessed, equally doomed.
In real life, of course, most of us experience the Mark II level. Not fatal but just as painful – the unrequited version. If you’ve ever been the object of it, you may hardly have noticed: the guy who doesn’t let up, the sad, even mad, idiot who can’t take a hint. An object of ridicule rather than tragedy.
When you are the one doing the loving it’s earth-shattering. Even the humiliation is epic. It’s not easy to admit to, even when time has grafted new skin over the wound. Writers, of course, have the art of fiction through which to process their experiences and those of others. Recognize any of the feelings in the following story?
“He was different from anyone she had ever met, a man of the world who had gone places and written about them. His eyes shone as he spoke of what he had seen and they continued shining when he looked at her. Understandably, perhaps, she mistook this glow for something special.
“After their second meeting they found themselves spending the evening together. One thing led to another, which in turn led to bed. Ask her now and she might admit it was a fairly routine coupling, certainly nothing registering on the Richter scale. But “it” must have happened afterwards.
“Maybe it came to her in her sleep, like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck slipping through her window and staining her eyelids with the juice of some love drug so the first thing she sees when she wakes she adores. ‘Oh, Bottom, thou art transformed.’
“Obsession came upon her like an illness. Initially it was delirium. For the first few days she had trouble breathing, such was the sustained level of adrenaline. She could feel her own heart beating a base track to a million sappy love songs.
“It took a week for her euphoria to sour – something to do with how quiet the telephone was. She would pick it up occasionally to check the dialing tone.”
(The phone of course, is an exquisite instrument of torture in tales of contemporary obsessive love. If Tolstoy or Flaubert had them they would have written heartrending hymns to their cruel power. Imagine Madame Bovary’s relationship with a mobile – eat your heart out, Bridget Jones.)
“In the end, she broke down, called him and spoke to his answering machine, leaving a jaunty message – nothing heavy, no hint of obsession to put him off. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he was away. Maybe he took it at face value. Whatever, he did not reply.
“She became mildly deranged, found excuses to drive down his road at strange hours. One night she dressed up and drove to his house. She parked nearby and spent an hour reading the street plan in the hope that he might see her and she could say she’d got lost looking for a party.
“Friends comforted, joked, became concerned and finally lost patience. It had – as one said to her – grown out of hand. Of course she knew that, knew that somehow she’d fallen victim to a capricious heart disease, though by now its symptoms were more like advanced emotional cystitis – all irritation and itch, with the very act of scratching bringing more pain than relief.
“She was moving from mania into decline when finally fate intervened. She was offered a job abroad and packed her illness in there with her clothes. But somewhere under different skies, meeting different people, the symptoms started to fade.
“When she returned, winter had turned to spring and none of the messages on her answering machine were from him. She sat in her living room and laughed before she cried, for there was loss as well as relief. She had left her job and bought a ticket to a continent she’d never visited. When she came back she wrote a novel about it. While it’s possible that none of these events were connected, she chose to believe that they were. But when you think you’re going to die, getting better is a serious as well as a joyful thing.”
The “she” of this story is not me, in case you were wondering, but she does come pretty close in many – mostly embarrassing – details. Reliving some of them for this column I was struck by how fresh their memory is, the taste of the pain unwithered by age or time…
You will of course be thinking Russell Crowe. Nice body, great special effects. But my admission is much more shameful – my gladiator was old enough to be Crowe’s father.
But then we are talking pre-pubescent passion here. I was about 11 when I first saw Spartacus. Kirk Douglas must have been pushing 40. If I press the right button in my memory I can still taste the excitement and hopeless longing of it all. Maybe you have similar memories? The first teenage crush that gets out of hand and threatens to drown you. A trial run for the adult experience. Sweet, terrible, obsessive love…
It all started in the front room of our house in London. When, at the end of his magnificent, doomed slave rebellion, Spartacus died on the cross, I cried for hours. Family legend has it that I was inconsolable.
When they repeated it again I cried from the opening credits – we’re talking a three-and-a-half-hour epic here – because I knew what was going to happen. My mother described it as high-voltage hysteria, but I loved every minute of it.
I didn’t see it as obsessive, of course. I probably didn’t even understand the word. But obsessive it was, in its own nauseous, teenage way. Within a week I had written a groveling letter to the film company, which duly sent me a set of stills from the movie. My room became a shrine to the doomed slave rebellion of 73BC.
I saw the movie a dozen times, until I knew Douglas’s scenes by heart. When I wasn’t watching it, I was reliving it. I sat in school daydreaming of Spartacus. I read and re-read the Howard Fast novel on which the film was based. At night I would fantasise about him in the cell where he was given a woman for the night, but is too chivalrous to touch her. “We’re not animals.” “Oh I don’t know, Kirk, I don’t mind.”
I wanted so bad to be Jean Simmons, his co-star, that for months I went to bed every night repeating over and over, “I have high cheekbones too”, because someone told me about the power of suggestion. Was anyone ever so young? It appears I was.
My passion seemed to last for ever. I think the corners on the photographs started to curl around the time Paul Weller tore into the early 1980s music culture, sweeping me and a generation of pre-pubescent girls with him. No false chivalry there.
Looking back, I feel a certain fondness for all that passion, all that lack of control. The sweet pain of unrequited obsessive love. Because that’s just what it was. A dress rehearsal for the real thing. A rite of passage as important as boys’ wet dreams.
By the time it passed I was exhausted and post-pubescent. If I couldn’t have sex with Kirk Douglas I could at least have sex with someone else. It’s a strange thing, obsessive love. On one level it’s a state to aspire to. Glamorous. Poetic. Dramatic. Technicolor – the stuff of art. While you probably wouldn’t want to end up under the 11:15 to St Petersburg, who hasn’t had just a touch of envy for Anna Karenina? Or wished to experience the kind of love affair where the voltage is so high you singe the world around you as you burn?
Except Anna was lucky in some ways – at least Vronsky loved her back, even if he couldn’t live up to it. But then, who can? That’s the built-in fault line of this kind of love. Where obsessive love is truly reciprocal it moves into another genre altogether.
Troilus and Cressida, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet – not a lot of happy endings there. Equally obsessed, equally doomed.
In real life, of course, most of us experience the Mark II level. Not fatal but just as painful – the unrequited version. If you’ve ever been the object of it, you may hardly have noticed: the guy who doesn’t let up, the sad, even mad, idiot who can’t take a hint. An object of ridicule rather than tragedy.
When you are the one doing the loving it’s earth-shattering. Even the humiliation is epic. It’s not easy to admit to, even when time has grafted new skin over the wound. Writers, of course, have the art of fiction through which to process their experiences and those of others. Recognize any of the feelings in the following story?
“He was different from anyone she had ever met, a man of the world who had gone places and written about them. His eyes shone as he spoke of what he had seen and they continued shining when he looked at her. Understandably, perhaps, she mistook this glow for something special.
“After their second meeting they found themselves spending the evening together. One thing led to another, which in turn led to bed. Ask her now and she might admit it was a fairly routine coupling, certainly nothing registering on the Richter scale. But “it” must have happened afterwards.
“Maybe it came to her in her sleep, like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck slipping through her window and staining her eyelids with the juice of some love drug so the first thing she sees when she wakes she adores. ‘Oh, Bottom, thou art transformed.’
“Obsession came upon her like an illness. Initially it was delirium. For the first few days she had trouble breathing, such was the sustained level of adrenaline. She could feel her own heart beating a base track to a million sappy love songs.
“It took a week for her euphoria to sour – something to do with how quiet the telephone was. She would pick it up occasionally to check the dialing tone.”
(The phone of course, is an exquisite instrument of torture in tales of contemporary obsessive love. If Tolstoy or Flaubert had them they would have written heartrending hymns to their cruel power. Imagine Madame Bovary’s relationship with a mobile – eat your heart out, Bridget Jones.)
“In the end, she broke down, called him and spoke to his answering machine, leaving a jaunty message – nothing heavy, no hint of obsession to put him off. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he was away. Maybe he took it at face value. Whatever, he did not reply.
“She became mildly deranged, found excuses to drive down his road at strange hours. One night she dressed up and drove to his house. She parked nearby and spent an hour reading the street plan in the hope that he might see her and she could say she’d got lost looking for a party.
“Friends comforted, joked, became concerned and finally lost patience. It had – as one said to her – grown out of hand. Of course she knew that, knew that somehow she’d fallen victim to a capricious heart disease, though by now its symptoms were more like advanced emotional cystitis – all irritation and itch, with the very act of scratching bringing more pain than relief.
“She was moving from mania into decline when finally fate intervened. She was offered a job abroad and packed her illness in there with her clothes. But somewhere under different skies, meeting different people, the symptoms started to fade.
“When she returned, winter had turned to spring and none of the messages on her answering machine were from him. She sat in her living room and laughed before she cried, for there was loss as well as relief. She had left her job and bought a ticket to a continent she’d never visited. When she came back she wrote a novel about it. While it’s possible that none of these events were connected, she chose to believe that they were. But when you think you’re going to die, getting better is a serious as well as a joyful thing.”
The “she” of this story is not me, in case you were wondering, but she does come pretty close in many – mostly embarrassing – details. Reliving some of them for this column I was struck by how fresh their memory is, the taste of the pain unwithered by age or time…
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