A SILENT BOOMER TALKS PILLOW TALK

When "Pillow Talk" with Rock Hudson and Doris Day came out in Oct. 1959, I was a few weeks from turning 22. I'd been out of the Navy nearly a year, and I was dating the young woman who was to become my first wife. To my entranced eyes, she looked like Doris Day in "Pillow Talk". She owned and often wore a tight, black sheath dress, tighter than Ms. Day's white sheath dress in that film. She wore her hair in a beehive, also like the coiffure of some of Ms. Day's photos in other films. My wife combined her sheath dresses with a girl next door's shy allure. Both together, wrestling in my libido, made her hotter than a recently fired pistol. Our adventures as we parked in her driveway in my powder blue, 1957 Chevy after returning from a well-dressed movie date to see "Pillow Talk" must be left to a reader's imagination, unless in a future book of essays, I reveal more detailed accounts. I'm sure I've got essays about film-going running out of my psychic sorehouse [sic].

Poster by Universal International Films

I just watched "Pillow Talk" again, thanks to the Encore Retro cable channel. I'd never before realized how completely false that film is to the human condition nor how ugly and sordid and maddening that film would be to a naive young man and his soon to be wife. The irony of Doris and Rock, playing wannabe lovers in that film and his death by Aids are well known, but as I watched the film recently, I was struck by the smug ugly nature of that whole wholesome striptease act being put on for the gullible audiences of that time. The film's message was if you love me you won't want to fuck me and if you love me you will be so hot for me that it's all a woman can do to resist your irresistible charms. 

Torn by that unwholesome lie festering in his psyche, it's a wonder that any young man's arrow ever found the quiver in his woman's thighs without also feeling a lot of guilt about any possibility of enjoying a good, hot roll in the hay. Pardon the metaphor, but even in this day, a man can't be too careful. There might be a fanatically prudish fundamentalist around any transom, trying to get a peek at what goes on between real, as opposed to reel, men and women.