Ralph Meeker, or Why I Like James Brooks as Much as de Kooning BY PETER PLAGENS y father always liked the off- because he wasn’t quite conscious of his brand, the second-rank, the preference for the B-list in practically all M runner-up, the lower-priced things. My father also had a lot of little slightly funky diner down the street that things wrong with him and he ended up fewer people went to. It was the same a not-quite guy, too. He was 6 feet tall, with movies; he liked the guys down the mustachioed and square-jaw handsome, list from such stars as John Wayne or but he let his teeth go to hell and was shy Clark Gable. My father favored guys with about smiling. Ralph Meeker was his soul something funny or strange or brother: Meeker in the leading man something, well, just not-quite about business, my father in the minor-league them. advertising art business. Ralph Meeker, who played Mickey My parents were from Cleveland, a Ralph Spillane’s private eye Mike Hammer in the Meeker of cities. My mother’s family 1955 movie Kiss Me Deadly, was like consisted of smoking, drinking, laughing, that: passably handsome and self- truant Irish Catholics with a lot of assured, but a bit chipmunky in the hanging flesh above their elbows. My cheeks and soft in the hands, with a father’s parents were pious, abstemious strained, breathy, not really tough-guy descendents of German Lutheran clerics. voice that sounded more like an Their bodies were as spare as their overworked cabbie than a vengeful PI. appetites. Somewhere along the line, my Meeker did look pretty good in a suit and paternal grandfather converted to tie, though, but unconvincing as the Christian Science and became a hardboiled protagonist: he seemed locked practitioner. My father followed in the in that suit and tie like the Man in the faith, although only as an off-and-on Iron Mask was locked in an iron mask. churchgoer and bedtime reader of Meeker also had a tiny, but quite Science and Health, with Key to the irritating once you noticed it, parakeet’s Scriptures. It was enough, however, to ruffle at the crown of his smooth haircut. make him something of a dreamy It bored a hole right through his amateur philosopher and—I see so clearly character’s street cred. in retrospect—terribly unsuited for the sharky business in which he unadvisedly But those little flaws must have been chose to try to make his living. precisely the things my father liked about Ralph Meeker, although he never told me During World War II, when I was a so outright. He probably never told me so toddler, my father—too old to be drafted—was sent to southern California would bring home Richard Hughes and to help make instructional films for the Vercors, Alfred Chester and A. E. van Army Air Corps. At the end of my fifth- Vogt. And not Hughes’s relatively popular grade year, however, he lost yet another A High Wind in Jamaica, either, but the small ad agency job, and we had to sell lesser-known In Hazard. He’d pass these our little mint-green stucco house for a books on to me, saying, “If you want to pittance and scuttle back to Cleveland to read a real writer, read this.” move in with the Irish grandparents. No surprise, I’m a lot like he was. I tend The man who’d forced my family to to pull back and crankily see myself more return to Cleveland by shutting down his as a midlist anti-hero, an honorable advertising agency, called one day and runner-up done in by fashion-followers, said he was back in business. He instead of reflexively assuming I’m hot persuaded my father to move us yet shit and going for the gold. But I keep again to southern California. Alas, the asking myself: Do we inherit this sort of man soon folded his business once more. stuff from our fathers because we hang My father more or less spun his wheels around it all the time growing up, or is it the rest of his working life, bouncing a real gene deal? Is it Pavlov or DNA that from one small advertising agency to constantly delivers me to the underdog, another, for lower and lower pay. During the off-brand banana-pineapple soda pop his descent, my mother saved the family’s in the cooler, talky noir movies, or a nice bacon by getting a job as a clerk-typist show of James Brooks instead of Willem with the Board of Education, and ended de Kooning, or a Sidney Nolan exhibition up, 20 years later, retiring as assistant instead one of Lucien Freud? registrar at Los Angeles City College. Immodestly, I’ll propose that there are My father turned out to be not all that some virtues in this: it takes a certain art- unhappy with being relegated to a distant critical grit, especially in these days of second in the moneymaking category. hyper-hype, not to slide down the sluice “Freelancing” (his euphemism for of received wisdom about the textbook hanging around the house and doing a greats, and instead do some hard looking little layout work in a back room) gave at the likes of Brooks or Nolan. Brooks him more time not only to delve deeper (1906-1992) was a first-generation into Mary Baker Eddy, but also to read Abstract Expressionist who combined a the stacks of books he liked to bring talent for composition that was on a level home from the Echo Park and Hollywood with such de Kooning masterpieces as branches of the L.A. Public Library. His Ashville (1948), and a sensitivity to paint unerring attraction to the off-brand, the surface that ranged from Jackson modest achievement, worked best with Pollock’s enamel “skeins” to Helen books: fiction and science-fiction in his Frankenthaler’s early stains. His color— case. Instead of Hemingway or Faulkner, solid and knowing while not quite Hans or Ray Bradbury or Robert A. Heinlein, he Hofmann—was more eccentric in his 2 Hamptons house, where the furniture None of this is meant to diss Brooks—one was white and the ceiling beams were of the very best AbExers—or Nolan, painted yellow. Nolan’s personal life was whose main debility was geographic, or as fraught if not as fertile as Freud’s, who even Ralph Meeker, who enjoyed a long fathered 11 kids, maybe more, by several and full career as an actor. Meeker was different women. Nolan (1917-1992) was even married for a couple of years to the an army deserter during World War II and very sexy actress Salome Jens, who carried on a decade-long affair with the became an item of controversy when she wife of his principle patron. But his starred in Angel Baby, a 1961 movie greasy, rainbow-hued series of pictures about religious huckstering that had more on the story of Ned Kelly, Australia’s Jesse lust (a near-rape scene with Burt James, is as quirkily profound as Reynolds) than Elmer Gantry. (The rights modernist figurative painting gets. While to Angel Baby, originally scheduled for the art of Brooks and Nolan is hardly B-list release in 1960, were purchased by in itself, Brooks’s living and working in Columbia Pictures so that a lower-budget the shadow of such scenery-chewers as picture, with Reynolds being a kind of Pollock and de Kooning, and Nolan’s younger, Meekeresque version of Burt simply working in Australia (although he Lancaster, wouldn't steal any of the did live in the U.S. for a couple of years sensation thunder from Elmer Gantry.) on a fellowship) before the onset of globalism in art, kept each from the big- No, this is about my wondering why I, time reputation he deserved. too, am drawn to the off-brand diner down the street and why, with a raft of And while Meeker, Brooks and Nolan big-budget new releases preening like never deliberately shied away from the peacocks on the DVD shelves of my local spotlight, aficionados of the off-brand video store, my gaze zooms right to the and the mid-list tend to. Instead of re-issues from the “Noir Collection” and clawing our ways to the top, we’d rather spots Kiss Me Deadly. Maybe after I stand a bit off to the side and think about watch it, I’ll start rereading In Hazard. things. If we’re literateurs, we want to And after that, I’ll go up to the Whitney write for a smaller, more thoughtful Museum or over to the Brooklyn Museum audience rather than for movers or to see if I can find one of their James shakers and trendspotters. If we’re artists, Brooks paintings to admire. we cling (perhaps a little too much) to the old delayed-discovery, “for posterity” thought always rattling around in the backs of our heads. And if we’re critics, we’d rather look back and write about the likes of Brooks and Nolan, instead of adding more laurel wreaths to the already over-laureled, or touting the next art star in waiting. 3 .