My first Richard

[Most photos in this post courtesy of RichardChamberlain.net]

[Left: Goran Visnjic as Luka Kovac. Photo: NBC]

Richard Armitage was my first severe celebrity crush, at the age of almost forty-two. I had a brief fascination with Goran Visnjic, in the days when I lived in a place where NBC was the only available terrestrial television station and I watched ER quasi-religiously. The Internet was younger then (1999ish) and there were two or three contentious fansites and one “Lukafic” fanfic site (“Degrees of Freedom” was my favorite story ever). There was even Kovac / Carter slash. Goran Visnjic-love was severely inhibited — for me — by the fact that half of everything he’d been in and a similar proportion of his press was available only in Croatian, a language inaccessible to me even with a dictionary. But I love a damaged hero, and I loved Luka Kovac to death. Visnjic was particularly effective in the scenes where Kovac remembers the horrendous destruction of his family during the siege of Sarajevo. I lost track of him and ER after I moved to a city with television reception in 2001, though I saw him in The Deep End (2002) and ran into him again briefly in Helen (2009), a truly beautiful movie that stars a favorite of mine, Ashley Judd.

[Right: Richard Chamberlain as Dr. Kildare]

Before that, however, if I want to look to my history of male actor crushes, I have to reach back to when I was eleven, to “my first” Richard. Richard Chamberlain. No, I’m much too young to have fallen in love with him in Dr. Kildare, which ran from 1961-66 (that was a little too late for my mom, who married in the spring of ’61, but even so still years before I was even born!). I’ve never seen a single episode of it, although people have told me it’s horrid. I can’t imagine, anyway, that I’d ever have felt any attraction to such an unbelievably clean cut actor. Servetus loves her some scruff.

Rather, I fell in love with Richard Chamberlain in the fall of 1980, when he appeared in one of the first big blockbuster television miniseries, which were really popular in the late 70s (Jesus of Nazareth is the first I remember). Networks ran a solid month of advertising to make sure we’d clear space in the calendar for a whole week of evenings. It was still a few years before the VHS player / recorder, which was just beginning to be sold in Japan, became affordable to the masses. In fact, I remember missing most of the Wednesday episode because we always went to church on Wednesday night, and not seeing it until a rebroadcast on public television in the 1980s, something else I associate a fateful memory with.

[Left: Publicity still of Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne, ca. 1980. I’d forgotten this picture, but it reminds of someone else. Now you know why I like the beard so much.]

The series was Shogun — you may remember it, or the eponymous novel by James Clavell that it adapted. It retells part of the frequently novelized story of a historical English sailor, Will Adams, who was shipwrecked in Japan in the very early seventeenth century. The novel’s hero, John Blackthorne (played by Chamberlain), a stranger in a strange land, becomes inadvertently embroiled in the politics of the emerging shogunate of Lord Toranaga (in history: Tokugawa Ieyasu, played by Toshiro Mifune) even as he falls in love with an unattainable woman, Mariko (Yoko Shimada).

[Right: Toshiro Mifune with Richard Chamberlain on the Shogun set.]

The series won a number of awards, as did Chamberlain. It was a typical piece of early 1980s tv, I think, made when audiences still watched tv for its art. It punched above its weight with a very ambitious story that was much too long and complicated even for the time it was given; actors were cast — especially Mifune, Shimada — who were much better than the material they were given; an attempt was made to give it artistic credibility with voiceovers by Orson Welles and a score by Maurice Jarre (notable enough musically that my high school wind symphony played it at a concert a few years later); and gorgeous, for the U.S. viewer at the time “exotic,” landscapes.

And the show — and the accompanying crush on Richard Chamberlain — made a strong impact on my life. Not as big as Armitagemania, but that’s asking a lot (smiles). I, like many viewers of the show, participated in the sudden Japan craze of the early 80s that responded to the show. In my case, that meant reading everything I could about Japan in the library, becoming a sort of mini-expert, creating for myself what I imagined was a samurai-like outfit by altering a pair of mom’s lounging pajamas from her Hawaii days, and trying out what I thought were Japanese recipes. I got mom to teach me how to eat with chopsticks. (Though I only got to try sushi once I got to college.) I wrote a “report” on Japan for school and got an A+ and the paper was displayed in the school’s case of especially good student work that month. I even learned some Japanese vocabulary which I tried out to humorous effect on an exchange student a year or two later. I read everything else that James Clavell had written — the first historical novels I loved. My favorite was probably Noble House (1988), although his early novel, King Rat (1962), made a big impression on me as well.

And I fell in love with Richard Chamberlain. Remember, of course, that it was 1980, and we didn’t have VHS at home. Chamberlain had made a number of swashbuckling, musketeer movies in the 1970s, which I watched when they were broadcast on television. When he appeared in a new miniseries, as he did repeatedly in the 80s, with The Thorn Birds (1983), Wallenberg (1985), and Dream West (1986), I made time, and I saw the not-very-good Quatermain movies in the theater when they came out. But the kind of quick access to information about a celebrity that we enjoy today wasn’t dreamt of then, so at the time I had a crush on him, I never knew all that much about Chamberlain the person. When he was in something new, I went to the library and used babysitting money to pay to make photocopies of articles about him in popular magazines. Once in a while, I bought a magazine itself. The main one I remember owning is People. When I went to college, in 1987, everything changed, and I lost track of Chamberlain. But I kept that issue for years, well into college and after.

[Left: Chamberlain as Father Ralph with Rachel Ward as Meggie in Thorn Birds. Screen cap?]

As an eleven-year-old, I was absolutely enthralled by Chamberlain. I fell deeply into the crush, and even deeper after I saw him as Father Ralph in The Thorn Birds. I’d only been kissed once then, behind the oak tree on the school playground by my elementary-school boyfriend, Brian, and the feelings I got from that were nothing like ones that overwhelmed me when Ralph stopped fighting his vow of celibacy and slept with Meggie on that vacation island. Chamberlain was tall, strong, gorgeous — and something else. Something that appealed to me deeply as an almost- and then, adolescent.

I watched Shogun again for the first time in almost two decades during the summer of 2012. I’m sure the way it fell down from the shelf while I was looking for something mom wanted to watch was no coincidence. I found it on DVD in the library, and I put it in the player evenings after leaving mom at the hospital. If nothing else, the positive feelings I still associate with the crush offered me a bit of comfort at the time. Watching it, I smiled a bit at my younger self. Seen from my perspective as an adult, both the love story (man loves woman who’s married to someone else in a situation where infidelity means death!) and the political intrigue (stranded white guy plays decisive role at the center of vital historical and political events in the East!) are conspicuously trite and entirely predictable.

But I can also see exactly what must have drawn me in as a girl. First, there’s the “stranger in a strange land” theme — something I often felt. As Blackthorne experiences more of Japan, he becomes more and more foreign to his fellow sailors, even though he also continues to feel foreign in Japan. Second, there was the thrill of experiencing the unknown and the exotic. I remember particularly enjoying the scenes where Blackthorne is trying to learn Japanese. So, again, as with Mr. Thornton and Richard Armitage, my primary identifications with Chamberlain’s character here were ones I made between myself and the protagonist. In the first place, I dreamt of being Blackthorne and replayed his scenes and dilemmas in my head at night for months.

[Left: Richard Chamberlain in 1980]

But, of course, I also fell in love with Chamberlain. It didn’t hurt that he was goodlooking, of course. Still: 1980 was just the point at which my father’s alcoholism was becoming especially bad, and Blackthorne as played by Chamberlain offered a version of solid, trustworthy masculinity pursued even at great cost to himself (I found out much later that Chamberlain’s father had been an alcoholic). And, finally, perhaps decisively, there’s something incredibly joyful in Chamberlain’s demeanor all the way through the movie, despite the many tribulations his character experiences. This mood is particularly clear in the love scenes. It’s something that doesn’t appeal to me in the last as an adult and in a moment of giving into cynicism and my weird Midwest ethnocentrism I might call it “California beach boy love.” But the “I’m thrilled to be alive and overjoyed to be in love with you” mood that Chamberlain gives nearly every screen minute of Blackthorne’s affair with Mariko-san was the kind of thing that would have pushed every button I had at the time. The same is the case with Chamberlain’s portrayal of Father Ralph. Though he’s often tried, unhappy, and frustrated, in the scenes where comes together with Meggie, his whole personality is suffused with light.

Loving Chamberlain was not something that my mother approved of, although she put up with the Japan fascination and even supported it a little. I’m not sure why she objected to Chamberlain, exactly, except perhaps, that it was wasted time and energy and a little money. Maybe it was that he was in his mid-40s by 1980 and she thought he was too old for me to crush on him? Anyway, she was opposed.

Generally, she could motivate me to stop doing things she disapproved of (but which weren’t easily described as sinful) through ridicule, and she tried really really hard in this case. At some point in the early 80s she said to me, after I’d enthused about him to her when reading a magazine article, rather scornfully, “He’s gay.”

Sexual reproduction had been explained to me when I was nine. I’d seen heterosexual pornography sometime in fifth grade for the first time at a friend’s house (I’m sure there was some in our house, too) and I read mature novels that described quite complex sexual acts between men and women. So at eleven or twelve I knew in a general sense what “gay” meant (to me, she meant that he loved men instead of women), but nothing specific. I knew “gay” was bad because kids yelled it as an insult at each other on the playground. What I understood from her comment at the time, thinking back now, was that Richard Chamberlain was not worthy of my adoration because he was a man who loved men. It was not only frivolous to invest attention in a celebrity, but particularly in one who was so much older and did not even love women.

[Right: Chamberlain with Dixie Carter, ca. 1980]

“It says in this article,” I said to her, “that he’s dating someone named Dixie Carter. There’s a picture.” (I didn’t know who Dixie Carter was; her fame in Designing Women struck a few years later.)

“Well of course it says that,” mom responded. “But it’s not true. He’s just being photographed with her at a party. He doesn’t love her.”

“But why would the magazine not tell the truth?”

“Because no one would put him in their film or show if they knew he was gay.”

“Oh,” I said. “Why?”

“Because people don’t want to see gay actors kissing women, it’s disgusting.” (Her objection at this point was cultural / moral — HIV / AIDS appeared in the U.S. in 1981, and in the Midwest we weren’t aware of it for a few more years and so the scare around gay actors wasn’t yet part of this discussion.)

At that point, I remember thinking that I wanted to kiss Richard Chamberlain. Very, very, very badly. I was lying in bed at night, soothing myself to sleep by thinking about kissing and heavily petting with Richard Chamberlain. He was a major figure in my early masturbatory fantasies. Did that mean I was disgusting? I wanted to do something disgusting? I wisely decided not to ask mom this question.

“Oh,” I said. I’m sure she realized I wasn’t actually agreeing with her, but she was probably happy to stop me talking about Chamberlain for a while.

I went on to dream for several more years about kissing Chamberlain. The Thorn Birds gave me lots of ideas about how he would kiss and do other things as well.

At some point while mom was in the hospital that summer, I mentioned to her that I watching Shogun in the evenings.

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Do you still like it so much?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Richard Chamberlain is just as beautiful and as moving an actor now as he was back then.” I smiled. It was true — even if I wasn’t as enthralled by the storyline as I had been thirty years earlier. I still felt the remnants of my crush on him and remembered all the joy the feelings had given me, all the nights of daydreaming adventures as and with John Blackthorne and kisses from all of his characters and the man himself.

“Just as gay, too,” she said in a sort of know-it-all voice. The scorn was back.

But now forty-three and a woman grown, I wasn’t having it. I’d read Chamberlain’s (not-that-great) memoir, Shattered Love, when it came out, and he confirmed his sexual orientation. He’d been outed in 1989 by a French magazine, although at 55, his career as a conventional heterosexual romantic lead was potentially already waning. But it had been clear from the book that his need to hide this piece of his identity for professional reasons had not come easily to him. Indeed, the book describes a lifelong struggle to hide his real self behind a smiling façade.

Maybe that was why Chamberlain’s Blackthorne smiled so much. Because he had to look as happy as possible in the strange circumstances in which he found himself, to preserve his equilibrium and safety?

I just wasn’t going to be scorned. So I said, “Do you know he’s been in a relationship with the same man since 1976?”

“No.”

“Longer than most heterosexual couples these days,” I noted.

“He’s still gay, though.”

“And I still love him, mom.”

“Hmmm.”

We left it there.

I never told her about Armitage.

***

These are the questions I have.

1. A crush comes out of this basically inexplicable feeling of strong attraction, infatuation, love. At that time we experience it, we can’t totally explain it, but a crush draws on and responds to our deepest needs. Consequently, as a crushee one feels pervaded by fantastic feelings of connection to the universe. One could say the crush involves a quality of unconditional feeling in which the real qualities of object of one’s affection is less important than the feeling itself, which comes from the meaning of the object, which somehow makes difficult things “okay.” Can a crush be understood, on the affective level, as an experience of renewed unconditionality, the possibilities for which are gradually lost as one matures?

2. Where does the need to scorn a crush from, then? Or, less drastically, the constant urging that one gets not to allow oneself to live fully within the crush and experience the emotions, to be sensible?

3. Why and in what sense does a crush have to be “worthy” of one’s psychic and emotional energy?

4. How do all of these experiences relate both to the perception of shame on the crushee and the practice of shaming of the crushee by those around her (either those who directly disapprove, or those who would insist on moderation or “being realistic,” or those who can tolerate “worthy” crushes but not “unworthy” ones, however those may be defined)?

~ by Servetus on January 9, 2014.