It can, on an abstract level, be a blessing when the beautiful die young.
It's hard to imagine today's birthday boy at 64. It's hard to imagine him, for that matter, outside the very particular milieu in which he shot to fame, for Brad Davis is as pure a product of the era cut short by AIDS as there is.
His was a physical perfection that less recalls that of his contemporary male stars than it does the greatest beauties of Hollywood - he's a kind of testosterone-fueled Hedy Lamarr, stunning but blank. That quality - an at times unnerving combination of physical charisma and emotional vacancy - is what made him, in the few films in which he starred, so effective. None of the other hunks of the era - the men who sauntered through the lesser action pictures and supported aging leading ladies in TV movies and second-string "international" movies that fed the fledgling cable-TV industry - were poised so perfectly between the obsessions of Fassbinder (the king of Dangerous Strangers) and Warhol (the immortalizer of Banal Enigmas). It's fitting, then, that he reached the apex of his short career in Querelle, directed by the former with poster art by the latter.
Nothing he did thereafter captured him so well, and then he was gone. What could he have done? Would a franker era, one with less patience for his excesses and obfuscations, have allowed him to find a niche of some kind?
Would he have finally "come out"? Appeared on endless telethons, or made guest appearances looking wooden alongside Neil Patrick Harris at the Tonys? Who knows? I'll just look at stills of "Querelle" and sigh... Jx
ReplyDeleteThis is what still angers, no, make that enrages me about the national leadership in power at that time - creating such an incredibly hostile climate in which people like Davis had to stay in the shadows because he had HIV, and by doing so, instilling the terror of seeking treatment because of any publicity it would generate, and therein, being exposed as a person infected with HIV. I know that people will say that it was his choice, but I disagree. He stayed hidden because it was the only way he could keep working, that postponed his treatment, and that is the tragedy of his death.
ReplyDeleteIt was indeed, to borrow Hellman's phrase, Scoundrel Time - but even so, in so many ways Davis was always somehow the Lost Boy that I'm not sure he wouldn't have found some other way not to be old...
DeleteHe took loads of treatments, but often the "latest fad" at the time, which was a risk. The best known treatment at the time was AZT, a drug that has killed more people than a virus could manage. And at the same time he was still taking "recreational" drugs. His death was allegedly by his own hand, or at least "assisted" by his wife. I don't think the full story has, or ever will, come out. Very sad. Jx
DeleteJon, I don't dispute what you say. But the simple fact is that President Reagan chose to ignore the enormity of the disease. He did nothing to calm the population, or work on behalf of gay men, who at the time, were the number one group getting it. Had he fully funded AIDS research, and or shown any compassion, there is a chance that people like Davis wouldn't had to fear for their livelihoods. As to whether or not his wife helped him exit this world for the next, that's their agreement. No, I hold Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush responsible for the deaths of so many men, women and children. Their head in the sand policies hastened the ends of a generation of people. And damn them for it.
DeleteI spent my teens, 20's, and most of my 30's looking for my very own Brad Davis. He was, as you said, absolute physical perfection (at least in my book).
ReplyDeleteI came closest to my own Brad with an Iowa born farm boy who made his way to NJ by way of Denver and Phoenix. Physically perfect, Midwestern aw-shucks charm, surprising, enigmatic...and gone after 4 months.
It was grand while it lasted. Spent years letting go of it. Saw pictures of him years later. He had, like the rest of us, slipped into middle age. A paunch, sagging cheeks, and (most aging) his 3 children (by surrogate). The dream evaporated. Perfection can only last in memory.
I'll take my imperfectly perfect husband any day of the week.
I found a picture online of my 20s and 30s heart-throb not long ago, and I have to admit he's aged very well - looking rather JeremyIronsische, which suits him (rather better, actually, than it's suiting Jeremy Irons these days). Still, I wouldn't trade him and all those years of High Drama for the Mister, who's tucked up under an afghan on the sofa while we wait to watch Golddiggers of 1933 on TCM; real life turns out to be much better than one's youthful dreams of Adonis...
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