Sep. 06, 2006 - Issue #568: Sex in the City

The Moviegoer

A look at a woman in man's pyjamas was all it took

The first flesh-and-blood actress I can remember having a sexual crush on (I say “flesh-and-blood actress” so that I don’t have to waste your time talking about my thing for Madame Yes from the “James Bondrock” episode of The Flintstones) was Claudette Colbert. An unlikely choice, I know. But I was about nine and very interested in old movies, and one of my prized possessions was a coffee-table book by film critic Richard Schickel called, simply, The Movies. It was full of gigantic black-and-white photos, some of them covering two entire pages, which seemed very decadent and lavish to me at the time.

One of those photos was that famous still from Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night showing Colbert and Clark Gable bedding down for the night at a motel. In order to preserve propriety (their characters are unmarried) they’ve strung a makeshift bedsheet curtain down the centre of the room—in the film, Gable refers to it as “the walls of Jericho.” Colbert is wearing a spare pair of Gable’s pyjamas, and I must have whiled away hours at a time staring at the sight of her.

I’m still not sure what made this picture so hypnotic for me. It’s a perfectly G-rated picture—actually, Gable is showing more skin than Colbert. I know I loved looking at her bare toes peeping out from the bottoms of the pyjamas. There was something erotically intimate about the idea of a woman wearing a man’s clothes—and of those clothes being a few sizes too big for her.

I don’t know what Freud would make of that skeevy little confession, but in any case, that’s something that still turns me on as an adult: I never actually saw it too often in real life, but I’ve always loved those post-coital movie scenes where the actress walks around the bedroom wearing nothing but her lover’s dress shirt. When I was a virgin imagining what my first sexual encounter would be like, I think I almost looked forward to seeing a girl walk around my bedroom in my shirt more than I looked forward to the actual intercourse. I’m amazed that all these years later, I can even recall Colbert’s precise pose. She’s fastening the top button of her pyjama top and she’s leaning forward slightly, as if to peer around the edge of the curtain. It’s impossible to figure out the expression on her face, although as a kid I spent many an afternoon trying to interpret it.

Her naturally wide eyes and her demure pose, as she self-consciously angles her body to keep it half-hidden behind the hanging bedsheets, both have an innocence to them, and yet there’s a faint perfume of seductiveness coming off her all the same. Her smile, which mirrors the amused smirk on Gable’s lips, seems so sexually knowing—is she really as shy as she seems? And again, I couldn’t take my eyes off those bare toes—small, no polish, a little monkeyish—gripping the floor of the motel.

What would happen next? I was so young that even if I pictured Colbert continuing to wander past the walls of Jericho and into Gable’s bed, the exact nature of what they’d do to each other remained a total mystery to me. Something involving these people ostensibly happened during the night, but beyond that, the film’s title was maddeningly unspecific.

Just as mysterious to me now, as I write this, are the reasons why I found this particular image so enthralling. The same book contained a much more provocative picture of Colbert taking a bath in asses’ milk in Cleopatra, and yet it was the shot of her in Clark Gable’s pyjamas that I kept returning to.

To this day, I have a big thing for women’s feet. Could this photo have been what triggered it? Or was my fixation on Claudette Colbert’s sexy monkey toes merely the first manifestation of a perverted little fetish that had been lying dormant all along? But what about the whole men’s shirt thing? And my ongoing affection for petite, big-eyed brunettes? I haven’t thought about that photo in years, but now I’m beginning to wonder with some alarm whether every element of my entire sexual personality can be traced back to the thoughts that ran through my nine-year-old brain as I stared at Claudette Colbert getting ready for bed.

Years later, I finally rented a copy of It Happened One Night from the library and watched it with my then-girlfriend. It was okay, but I gotta say: it was nowhere near as good as the still. V

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