Love Goddesses

A recent post by Steve Altman, in the blog he co-writes with George Clack, considered the glamorous female movie stars of decades ago, particularly Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner (http://www.317am.net/2011/10/kaze-a-love-goddess-or-a-grande-cappuccino.html). Artie Shaw, the clarinetist and big band leader, was married to two of them and is said to have had an affair with the third. Altman reports that when Shaw was very old, he was asked what it was like to wake up next to a love goddess. He replied that when he woke up what he wanted was a cup of coffee, and was she going to get up and bring one to him? No. After all, she was a love goddess.

My wife was indignant when I relayed this story to her. “Why should any woman get up and make him a cup of coffee?” she asked. True. But Shaw’s response is amusing on more than one level, suggesting among other things that after awhile the importance of sex diminishes in the day-to-day life of a couple. It’s important, yes, but then so is a cup of coffee in the morning.

When I awoke the other day, snuggled against my wife, I felt thankful that I had been long married to her. And I felt sorry for Artie Shaw. How little he knew of love! Married eight times, he could never have experienced “the continuous organic thickening of relationship” that occurs in a good marriage. The phrase comes from Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s discussion of “the peculiar nature of love” (Genesis: the beginning of desire, p. 92).

Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner were accomplished actresses, but they were also goddesses. They were not, however, true goddesses of love. They were goddesses of sex, the objects of masturbatory fantasies. Love had nothing to do with it. Unlike Artie Shaw, I wake up next to a real goddess of love. This is an enormous gift, for which no words can express my gratitude.

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