In Like Him

I dreamed I was in an old-fashioned magical movie theater with huge ceilings and all sorts of carvings, and all the old stars from the black and white era were arriving. They came larger-than-life, fifteen feet tall as a solid hologram. Each name was announced as the star appeared by an invisible voice, and the huge image was a three-dimensional representation of the star from a famous role. Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn. But I, of course, only wanted to see one person, whose giant Robin Hood made me just about pass out when I finally saw it. But as the stars became human and started to mingle, drinking champagne and laughing, he sat apart. While the others were themselves from their heydey, he was different, an air of palpable sadness and majesty around him.

Errol Flynn was his aged self, a faded relic, but he was sitting in a high-backed chair apart from the rest looking regal and wearing a blue tragedian mask, one half comedy, the other half tragedy. I had tears in my eyes when I saw him. I pulled up his mask just for a moment, and his hair was white and his face lined. I helped him put the mask back on, seeing that he wanted it that way, and he knew better than I that it was meant to be so. And when I spoke to him, he told me that he saw what his life had become, a symbol of an ephemeral ideal and a charicature of himself, the real man destroyed by drugs, alcohol, womanizing, and cigarettes. This was his final performance, as a shadow of himself, the man gone while the actor remained for one last show.