Obits, the journalistic saw goes, are supposed to be about people you've heard of. This one is about someone you probably haven't, but who deserves your attention. His name is Gary Carey, and he died Tuesday evening, at 70, having completed a life that was both full and far too short.
With distinction and insouciance, Gary pursued four separate careers: magazine editor, museum curator, biographer and college teacher. Five if you include raconteur on the arts, which he initially and always was. And though he might not list this among his signal accomplishments, he was also, for more than 40 years, a close friend of mine and my wife Mary's.
He came from the comfortable Philadelphia suburb of Chester, where he was the youngest of three sons. (Ted, an artist, died of AIDS; his brother Paul, Jr., survives him.) For college Gary chose Columbia, which had an impressive roster of theater and literature teachers — Eric Bentley, Maurice Valency, Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas — to nurture a young man's verdant love of the spoken and written word. Most important, Columbia was a short subway ride from both Broadway, with its legit theaters and movie houses, and the Metropolitan Opera. For this budding addict of arts low, medium and high, midtown Manhattan offered nirvana.
After Columbia, he edited and published a film magazine called The Seventh Art. In its brief, vital life, the magazine ran criticism that took movies seriously but not solemnly; it was a showcase for the enthusiasms and antagonisms of Gary and his smart friends, including the young Susan Sontag. By the time The Seventh Art folded, Gary had joined the burgeoning staff of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film.
In the mid-'60s, under the film department's director, Willard Van Dyke, MoMA's screening schedule had expanded from a half-dozen or so movies a week to 16 or 18, and from its own imposing film collection to loan-outs from other museums and archives. Housing retrospectives on Ernst Lubitsch's German silent films, on the Japanese director Kon Ichikawa and, just to mix things up, on Charlie Chan movies, the basement auditorium on 53rd Street was an education destination, a cathedral of cinema that was also a carnival. With no videotapes, no DVDs, no 24-hour movie channels, you often saw films there or nowhere.
Eileen Bowser programmed most of the films from the MoMA archive, while Adrienne Mancia (still going strong at 81, curating film shows for the Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Gary filled most of the other slots. Gary also wrote a series of elegant program notes and curated wall shows outside the auditorium: exhibitions of handsome blowups on such subjects as the action still and "lost films," movies whose only surviving documentation was in photographs taken on the set. The latter show, expanded with Gary's thoughtful commentary, became his first book, published by MoMA.
I came to the film department in the late '60s, on internships from Columbia and NYU, and worked for Gary when he became the first head of the Film Study Center. (I then worked in MoMA's Film Stills Archive under the lovely Mary Yushak, who would later become Mary Corliss; but that's another story.) Instantly I was aware of the congenial, complementary star quality of Gary and his assistant in programming, Carol Koshinskie.
Gary in his youthful prime had a sensual face — the profile of a thin Brando, features of the young Nureyev — and a languorous demeanor; nothing, I thought, could shock, surprise or impress him. Carol was a pert blond bundle of Brooklyn-Polish energy who radiated an early-'30s star glamour; think Joan Blondell crossed with Carole Lombard. In a real way she was a movie star, having blithely upstaged Gerard Malange and Mario Montez in the 1965 Andy Warhol film Harlot. Like Gary, she was a sauntering encyclopedia of entertainment history, recalling the minutest plots, the grandest gestures from films gone by. They both knew everything about movies and deserved to be in them.
The two weren't dating at the time, but they made for a charismatic couple. While I, not much younger than they, felt like an arrested adolescent, struggling to cast off the cloak of the gauche, Carol and Gary had somehow suavely slipped into their grownup personas; to the rest of us, it seemed, they already were who they wanted to be. Soon, we realized, what they really wanted to be was together. They got married in the summer of 1969 (as Mary and I did). Heroically, they raised a severely autistic son, with Gary often working at home and caring for Sean while Carol supplemented the family income with jobs at MoMA and elsewhere. At home in Brooklyn, with his books and her paper dolls, and a menagerie of semi-feral cats, they remained not an ordinary couple but a kind of ideal one. And though Gary has passed on, they still are.
Shortly after their marriage, Gary left the Museum to write books, publishing six in the next decade: Lost Films (1970); Cukor & Co.: The Films of George Cukor and His Collaborators (1971); a Brando biography (1973); a triptych on Lenny Bruce, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix (1975), and bios of Katharine Hepburn (1975) and Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (1977). The 1981 All the Stars in Heaven, a study of MGM's golden age, was followed by lives of Judy Holliday (1982) and legendary screenwriter and playwright Anita Loos (1988). These histories wore their erudition lightly, as Gary wore his; they were both familiar and illuminating, a judicious blend of scholarship, analysis and dish. Reading them, one could hear his drawling voice, and Carol's too, for she was an enabling collaborative presence. (The MGM book carries the dedication: "For Carol Estelle Koshinskie Carey, my own kapusta swieza na kwasno"; no one who knows Carol would deny that she is one adorable cabbage.) To hear that voice, on paper, search for the books on Amazon or Alibris.
In 1971 he joined the School of Visual Arts, where he taught literature, English composition and theater until three months before his death. To illuminate the text of a novel or a Shakespeare play, or on a course called The Literature of War, he often would show the film version. I never sat in on one of his classes, but I often wondered whether Gary's students got him. Having been bursting with intellectual curiosity when he was their age, he probably didn't bend to the relative ignorance of the new young. I also wish that, in my college days, I'd had a teacher as learned, and as free with his learning, as Gary must have been.
Gary's decline was a long, slow leaving. By last December, when the Careys hosted their Christmas party, emphysema and its allied complaints had sapped him of energy. But when gently prodded he would dip into his capacious memory bag, which held a half-century of theatrical magic — events more precious because they were not recorded but preserved only in the minds of those who saw them. (Edmund Booth, Gary liked to recall, called actors "sculptors whose medium is snow.") With a young lover's total recall, he described the impression young Audrey Hepburn made on Broadway in Ondine: a sprite who beguiled across the footlights as she would through the camera. Or the furious intensity that Maria Callas brought to Norma on the Met stage: "Of course you knew Norma wouldn't kill her children," he said, conjuring the past to life, "but as Callas stood over them with a knife, she made you think, 'My God, she's going to do it!'"
Gary never stopped banking those memories, attending plays on Broadway and at BAM, seeing and reseeing European films at home. At the very end, as he came to acknowledge mortality, his greatest disappointment was that he wouldn't see another play, another film. His greatest frustration was that his arts education, which for him was part of the heart of his life, was over. Now the eternal student, the perpetual prodigy, has graduated. It is left for those of us who read his works, attended his lectures and spent enthralled evenings with this sage of the seven arts to do for him what he did so passionately for the great performers of the early and mid 20th century — to pay tribute to Gary by keeping his memory alive. His talent went into his books, but his genius was talking. And like Audrey on Broadway and Callas at the Met, he was a magnificent sculptor in snow.