Lady in White

a gentle Halloween film for those in need of a happy-ish ending.

I was living in Ojai with my baby daughter when I first saw Lady in White. We were living in the house I eventually sold to Robin Ford.. the guitarist. Looking back now, this was way too scary for her age but there you go. I remember that we watched it. I’d cover her eyes for the scary parts. But it’s possible I watched it all by myself, imagining some time in the future when we’d be able to watch it together. It became a favorite for us. Eventually I let her see the ghosts, discuss the big issues brought up in the film, and even watch Katherine Helmand floating down the stairway toward the children as the explored what they thought was an abandoned house… Scary! Part of what I liked was that this was scary for the child that I was. So when I watch it I can be ten again, and that’s always a big Yes for me.

Lady in White was written and directed by Frank LaLoggia, an extraordinarily talented actor. He also scored the film. In fact, I think he may have conducted the orchestra as well. Frank grew up in the east, he told me, and his childhood was very much like mine back in Arizona…. I am not sure why that took me by surprise. Stereotypes I guess. Television still shamefully depends on them.

Flanked by a few cultural specificities, Frank and I have the same memories, These shared markers make people of my generation feel like home to me. Because the 1954 babies were not old enough to really be hippies, neither ‘baby boomers’ - (at least not at the time- those new definitions expanded to include us in later years) nor were we the 1958-60’s babies, the youngsters who would become the first participants in -what… new wave/punk rock. We were truly in-betweeners, too young or too old, and our childhoods were lived more as witnesses of other Big generations. We watched our big brothers sporting Daniel Boone raccoon hats, We saw our little sisters shave half their heads and dye the other half pink, bobbing up and down as the boys crashed into each other in faux battle dances. Really, how could we take that seriously? That was for later generations to imagine a meaning to it that really was not there at the time. So, Yes, we watched. But our own precious, non-violent, almost invisible childhoods were nearly looked over entirely.

Enter Frank LaLoggia.

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Before the assassination of J.F.K and the subsequent disappearance of our way of life up to that time, we Americans were connected to the entire history of our century. For instance, our books in school had water color illustrations of boys and girls in clothes from the 1940’s. Before the war even. Yes, our books were old but nothing had changed that much. Men still wore hats, ladies wore gloves. And even in some cases, the 1930’s were right there in the language we were being taught. The films we saw on Saturday - like Tarzan - were really very old. We were connected to our history in ways that no one under 60 is connected today and will ever be again.

For Lady in White, Frank’s costume and set designers got every detail of hairstyle and bicycle just right. There is a little Rickie girl there, with long blond braids and a penchant for dancing in public. Even the teacher, they just got her right, that hairstyle goes with that dress. yes! Most people who design costume and hair today usually get something wrong. They put things together for a modern hipness, never understanding the truth of the person who was wearing the stuff. They forget to dress how people felt about themselves. Every day of my life feels like Invasion of the Body Snatchers - the second one, from 1979. ( Who was ever more frightening than Donald Sutherland at the end of that film?)

Some days, I think… Something just is a little off, right? I say, This was not the world I went to sleep in last night, half believing it. But no, conspiracies have not taken the place of reality for me. Still… I wonder why it feels like a dial turns each year, pulling me further and further away from the world I see around me.

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I went to meet Frank LaLoggia in Italy, where he had moved after the success of Lady in White waned. Who knows why really. I don’t think it was his idea. But once there, he told me he had discovered he was gay during the filming of Lady in White. He was working on a new film now, he said. Or maybe a play. One about a man who becomes a woman. He had the whole storyboard, It was a musical.

As in all thing in my life, for most of my life, Tom Waits showed up. Frank said, and I paraphrase here, “You know your friend Tom Waits loves Lady in white too. He called me up at the time.. back in 1989 , I guess..… he said …. “ bla bla bla.

Really? Even here? But of course! I thought, seems like we really did belong together, old friend.

However misguided my attempts to meet folks whose work I liked - from Frank here to the Blue Nile way up in Scotland, Van Morrison in Ireland. I wonder what I was looking for? Why did I travel so far to try to touch home? It seemed the right thing to do at the time, to meet, in person, talk with other artists. I’m not so sure anymore.

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Lady in White is a ghost story. a haunted house. It begins with a flashback of a writer- Frankie Scarlotti, as he stands by a gravestone, remembering his childhood in 1962 and the events that shaped his life.. It’s Halloween and school is ending with a class party. Typical American child in a typical American town - but we soon discover that Terrible things have been going on in this typical town for fifteen or twenty years. Many children have been murdered. And on this night, the ghost of one of those souls finds her way to our ‘hero’ young Lucus Haas. And so does the murderer….

There is an old Bing Crosby song that the ghost is always singing. It was playing when she was killed…. The script takes a turn from a normal kid/mystery to include the political climate of the time, lending the story much more ..substance… than most films attempt to capture in a seemingly simple horror type movie.. fear of the poor. fear of…the dead. fear of each other. What it means just to be decent in indecent situations. The director succeeded I think because he earnestly felt all this was the reality of the time, and he was a good enough writer to include these themes without it taking away from the forward motion of the ghost story, or seeming to be disingenuous. The feeling that secrets are everywhere and some of them could come back to bite us is a feeling that permeates the film. Something here evokes my own childhood so strongly, but what can it be? I look but cannot find. Perhaps it is cumulative. bikes and autumn, music and big brothers… Favorite things. Or maybe the ‘dime store"‘ angle, a destination of families for many years, full of pumpkins and candy and brooms… ( TG&Y was ours in Phoenix) where you could buy everything from long ribbons of sweet suckers and toilet plungers to pastel colored parakeets and tiny baby alligators.

(I wonder who the buyer was who took those first predators to the aquariums of unsuspecting American children and their parents.). This is where the rumor of the sewer alligator comes from. I wonder if they ate the sewer gold fish. Poor little things.

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