The Weekly Screed (#623)

“Now it’s time to say
goodbye to all our company…”
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — With her death this week, the swiftly-reached media consensus about former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher is that she was a “transformational” figure. Perhaps so, but… overshadowed by the obituaries and eulogies to Britain’s “Iron Lady” came news of the death of a woman perhaps even more transformational.

Under the constant gaze of an entire generation, Annette Funicello blossomed from a scrawny little girl to a grown woman, in stages just perceptible enough that every kid who watched her on the screen came to appreciate — and fear, just a little — the relentless, transformational passage of time.

Margaret Thatcher, for all her influence on world affairs, occupied a discrete moment in history. She emerged full-grown and, when she left office in 1990, she virtually disappeared, leaving behind a clear imprint with sharp edges. Word of her demise probably surprised millions who thought she was already dead.

Annette, however, was timeless. She remains a lingering image in millions of memories. Her death kills a little something in most anyone whose childhood fell within the years between 1945 and 1970. Starting with the Mickey Mouse Club and later in the “Beach Party” movies, Annette’s journey mirrored and guided that of just about every sentient American kid, and it had the inexplicable power to mitigate the turmoil that regularly threatened to overwhelm an entire generation.

We met Annette at the birth of the Cold War, when every kid knew he or she would die before age 21 in a nuclear holocaust. We knew Annette through days when bigots murdered little girls in churches and freedom riders in the night. We still had Annette during the war in Vietnam, when every boy knew he would die face-down in a rice paddy 8,000 miles from home. But none of our quotidian horrors touched Annette. She sang, she smiled, she grew — upward, outward.

On the Mickey Mouse Club, Annette was the lodestar. Every girl had to decide how closely she wanted to emulate Annette. If you were a boy, you had to measure how big a crush you had. Annette was an issue no kid — boy or girl — could sidestep. An opinion was required of everyone, and every Annette skeptic had a little explaining to do.

In Stand By Me, Rob Reiner captured, in a few charmingly vulgar lines of dialog, every kid’s obligation to Annette. Indeed, if  Reiner had failed to mention Annette in his homage to that era of American childhood, critics could have justly savaged him for an egregious omission. In the movie, the topic, as it must be, is Annette’s boobs — easily the most closely observed breasts of the1950’s. Gordy, the intellectual of the group, says: “Yeah, I’ve been noticing lately that the ‘A’ and the ‘E’ are starting to bend around the sides.”

Although she seemed unaware of the phenomenon, Annette was partner in puberty to a nation of contemporaries. As Reiner illustrated, she was a visual aid for boys like me who, otherwise, might have stayed clueless for years. Annette certainly wasn’t the only girl on earth but, well, take my sister, Peg. I might have observed her as she gradually crossed over into young womanhood. But, except for the frequent occasions when she hogged the bathroom, I paid Peg as little heed as possible — as she did me. Peg could have grown antlers and I wouldn’t have noticed. Annette, however, no kid could ignore. As Annette swelled, from episode to episode, season to season, boys learned what happens to girls. We eventually realized that the same miracle was happening all around us. Even to Peg.

By the time Beach Party came out, we (former kids) were older, harder, a little jaded — all of us but Annette. She overlooked our cynicism and beckoned us into the movies. I went, of course, with all my sarcastic friends, to every new Frankie-and-Annette release, Muscle Beach Party, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, etc.

Mind you, Annette never stuffed a bikini, wild or otherwise. Her modest two-piece rose two inches above her belly-button and swallowed those iconic breasts with enough material to conceal a VW microbus. Which was the point. We had grown. We had changed. We had become — at least in our estimation — worldly-wise and cool. We knew what was happening. There was a war on. The Beat Generation had given us a new definition of what it meant to be hip. A rock group called The Fugs was appearing at the University. We were reading Orwell, and Candy and e.e. cummings. I had discovered Coltrane, Bob Dylan and Mussorgsky.

When first we saw Annette on TV, she ushered us gently, ingenuously, through our first big change of life. She was our pilot through the fog of youth. But then, as we learned through seven beach-party flicks in less than three years, Annette had become changeless. When her boobs finished growing, so did she.

And so could we, for a moment. Holed up in the old Eastwood Theater, under Annette’s spell, we could pass two hours without uttering a putdown, alluding to the works of Ian Fleming or trying to strut our stuff. We could pause our blind march toward adulthood. We could even reverse the process. Annette had powers to evoke any moment in the childhood we had shared with her. She was a mouseketeer among beach bunnies. She was the ingénue who for whom candy wasn’t dandy and liquor was no quicker. In the raging maelstrom of the sexual revolution, she was the eternal virgin — high and dry, with every hair in place.
 In something like Beach Blanket Bingo, horny teenagers might shimmy themselves into a lather and hormones could rage all around her, but Annette sat unfazed, hands folded, always a little boring. Her dullness was assurance that the beach was not the orgy it was cracked up to be. Nor was life beyond this imaginary beach really so cruel after all.

Annette was the living repository of the innocence we were all losing.