On Beaches And “Beaches” (1988)

by Naomi Skwarna

In the city where I live, the lake stretches from east to west, a long boulevard yoking the outer boroughs to an urban core. The beaches that line the lakefront properties are mostly unenticing — save a few isolated spots — waves cresting with trash, the air dank and sulphuric. Summer enhances the qualities of our beaches to near-intolerability. In an inverted Hotel California-esque way, you can check in anytime you like, but you will always leave.

When I go down to the lakeshore, I go alone. By and large, other people, perched on capsized picnic tables, also seem to be alone. There’s a hot dog stand that does good business. Hot dogs were made for solitary public consumption.

The horizon is a fair sight, but this is not “the beach,” meaning the beaches of my California Dream Barbie, or the Beach Boys, or even Pauline à la plage. Most of all, these beaches are wholly unlike Beaches, the 1988 film starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as two friends who meet in sun-drenched Atlantic City to the strains of “Under the Boardwalk.”

The first time I watched Beaches was at drama camp, surrounded by a group of Loud Young Jewesses who, like myself, loved Bette and Barbra and Liza with the preening devotion of infant drag queens. We re-enacted key scenes, switching off between Hillary (Hershey) or CC (Midler), depending on whether we felt like dying young & hot or winning the Tony.

Here was an Adult Contemporary life tailored just for me: apartments with clawfoot bathtubs in the kitchen and novelty magnets on the fridge; experimental downtown musicals about Industry, Charity, Faith, Hope. Opening night, the whole team drinks champagne while waiting for the Village Voice and Times reviews to roll in. All other events pass as a series of montages, punctuated by seaside beach shots, CC and Hillary slung in canted chairs as the sun comes down.

By the time camp was over, friendship seemed made and sustained by opposites: swinging shampoo commercial hair (Hillary) versus puffy orange triangle (CC). Quiet versus brash; wind versus wings. Dispersing among middle schools, we practiced our Midler side-eye, best viewed from a slight distance. Like camp, like a Toronto beach, like summer itself.

As a kid, summer was respite — a two-month chance to address failings of the year previous. You could forge a newish identity at the public pool; roam neighborhood barbecues with a paper cup of Fruité. Summer also meant reading alone in the park until the words disappeared into the page. Camp was short and holiday weekends rare. If I put my mind to it, summer was really about looking your own solitude in the face while holding out for those brief instances of with.

Years after seeing Beaches, I took the subway to the utmost point of the city. Instead of a suitable boardwalk, I found a path of grey planks that insistently rattled underfoot. I followed it west to a beach that a few years later would make Viacom screen news when razor blades were discovered in the sand of the volleyball court. I kept walking until I arrived at a secluded strip of gritland veiled by trees. This was the beach where, my 10th grade history teacher explained, old-timey cops brought certain “perps.” Take ’em down to the Cherry Beach Express said Mr. Iafolla with glee, hammering fist against palm.

How could I be selfish, talented CC or toothy Hillary without a boardwalk to smoke under, without an overbearing showbiz mom, without a humiliating audition for a pair of cigar-chomping Hollywood types? Instead I had a scrubby sandbox known for its discreet police brutality.

*

Hillary and CC live in California and New York, respectively, traveling back and forth but never settling on the other’s coast. Briefly, after reconciling a conflict of years, CC moves to California to attend Hillary’s pregnancy, both of them having left their husbands (CC: insatiable narcissism, Hillary: husband’s infidelity).

As much as it is about the specialness of a special friendship, Beaches is a lonely movie, most of it taking place in CC’s memory as she drives from LA to San Francisco. Loneliness not simply when the two women are apart, but in a glance from across the room — the opposite of the moment that Frances describes in Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha.

Watching Beaches now, I’m curious to see if I’ll appoint myself as CC or Hillary, or if maybe I’ll shift back and forth, the way my friends and I did at camp. How would I read the thing they shared, what the movie’s alternative title, Forever Friends, drives at? A mystifying ideal of eternal friendship that I believed in, and believe in still, I think. Being opposites only sustains a friendship if nothing tears along the way. Too many rifts and you end up collaborators in mutual ruin, worse than enemies.

*

Surprisingly, it wasn’t CC or Hillary I devoted myself to, but the tertiary character of Dr. Richard Milstein. More precisely, Spalding Gray, the late and achingly great theater artist who played him.

I found Gray as an adult, through my obsessive hunting of New York theater history. Gray is one facet of a larger gem, but my mind accepted him as a weird beacon: a white, (mostly) heterosexual male WASP whose art took the form of long, self-observing monologues. And yet I felt the need to know everything about his voice, his work, and his suicide. Gray was transfixed by the ocean, his mother having drowned herself when he was a young man. When he took his own life, it was also in water, although a body without any of the sublime allure of the ocean. In 2004, gripped by physical and neurological injuries, Gray dropped off the Staten Island Ferry into the New York harbor, not quite full fathom five.

Before he died, Gray supplemented his artistic life by acting in mainstream film and TV. Scanning his not insubstantial IMDB credits, Gray was overwhelmingly cast as medical doctors, perhaps because of how trustworthy he looked, with his silver hair and soothing, wide-set eyes. Certainly in Beaches he appears and disappears in that way, the source of CC’s brief desire to marry a doctor.

In Gray’s posthumously published journals, I searched the index for any scant Beaches reference. There was one, a year and a half after the movie’s release:

January 20, 1989

I made up my mind because I ran into an anonymous fan on the street who said I was the best part of Beaches for her and then when she said, “Is that really where you want to be?” The answer inside was “NO.” I need to stay on the EAST COAST of AMERICA and try to come from a quiet mind and see what comes next.

*

For as long as I can remember, I assumed that I was on my way somewhere — in transit to the real destination. Somewhere between CC and Hillary, between Toronto and another city, walking from one beach to the next.

Does true summer elude everyone, or is this just proof of my chronic inability to arrive anywhere? Adjacent to the hot dog stand, people swim and fly box kites on these beaches that I find so inhospitable, that in my mind no one makes their destination. Summer is now — I just can’t bring myself to stop looking for the place I really want to be.

A movie’s signifiers change as you return to them over the course of decades. They look the same, but feel different — because you are different. But you’re also the person you were the first time you watched it, maybe in summer, and that of course brings you back to what the word summer meant. And what, you must admit, it no longer means. It’s still about solitude, but the solitude of an adult is different than a child’s. I must try to come from a quiet mind and see what comes next.

Sitting in the grass at camp, the other girls would lay their palms on my black hair to evaluate the sun’s strength. Feigning burned fingers, we’d know that it was a scorcher — that we were in summer together — and so it was time to play.

Naomi Skwarna is a writer and artist.