THE CYNEPHILE

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” –Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye

Here’s a little gem from this week’s New Yorker, from a tribute by Lillian Ross:

Salinger loved the movies, and he was more fun than anyone to discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen “Grand Illusion” ten times.) Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news. “I mean it,” he told me. “She’s a cute, talented lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accomodate her, pour le sport.”

Oh, J.D. Many men were tempted to accommodate her, and then some.

“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.” — A Perfect Day for Bananafish