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At a screening of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
May 2005
The movie theater at 23rd and 8th shows older movies on Thursday nights, as part of their Chelsea Classics series. One night, about a year ago, I saw they were playing Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, which I had never seen. Poor, helplessly naïve me was, however, under the impression that going to Chelsea Classics would be a little like going to Film Forum [an art cinema here in Manhattan], where we would all sit in reverent silence and appreciate the cinematic work on display. I did not count on people coming in costume as their favorite character, a drag performance before the film, and the majority of the audience knowing and reciting their favorite lines. As the movie is a bit of particularly pulpy pulp, however, this turned out to be the ideal viewing conditions.
The movie opens with the little child star who will grow up to be Bette Davis singing “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy.” Daddy, it seems, is dead, and at the end of the song, the letter floats on a string up above the audience, presumably… all the way to heaven.
In the theater in which I was watching the movie, some enterprising audience member had affixed a letter by string to a helium balloon, which he let go to general laughter and applause when the child onscreen sang the song. The balloon was caught in the theater’s air conditioning when it reached the ceiling, and was blown over to the side of the screen, where it remained for the next hour.
Midway through the movie, the adult Bette Davis sings this song again, in a scene demonstrating what a bonkers dried-up former child star completely living in the past she is. Incredibly, as she began to sing the song, the real balloon and letter drifted over into the center of the screen. It floated around the image onscreen as she sang the song, and several times the character onscreen seemed to gesture directly toward the letter in the theater. The audience laughed and applauded at first, but that gradually died away, everyone unable to believe what was really happening right in front of them.
As the song ended, the balloon slowly began to fall, and at last settled on the floor.
