It’s only after I learned about Tom’s mother’s sad descent into hopeless alcoholism and degradation that the two movies which Tom recounted to me on our very first date take on a new meaning.

“At the end of the meal, the owner and his wife came out and shared a brandy with us. We sat enjoying the brandy, and Tom proceeded to tell me about two of his favorite movies, both of which happened to be tragic romances. Waterloo Bridge was the first one. It's a war movie starring Vivien Leigh as a ballet dancer who risks everything to marry an aristocratic flyer, Robert Taylor, but sinks into degradation to earn a living when she believes him to be killed in World War One. He returns alive, but her fall into prostitution leaves her too shattered to marry him, and she commits suicide. How could I, a devoted Vivien Leigh fan, have neither heard of nor seen this movie, and this big masculine Marine, I mean Army guy, knew it by heart? How did that happen?”

Now, I can see it’s obvious this story bears a striking resemblance to the tragic story of his mother, who married so young, only find that the man she married was not the man she had dreamed he was. Perhaps this was Tom’s way of excusing her for sinking so low and ultimately committing suicide with alcohol.

Here is the second Movie:

“Seeing he had my complete attention, he went on to describe a second movie, To Each His Own, starring Olivia de Havilland as a wartime young woman who gets pregnant by a World War One ace pilot. Unfortunately, he is killed before he can marry her and make their child legitimate. Then, she inadvertently and anonymously gives up her child to rich, but childless old friends. Crushed, she throws herself into her career as a face cream manufacturer and is very successful but remains lonely until that child comes back into her life in London as another pilot, this time in World War Two, just like the father he never knew. At last, she is able to do real, motherly type things to make him happy. It's a total tear-jerker and a movie not to be missed. Never heard of that one either. What was going on here? I was the diehard romantic. Yet, here was a man who understood and loved romantic movies, too.”

I think Olivia is the mother Tom always dreamed would come and rescue him someday and make him feel loved.



Interestingly, both of these movies were very revealing Freudian slips about his secret life story that I only learned after he passed away. Not that I could have guessed anything at the time. I was simply impressed that he was a romantic like me.