The Light Grey Suit, North by Northwest
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”—Cary Grant
He’d rather walk down Madison, his route
to Oak Bar cocktails, in his perfect suit.
He cuts through tweeds and Technicolor skirts,
a chiseled, dapper gentleman: it hurts
to see him roughed-up, passed out in a cell.
He fares quite badly, but the suit wears well.
Caught bloody-handed with a murderous knife,
he hides aboard a train, meets future wife
Eve, who stows his suit inside her bag
and asks about his monogram. The snag—
the O in R.O.T. It’s meaningless.
He seeks a self, but in unchanging dress.
Dodging a plane, he finds his chances slight.
He’s dust-caked. Eve demurs, Your suit’s a fright.
His being’s shaped by some unseen valet;
unlike the jewel-toned Eve, his palette’s grey.
A cipher wiped by blanks. A bloodless scene.
He’s then locked up; the suit is boxed and clean.
In “off the rack” an active man emerges,
who climbs up steel-framed houses, mountain verges.
Eve’s shawl gets torn on trees, she sheds a heel,
but stays kid-gloved and nyloned all the reel.
They cling to giant crowns on Rushmore’s mount,
A drab professor ups the body count.
Now Eve in silk paj—CUT!—a scene suppressed!
The tunneled ingress tells us he’s undressed.
***
Charisma, granted, carried its own load,
his past submerged beneath the star-paved road.
Grant’s father labored as a trouser-presser;
the son in time became a snappy dresser.
Oh star of lacquered hair and knife-edged pants,
You too had wished a life like Cary Grant’s.