Smitten by Bud Stamper

HALLE EPHRON: I was a child of the movies. I wanted to BE Velvet Brown. I wanted Holly Golightly to be my best friend. And I lusted after Bud Stamper. 

We're talking the early nineteen sixties when I was fourteen years old and obsessed with my shortcomings—too tall, too skinny, pimply, smelly, hairy. It was then, in the throes of self-conscious adolescent angst, that I first clapped eyes on Bud. 

My best friend and I took the bus to the Picwood movie theatre in Westwood to see Splendor in the Grass. I left besotted with Warren Beatty’s character, Bud, a sweet, sensitive, sex-starved high-school quarterback who’s madly in love with the virginal, beautiful, popular, passionate, repressed Deanie (Natalie Wood). 

He (Bud? Warren?) nailed me with those crinkly eyes, that goofy smile, and an endearing boyish awkwardness. He had the perfect inarticulate stammer and aw-shucks manner about him, a sweetened amalgam of Marlon Brando and James Dean. 

If you’re in my generation, I know you saw the movie. If not, here’s what you missed. It’s set in small-town Kansas in 1928 inthe midst of Prohibition and in the run-up to the stock market crash. Bud’s wealthy father, an oil man who’s all bluster and narcissism, wants Bud to go to Yale and join the family business. Bud wants to go to ag school, become a farmer, and marry Deanie. 

Deanie’s not-so-wealthy parents have aspirations for Deanie, too. Her mother is desperate for her to marry Bud. But her mother’s nightmare is that that her daughter will “go too far” and have to have “one of those operations” and end up shamed for life. 

The screen nearly explodes with unfulfilled lust that drives Bud into the arms of Juanita, the girl boys say “knows what it’s all about.” Desperate Deanie tells Bud she’ll do “whatever you want,” but he can’t bring himself to soil her innocence. Which in turn drives Deanie literally around the bend. She tries to kill herself and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

Bud soldiers on. Following Daddy’s orders, he goes to Yale but flunks out. He marries a waitress and settles down to be rancher on his father’s land, the only bit of his father’s estate that remains intact after the stock market crash. When Deanie, about to be married, comes looking for him, she meet Angelina, a former waitress who’s his sweet pregnant wife, played by the wonderfully slatternly Zohra Lampert. Deanie asks Bud if he’s happy. He answers, “I don’t ask myself that question very often.”

And they go their separate ways.

It’s all very tragic, a morality tale about the power of sex that left me with a great deal to think about. Would I be Deanie or Juanita or Angelina? There are so many tired sexual stereotypes in this movie, but back then I was seriously unwoke. Almost everything I knew about sex was based on Selena in Peyton Place. And now Deanie in Splendor in the Grass.

I followed Warren Beatty’s career, but by the time Bonnie And Clyde came out six years later the bloom was off that rose. According to my movie magazines, my sweet Bud Stamper had been sleeping around. And around. 

It would take a while for me to realize that my ideal partner was not a hunk whom other women lusted after. He was slow but steady, the tortoise not the hare, not clever but smart, loyal…and devoted.

Once upon a time (before you knew better), were you smitten by a rock star? A movie idol? Was it the smile, the eyes, or the abs?