The first woman I was ever truly in love with was Jane Russell. This was a love both tragic, and confusing for me. It was especially confusing as I was a child at the time and I had absolutely no idea that I had fallen in love with her. It came about unconsciously, just like an illness with an incubation period.
Apparently, when I was young, I don’t even know what age, I saw one of her films by accident . Perhaps it was showing along with one of the westerns I would go to see back then. I can remember that there were two feature films showing together, and because of the Jane Russell film I sat through both movies twice.
I soon forgot all about those movies, but several weeks later I had a vivid dream about Ms. Russell. I can’t remember any details of that dream except that we were in love and then she rejected me for someone else.
For many days, even weeks after that dream I was terribly depressed. It was exactly as if it had actually happened, as if it was my own real life experience. This so upset me that I actually began to argue with, and ridicule myself. “Richard,” I would say, in a tone of indignant reproach, “You’re only nine years old and she has got to be at least twenty. Besides you’ve never even met her, never ever really seen her. I mean you’ve seen her image but that’s just some dots of ink on some paper in a magazine. It would be one thing to fall in love with a movie star, very understandable to suffer the pangs of unrequited love in that situation. But to suffer from rejection? Well, this is just idiotic!” But I discovered at an early age that no amount of verbal logic or reasoning has any power over one’s emotional life. It just roars along under its own steam, and you just wait until it is over.
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