Ira Levin

Ira Levin — who died earlier this week of a heart attack at age 78 – may not have been the greatest writer in the world, but as a contributor to the great compost heap of pop culture, he was like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and James M. Cain rolled into one.

I hate to use middlebrow words like “resonant” and “iconic,” but in his novels Levin repeatedly came up with ideas and gimmicks that turned out to have surprising staying power. The roboticized suburban hausfraus of The Stepford Wives and the paranoid mother of Rosemary’s Baby existed within the framework of “trashy” horror novels, but they said things about male-female relationships that still carry a sting while feminist tracts like The Dialectic of Sex have crumbled to dust. Just the other week I heard somebody make a joke about “Stepford Republicans” automatically supporting Bush. Say what you will about Ira Levin, but he had cultural impact. And he really wasn’t all that trashy a writer, either. The line from his play Deathtrap — “This script is so good, not even a gifted director could ruin it!” — has worn a lot better than the film version.

On a personal note, let me say that Ira Levin’s work made possible some of my fondest movie memories. I can still make myself laugh by remembering the time I saw Deathtrap at the Quakerbridge Mall, sitting a row or two in front of a gaggle of young teens who’d come to squeal over Christopher Reeve; when that hunka hunka burnin’ love gave Michael Caine a big wet kiss, their collective “EEEYEWWWWWWWW!” almost sent the mall’s roof sailing toward Route 1.

And then, of course, there’s the one, the only, the ne plus ultra — The Boys From Brazil. 

To watch Gregory Peck, playing Josef Mengele, chewing on Laurence Olivier’s ear or struggling to speak with something he thinks will approximate a German accent, is a spectacle matched only by Charlton Heston coming off the mountain with that faaaaaabulous hairstyle in The Ten Commandments, and for making such moments possible, and getting rich doing it, all I can say is, thank you, Ira Levin.