Virgin Romantic: Summer of ’42

Some things in life just have to be experienced. You can watch all the documentaries you like, read as many text books, listen to those who have been there, but the physical sensations are what really count.

The first sight of the Grand Canyon. The dip of the roller coaster. The bite of wasabi. Your first orgasm.

Remember that craze of nostalgia movies back in the Seventies? Well, I know you don’t, Grl, but we’ll fire up the laptop and watch Paper Moon one evening, snuggled up together.

Summer of ’42. It came out in theaters when I was a teenager (barely), but I had to wait for a television rescreening years later to see it. My parents certainly weren’t going to take me to an R-rated film! I had to rely on Mad Magazine’s version in the interim, so my memories have the same soft focus as the film itself.

The film and the novelization by Herman Raucher were huge hits. The “nostalgia” craze of the ’70s was just beginning, with The Way We Were, American Graffiti, Paper Moon and others to come.

It was the baby-boomers reliving their good times, I guess. The years before jobs, children and mortgages. The years of high school, college, good music, fast cars and first love. A dollar bought you an hour and a half of memories in a dark hall, and you emerged, sighing, into the present day.

There was more than happy memories in this film. There was the conflict and confusion of those years. The war, to be sure, always looming just over that sea horizon and underscored by the young men in uniform, but beyond that, the threat and promise of adulthood.

As Raucher says,

Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I’ve ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant.

There’s conflict and confusion. And there’s a great story.

Hermie, Oscie and Benjie are three boys, summering on the fictional Packett Island in that summer of 1942.* Oscie is a little older than the fifteen year old Hermie, and Benjie a little younger, and the “Terrible Three” play their roles to perfection. Oscie is the knowitall, brash and bold; Benjie is the nerdy youngster, always just a few paces behind. And Hermie, as played by Gary Grimes, is in between: cute and handsome, shy but willing, romantic and gawky.

We first meet Hermie as the three boys conduct a commando reconnaissance raid on the beachfront house of young bride Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill) and her soldier husband. Peering over the dunes at the couple, Oscie and Benjie make ribald comments, as the husband kisses Dorothy and then picks her up and carries her inside, while she laughingly protests. His friends leave, but Hermie is smitten, frozen to his observation post until the shouts of the other two boys rouse him.

Over the summer holiday weeks, Hermie braves the scorn of his friends to get closer to Dorothy, left alone on the island when her husband ships out. He performs chores for her, cringing with embarrassment when his attempts to show worldliness and sophistication flop. “You should be more careful – you could get a hernia,” he advises her about lifting bags of groceries.

As boys are, they are obsessed by sex, and painfully ignorant of anything but the basics. The discovery of a medical text with body parts named in Latin, and photographs that no drugstore would possibly develop, provides help, but ultimately even more confusion. Just what is this mysterious “foreplay”, why is it required, and exactly how do you play it?

There are teenaged girls, and fumbling encounters at the movies and marshmallow roasts, but it’s Dorothy that Hermie desires. One evening he shows up at her place for coffee, but all is silent save a record stuck on its final groove and the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Nervously entering the house, Hermie finds a crumpled telegram, advising the death of the husband.

Dorothy emerges, tear-streaked and devastated. She puts the record on again. It’s That Old Feeling, a reminder for Dorothy of her lost love.

She holds her hands out to Hermie, they dance, slowly and tenderly, and then she takes him to bed.

It is an incredible scene. Sweet, poignant, soft and sensual, but without being salacious or sleazy. It’s soft-focus sex – you know what’s going on, but you can’t see any details.

And that’s what makes it. After all the embarrassment and ribald speculation, Hermie’s fantasies have come true, but in a way that he never imagined.

He leaves the house, drifts away home through the grass on the dunes, and in the morning returns to find her gone, the house empty, a note on the door. He never sees her again.

The film ends with Herman, now grown, returning to the island, returning to the house, decades later. We hear him as he looks out to sea,

Life is made of comings and goings. And for everything that we take with us, there is something we leave behind. In the Summer of ’42, we raided the coast guard station four times. We saw five movies, and had nine days of rain. Benjie broke his watch, Oscy gave up the harmonica… and in a very special way, I lost Hermie forever.

This film speaks to me, as it did to so many of my generation, and, for all I know, everyone. Our own first experiences may be wildly different, but like going over that first rollercoaster dip, we can’t go back to the safety and innocence of a minute before. We’re different now.

I’m romantic enough to think that losing our virginity isn’t so much a loss – after all, what have we physically lost? – as it is a gain. An entry into adulthood, solid knowledge, a feeling of confidence, a desire to do it again and get better at it. And I’m romantic enough to think that it isn’t so much sex that we learn as we explore further, but love. Love and intimacy and the shared feelings of another human being. I love being able to give my partner that ultimate pleasure. And I love it when we come together, and I know that just a few inches away, the same waves of bliss that are rolling through my happy brain are crashing ashore in my lover’s head.

Go see the movie. See it again if you’ve watched it a long time ago. Enjoy the scenery, the three boys coping with the world, the funny moments – there’s a fantastic scene where Hermie goes into a drugstore to buy condoms – the interactions between the characters, and finally that delicious, bittersweet scene where Hermie becomes Herman.

—Guy Sez

*In the novel, it’s Packett Island. Herman Raucher based the story on his childhood holidays on Nantuckett, but in the film, it’s clearly California around Fort Bragg.