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regarded as a novelized MGM movie, with sets by Cedric Gibbons and a part for Katharine Hepburn at her most mannered. So much for my strict realism. Eudora Welty may tell us all about
her
folks, and there is the pleasurable shock of recognition. But should I capture my family upon the page, the result is like a bad movie—or, worse, a good one. I never again used my immediate family as the stuff of fiction. We require no less than a Saint Simon. Unfortunately, we have received no more than a Kitty Kelley. What is the Agora trying to tell us?
    It is possible that even when working from memory, I saw the world in movie terms, as who did not or, indeed, who does not? So let us examine the way in which one’s perceptions of history were—and are—dominated by illustrated fictions of great power, particularly those screened in childhood.
    Although most of the movie palaces of my Washington youth no longer exist, I can still see and smell them in memory. There was Keith’s, across from the Treasury, a former vaudeville house where Woodrow Wilson used to go. Architecturally, Keith’s was a bit too classically spacious for my taste. Also, the movies shown tended to be more stately than the ones to be seen around the corner in Fourteenth Street. Of course, no movie was ever truly dull, even the foreign ones shown at the Belasco in Lafayette Park, located, I believe, in the house of a fictional character of mine, known to history as William Seward, the purchaser of Alaska.
    It was at the Belasco that I first saw myself screened in a Pathé newsreel. At the age of ten I took off and landed a plane. As Roosevelt’s director of air commerce, my father was eager to popularize a cheap, private plane that was, if not foolproof, childproof. Yet, thinking back, though he had grasped the silliness of cellophane, he seriously believed that since almost everyone could now afford a car, so almost everyone should be able to afford a plane. He dedicated years of his life to putting a cheap plane in every garage. Thanks to his dream, I, too, was famous for a summer. In a recent biography, I noted with amusement that one of the numerous lies that Truman Capote had told his childhood friend Harper Lee was that at the age of ten
he
had flown a plane.
    Today anyone’s life can be filmed from birth to death thanks to the video camera. But for my generation there was no such immortality unless one were a movie star or a personage in the newsreels. Briefly, I was a newsreel personage. But what I really wanted to be was a movie star: specifically, I wanted to be Mickey Rooney, and to play Puck, as he had done in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.
    Parenthetically, life is always more ironic than art. While I was acting several lectures at Harvard (and revealing for the first time my envy of Mickey Rooney), Rooney was at the bookstore of the Harvard Coop, autographing copies of his latest
book
.
    Recently I watched my famous flight for the first time since 1936. I am now old enough to be my father’s father. He looks like the movie star. I don’t. I am small, blond, with a retroussé nose as yet unfurled in all its Roman glory. I am to fly the plane, and a newsreel crew is on hand to record the event. My father was a master salesman: “This is your big chance to be a movie star,” he had said. “All you have to do is remember to take off into the wind.” As I had flown the plane before, I am unafraid. I swagger down the runway, crawl into the plane, and pretend to listen to my father’s instructions. But my eyes are not on him but on the cobra-camera’s magic lens. Then I take the plane off; fly it; land with a bump; open the door; and face my interviewer.
    “What fools these mortals be,” Mickey’s speech, as Puck, is sounding in my ears as I start to speak but cannot speak. I stare dumbly at the camera. My father fills in; then he cues me. What was it like, flying the plane? I remember the answer that he wants me to make: “It was as easy as