Crayons to perfume 

The World of Henry Orient was outdated the moment it premiered in March 1964. Not that the film doesn't have lasting merits. It does. Essentially, it’s an R-rated Disney movie about a couple of just-barely teenage girls who develop an obsessive crush on Henry Orient, a goofy avant-garde pianist. But the film also underscores the cultural reality back then that young girls had some slim pickings when looking for cute, non-threatening guys with which to channel their teenage infatuations. 

16 Magazine was the Dow Jones Index of teenage heartthrobs, and a quick review of its covers from late 1963 shows a true bear market. There was the bland (Paul Petersen of The Donna Reed Show) and the blander (Johnny Crawford from The Rifleman), and a group of actors whose ages might have made them old enough to parent a 16 Magazine reader: George Chakiris (31 and maybe a bit too swarthy), Russ Tamblyn and Richard Chamberlain (both 29). 

Pop stars? Bobby Vinton had a couple of huge chart hits with Blue Velvet and There I’ve Said It Again, but he wasn’t someone to fantasize over, a decade before he became the Polish Prince. Bobby Rydell was 21 and at the absolute end of his career as a pop star. The editors of 16, with a hint of desperation, began padding things out with features about nice-girl role models like Patty Duke, Shelley Fabares and Hayley Mills. 

The World of Henry Orient was filmed between July and October 1963, and the girls in the movie, played by Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker, are filmed in slow-motion jumping, skipping and running around Central Park and Greenwich Village with a kind of soaring innocence and optimism that maybe the country – feeling good enough to describe itself as Camelot – was feeling up till then. 

By the time the movie opened on March 19, 1964, an “eternal flame” burned over John Kennedy’s gravesite in Arlington Cemetery and the Beatles, heretofore unknown, owned the first four spots on Billboard’s Hot 100. 16, meanwhile, kicked off its own golden age, beginning its breathless monthly coverage of the Beatles, then the Dave Clark 5, Peter & Gordon, the Monkees, Mark Lindsey, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy and finally the Osmonds. 

The World of Henry Orient, having spun off its axis, was gone forever.