Burning the Days (32 page)

——

Lunch near the Odéon. Paris day, a table by the window, handwritten menu, noon blue sky. The chef, who is probably the owner, is visible in the small kitchen in a white jacket and toque. Between orders he reads, with the calm of an historian, the racing page of the newspaper. I don’t imagine him betting, not today, not at work. He’s engaged in study.

I think back to repudiated years and a man I once saw in a dirty movie house near the Gare de Luxembourg. The lights had come on after the first film. Silence. There were ten or twelve men sitting there in the theater, waiting. He was much older than anyone
else. A wonderful head of white hair, like that of a restaurant owner or horse trainer. He pulled out a newspaper and began to read it, leisurely turning the big pinkish pages. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of them turning. A man who ate solid dinners and had a dog; perhaps he was a widower. He had seen a lurid presentation of three young
bourgeoises
and what unexpected things befell them, an impure work less interesting than its title. When the lights went down again he folded his paper. You could see his fine, impressive head in the darkness. I thought then of a lot of people for no particular reason, people who would never be found here. I thought of Faulkner one year when he was trying to work as a scriptwriter, driving down Sunset Boulevard on the way to work, unshaven, his bare feet on the pedals and bottles rolling on the floor. I thought of the Polish doorman, very tall, who used to work at the entrance to my parents’ apartment building in New York. He’d been a lawyer in Poland before he fled, but it was impossible here; it was all different and he was too old. He didn’t have much to do with the other doormen—they scornfully called him the Count. I thought of Monte Carlo and the woman at the roulette table who had asked me for chips. Afterwards we had some drinks at the bar. She wanted to show me something in her room, the clippings of her before the war when she danced at the Sporting Club; I was able to pick her out in the chorus. The English were there then, she said, and she had gone with them; some were lords.

You were constantly—perhaps that was it—meeting people without money, people who amounted to something. Sometimes the more they didn’t have, the more they amounted to.

Rising above the rest and very much of her class was a woman in London. She was a countess, though fallen from the heights. Her family name you would know instantly, that of Germany’s greatest chancellor. Tall, with beautiful hair, she had once been a model for Chanel.

She’d been at a party one night where there was a film director, “this Joe Lozey,” as she pronounced it. “I hate him,” she said, “he’s a bastard. He was saying what a great film was
Death in Venice.
I told him it was a beautiful painting but boring. He got very angry. ‘Just who are you?’ he said.”

Yes, who? Only the real crop of Europe, she might have answered, the originals from families centuries old. She was already a barbiturate ruin, breasts thin and drooping, skin beginning to go. She ignored it. Her eyes were heavily made up, her mouth curved down. She had a low, commanding voice and liked to laugh. Her words were slurred but her eyes were still clear, the whites startling. She had been deflowered at fourteen by her uncle, and later, even after marriage, was the mistress of writers. She was imperious but very fine. She was also, in large measure, indifferent. She knew quite well what the world was, and in a sense, coming from a great family, she was responsible, but she could not be expected to control fate or the crowd. She was a woman who had loved deeply, and for years brought flowers to the grave of the writer, James Kennaway, whose photographs were in her marital bedroom. “He was buried standing up,” she said. Her hands trembled as she talked and lit one cigarette from another. She was outspoken, impatient, and her wake stretched a long way back. Being with her was sometimes annoying but somehow it gave one enormous courage, the courage, really, to die.

——

I’ve left out the Kronenhalle and the hotels above the town in Zurich; Sicily; Haut de Cagnes; London in the evening and girls in Rolls-Royces, faces lit by the dash; the German dentist in Rome—the bombing of North Vietnam had just begun—“Good, bomb them,” he said as he picked up instruments, “bomb them all.” I’ve left out the place in Paris that for a long time was the essence of the city for me, oddly enough a household, that of the Abbotts. He
was an old friend who had remarried, and his new wife, Sally, was young and like a sheaf of silver. Witty, taut, she was like a new child in school who had come from some unnamed but difficult elsewhere, someone who made friends and also enemies quickly and who cut a swath; Nate was her second husband. He had been a dashing Air Force colonel, a pilot in the war, and now was the European representative for a large company.

Their apartment, in the 16th, was majestic; the living room opened into a kind of dome. The sofas and chairs were comfortable, the doors everywhere eight feet high. Late one fall, the year of the Berlin crisis, we came up to Paris, four or five of us, from Chaumont, and that evening had drinks with them in the apartment. The city was black and gleaming, wonderfully cold. Nate drew me aside at about nine-thirty or ten. “Why don’t you take them to the Sexy?” he said—it was a favorite of the president of his company.

I forget how we got there; there were photographs outside. I went in first to have a look. It seemed a place of style. “How is it?” they wanted to know when I came out. “Great,” I said and we entered. “He comes here all the time,” I explained.

There were a number of good-looking women. I think a band was playing; there was a bar. “Give me three hundred francs each,” I said to them knowledgeably, “and I’ll pay all the bills.” Women were already introducing themselves. I could see Weiss and Duvall, neither of them inexperienced, exchange a brief glance as if to say, here goes. The money was gone after the second round. It seemed unimportant. It was like the night before the
France
sailed. It went on and on, and though portions remain bright, where it happened is unknown. I’ve looked for the street a number of times; it is gone.

UKIYO

F
ROM A BAR
called the Seven Seas—less wondrous than its name, where every fifteen minutes a panorama of distant boats and harbors painted on the walls would darken to the sound of thunder with flashes of lightning, and heavy rain would begin to fall on a false tin roof—we went back to our suite.

In the hotel—it was a secondary place called the Hollywood Knickerbocker—was a livelier bar filled with laughter and noise, grinning faces, the euphoria of the postwar era. It was like an impromptu party, with many dotted lines between pairs of eyes, while removed from it, upstairs and alone, a forgotten figure sat, D. W. Griffith, the famed director, living out his final years. He was a metaphor for the fabled life: staggering triumph, praise, Babylonian splendor, then age and rejection, a fallen king.

He had been the greatest of them by far. The adult world—this was 1947—was still populated by people who had grown up amid the flickering of his then tremendous films
The Clansman,
later to be titled
Birth of a Nation
(1915),
Intolerance
(1916),
Hearts of the World
(1918),
Way Down East
(1920), and
Orphans of the Storm
(1921), following which came gradual failure. He had created the syntax of the movies and had been one of the aristocracy, his dark Western hat, lean intent features.

I had seen none of these films with their cottony puffs of cannon smoke, their jerky movements and virginal young women dressed in white. When I saw them, much later, I thought back to that time in Los Angeles when Griffith was upstairs, and below the crowd drank and sang. Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford were two of his stars. By then they were old too, in their fifties and past usefulness. Their voices had never been heard, that was the thing, and the angels who followed actually spoke, laughed, and wept. The father of a young actress once confided to me wonderingly of his daughter, “She can cry
real
tears.”

So it was like passing, that first time, over lost, sunken fleets. I had come into the city with our navigator, a stocky, powerful Hawaiian named Fred Hemmings. We behaved like sailors. We had nothing to do but find ways to be appealing. We jumped from place to place like fleas.

It was later that I had the first glimpse of a movie being made. I had met Samuel Goldwyn in Honolulu—it had somehow been arranged by my father—and he invited me to come to the studio when I was next in Los Angeles. Without his secretaries and beyond his domain, he was an ordinary-looking man with no particular authority. Unexpectedly he remembered me when I called, although of course I was not permitted to speak to him directly. The guard at the gate—the very emblem of the studios was the unsmiling guard—would have my name. I was directed to a sound stage where for an hour or two I watched an actor dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman descend a flight of stairs and deliver some dialogue, never to the complete satisfaction of the director. The actor was David Niven. It all seemed tedious. It seemed—the artifice and repetition, the naked back of the set—false.

Seven years later, an officer still, in civilian clothes I sat in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside, going from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Points of rain appeared
on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine in which the models, maddeningly prim, wore little hats and white gloves there was a curious article that caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plumpish Welsh poet whose photograph, taken outside the door of his studio in a seaside town, a manuscript stuck in the pocket of his jacket, was beguiling. John Malcolm Brinnin, perhaps excerpting it from his book, had written about Dylan Thomas and somehow the piece had appeared in
Mademoiselle.
There was a picture of Dylan Thomas’s wife, children with Celtic names, and even a snapshot of his mother.

Brinnin’s lyric description of seedy, romantic life was an introduction to the poem that followed, in overwhelming bursts of language, page upon page. It was
Under Milk Wood,
roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. In the soft, clicking comfort of the train I feasted on it all. The drops of rain became streaks as the dazzling voices spoke, housewives, shopkeepers, shrews, Captain Cat—the blind, retired sea captain dreaming of a strumpet, Rosie Probert (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”).

It was an unforgettable performance, singing on and on—the longest poem, though written as a play, I had ever read—and its imagery was such that I was enthralled by the unoriginal idea of seeing it as a film. It could be, and eventually
was
one, of course, though I was then incapable of realizing that even a perfect film would illustrate only one facet of all the glittering possibilities. The poem’s power was greater than any alternate version of it could be, and in fact it would be limited by such translation.

With me in that Bundesbahn car that had, I suppose, survived the war—within me—was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem I had read, and the longing to do so, never wholly absent, rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?

——

As it turned out, my entry into films was by way of a cluttered back room, toppling with papers, in the offices of the prominent theatrical lawyers, Weissburger and Frosch. The most junior member of the firm, theatrical in his own right, large, soft, animated, the son of a movie writer and brother of another, was Howard Rayfiel. He performed the essential drudgery: completing contracts, drafting letters, laboring in the stables of kings. On his own time he was impresario of a phantom company. He wore a velvet-collared overcoat and an Astrakhan hat in which he appeared, like a sophomore Diaghilev, at Carnegie Hall, not in the auditorium but in the large-windowed studios above, reached by a majestic ancient elevator. He arrived not with a ballerina but with a paper bag containing Camembert and apples, lunch for those conferring with his partner, a theater director who had had limited success but was confident of his talents. Together they were going to make films. They invited me to join them, to write a script. Flattered, ready to believe I could put my hand to anything, I began what turned out to be a long affair.

The director already had a first film behind him. I recall it as having almost no dialogue, the endless, headlong flight of what seemed to be a fugitive or survivor through dense woods, a man pursued by demons or perhaps dogs. Well into the film, as he bent over to drink from a stream, there was the glint of something dangling from his neck. It was a pair of silver bombardier’s wings, and the source of his agony—I forget how it was made clear—was that he had been one of the crew members who had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. He could flee but would never escape the memory. I was certain I could write something less banal.

I worked in a quiet, odd-numbered house on Sutton Place, one of a pair that belonged to a devoted pupil of the director, convert would be a better word. She was rich but did not contribute any money to the venture, only part of her premises. This was wise in
one way and foolish in another. She would have probably lost the money and been criticized by her bankers, but a year or so afterwards she died in a plane crash—on her honeymoon, as it happened—and what did it matter then?

One afternoon in the studio at Carnegie Hall I encountered what I took to be the genuine: a man with an accent and a long, ascetic face, dressed in the unmistakable manner of an artist—pants from one suit and a double-breasted jacket from another. Adolphus Mekas was his name. He was renowned both for a film he was then directing and also because his brother, Jonas Mekas, was the uncompromising judge of all film culture which, capitalized, was the name of his didactic magazine.