Inside a Pearl (10 page)

Now, ten years later, I was catching up. Thomas had a beautiful series of self-portraits in pastel by Francesco Clemente, including one where he was exploring his own bowels, candle in hand; over his fireplace hung a powerful, iconic horse by Susan Rothenberg. He had a stenciled portrait of himself by Warhol. Thomas's idea was to
collect
paintings done since the early Warhol and to
deal
in paintings done from the Impressionists up to the Warhol “disaster” series and the electric chairs. That way he'd never be in competition with his clients to secure a prize painting.

As a novelist, I was intrigued by the economics of painting. Whereas serious novelists, even celebrated ones, could barely survive, the top painters were very rich. It was all because a painting was a unique object whereas a book was a multiple. No wonder so many writers turned to the visual arts—Burroughs to painting and Ginsberg to photography. That was the only way they could make money. (Ginsberg also got a million dollars for his archives.)

It took ten critics, two dealers, and twenty collectors to get an artist on the cover of
Time
, whereas a novelist had to convince eighty thousand readers to buy his book to win a comparable fame. For this reason, the painters could be more daringly experimental than the writers, who had to please so many more culture consumers, many of them with brows firmly in the middle. Painting—and heavily subsidized arts like ballet and poetry and “serious” music—were obliged to be avant-garde in order to seem flamboyantly original. Fiction and theater, which were expected to earn their own keep, had to maintain a broader appeal.

This knew both the painting world and that of cinema (which needed thousands of paying customers in order to survive). Certainly feature films were doubly cursed, since they needed a huge fan base in each city to fill those theater seats, whereas a novel could go out into the wide world and nab a reader here and another one there—no more than half a dozen in any one city.

This invited me to the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals for many years in the eighties. They were completely different from each other. In Cannes, we'd stay at the Carlton, the chicest “palace” along the Croisette. Would-be starlets would hold bikini sessions on the beach nearby for amateur male photographers. Huge billboards all over Cannes advertised the newest films. The major films in competition would be screened in an ugly modern building accessible only by the red-carpeted stairs. Invited members of the audience in evening clothes would mount the two dozen stairs to the exhibition hall while velvet ropes and policemen held back the adoring crowds and busy photographers. Even though it was only May, the days were already long because France is so far north, and it was strange seeing all these heavily made-up female stars in strapless sequined gowns in broad daylight. The men had to be in tuxedos, no exceptions, though once a handsome young guy went nude with the tux painted on his body and he got in—after all, it was all show business, feverishly in pursuit of as much publicity as possible.

A typical day at Cannes was at once somnolent and exhausting. Since This was the manager of five cinemas in Zurich and since his rivals, who managed national chains, got all the blockbusters, he had to run after all those “interesting” movies made by Belgians or Taiwanese, films that would presumably receive good reviews. We would see as many as five films during the day in what was called the marketplace. He provided me with full accreditation as his assistant. My parents had not permitted me as a child to see many films, no more than one a year, considering them an unhealthy influence. As a result now I was overly sensitive to anything occurring on screen and would scream bizarrely if a close-up showed an actress breaking a nail. Anything sad made me cry and when it was all over I said to This that I felt like a Japanese court lady out of Sei Sh
ō
nagon; I'd spent five days in dark rooms weeping.

I suppose the two biggest evenings I had at the Croisette were both in 1985:
Rendez-vous
, with Juliette Binoche in her first leading role—everyone knew right away that a star was being born—and Paul Schrader's
Mishima.
Schrader and his wife, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, were friends of This and had been traumatized because they'd just been held up by thieves while they were looking at the view from a
turnoff near the French-Italian border. The sets and costumes in
Mishima
were sumptuous, the whole film was beautifully conceived, and it won the Palme d'Or.

We would dash from seeing two or three films in the morning (This would often fall asleep in his seat) to the beach, which was partitioned into expensive cabanas with lounge chairs. We'd take the sun and have our lunch while tall, elegant Africans threaded their way among the bronzing white people offering for sale African carvings and jewelry no one bought. After lunch, we'd go see more films—at the old competition palace, where there was a director's festival, or back to the marketplace scattered among the city's various commercial cinema theaters. In the evening we'd don our tuxes and head for the red-carpet events or we'd grab a drink in the lobby and bar of the Carlton, which was thronged with propped-up cardboard promotional cutouts. Dozens of paparazzi clustered around the entrance on the lookout for stars. We had drinks with Spike Lee, who was just beginning to be known. I wasn't really used to being the quiet little sidekick. It's a very tiring role, and of course no one knew who I was. It gave me a new appreciation of what John Purcell must have felt all the time, although John seemed suited to his role as sidekick/son/wife/kid brother. And yet I wondered how happy anyone could be playing second fiddle. No matter how wifely his fantasies, every man is brought up to be the first violin.

No one lingered long because everyone was looking for producers and distributors. It struck me that although a movie required hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to make, most of the actual filmmakers were poor and perennially broke. In this crowd at the Carlton bar, everyone was trying to put together a deal. In Europe a film typically received a third of its money from distributors in the form of an advance against eventual receipts, a third from a TV channel, and a third from government subsidies or private producers. This last source of funding was the hardest to find, and all these half-shaved, half-bathed directors were scrambling around in search of money, their beseeching faces and politeness at odds with their bohemian backgrounds.

Late at night there were big parties in the area in the hills known as La Californie, in elegant rented villas. The Weinstein brothers and
other moguls would be holding court. Metal torches were planted in the ground. Hundreds of Yugoslav or Greek or Taiwanese directors came out from under a log for funding or a free meal of hot hors d'oeuvres. Before Cannes, I'd assumed movie people were well heeled and that their money came to them in regular, foreseeable ways. I would never have guessed how improvised their financing was. Cannes (unlike the Venice Film Festival) was more devoted to wheeling and dealing than to pure cinema.

If Cannes could be symbolized by a white fur draped over a bikini, Berlin was cold and grimly serious, typified by dirty-haired intellectuals viewing a six-hour Bulgarian film about a failed businessman. Because This spoke German somewhat more easily than French or Italian or Spanish (though he was fluent in these languages as well), he felt more at home in Berlin—even though he'd been attending Cannes since the Sixties. In Berlin he had a secret language, Swiss German, which real Germans couldn't understand. He would discuss money or business with other Swiss friends in Switzerdeutsch and no one knew what they were saying. He did so only in an emergency. Normally he spoke his guests' language. I'd leave a table of Zurichois to go to the toilet and when I came back they would still be speaking in English. The French would never have been that polite. First, they wouldn't all have been fluent in English, and second, they wouldn't all have continued in a foreign tongue longer than a minute if they outnumbered the anglophones. Perhaps that's the difference between a big country and a small one—moreover one like Switzerland with four national languages. When This and I went to Egypt it was with a Swiss tour in which the guides repeated everything in both German and French. No one got impatient. We even traveled with a mother and her grown son from Basel; she spoke to him in German and he replied in French. I once had to wait for someone in the lobby of a grand hotel in Switzerland. The young woman concierge chatted amiably with clients in French, Italian, German, Swiss German, and English without any apparent transition or hesitation. Movies in Switzerland often had subtitles in two or even three languages, which ate up the bottom third of the screen. As a child, This had been sent every summer to French-language
camp in the western part of Switzerland. The Swiss French only rarely spoke German, and only those Swiss Italians who actually lived in the north knew German, while most of the Swiss Germans knew at least English and French.

One year in Berlin, the self-created it-girl Pia Zadora astonished the German journalists when she gave them a bikini session in the swimming pool in the old Kempinski Hotel Bristol on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. She also summoned them to her glamorous airport arrival when she walked down the stairs in a chinchilla coat—Germans weren't used to stars of that magnitude. They were used to Tilda Swinton or Klaus Kinski talking about their roles as an English hermaphrodite or a suicidal Austrian homosexual. But Pia's diminutive, sunny disposition, delicious child's body and rich girl accoutrements were out of their range. Her very rich husband was an Israeli industrialist. He paid for billboards advertising her questionable talents as a disco singer and movie star along Sunset Boulevard back in Hollywood. She was made for John Waters.

The Berlin festival was in January, the coldest time of the year. It took me back to my adolescence in Chicago, my fear of freezing before I got home. I spent a lot of time alone and went to the Mövenpick cafeteria for my meals since the only German food word I knew was
Kalbsleber
(“calf's liver”) and I quickly got tired of that. In spite of my nonexistent language skills, we went several times to the theater, where we saw plays I already knew and could follow (like Chekhov's
Three Sisters
in 1984). Occasionally I'd be stuck in a new four-hour German play in which the characters were crawling across a huge, bleak rock surface.

Three Sisters
, starring Edith Clever and directed by Peter Stein, was a breakthrough in what I joked was a daring experiment called “realism.” There were real birds on stage, confined by a nearly invisible wire net. The actors all left the stage to eat dinner in another room, not visible but audible to the audience. We could hear the clinking of silverware and plates and the shrieks of women's laughter and the murmur of conversation. This went on for a very long time.

Once in Munich we went to see the reclusive director Werner Schroeter, who was editing his 1986 film,
Der Rosenkönig,
starring
Magdalena Montezuma. We also spent time with the handsome, if drug- and AIDS-ravaged, film actor Dieter Schidor. Schidor usually played German soldiers in films like Sam Peckinpah's
Cross of Iron.
He also produced and played in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film,
Querelle
, based on Genet's novel, in which Brad Davis, Franco Nero, and Jeanne Moreau also acted. Apparently he'd had sex with the American writer Gary Indiana in an oven at Dachau while they were both tripping. Gary wrote about it in his 1993 novel
Gone Tomorrow
. When Dieter found out he had AIDS, he sold an expensive painting and traveled extensively. At last he was ready to commit suicide and took tranquilizers and sat in a tub full of hot water. The idea was that he'd doze off, sink under the surface and drown. A woman friend discovered him still alive days later and “saved” him, so that he could die a horrible death in a hospital ward weeks later, his body still recovering from the hot water burns he'd sustained over three days in the tub.

There was something perverse and eccentric about all the people who'd once surrounded Fassbinder. Although he was gay, Fassbinder had a wife, Ingrid Caven, to whom he was married from 1970 to 1972. She told us that once when she was in the States, she was broke and got a gig through the actor Peter Chatel to dub
Deep Throat
into German.

“I knew Rainer disliked porno and would never see it, and since I needed the money, I went ahead.”

Then one day, stopping in front of a cinema in Munich, Fassbinder had said, “This is that movie everyone's talking about. Let's go in and see it.”

“Oh, no, darling, it will be boring,” Caven said modestly.

Fassbinder insisted, and according to her the minute Caven's first groan was heard he turned in his seat and slapped her and said, “Slut!”

We saw Caven in a strange ragtag evening onstage put together by Rosa von Praunheim. Later, in 1989, I saw her in Paris singing Édith Piaf's repertory at the Plaza l'Athenée Theater. She was wearing a backless floor-length dress that Yves Saint Laurent had designed for her.

I once spent an evening in a garden in Paris with her and Maria Schneider, who was no longer the curvaceous teenager of the 1972 Bertolucci film,
Last Tango in Paris
, in which her character was
sodomized by the much older Marlon Brando character using butter as a lubricant. I'd seen the film in Italy, and when the now-infamous scene began everyone in the audience was exclaiming
“Burro, burro!”

Schneider felt traumatized by the movie and her fame and had turned to drugs, which had left her once-beautiful face ravaged. That night she was with her female lover, Pia, whom she credited with saving her. Caven was with Jean-Jacques Schuhl, a French writer who in 2000 won the Prix Goncourt for his novel
Ingrid Caven
—not a biography but a highly fragmented novel. Both Ingrid Caven and Maria Schneider had been in scores of films and survived decades of being sex goddesses.