Loose Living (4 page)

A
T THE
Cannes Film Festival, instead of being an official entry, I was part of the Ex-American Express Card holders' Club, which was forced to meet in a poky pay-by-the-day-in-advance hotel in the back lanes of Cannes.

We didn't get good service, in fact, we could hardly get a drink order taken because the staff held us in such utter contempt for being Ex-American Express Card-holders. We were the poor white trash of the Riviera. But it is a rapidly growing club and has some great names as members.

We are considering doing a television advertisement where we sing, ‘Brave enough to leave home without it.'

We go to the most unfashionable and unnewsworthy places and hang around being treated with utter contempt by all retail outlets and service staff. We live in a state of utter contempt.

After Cannes, I used the Duc's 1935 Dragon Rapide to fly a party of brilliant young, new, new wave Australian film-makers up to the
château.

The young film-makers were seated around me in the great hall of the
château
, drinking their Vittel, their Evian and their Volvic, and pressing me for stories of the old days in the film industry.

I felt like George Smiley from Le Carré's
The Secret Pilgrim
, where, now retired, George Smiley tells the young spies how it was in the Cold War when you could kill people if you felt you should. In the old days, the Australian film industry was like that.

I had earlier in the evening given a lecture on ‘Credit Cards, the Cinematic Arts, and Gender'.

‘You are all,' I said, sipping my Cognac, my eyes twinkling, ‘a much happier cultural and commercial blend than we were in my day.'

I cleaned my glasses on the bow tie of my dinner suit, which I'd undone to put them at their ease, although they all seemed surprised and bemused that bow ties undid and were tied.

I noticed some of them came over later and had a closer look at my bow tie and at my Order of Australia medal.

‘In our day,' I said, immediately gripping their attention, ‘we worried about whether we were being “too commercial” or whether, on the other hand, we were being “too arty”. We had not realised that we were falling into a trap. We were making an erroneous description of the “economy” of art by using this distinction.'

They were all great admirers, as I am, of Michael Thornhill, with whom I worked for many years in charge of the gates at the studios and backlot of Edgecliff Films (
Between Wars
,
Everlasting Secret Family
,
The Third Man
,
The King and I
,
Casablanca
) before I was fired from the set for Having Dubious Friends and for Loose Living.

They asked about surviving in a recession.

I told them how in the early days during one of the tough years for Edgecliff, Mr Thornhill had to fall back to living on his Frequent Flyer Points.

If he could have cashed his FFPs he would have been a very rich man.

As it was, Mr Thornhill and I had to gain breathing space financially by living on the FFPs. Off we went First Class, in what he called the Big Restaurant in the Sky, with only his FFPs to see us through. Going out into the world on a smile and a shoeshine, as Willy Loman says in
Death of a Salesman.

I remember once that we'd landed at Frankfurt airport on our way to Amsterdam or some other film capital, and the plane emptied. We stayed seated because we couldn't afford stopovers or, in fact, to leave the plane, even though the barman at the airport bar in Frankfurt calls Mr Thornhill by his first name and we were travelling First Class.

The cabin attendant came to where we were seated and told us that we had to vacate the aircraft, explaining that the plane had to be cleaned and serviced—something about a 100,000 kilometre service.

Mr Thornhill explained to the cabin attendant that we preferred to stay on the plane. ‘The 100,000 kilometre service only takes forty-eight hours,' he said, ‘we'll stay on board.'

She went to the chief steward and we saw them whispering. The chief steward came down the aisle to where we were seated, both reading our single copy of
Variety.
She tossed Mr Thornhill the keys to the aircraft galley and said, ‘It's your plane, Mr T.'

Even I was impressed.

So while the plane was having its engines stripped down in the maintenance hangar and going through the steam cleaner (it was like spending a few days in an auto mated car wash), we stayed on board and washed our pair of socks in the toilet (the one who was to do the pitch wore the socks) and we watched in-flight movies.

I set the attendants' cabin up as an office and wrote a script.

This was before the big breaks came for Edgecliff. In those years, it looked like Mr Thornhill and I would have to live on his FFPs by sitting out the bad times on a plane going around the world, me looking out the window and saying, ‘It looks like Mascot again, Mr Thornhill.'

I can still see Mr Thornhill now, striding up and down the aisle of the plane practising his pitch.

Looking around the young film-makers there in the
château
, their intelligent, determined Australian faces lit by the warm glow of the big open fire, I said, ‘Yes, we were learning that the whole of the world is the “economy” of the arts. The “marketplace” so called, for the arts, is everywhere and everything. There is no distinction between the public and private sector.

‘Of one thing I am glad,' I said, looking at their fit bodies, their rugged immune systems, ‘that you are a new breed who will not be made martyrs to your art. You have put that behind you and said to Society,
“No—I will not be an alcoholic, I will not live in poverty, I will not be a drug addict, I will not have a thousand divorces just to be recognised as an artist.”'

I think I must have fallen into a deep sadness about my own wasted and blighted life because I felt someone tugging at my elbow and handing me a clean handkerchief made from rough recycled paper with which to dry my eyes, but which, instead, caused one eye to bleed. I didn't say anything, having myself been accustomed to only the finest silk.

I apologised, managed a smile and said, ‘“The black ox hath trod on my foot”, sorry.'

I said that they were all probably familiar with the story of how I'd been made a martyr to my art.

I could tell from their faces that some had not been aware of this. I could tell that they were uncertain which art it was I practised.

Before I could tell them how I became a martyr to my art, the Queen of Commas' boyfriend blundered in with the rather soiled drawing of the semi-colon with the snail slime on it, and a couple of bruised snails.

The last thing I needed.

He was still working on the relationship between the semi-colon and the snail. He does not know it yet, but I have plans for him to become a human canon.

The Queen of Commas is in England sleeping in Bruce Chatwin's bed (I wish her luck).

I shooed the Queen of Commas' boyfriend away. The eyes of the young film-makers followed this frightening-looking man with his snails.

I could see that Europe was a place of endless surprise to them. This endeared them to me.

As an illustration of the Old World Meeting the New, I told them how I rose in the estimation of the local peasants by showing them how one could start a fire which is slow to catch by blowing on it.

The young film-makers applauded my bush skills and asked me to teach them the trick, which I quite willingly did.

A young employee of the South Australian Film Corporation put up her hand and asked what they should eat to be successful in the arts. I was pleased by this question.

‘Would you recommend against red meat?' she asked.

She was probably prompted to this question by the sight of the oxen roasting on the spit. She said later that there was much pressure on young film-makers in Adelaide not to eat meat or touch men.

I said I could see a case for not touching men, but as for red meat, I couldn't disagree more.

I stood with my back to them, one foot on the hearth, looking into the fire, which I occasionally poked with my poker.

I watched the roasting oxen. I said there was a lot of silly talk about humans and animals. The fact is that humans and animals are different things, and this must always be kept in mind.

If you're in any doubt, try to pick an argument with an animal at a party. Or taste a martini mixed by a kangaroo.

The only thing that changes over the centuries is the reason these people give for not eating animals. I sipped my Cognac.

I warned them to beware of any position that kept changing its ground. It was a sure sign of a hidden obsession. ‘Of course, nevertheless, one day they might come up with an argument which is correct,' I said, turning from the fire and giving them a playful wink.

Until that happened, I urged them to enjoy the remarkable culinary abundance of the world. The dependency of humans on animals for warmth, for various services such as that of guards, simple companionship, and also for nourishment, was itself a deep, primeval relationship to the animal kingdom.

It was the eating of plant matter that has always seemed to me to be somewhat unnatural. If they thought about it they could see why.

I could see they were thinking about it too hard. I looked up at them and smiled. ‘Just teasing,' I said.

I went on to tell them that the important change in our life since the Middle Ages is the way that meat is served.

The animal or large parts were once brought whole to the table. Whole fish, whole birds with their feathers still attached, lambs and pigs.

The Sunday joint is a relic of these grand days. From this comes the idea that a gentleman should be able to carve meat at the table.

As Erasmus said in 1530, ‘
Discenda a primis statim annis secandi ratio.
' (In reply to a question about what
course of studies I would advise for a young film-maker, I advised the learning of Latin and Greek.)

I loosely translated this for them as meaning that the correct way to carve should be taught to the child from the early years. I explained to them that the carver should avoid dramatic movements and useless and foolish ceremony. He or she must never be nervous. Deftness and fine judgement in the distribution of the choice parts was the secret of good carving and good film-making.

I could see that they found this fascinating and that it was the first time that anyone had spoken sensibly and openly to them about eating and carving of meat and that I was rising in their estimation.

We finished the evening with silent films of First World War trench vermin—footage which the Queen of Commas' boyfriend enjoys excessively: his maniacal giggling can be heard far into the night after the screening is over.

I have been gratified that a few of the young film-makers, upon returning home, took the trouble to write to me saying how much they appreciated the talk, the ox, the Mouton-Rothschild, the films and the medieval orgy which followed.

Quite a few said that it was the latest they had ever stayed up.

M
Y
L
ACANIAN
analyst said that I was simply suffering the Crisis of Western Man combined with the Crisis of the White Privileged Male together with Post-Colonial Guilt and a touch of Post-Modern Confusion.

Much to her surprise, the De-centring of the Author had not affected me at all.

She feels I am handling International Fame very well and that loose living was the appropriate strategy.

She wouldn't agree that I was just ‘ineffably sad'.

To nurse my breakdown, I went into deep contemplation in the wilds of the Jura mountains, on the border of France and Switzerland, where the anarchist movement began which, it was suggested, could be the source of my inner chaos.

There, I was able to lie in my sleeping bag at night under the stars, well away from the fast lane, away from the night life of the capitals of Europe, and where, deep in the bosom of nature, I could watch the silent slipstreams of the airline traffic of the whole world pass overhead.

The long white lines of the aircraft created an illustration which showed me that I was at the very crossroads of the world, maybe the crossroads of life.

Or at least at the crossroads of the world's airlines. Up above me passed Boris Yeltsin, there went Yasser
Arafat, Gough and Margaret Whitlam, there went Lady Di, Olympic champions.

All passing overhead as I lay in my camp in the Jura mountains.

I felt I was being personally intersected, the silent slip streams mapping my place in the universe.

As something of a bushman, I know that every country has its secret insect, unspoken of to foreigners.

France, as well as having the
moustiques
, with which we are all familiar, has the
mooches
,
taons
and
aoutats
, cousins of the
moustiques.
I've had scandalous trouble at family reunions back home with cousins. As with Mozart, I can never remember what the Bible says about cousins.

At least they don't have the African worm which breeds in the human eye and grows to ninety centimetres, which I had to deal with on my great treks there.

Up in the pine forests, I fell in with some mountain folk and drank the strange wines of the Jura with these hoary men armed with shotguns, bandoliers of cartridges slung across their chests.

As we sat around the camp fire, they spoke that special wisdom of the folk of the Jura. The direct earthy sense of their observations and the smell of burning pine wood cleared both my intelligence and my respiratory system, taking my mind back to the deepest origins of existence.

Up there in the mountains they taught me another form of analysis which predates Lacan by centuries—the Forest Catechism of the Six Questions.

‘By your answers you shall be known,' the elder said.

I admit that I shivered at his words but sat, humble and poised, awaiting the Questions.

The first question was: You are on a path in the forest—how do you portray this path and where do you locate this path?

I closed my eyes. They sat in silence around the fire. I heard the crackling of the burning wood.

I replied that I saw the path as being through the Jura pine forests, I saw the time as now, but I saw the forest spreading for thousands of square miles in its original primeval state, alive with all its animals and birds, at the very centre of ancient Europe.

I said that I saw my comrades back then as being of the same stock as those reclined around me now.

At the mention of ‘my comrades' they smiled and looked at each other. One stood and poked the fire. Another chuckled and drank from the wineskin, which he then passed to me.

The elder spoke again: ‘The path divides three ways. Which fork do you take?'

I pondered this and replied, ‘I choose the path least travelled.'

He said, ‘That is the path straight ahead. Most people turn to the left or to the right.'

The third question was: You come to the place of thorns. What do you do?

I replied that I pushed on through the thorns. I said that in my country we have a saying, ‘He loves dancing well, he who dances among the thorns'.

They all nodded at this.

The elder then asked: ‘You come to a large
épicéa
log across your path, and then?'

I thought for a moment and said that I would surely look over at the other side of this log before jumping or climbing over it. One did not move blindly in any forest.

I said merrily that I would apply a ‘logistical' solution to the Question of the Log. Or perhaps use ‘logarithms'.

They stared at me blankly.

They did not understand these puns. I took the opportunity to teach them both the use of logarithms and the military science of logistics.

Upon hearing my explanations, they laughed heartily. They all slapped their calloused hands on their leather trousers in appreciation of my wit and learning.

The fifth question was: You come across a bear?

The mountain men looked at me closely as I prepared to answer. I said that from my experience in northern Canada I knew the nature of bears and the terror of bears. I had found that it was pointless to run from a bear and pointless also to climb a tree. The bear could outrun a human and could either shake you from the tree, climb into the tree or pull down the tree.

There were knowing grunts from the Jura mountain men.

I said that in the past I had found that throwing my rucksack to the bear was the best defence. The
bear would tear the rucksack apart and devour all that looked like food.

Because of this, I always carried heavy-duty tranquillisers and strong sleeping tablets when in bear country, both for myself and for the bear.

As the bear devoured the contents of the rucksack, it inevitably first drank the Cognac and swallowed the drugs.

The bear's actions would quickly slow and it would then fall into a deep sleep, leaving you free to make your way well out of the bear's olfactory range and to safety.

They applauded this heartily and took it as an appropriate time to open the cask of Cognac and to pass it around, drinking from the bunghole and using their fore arms to cradle the cask.

They made their own rough humour about Cognac and the hug of the bear.

The sixth question was: You come finally to a high stone wall and you hear a sound on the other side. What is it you do and what is the sound?

I said the sound that I hear is the cry of the coyote. I climb to the top of the wall to scout out the sound and to find my bearings.

There was interested muttering among them, and I noticed that they had slipped back into their local argot to discuss my answer to this question. One crossed himself. I sensed, though, that I had risen in their estimation but why I did not yet know.

The elder said that my answers to the forest catechism were a description of my true and intrinsic self. The
questions describe the journey of life. My answer to the first question revealed how I saw my life. I lived my life in the here-and-now. However, I had pictured a large wild forest where there was, in fact, now only a small forest, that is, I enhanced my world with my imagination, preferring the older, wilder nature to the civilised world. He suspected I belonged to another time.

He said that I saw my comrades as comrades of the trail, their place to be taken, perhaps, by other comrades on other trails as I went on my journey.

‘My journey from bar to bar,' I quipped.

He said I must realise that I had also to dwell there in that wilder forest which I had created. That while using my imagination to free myself from the limitations of reality, I was, in turn, claimed by my invented world.

It was a sobering thought. But not too sobering.

On the matter of the path which forked in three ways, he said that this revealed the civic temperament and social volition of the traveller. The path straight ahead which I had chosen was the path least travelled, it was the path of the one who laughed with life.

I said that in my country it was sometimes called ‘sitting on the fence'.

The mountain folk guffawed at my colourful and poetic expression. ‘Our expression is
ménager la chèvre et le chou
—to live between the goat and the cabbage,' one said.

The elder gestured with impatience at our levity and we stopped. ‘True, there is a way of avoiding
political passion which is cowardice,' he said. ‘But there is another way which combines both bravery and compassion for the human condition.' Surprisingly, he mentioned the Red Cross. But I recalled that the Red Cross had originated in this region and almost certainly he and his comrades would have shares in it.

He went on to say that the question of the thorns showed how I dealt with the petty hindrances of life.

He saw in my ‘dancing on the thorns' answer a happy relationship to irritation and to pain. A willingness to incorporate the pain of living into a joke and a proverb. But, he said, I must take care that I was not taking the path of self-punishment.

In a way I am glad that he didn't go further with the whole question of pain, given the Companions of the Night with whom I sometimes carouse. They tend to be those who see some punishment, self or otherwise, as a source of fun.

The question of the fallen log revealed how I handled the profound obstacles of life. He said that in my answer he saw that I exercised caution but again that I joked away the profundity of my problems. He said that it could be said that I laughed in the face of life.

I could not tell if he approved of this laughing in the face of life.

I thought not.

‘You must be able to make the world laugh along with you,' he said, ‘for if you laugh and the world does not laugh with you, beware.'

I felt a chill.

‘We come now to the matter of the bear.' The other comrades of the camp fire laughed among themselves again. ‘This is the question of the carnal, of the way we live with, and accomplish and delight in, our lust.'

At my obvious embarrassment, the others made jokes in their colourful argot.

The elder said that my answer had been a befitting appreciation of the apprehensions and ordeals of the carnal. It was of interest that I had chosen to see the bear not as small, not as something to befriend, not as a fellow creature of the wilds, not as a dancing bear.

True, my reaction had been to share the things of my haversack but with the intention of disarming the threat. It was a deliberate approach, showing guile, craft and the application of the prudence which came from experience. But his advice to me was that I must learn to partake of the cup of good spirits and to learn that it must be partaken with another. ‘Learn to embrace the bear but learn also that there is always the risk of the claws.'

I blushed as my comrades guffawed.

I had never been intimate with a bear.

‘Finally,' he said, ‘we come to the wall of stone and the unknown sound. This is the wall which marks the boundary of life and death and the beginning of the unknown. You heard the cry of the coyote.' He said that from what he knew of the mythology of the coyotes, they were animals which made great plans which came unstuck.

I nodded. I had sometimes made great plans which came unstuck.

‘No,' he said, ‘everyone who makes great plans hears the coyote. It is the anxiety of failure, not failure itself, that you heard.' He said that I climbed the wall to scout, which showed that I did not fear death, nor did I fear what I saw ahead.

I said that in my will I ask that my tombstone bear the inscription, ‘Come, my friends, join me on this next adventure.'

He nodded and perhaps smiled.

The party fell quietly serious now as they all recalled their own answers when they had first been catechised with the forest questions.

All saw their own lives passing before their eyes, the forking paths, the obstacles of thorns, the ways blocked by the log, the bear and its puzzling nature, the inevitable stone wall, the strange sound beyond the wall.

They saw in the camp fire the nature of their own selves, their inadequacies, their fortitude, their strife and strivings. They looked, briefly, upon the countenance of death.

They did this for about ten seconds and then were soon drinking, storytelling and singing again.

When I awoke in the morning in the cool bright sun light of the Juras, my comrades had left and for a moment I believed that I had dreamed the forest catechism, but I saw that they had left behind the cask of Cognac.

They had risen at daybreak and had gone their ways through the forest to their work of cheese-making, forestry, wine-making, the hunting of
sanglier
, the smoking of meats and the making of watches (that is, those with uncalloused hands).

As I made the morning fire and coffee, I thought what nonsense the wise mountain men of the Jura talk with their babbling about forking paths and encounters with the bear.

Back in civilisation I told my Lacanian analyst about my meeting with the mountain folk. I tried to joke it away, seeking from the analyst that rewarding laugh for which the ingratiating analysand hungrily looks with sad desperation.

She did not laugh. She stared at me thoughtfully but said nothing.