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More is to be learned, I believe, from William Keighley, auteur of
The Prince and the Pauper
as well as of
Babbitt
, than from Capra. The prince’s father, Henry VIII, explains to his son the nature of power. Why the Warner Brothers thought that the American public would find interesting a disquisition on princely power in Renaissance times is a secret that Jack L. Warner took to his grave. On the other hand, the king’s musings were possibly addressed to the serfs at Warner Brothers, a studio known for its love of such traditions as the annual Christmas layoff.

The king confides: “Never trust too much, love too much, need anyone too much that you cannot betray them with a smile.” This is true Machiavelli and must have seemed startling to an audience imbued with such Christian values as turning the other cheek while meekly obeying your master. But I am now convinced that my generation of Americans either went to church
or
to the movies for spiritual guidance. As a third-generation atheist, I was nourished by the screen, and I was particularly struck by the king’s sermon, so like my grandfather’s bleak wisdom. “In politics you must always treat an enemy as if he might one day be a friend, and a friend as if he might one day be an enemy.” My grandfather did concede that he found the second part hard to do, but that did not make it any the less advisable.

The scene that I remembered best was a forest at night, much like A Wood Near Athens. The prince has been taken captive. He is told that he is to be killed right then and there with a knife. The lighting is beautiful, and if television ever decides to paint this black-and-white film, I hope they will use Gainsborough’s delicate earth colors.

There is a startling close-up of the prince’s face as he realizes that he is about to die. Then, invited to pray, he gets off a bold line: he hopes that his father is
not
watching from Heaven because the king would be ashamed of the treacherous Englishman, but not of his son. I still feel the force of this scene. For the first time, the boy knows that he is about to stop being. Like most children, I often used to imagine what death must be like. But unlike most, I had no belief, or even interest, in an afterlife. To me, if not the prince, death is
not
being; and that is why for us who know only being, death is literally unimaginable, try as hard as one might to imagine—what? An empty room where one is not? Put out the light and then put out the light? For the young, death is supremely unnatural. For the old, it is so natural that it is not worth thinking about.

As I had never for an instant believed in an afterlife, I suppose that all I could come up with, at twelve, was the formulation that as one was not before birth, one will not be after death, and so there you are, or not, as the case may be. For some, the notion of images impressed on celluloid provides a spurious sense of immortality, as does, indeed, the notion that those light rays which record our images will keep on bending about the universe forever. There are those who find comfort in such concepts. I don’t.

Errol Flynn saves the prince in the wood, and as the pauper is about to be crowned king, the true prince is restored, and all is right with a world where a good boy-king will stand up to evil, whether played by Claude Rains or by Hitler.

So, in a single film, screened at the susceptible time of puberty, one experienced the shock, as it were, of twinship. Also, the knowledge of how to exercise power. Also, the contrast between rich and poor that even I had been made aware of as the Depression deepened, and there was no help on earth for the poor except from the king, if he be good and well-informed. This was much the attitude of the American people at that time to their sovereigns, Franklin and Eleanor, who were opposed, as was the good prince, by evil lords. Finally, there is the impact of imminent death upon a twelve-year-old. Of all the facts of life, death is the oddest. Suddenly, there it is, in a moonlit forest, at the hand of a traitor with a knife; and then no more life. No anything. Nothing.

Underlying the film, there is an appeal to altruism. Now altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred. Yet the prince in the film is obliged to note that there are others in the world beside himself (not to mention a pauper duplicate), and to those others he must be responsible. This is a highly un-American point of view but not without its charm for the youthful viewer, who will discover for himself, more soon than late, that one must always put oneself first, except when the American empire requires a war and then,
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
. I believe that my generation of Americans was the very last even to begin to take seriously that once-powerful invocation.

But now the feature film’s over. The newsreel begins. The Japanese sink an American gunboat on a river in China. Senator Gore is defeated for a fifth term. “All is lost,” he declares, “including honor.” The House Un-American Activities Committee is formed. The director of air commerce resigns. The Munich Agreement is signed. Hitler takes over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

I used to chat with Prince Philip of Hesse, the only person I ever knew who knew Hitler. Philip was son-in-law to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, and Italy was a founding member—with Germany—of the Axis powers. Prince Philip was always regarded with suspicion by Hitler, and, eventually, his wife, Princess Mafalda, was sent off to a German concentration camp where she died during an air raid—Puccini had dedicated
Turandot
to her. Prince Philip was rarely revelatory. Like his class, he regarded Hitler as a cheap demagogue, who was bringing a degree of order to the country. I asked about anti-Semitism. Prince Philip said he thought at first it was just pandering to voters. “Later, of course, when friends of mine were proscribed, I tried to intervene. Hitler was always agreeable. He even protected them for a time. But I never got him past his usual point: ‘in the professions they should never number more than their proportion in the general population,’ which made no sense to me.”

SIX

Next: Previews of Coming Attractions. And coming to this theater is—what else?—
Fire Over England
, yet again. Huey Long is murdered.

My whole family delighted in Huey Long not for his politics but for his comic speechifying. After my father divorced my mother he rented an apartment in the same Connecticut Avenue building where Huey was bacheloring it. Though my father disliked most politicians, Huey always made him laugh. The Kingfish, as Long was known, began performing when he stepped out of the elevator in the morning and confronted the day in the form of a desk clerk, a meek young man, whom Huey enjoyed lecturing on Success, to the young man’s embarrassment. Huey would declaim: “Why, when I was your age I would spend what little idle time I had with an instructive book not that racing form I see that you’re now trying to hide. Of course I was not given to late-night dissipation in the fleshpots of the District of Columbia! Oh, you can’t hide your ruinous habits from me! I can see by the trembling of your hands what demon rum is doing to you…” The poor clerk was indeed trembling—with terror—as the great voice thundered in his ears and Huey, particularly if an audience had now filled the lobby, would become prayerful as he invoked the lad’s aged mother back in Butte, Montana. “I know how each night she prays for your success—on her knees, little suspecting that all those hours that should be golden with study are scarlet with vice…” Tears would fill Huey’s eyes on cue as he contemplated that little old lady who had mothered a son so reprobate. Only my father’s arrival with his car would stop the great flow of language, and Huey would cadge a ride from the director of air commerce while lecturing my father on aviation as they proceeded to the Capitol where Huey had all sorts of somber public advice for President Roosevelt.

The great Huey Long is ready to crown every man a king, until a mysterious doctor gunned him down in the Louisiana State Capitol. He was preparing to run for president on a third-party ticket, splitting FDR’s vote for reelection.

Lately, Huey had been discussing a run for the presidency on a third-party ticket in 1936. Many thought he could keep FDR from being reelected and then in 1940 he would be the Democratic candidate and win the presidency. Possible? We shall never know. Huey was gunned down in the Louisiana State Capitol at Baton Rouge by a medical doctor with no known motive. It was rumored that Huey had actually been killed by his own guards. Forever after, the Long family believed that FDR had ordered his killing, which seems farfetched even in Louisiana. But it was about then that the
conspiracy theorist doctrine
was promulgated to make it impossible for anyone to investigate much of anything and so it was that we, a naturally suspicious and garrulous people, were officially silenced through our institutions and by a media seemingly devoted to a Sicilianesque omertà, even when Marine Corps General Smedley Butler revealed that he had been approached by right wing elements to overthrow FDR in his first term, a story that never really broke despite Butler’s own memoir of the events. Huey’s murder was the first of a number of stylized “unsolvable” murders committed by solitary lone killers given to motiveless acts of violence; witness, Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas. More later. It is as if we have a permanent Federal Bureau of Non-Investigation ever ready to chuckle about the relation between flying saucers and political assassinations or the “alleged” torture of those held in our military prisons.

In any event, Huey, whose slogan was “every man a king,” never did have his proper day. But there is a wonderfully comic bit of newsreel where he is sampling a New Orleans bartender’s Sazerac, a lethal cocktail full of whipped egg white. He praises his old friend behind the bar, sips delicately at the brew, and gives gentle instruction on the correct proportion of the ingredients. He finishes one glass which is refilled. Ever the perfectionist, he savors this ambrosia, complimenting the bartender—so let us leave the Kingfish there, contented, presidential, the people’s friend who built so many schools, roads, hospitals, and gleefully taxed “The Standard Oil” to pay for it all.

SEVEN

I sit now at a so-called partners desk where two people can sit directly across from each other. In 2003 my “partner” (as the politically correct call it) of fifty-three years—Howard Auster—died and now I work here alone. Here? Where? When? Who? We shall let “why” linger a while longer in the wings.

Howard and I in Arizona during the filming of
Billy the Kid
with Val Kilmer. I play a minister whose specialty is—what else?—funerals. Over the years I’ve done several Billy the Kids, the first for live TV with Paul Newman in 1955. Others turned my work into the film
The Left Handed Gun
, a perfect mess almost as highly rated by the French as Jerry Lewis.

“Here” is the Hollywood Hills. “When” is today, December 31, 2004. New Year’s Eve is at hand and with luck—good or bad—tomorrow will bring the two thousand fourth year of the Christian era to a close. For several days television has been full of images of Southeast Asia drowning in tsunami tidal waves. As I watched the Thai island of Phuket being pummeled by wind, I looked in vain for the Royal Yacht Club (a hotel not a club) where we stayed a dozen years ago. It is now as gone as, indeed, are “we” reduced to the singular “me.” Rain has been falling for more than a week on Los Angeles. Since 1977 “we” have had a house here, usually rented out to others as neither of us ever had any intention of living here until the obligatory arrival of the Cedars-Sinai Hospital years which, finally, came two years ago, like a tsunami wind, for him. So now—“what?”

Barbara Epstein, editor of
The New York Review of Books
, has just rung to report a “what”: the death of Susan Sontag whose decades-long war with cancer is over. Years ago a celebrated guru of the day gravely admonished her: “What’s all the fuss about? Why don’t you just let go? After all, death is simply a natural part of life,” and so on. Susan was having none of this: “I don’t consider death at my age,” she said (she was still young—forties?), “to be just nothing,” echoing Tennessee Williams who once wrote: “I have never considered death to be much in the way of completion.” I last saw Susan when we acted in Norman Mailer’s production of Shaw’s
Don Juan in Hell
. I was the Devil; she was Donna Anna…What gifts Susan had for performance were reserved for her most successful portrayal—the autodidact who could play aspects of herself by ear, often universalizing them in the process.

According to Barbara, Susan, the winner of so many skirmishes in her long campaign against oblivion, had left no instructions about a “final resting place.” Surviving loved ones are now discussing her passion for Balzac and should they bury her near him in the Père Lachaise cemetery at Paris. If they do, I don’t envy them all that bureaucratic French paperwork. As it turned out, Susan was admitted to the Montparnasse cemetery where she will join Sartre and Beauvoir, not too bad for a graduate of Hollywood High.

“What?” In front of me on the desk is a copy of
Palimpsest: A Memoir
, published in 1995 and dealing with my first thirty-nine years. I’ve just read the opening pages, curious to see how I had dealt with the all-important problem of memory. Or is it how memory deals with me? I read: “I have always been curious to know where writers are physically situated when they write memoirs. Their placement during works of the imagination is less relevant because the true geography of a fiction is all in the mind but a memoir is set off by a thousand associations, even by objects in a given room.” At the moment, today, in front of me there are several novels by James Purdy on the desk. I’ve been writing about him, and wondering why so unique a writer has been so ignored. But then, “unique” will do it every time hereabouts. Nearby, a volume of Montaigne’s essays, the ultimate touchstone for anyone trying to recollect himself as well as others.

I resist opening Montaigne for as long as possible. I spent an hour once in his sixteenth-century Gascon tower and saw the same view that he saw from his third-floor study window. But where he tells us he had his chicken run, there are now ducks at ground level. Otherwise, inside that round tower room, one can imagine oneself inside his head, preserved in this room as his attempts—essays—inhabit his books. Unable to resist, I turn to the page where he frets about his poor memory. “I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realizing it.” Since I am now thirteen years older than the author of
Palimpsest
and since most of my contemporaries are vanishing, I am often drawn to Montaigne on the subject of memory and its lapses, not to mention on our common mortality. He is surprisingly sardonic on this last delicate subject: “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in,” he writes. “Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years.” Hardly a delusion of mine as I examine a new cancer on my forearm, all the while waiting for diabetes to do its gaudy final thing. I sometimes imitate Montaigne when he notes that: “I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips.” Hence, Susan; I am told that a failed marrow implant, not to mention a harrowingly painful chemotherapy procedure, ended her ordeal. Since “each man bears the entire form of man’s estate,” as Montaigne puts it, I can take part, at a near-remove, in her now abandoned estate so like that of all the rest ever born.

I grow homesick when I read where I was in 1992, my workroom in Ravello: “a white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks out across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum; at the moment, a metallic gray sea has created a white haze that obscures the ever more hostile sun.” As I quote these lines I will myself back to then where Howard is still alive and our world has not yet cracked open.

Where am I now? I am in a second-floor study that an old friend, Diana Phipps, copied from a picture of Macaulay’s book-lined study. Through the windows in back of my chair, a steady monsoonlike vertical rain has been falling for days, rattling the straight palm trees that hide the road which crosses over from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley.

I have also just found the deed to the house; apparently, I bought it March 24, 1977, not long after we had bought the villa La Rondinaia (“The Swallows Nest”) in Ravello. We moved back here after a routine physical examination; our doctor showed me the X-ray of Howard’s chest: at the top of the right lung was a round object like an eyeball with glaucoma, startlingly white against the black foil of the radiogram. A lifetime of smoking had finally done its work; every attempt to stop the addiction had failed and continued to fail. Even after two “successful” cancer operations, he kept right on smoking and that is how “we” ceased to be we and became “I.”

To my left, as I write this at the partners desk, there is a chair that bars entrance from the study to the door to Howard’s room. Norberto, our Filipino housekeeper, has placed in the chair a puppet Mephistopheles with a white skull-like head and pointed mustache—to ward off the evil eye? But surely that eye has already failed to do its work.

The books here in Macaulay’s study are neither mine nor his, alas, but those of an old friend who has finally gone back East. Apparently, during his Western hegira, he had acquired every Literary Guild book club choice of the last thirty years. They are now stacked in the glass-fronted bookcases until my reference books come from Italy…if I decide actually to live in a so-called “homeland” daily grown ever more repressive.

At work in the La Rondinaia studio with a white cat waiting for me to thank her for the splendid rat that she has just delivered.

I see that a writer in this morning’s
Los Angeles Times
chides Sontag for not telling
all
to everyone about her affairs with so many fascinating women. Rousseau made the same complaint of Montaigne who was equally reticent about his private life. In the decades that I knew Susan slightly I was dimly aware of her private life and had no interest in it—nor anyone else’s for that matter unless it was, in some way, comical. I was also not particularly interested in her meditations on subjects like photography. What did matter to the non-specialized world was her views on war and peace in the Balkans and on the civil war in the Middle East where she sometimes offended the right people. That’s enough of death for now.

I’ve just switched off the television with its endless images of the floods in Southeast Asia. I think fondly of all the winters that Howard and I spent in Bangkok at the Oriental Hotel when it was still just a single high-rise building at the edge of a dark Klong. The manager was a young Swiss married to a Thai girl. I’ve not been back for several years but I am told that the two of them are still there, if somewhat emeritus. They also presided over the glamorous remodeling some years ago.