Timebends (84 page)

Eisenhower now, Kennedy coming up. Very strange. I moved about wonderfully uninvolved in anything at all, without even a home for the first time in decades. It was a good town to walk around in, safer than New York, I thought, but strange places always seem safer in America than the places you know.

I sensed I would be all right, but every few hours I wondered about Marilyn in the hands of strangers. I began to see that I had thought that everyone but me was a stranger to her—she had been with me so much longer than with anyone else in her life—and my egoistic presumption again embarrassed me. She had tried so hard to give but found it unreal to receive, as had I. Realizing slowly, day by day, that she had always known how to survive, I allowed myself the luxury of being cut off. I thought of going to the Connecticut house to live and maybe even farm, if I dared.

There were dark moments when suddenly I did not believe she really knew how to survive. But my uselessness to her confronted this fear and dissolved it twenty times a day. That was what I had to learn, how to believe she'd surface and stay there. Sentimental
as it sounded, perhaps she really did belong to the world. I put it all out of mind—it could no longer be my business, you save yourself, no one does it for you or can. But it kept coming back. I wondered again if the analysis was peripheral. Did her doctor know the mortal danger she was in from sleeping pills? Maybe he was reassured by her showing up at his office looking like a milk-fed high school girl hours after peering over the edge into death's very jaws. Her unbelievable physical endurance, did he understand that? Even her stamina conspired against her.

I drove back down to Los Angeles, wondering at the instinct that had moved the first film people to select this artificially lush area for the industry, a desert that had to be watered before it would green up, a fake to start with, and I recalled Fox asking my father for an investment. It had never been anything but a money machine. What made people continually expect something more sublime from it?

There was a knock on the Hollywood hotel room door. A woman in her twenties stood in the hall, staidly dressed in a plaid skirt and blouse, a kind of pretty imitation college girl with a slack, overused mouth.

“Do you have some ink?” The nerved look straight in the eye; how touchingly inventive a way of telling me she recognized me and knew that I was now alone.

“Ink?”

“Yes. I want to write something.”

“Well, no, but I can lend you a ballpoint.”

“No, I only write with a real pen.”

“Ah. You're a writer?”

Thin ice. Her cheeks pinked up. “Well, I'm starting to. I'm trying to learn.” She smiled faintly.

“Good. I'll be glad to let you have a ballpoint.”

“Thanks. I really wanted ink.”

“Sorry.”

“That's all right.” She turned away, voice thinned out by the rejection.

I walked to the window and looked down eight stories to the swimming pool. A young woman was doing the crawl. She slipped out of the water and dried herself in a stripe of sunlight, bending over to pat her hair dry. She had heavy thighs, a broad bottom. Woman, that worshiped, tortured species. In youth I had always felt they were being endlessly lied to, why didn't they know?

I drove out to the beach, but there was a cold breeze and few
people were around. There was always something listless, almost forlorn, about the lazy Pacific, unlike the sharp and cold and saltier Atlantic that was so full of anger and ideas.

A girl walked out of the sea leading a Newfoundland on a leash. “There's a million beautiful girls,” she had said once when I marveled at her in a new navy blue skirt. She wanted everything, but one thing contradicted another; physical admiration threatened to devalue her person, yet she became anxious if her appearance was ignored.

I took off my shoes and walked in the lobes of tepid water softly washing up the slant of the beach. There was nowhere I had to be tomorrow, yet something kept pushing me to hurry and make up lost time. But lost to what? Who finds time that is lost? Time is never lost, we give it away, dump it out, character is everything, and I had not wanted to withhold myself anymore, that was all. And hadn't, period. I had to try from now on to command an inner motionlessness, to recover by spreading out my energy, opening to all things, rather than keeping myself pointed at a target that was not there anymore.

It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being. Only irony was certain. The setting, cooling sun I was looking at was rising somewhere else, all hot and new.

Did anyone ever feel he belonged in this place? It was odd to recall that she had been born here. By even that much I could never understand her … she thought this city was real rather than an apparition recently summoned up out of nowhere.

With the sun going down on just such an evening “they said we were going for a ride in the car but when we got out and I saw it was the orphanage I grabbed the door and kept yelling, ‘I'm not an orphan, I'm not an orphan!' They had to tear my fingers open to get me inside. And left me there.” She had learned to laugh at the poor incompetent people who had abandoned her.

I went back to my car and sat brushing sand off my feet. The rapid night-cooling of California, like a refrigerator door opening in a warm room. Her first night in the orphanage must have withered up the blessing of life, and it died in her there. For she did have a mother, and a father too, although neither one at home; she had roots and a recognizable being. So it would never matter again what you really were, you could get dumped in the alley by what some stranger said about you, you could get lost in his dead stare upon you. So you'd better be sweet to him, or look sweet and sing the orphan's anthem that charm was life.

But did her outcry mean she had known she had a real father and even that he was married to her mother, although they had broken up? Had it been her mother on one of her wild returns from the hospital who had spun out the idea of the unknown father, handsome and rich, who had refused to acknowledge her? Bedeviled by sin, smacked to the floor by religion's violence, had the poor woman come up with the story of illegitimacy and its curse, her own cue to murder, snatching the brand from her own heart and slaking it in her daughter's dreams? Where it would live on, yes.

Ben Hecht had been the first to seize the idea of her orphanhood and run with it, but she was never clear in telling about it whether she intended to be known as a real orphan or only as a child who had been left temporarily in an orphanage. Maybe it had always been much the same muddle for her as for her mother who the father was or was not, leaving only one thing clear, that illegitimacy was sin and sin made you worthless. Hecht must have sensed the attraction, for if you were worthless and so innocently babylike too, you were a defenseless sex object, or if you preferred, a free spirit with no one in the world to account to for your actions.

But it had left a quandary: to the end she would be crying out the contradiction that she had a real address and roots and a being and was in no way a defenseless orphan and did not deserve the concealed contempt such discarded people feel they inherit; and at the same time that she was as you desired her, a sexy, charming swinger with no home address. Who to be? It would not have been so painful a choice if one side of her had not been so serious about how to live usefully.

On the plane back to New York,
The Misfits
out of my life, I braced myself when a fat man in his sixties making his way down the aisle to the toilets stopped at the sight of me and pointed. “Say . . .”

“I know, but I'm not him. I look like him, but I'm not.”

“Morris Green?”

“No.” But I could not forbear. “Who's Morris Green?”

“Who's Morris Green!”—as though he were Bob Hope.
“Morris Green,
Poughkeepsie. Green's Hardware?”

“Oh! Well. No, I'm not him.”

“I could have sworn. Excuse me,” he said, continuing on his way and knocking my arm off the armrest. I had become part of the background, thankfully, fading fast into the national river of faces tumbling into the American gorge.

We met for the first time in Reno, where she had come with Henri Cartier-Bresson to photograph the goings-on. There can hardly have been many film productions more journalistically saturated than
The Misfits,
and they were the latest of a score of Magnum photographers who had been spelling one another over the months of shooting. Marilyn had liked her at once, appreciating her considerate kindness and the absence—remarkable in a photographer—of all aggression. She doted a little on the pictures Inge Morath had taken of her, sensing real affection in them.

I walked into the Mapes bar and found John Huston at a table laughing his head off with a photographer, a slender, noble-looking young woman with bobbed hair and a European accent, who seemed both shy and strong at the same time. I noticed the bob, her transparently blue eyes, and a conflicted sensitivity in her, but I was preoccupied by endings then, everything had gone out of control, and what words were spoken at the table I could never more than vaguely recall. That Inge and I have been married for twenty-five years as I write this sentence is not something I would have been able to believe that day. How to combine our quarter-century together, the best of my life, with my reasoned resolve never to marry again, surely not a third time! Past convictions, more often than not, are possible to recall but as difficult to relive as the future is unknown. I had been sure it would never come to me again, but it came and it stayed for days, and then weeks and months, the need to reach out and find the same person, to rely and be relied upon. Almost fifty years ago in Catholic Austria her parents
had turned Protestant just before their wedding in order to be able to divorce legally should the need arise. A marriage should last as long as it lasted, she thought. So we got married in a state of spiritual modesty, with firm if minimal expectations of our predictabilities. It was all permanently temporary, and would stay that way, to our surprise, a reed to be admired rather than carelessly leaned on; marriage, after all, is a case of mutual forgiveness, and she knew she would need to dispense a lot of it.

But it was a mere glimpse of Inge Morath then; we would hardly speak more than a few words together until months later in New York, where we became friends. Although much younger than Cartier-Bresson, she had been a kind of editorial conscience to him for years in Paris and had joined him to cross the country in a rented car hoping to see the real America. They had searched in vain for something to eat from New York right into Reno. She an Austrian who had lived long in France, and he a Frenchman, they had made the fatal assumption that they would find marvelous provincial cooking along the way and had discovered the same hamburger tracking them everywhere. Luckily he had brought a little electric coil with which to heat water in a cup, and they practically lived on tea and a few lettuce leaves.

Huston would later explain what they had been so tickled about in the bar that day. She had photographed the making of
The Unforgiven,
a film he shot up in the Mexican backcountry just before
The Misfits.
She was working then for
Paris-Match
and
Life.
The picture starred Audie Murphy, the World War II infantryman turned movie actor, America's most decorated hero, who had killed endless ranks of Germans single-handed. One morning while John and a few friends were hunting ducks on the shore of the enormous high-country lake, Inge, who Huston insisted had to sit right behind him to photograph his kills dropping out of the air, grew bored with the noise and the pellets falling down on her and her new telephoto lens and went wandering off by herself. A couple of specks far out on the water and what looked like erratic thrashing drew her range finder to her eye, and she made out what she thought was someone struggling around a rocking boat. She called to the hunters, who refused to worry, knowing it was Audie out there with the company's plane pilot, a pair of machos who could survive anything. But she saw two helpless men. After a few more minutes she got out of her clothes and in panties and bra slipped into the cold lake and after swimming nearly half a mile found Murphy flailing desperately in the final stages of exhaustion,
too weak to climb into the boat he had fallen out of; the pilot, also unable to swim, was hysterical and could not hold on to him from within the boat. She got Murphy to grasp her bra strap and towed him back to land. It took a long time, during which the onshore hunting never paused. Gasping for breath herself, she turned to the men and called them all bastards. In Reno these months later, Huston guffawed with happiness at seeing her again, showing the special respect for this handsome young woman that he reserved for people who had looked death in the eye. In gratitude Murphy had given her his dearest possession, a watch that had seen him through the entire war, a wonderful chronograph that she still wore. The other thing Murphy treasured was a revolver he always kept under his pillow and occasionally fired at the tent flap when he awoke out of one of his nightmares.

In New York, where she was temporarily staying between assignments, Cartier-Bresson and Gjon Mili, also a great but a very different photographer, were carrying on an amazing struggle of long standing for acknowledgment as her exclusive photographic godfather. The main issue at the moment was whether Inge should be using a tripod. Mili insisted she absolutely had to, Cartier-Bresson that she must not on any account, and all of this in French, up and down Sixth Avenue with the snow falling on us, and into Mili's vast studio on Twenty-third Street, and there were moments when it really looked like violence on the way. Meantime she, in the middle, was doing variations on “Oh, my God, stop it, stop it, stop it!”—but of course what she had to say was of small importance next to the towering authority over her that they were grappling for. They were pros but definitely not cool. Their fanaticism created a purity of feeling around them; egos and all, they were innocents because they cared so much. I wanted to be that way again myself.
“Moi, je déteste… moi, j'adore… moi, je…”
—they were endlessly shifting pieces of the world around to place themselves within its pattern, taking for granted that what they thought was of some decisive importance to the human condition. This refreshed me, so recently come from Hollywood, because none of it was for sale; it was simply their zealot's caring. Once, Cartier got so furious he began to take out his penknife. They loved one another, and she was glad to be their common sense, intolerable as they were. When she did a wonderful picture, each took it as an example of what he had been trying to tell her all along despite the other.