That is the end of my apologia.
Now, outside on the street, I see my American tourist again, wandering alone as tourists do not often wander in Florence, pairs being more likely, throngs the most common. The single middleaged American with a paunch is remarkable and the temptation to invite him inside, to lure him into a trap and watch him squirm under my interrogations is so great that I almost lean out the window and summon him to join me for an aperitivo, and, over a bitter red cocktail, ask him why, six decades into my exile, I cannot be left alone.
My love to you, Myles, and in hope that you will respond, I remain, yours always,
Desmond
Firenze, 13 June 2015
Dear Mrs. Fairdale,
You do not know me, and I hope you will forgive my writing in this way, but I found some letters you had sent to our mutual friend, Mr. Desmond Frank, a few years ago now. As you must be aware, Mr. Frank passed away last summer. His death was covered in the European press, and I think to a certain extent in America as well, although it is my impression he is not remembered as much in your country as in my own, or in France, where he lived for so many years. If his death is news to you, please forgive me being bearer of these sad tidings.
I write as the executor of Mr. Frank’s estate, and also as his heir. He had no children, but I was, if this is not too indelicate, a companion to him in his later life. Maybe you call us lovers, I don’t know. I loved him and I think he loved me and we lived together for some years as a couple, no matter the difference in our ages. Myself I am a painter by training but mostly I make a living now giving classes to rich Americans. This is not totally relevant, but I want you to understand my relationship with Desmond, and how I come to read your letters. It feels maybe intrusive that I did so, and I apologize, but I was trying to understand his archive and your letters, they are a part of it. I am not sure what to do with all this paper. Maybe I give it to a library, if anyone would be interested. (Maybe you are interested?) Or if you would like me to return your letters to you, this I can also do.
I am writing now because I do not know if Desmond ever replied to these letters you sent. But he did write something to your husband, Mr. Haywood. I address this to you now rather than Mr. Haywood because of the delicacy of the matter. I know that he and Desmond had a relationship many years ago, and it seems this was no secret between you. Forgive me if I am mistaken, or this is a surprise. Two years ago, I think after your letters arrived, Desmond spent weeks writing a long letter to your husband, if letter you can call it, and I assumed he sent it, but then, after his death, I found it and think he must not have. I read the pages recently and see it is not a letter so much as a confession, but then there are other things in this file, sections of a screenplay and stories he seems to have written in the 1950s, all of it mixed up together, pages numbered by hand. The order and dates do not make much sense to me, but then I am not so good a reader of English and maybe to you it will be clear. The parts that are stories, they use the names of real people sometimes, and when I read them I ask myself, how can he know what he writes about? In my own experience, he imagined things about me, about my life growing up, and he was totally but totally wrong. Crazy ideas. Fights with urchins out of Rossellini and De Sica and love affairs with playboys like from Fellini or existential sufferers from Antonioni and all of it nothing like my youth. Other times he imagined things about me and it would be but so terrifyingly true. (I like this English word, ‘terrifyingly’, in Italian ‘spaventosamente’, also nice, I think.)
If I find anything else that seems relevant, I will send this also. I should say that Desmond spoke often to me of his love for you, and of course for your husband, and his regret at not having seen you for so many years. I feel that this was his greatest sorrow, that he died without seeing you both once more. I hope, I don’t know what exactly, but perhaps your husband will read this testament from Desmond and it will make some difference to him.
Again, please forgive if this seems intrusive. If you say you do not wish to hear from me again, I respect this, and yet I hope perhaps one day we will meet, if you ever come to Firenze. You and your husband would be most welcome.
Yours faithfully,
Alessio Rabino
July 15, 2016
Pacific Palisades, California
Dear Mr. Rabino,
First I must apologize that it has taken me such a long time to confirm receipt of the papers you sent, now more than a year ago. I opened the file right away when it came, and thought I could read it quickly, but then the more I read the more troubling it all became, and it took me a long time to finish it, picking up the file and putting it down, going back to the beginning and circling the text over and over, which is probably what Desmond intended. The problem was knowing whether to show it to Myles at all. He was in poor health when the package arrived, suffering with congestive heart failure. As you probably now know he passed away in January. It was a terrible blow to me even though he had been ill for some time, and it has taken me this long to read Desmond’s letter or whatever it is once more.
The truth is, I feel angry more than anything. Not with you, but with Desmond, because he took so long to do something he should have done decades earlier. And I am angry with myself because I failed to show it to Myles before he died, and that failure means I have inherited Desmond’s guilt.
I showed the file to my children because I needed to share it with someone and talk about those years. There are details Desmond gets wrong, naturally, or that he remembers very differently from the way I remember them. Barbara and I were never as close as he imagines we were, or at least not in the same way that he and Myles were. I don’t think I was ever as self-denying as he makes me seem. But then we’re often poor judges of ourselves, and the way other people see us in our youth is never quite how we imagine we actually are. I know I had a sharp tongue, but I’m not sure I was as clever or audacious as Desmond paints me.
I can’t say whether John dropped acid that night in particular, but he spent so much of his later life on one kind of drug or another it’s certainly possible. There are other things, however, that are just plain wrong. Mary Dawn, for instance, was never as composed or frigid as Desmond describes her. She could be genuinely warm and was a good friend to me despite everything. I think she knew about me and Myles, and it didn’t seem to matter to her. I know for a fact that the Nazi housekeeper is an amalgam of a few different women who worked for the Marshes in the late 40s and early 50s, none of them Nazis as far as I knew, none of them recruited by the U.S. government to spy (although how would I know for certain, right?), but I am fairly certain they were each of them German. Desmond was right about Mary keeping secret her foreign birth, but that came out later when she realized it didn’t matter to anyone where she was born or what language she spoke as a child. Whatever the case, Desmond had an uncanny gift for seeing through people, and, as you say, there are things he gets terrifyingly right. I find myself wondering, How can he possibly have known that about me? I’m too old and too proper to tell you what those things are, but up until now I always assumed they were private. I suppose Myles must have told Desmond a lot about our odd married life, but it’s been an uncomfortable experience to read descriptions of myself as a young woman because for the most part I feel either that Desmond saw me with painful clarity, or simply failed to see me at all. Apart from the studio memos you would never know that I was also in She Turned Away, playing the Rose Zapatero character and several other bit parts. I suppose that my participation was not Desmond’s point, but the oversight, or the silence around me, hurts.
I wish I could say that Myles and I had a happy life together. At least it was not an angry one. There was no fighting. We were best friends, we adopted children who have given me great happiness, but we lived with the particular melancholy that comes from spending most of one’s life in the closet. Although I wanted us to, Myles was never prepared to come out, not even when so many others had. He said it would make him look
ridiculous. I said it would make him a star all over again, but I guess it was too late for him. Maybe it isn’t for me. I think for Myles it seemed impossible because he never got over Desmond. Occasionally he would bring someone home, always discreet, but no one lasted longer than a week or two because he kept hoping that Desmond would come back, that he would get over himself and apologize for what he had done. Myles did not stop loving him but he hated him, too, and in the absence of an apology could not find it in himself to offer forgiveness.
Now the apology is here, before me, but too late. And that is my fault.
With the script of She Turned Away as it appears in the file, I sat down and watched the movie, although I have made a habit of avoiding our old films since Myles’s death. I usually find them too painful to watch, particularly those from before his accident. The script in the file is different from the final cut of the film, as you probably know, but not in ways that seem very significant, which leads me to wonder why Desmond makes such a meal of the thing. Lines are different here and there, scenes end earlier or begin later than in the script, some sequences have been rearranged, but it seems intact for the most part, and still largely his work, even if his name does not, even now, appear on the film. Perhaps that was his point, now that I think about it, and it is an injustice, especially since the characters and the story and situations, and so much else besides are based on his original ideas. I still have some influence with the company that now owns the distribution rights, and could lobby for his name to be restored, if that is something you would like to pursue.
Late in his life, after Mary’s death, John Marsh spoke to me about his appearance before HUAC. I had never asked him about it because it was obvious whenever it came up that it caused him very real pain. I know it was an unforgivable betrayal, and no amount of moral relativism about the pressures of that time can excuse what John did. I think even John, at the end of his own life, knew that there were no excuses that held up to scrutiny, at least not scrutiny by the kind of mind that can see individual acts in their historical context and understand that partisanship and ideology must be subordinated to a greater sense of right and wrong. There, I sound like Desmond. How do we determine the definitions of that ‘greater sense’? I am not a Christian or anything. I feel closest to Buddhism and Judaism but am neither of those either and cannot set aside my natural skepticism to believe in anything other than what I observe, even now. Given that limitation, how do we decide what is good and what is evil in a way that can be tested and does not require the passage of time and the distance of memory to see clearly? How could the men and women in the 1940s and 1950s who believed they were doing good (as I want to believe the witch hunters did believe, whatever we thought of them then, whatever we think of them now) possibly fail to see that they were doing evil? How, today, can the people who rally behind racists and misogynists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, and homophobes, believe that they can possibly be on the side of good? Are the truly good always struggling not to be ground under the heel of the evil man’s boot, struggling not to be rounded up and pilloried, not to be banned or deported or killed in their millions? Is the nature of goodness – true goodness – always to be in a position of potential vulnerability, always to be at risk of persecution, always to be susceptible to banishment, damnation, and termination by the evil forces who arrive insisting they are good? Is the nature of goodness in fact a greater proximity to death and violence and victimhood? They are troubling questions. I do not have answers. I do not expect that you should either, Mr. Rabino, but these are the questions that keep me up at night, now, in the recent days and weeks and months, as I contemplate Desmond’s narrative about Myles and me, and as I glimpse a possible political future that I pray does not come to pass.
I wonder what is to be done with these papers, and whether you have made any progress with sorting through the rest of Desmond’s archive, or if his publishers have any thoughts on the matter. As for me, despite the fact the manuscript uses my actual name, I have no objection to your going ahead with publication, and would be happy to provide an affidavit to that effect, indemnifying you and the publishers, in whatever way you think fit. Everyone else is dead, so you are free to do as you like.
Sincerely yours,
Helen Fairdale
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Beatrice Monti della Corte for her generous hospitality, which provided the space and time in which this book first took form at the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Spring 2013, and to Arts Council England for the residential fellowship that helped fund my stay there.
Thanks to Cassie Blake and Lynne Kirste at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive, Hollywood, California, and to Jenny Romero at the Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California.
Thanks to the staff and librarians at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Thanks to Eduardo Cadava, Javier Montes, Neel Mukherjee, Mercedes Cebrián, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Michael Holtmann, Margaret Stead, Tristan and Lana Dalley, Nadia Davids and John Gutierrez, Chris and Katie Holmes, Amy Villarejo, Paul Saint-Amour, Gayle Rogers, Jennifer Spitzer, Susan Milrod, Angela Rae and Justin Cornish, Nayla Elamin, Laure Thorel, Nan van der Vlies, Undine Weber and Michael Ludewig, and Deborah Seddon. Thanks also to the late Evie Zysman, who was a model of political engagement, resistance, and friendship.
Thanks to Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant, Alba Ziegler-Bailey, Rebecca Nagel, Charles Buchan, Sarah Watling, James Roxburgh, Tamsin Shelton, and everyone at the Wylie Agency and Atlantic Books.
Thanks to my mother, for encouraging an early love of movies.
Thanks especially to Andrew van der Vlies, for wearing many hats but always remaining himself.
~
This novel was written with reference to the following materials:
BOOKS
The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate by Norma Barzman
Los Angeles: Photography by Robert Lee Behme
Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist by Walter Bernstein
MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot by Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester, and Michael Troyan
Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles by Craig Davidson
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis
Imagining Los Angeles by Amy Dawes
‘Let The People Know’, The Truth About the Communists Which the Un-American Committee Tried to Suppress by Eugene Dennis
The Inquisition in Hollywood by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund
The Gordon File: A Screenwriter Recalls Twenty Years of FBI Surveillance by Bernard Gordon
What Cooks in Hollywood: Autographed recipes straight from the kitchens of your favorite movie stars edited by Dorothy and Maxwell Hamilton
Writers in Hollywood: 1915-1951 by Ian Hamilton
Night for Day Page 50
