The Russians announced their return in force early on November 4, with a massive artillery barrage that began at three in the morning, lighting up the sky all around the city. There had been plenty of signs that they were coming, but nobody had wanted to believe them. Longdistance calls produced no reply or were answered in Russian, while radio stations all over the country closed down one by one, and trains that left Budapest failed to return. In the streets, the feeling was one of fatalism, a Hungarian national character trait even under the best of circumstances. The only optimism to be found was among the American correspondents lined up at the bars of the major hotels.
My own spirits were not exactly buoyed by the sight of barricades of cars, street-lamp poles, trams, and tram rails going up in the streets. I did not think they would hold back the Russians for very long, which shortly proved to be the case. The constant rolling thunder of the big guns, the scream of incoming shells, and the deafening crash as they hit some apartment building or monument seemed exciting at first but soon began to oppress. The cold, gray, cheerless sky of Mitteleuropa in late autumn was obscured by a low-hanging pall of greasy black smoke from fires and explosions, and the air smelled of cordite, burning gasoline, diesel fumes, clogged drains, and death. Clouds of gritty plaster and cement dust rose from each hit. Shards of broken glass, chunks of masonry, and pieces of white-hot shrapnel hissed and whizzed past my ears. All too soon, however, noises began that made the artillery barrage seem comforting by comparison: the sharp hammering of machine guns, the high-pitched crack of rifles, the thud of an occasional hand grenade, the rapid pop-pop-pop of automatic small arms, and worst of all the ominous roar of diesel engines and the squeal of metal treads on cobblestones that indicated the approach of tanks. The rumor was that the Russians were not taking prisoners
As the city burned and shook around me—the old streets seemed to heave with each detonation, as if rocked by earthquakes—I began to think about my future, if there was one, in clearer terms. A number of my illusions faded during the siege and fall of Budapest, some of them having to do with fear and courage, others to do with the future. It became clear to me in the harsh, cold, grubby, and dangerous reality of Budapest—the city to which Alex had come as an impoverished enfant terrible in 1908, and where he had directed his first movie in 1914—that Alex’s death had in fact meant the end of any easy way for me to enter the movie business. For the first time, I thought about that with relief. Why, after all, enter a business in which Alex and his brothers had succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations?
Given my interest in history, my father had hoped that I would teach it eventually, but having seen history in the making, I didn’t think that trying to make tidy sense of it would be the profession for me. In any case, I couldn’t see myself settling into a comfortable life as an Oxford don, even assuming I could improve my academic record enough to make such a career possible.
Had I nurtured any fantasies about working for the British intelligence services, they would have evaporated when I saw the Red Army in action. This particular fantasy was not as far-fetched as it sounds. This, after all, was in the years before an endless number of Oxford- or Cambridge-educated traitors were exposed, discrediting the idea of recruiting young men over a glass of sherry during tutorial sessions. Many an Oxford or Cambridge don was a talent scout for the spymasters, and those undergraduates who, like myself, were fluent in Russian and seemed to be on the right side of the class barrier were likely to receive a carefully phrased offer from one of them—I certainly had. (Oddly enough, an attempt had also been made to recruit me for the other side while I was in the RAF.)
I had no interest in the more traditional “professions”—law, medicine, et cetera—and recognized that I was not at all the type for a career in the British diplomatic services, nor for the stock market or banking—like my father and my uncles, I was interested in spending money, not in dealing with other people’s. There was always journalism, of course, but I had tried that during a brief spell with the Financial Times the summer before and hadn’t liked Fleet Street much. Besides, the British journalists in Budapest were for the most part a poor advertisement for their craft, hard drinking, given to reporting even the wildest and most shortlived of rumors as truth. They seemed to me straight out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. “This is a second-rate profession,” one of them said to me glumly, as we sat drinking in a bar, surrounded by bits of broken glass and pieces of the chandelier, which an explosion had brought down from the ceiling. “I mean, what can you say in five hundred words or less about all this? Anyway, what they want back in London is human-interest stories. And who wants to go out into the bloody streets and risk getting shot just to find some poor sod of a freedom fighter who understands English well enough to ask him how it feels to be shot at?”
Who indeed? I said sympathetically. Still, it was a big story, surely, exactly the kind of thing people wanted to read about?
“Don’t you believe it. They want to read about pools winners and American film stars. This is foreign politics, that’s all. The moment these people have lost, they’ll be off the front page.”
Truer words, I was very soon to learn, were never spoken.
THE FACT was, as it was gradually beginning to dawn on me while I sleepwalked through the last few days of the revolution, I didn’t really seem to fit in anywhere in England. I didn’t belong there any more than I belonged in Budapest. I was “mid-Atlantic”—as much a product of America, where I had lived as a child from 1941 to 1946, as of England; more at home in Switzerland, where I had gone to school at Le Rosey, or in France, where my father spent most of his time, than anywhere in the United Kingdom. During my service in the RAF, people had assumed that I was on some kind of Anglo-Canadian exchange program, while most people at Oxford mistook me for a Rhodes or a Fulbright scholar. I had lost most of my English accent while I was in America and made no effort to regain it once I was back in England. As a result, hardly anybody believed I was English—starting, unfortunately, with myself.
Not being thought of as English gave me a great advantage in that it removed me altogether from the British class system, in which the most obvious identifier is accent. But since the class system is central to life in the United Kingdom, it also left me adrift. I had none of the cozy companionship with my peers or the sense of belonging that constitute the real advantages of a class system. I had always felt myself to be an outsider except when at school in Switzerland, where everybody had been an outsider, except the Swiss.
So the problem wasn’t what kind of a career I should pursue, it was where I was going to live, which was much easier to resolve. I felt a great sense of relief at reaching this conclusion, one that sustained me through many days of unpleasantness as the Russians “mopped up” after their victory, restoring the Hungarian Communist Party to power with a brutality that was to keep it there for more than thirty years. The streets were empty now of everything but burned-out tanks, smoldering barricades, corpses, and the omnipresent, expressionless Soviet soldiers. The enforced calm of defeat, oppression, and terror descended on the city.
I tried the secret telephone number that Graham Greene’s friend had made me memorize, but it turned out to be that of the British Embassy, which you could find in any Budapest telephone book. I was eventually hustled out of Hungary in a long convoy of foreigners who had managed to annoy the Hungarian communists or their Soviet masters. As I crossed the border into Austria, I saw that man from MI6, dressed in the uniform of a British army doctor. He cut me dead—actually turned his back on me when I waved at him.
IT WAS a portent. I did not return home as a hero.
My friends and I got rather more attention than we wanted in the British press, but most of the papers treated our journey to Budapest and back as an escapade by high-spirited Oxford students, although the French press described us as if we had been adventurers in the John Buchan tradition. “Vacances en prison!” one Paris headline blared inaccurately, above a
photograph in which we appeared unshaven and scowling, like Balkan bandits.
In fact, we had plenty to scowl about. We had left Oxford midterm, without permission, on the very sensible grounds that we would have been refused, and neither the university nor our colleges were pleased or in a forgiving mood. At last, at the cost of a long and serious lecture from the college dean warning me in no uncertain terms to apply myself to my studies more seriously in future and to avoid adventures, foreign or domestic, I was allowed back again, though not quite forgiven—I had committed the unpardonable sin of getting Magdalen College mentioned in the newspapers.
AS I struggled through that winter to catch up on my studies, lost in the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (my tutor’s specialty), I felt, for the first time, a certain discontent with my life at Oxford. It was not, I recognized, the fault of the university or of Magdalen College. They had not changed, nor were they ever likely to, but I had.
When spring came, I surprised my father—and myself—by taking a job as a waiter in a Chelsea espresso bar owned by the father of a girlfriend instead of joining him on the Cap d’Antibes. My father put it down to love (a possibility that struck him as far more dangerous than the Hungarian Revolution), while Alexa, who knew a thing or two more about love than my father, dismissed it as an ostentatious act of “slumming”—after all, I didn’t need the money. The truth, however, was that I liked the noisy, late nights, the easy camaraderie with total strangers. It was a pleasure to be too busy to think. It was 1957, and Chelsea was at the forefront of that great cultural sea change in English life that was to take place in the sixties.
Besides, I was trying to stay out of my father’s way, and Alexa’s too, for what neither of them knew was that I had already decided to go to America—and that I wasn’t planning on coming back.
CHAPTER 2
In the summer of 1957, I returned to New York, which I had not seen since 1946. My father saw me off at Heathrow, dry-eyed and for once with no advice. I had already said good-bye to Alexa, with tears on both sides, and was never to see her again—she committed suicide some years later, after an unsuccessful second marriage and a difficult love affair.
New York is not like London, most of which changes slowly (many of the changes having been wrought by the Luftwaffe rather than by builders and planners). The New York I returned to was a radically different place from the one I had left. Then, the Third Avenue El had divided the East Side of Manhattan, its noisy trains rumbling and screaming above innumerable outdoor markets. Then, air-conditioning was quite unknown, except for the “air-cooled” movie houses, in which people took refuge during the summer. Offices were equipped with big, noisy standing fans, roaring like airplane propellers, that stirred the hot air to a gale, sending papers and cigarette ashes flying. Then, Fifth Avenue buses were double-deckers, like those of London, except that the top deck was open. Now, air-conditioning had tamed the summer, the El was gone, as were the double-decker buses, and everywhere glass-fronted skyscrapers were rising.
Television sets had been a scientific curiosity then, with postage stamp–size screens—a thick magnifying glass was placed in front of the screen by those who could afford to buy one, creating a picture that it was just possible to watch from a distance of a few feet, though everything looked as if it were being photographed in the dim waters of an aquarium. Now, in 1957, television was everywhere, most of it emanating from New York.
AS A CHILD, I had been taken to the BBC studios to watch my mother appear on a primitive television set. My nanny and I stared with amazement at the tiny screen, on which we could just make out my mother—or a miniature, black-and-white version of her—doing an old number from Charlot’s Revues. Since then, television had played a very small role in my life. It simply did not exist, for all practical purposes, and for many years I was one of the few people in England who had ever even seen a television set in action. In France, in Switzerland, there was no television—in the evening people still sat in the café, read newspapers, and played cards, without even dreaming that their lives were about to be changed by a box with a glass screen in the front. In America, however, television had caught on while I was away. Everywhere I went there was a set, already changing people’s lives, as it was about to change mine.
In that innocent age, moreover, there was still such a concept as “quality network television,” though it was already beginning to die on the vine. Playhouse 90 had been instrumental in bringing serious original drama to television, introducing talented playwrights such as Paddy Chayefsky. CBS was the undisputed leader in the culture stakes. So determined were they to produce quality original drama on television that they had signed very substantial contracts with some of America’s leading playwrights, including Sidney Kingsley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Dead End, Men in White, and Detective Story. Kingsley was married to Madge Evans, former Hollywood child actress; Madge, as it happened, was my mother’s cousin.
It was my mother’s intervention that procured me a job on the fringes of television almost as soon as I arrived in New York. Sidney, it turned out, was writing a play for CBS about the Hungarian Revolution and was stalled for want of “background.” My qualifications for any job were nebulous, but if there was one thing I had to offer it was background about the Hungarian Revolution; more of it, actually, than most people wanted to hear.
Sidney and I met for lunch in the dark and gloomy Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, a few yards from his office on Central Park South. I saw before me a short, powerfully built man with broad shoulders, a big head, and rough-hewn features that made him look like a bust by Sir Jacob Epstein. He had a deep, almost self-consciously “musical” voice and a strange accent—stage British lightly painted over New York Jewish—intended, I suspect, to disguise his Lower East Side background. He spoke slowly, articulating each word very clearly, as if talking to the village idiot, keeping his voice low, so that I was obliged to lean close to hear him. His method of writing, he explained, was to do meticulous, thorough research until he knew everything there was to know about a subject—not so much in his head (he tapped that organ for emphasis) but deep down in his gut. He patted his stomach forcefully. When you had that, the writing was easy—it was getting to that point that was hard. Research and facts, then more research and more facts, was what he needed. He would steep himself in them, soak them up, and demand still more. The story would come out of the research, eventually—there was no hurrying the process of creation. Eventually, the creative juices would reach the boiling point and flow.
I nodded vaguely. Even then, perhaps because of my friendship with Graham Greene, I knew that on no subject more so than their own writing are writers more likely to be self-deceived or, in conversation, more boring. Graham, perhaps for just that reason, never discussed how he wrote books and made savage fun of writers who did, but Sidney was of a more old-fashioned, self-taught school. His plays always had big social themes and “realistic” dialogue, very much in the spirit of the thirties, when he had had his big successes. He was now somewhat out of fashion and deeply resented the fact.
Sidney took the process of creation seriously and expected others to. He talked about it long into the afternoon, puffing on his pipe, slumped reflectively in his big leather chair, as the room grew darker and the waiters began setting the tables around us for dinner. My job, he emphasized, was to provide him with all the facts, the background, the raw material.
Apart from shoveling information at him, I was to play devil’s advocate and tell him—frankly and ruthlessly—when he was full of shit. Above all, I should not spare his feelings. He could take it—he was a stage writer, not some cloistered novelist; he was used to arguments, objections, suggestions, pitched fights. He was not, in short, the kind of guy who bruised easily.
I promised to keep that in mind. My Uncle Alex’s view had been that all writers had to be protected carefully from the harsh realities of the movie business, like children or sensitive plants, but I reasoned that perhap
s the stage was different. Certainly Sidney looked like a tough guy. There was something of the boxer about him, with his heavy brow, his powerful chest, and his strong, muscular hands. (He had taken up sculpture as a hobby late in life, to my father’s scorn, for when it came to art, he despised amateurs.) Sidney had, surely not by accident, the hunched-up stance of a fighter too, though there was, in fact, nothing particularly pugnacious about him. Indeed, his eyes, pale, deeply expressive, rimmed with long, pale lashes, seemed to be those of a man who was sensitive, withdrawn, perhaps easily hurt.
Did I want the job? Sidney asked. Absolutely, I said—after all, it was the only one I had been offered, as well as a foot in the door of serious television. We shook hands—Sidney’s handshake was the kind that made you wince in pain—and parted on an amicable note. I was to start work on Monday.
ON MONDAY morning, promptly at nine, dressed as if for a funeral in a sober, dark suit, I turned up at Sidney’s office, only to be told by Casey, his attractive young secretary, that he never arrived before eleven. The office was in fact a duplex apartment. Sidney had the downstairs part—a huge, two-story living room overlooking the park, together with a bedroom and the master bathroom—while Casey and I shared two small, windowless rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen upstairs. A circular flight of stairs descended to Sidney’s quarters, which, I was warned, I was never to visit unless he invited me to. I sat myself down at a desk in one of the small rooms and started to call around for material on the Hungarian Revolution.
Another Life Page 2
