Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  Standing in awe in the midst of my villa, I realised immediately why we had gone broke. It must have cost thousands and thousands. It had. And more was to come. The entire place was carpeted, wall to wall, up and down stairs, in dark brown. Visconti, on the first morning of his inspection, with not one single cent left in the bank and some of the film still impounded at the airport in Düsseldorf for non-payment of bills, tapped his foot gently on the acres of carpet, shook his head gently, and said, “No”. In appalled horror his designers and assistants and production staff, trailing behind him as if he was indeed an Emperor, implored him to explain. It was very simple. There was a muffled sound through the villa … no sound of feet clacking on polished wood, no sense of urgency would be heard, hurrying feet, running feet, frightened feet, stealthy feet. It was ruin to the atmosphere, it must be relaid, immediately with wood: parquet flooring, polished, shining, cold. The floor must play the music of fear.

  It did. It took six men five days to rip up and relay, in oak and beech wood blocks, the two floors and staircase of the house. And Visconti was right. Now the house rang with a clear, cold steel sound. Of course. It caused a tremendous scandal in Rome; and everyone prophesied ruin for the film. They were nearly right. With the cost of the floors and the cost of the flowers and costumes alone, Losey and I could have made “King and Country” twice. But this was Visconti. The attention which he paid to the smallest detail was incredible. Always I had been brought up in the cinema to believe that they would never see it. They being the much maligned audience. This was the direct opposite of Visconti’s theory which was that they would all see it, feel it, smell it; and they were not to be cheated. Fires were fires, and burned from real logs. The meals we ate at the dinner scene, which went on for three solid weeks in sweltering heat in the studios which were not air-conditioned, were cooked and brought in by Alfredo’s in Rome. Wood was wood, never plaster, and wood was wood indeed. Silk was also silk. I had learned texture from Losey; but this was really texture, and if Visconti’s excesses sometimes seemed self-indulgent he never, at any time, excused them. Save by example. The old man I must kill with my small revolver lay propped up in his vast walnut bed. The room softly lit, the sheets and pillows, vast and of the finest silk, he lay white and ashen, his veins green as malachite, raised across hands and arms, like tributaries of the Amazon. A dinosaur for dying. Visconti took up a pint plastic bottle of real blood (bought from a local Accident Clinic) and with careful aim sprayed the venerable corpse, his silken sheets, his pillows, his nightgown of finest lawn, the bed even, walls and carpets. It was a cavern of blood.

  “Visconti! It is too much surely? Excessive?”

  He looked at me from beneath his craggy brows, balefully, as if I had questioned his pedigree. With a swift movement he threw the plastic squeezy-bottle into my astonished grasp.

  “You are English, Bogarde? You must know your heritage … Shakespeare? You know your text to ‘Macbeth’ … you remember, ‘who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’, is a line from ‘Macbeth’? I am correct? Not excessive, Elizabethan perhaps. I tell you, I make opera in the cinema. Macbeth is opera, this death is opera. Ecco, capisci, Bogarde?”

  But on occasion this desire for texture took up a great deal of time; and that, coupled with the on and off situation, grabbing money in small parcels whenever possible to pay for the excesses like the dozens of roses and lilies, the exact beautiful Art Deco jars to hold them, and his alarming rages if they were not immediately available, put the shooting time of the film in a frightful mess. My looming commitment to Mr Strick in Tunis bothered no one but myself; Visconti was, I feel sure, convinced that when the moment came for me to pack up on his opera and fly to “Justine” I would refuse, and stay on in Rome ignoring my future assignment. It was a repeat of “The Lonely Stage” situation, and I grew increasingly nervous as each day’s delay continued either in a search of ready cash or else of a particular object with which to decorate a scene. I would arrive at Cinecitta every morning at seven-thirty in the hopes that work would proceed. Very often it did not. Sometimes there was no Visconti to be seen, and no one dared to telephone him to ask why. So I was often handed the instrument, after someone in the office had bravely dialled the number of his country house at Castelgondolfo, and asked to find out why.

  “No one has paid me one single lira for two weeks. I do not work. Where are you?”

  “At the Studio.”

  “Come to the house, is better here by the pool, Rampling is here too, she has not been paid. We do not work today.”

  I would then relay the news to the worried crew members and go to Castelgondolfo where Charlotte Rampling and one or two others of the cast not immediately working nor yet paid would be sitting in rather hopeless heaps round the pool. Visconti would be happily working away at something in his study. Charlotte, whose big break this was—Visconti had chosen her for his film because “she has the beautiful eyes of tragedy … she can be one day a big, big star … it is her decision, not mine: mine to have her, but hers to take the chance”,—was naturally depressed. No work, no money, and what, we all wondered, would happen if the film was, like so many before it, quite suddenly abandoned? It was a possibility which seemed to go with the kind of pictures I had elected to make. A haunting.

  “Luchino, you know I have to leave for Tunis in a few days?”

  “Tunis! What for Tunis?”

  “For another film. ‘Justine’.”

  “Non possibile. We do not finish this yet! How to Tunis and this not finished?”

  “I’ll have to leave you and come back after I finish ‘Justine’.”

  “When you finish, you think?”

  “After Christmas.”

  “Ayee! Is now October! What do I do, Bogarde … you leave? We have one big, big scena, in the steel works, is essential, is not possible to go.”

  But go I had to. He was very philosophical in the end. He would have to shoot what he could of the film which remained without me, and then settle down until I could be released from Mr Strick. So be it. He would wait.

  “But we must have a little party before you go. You must show your respects to the troupe, is very important. Some beer, some sandwiches, I will arrange. Very simple.”

  The night of the farewell party, my beer and sandwich “thank you” to the troupe, I arrived at the studio canteen at the appointed hour to find it dark, chairs stacked, a cool wind whipping through the pines in the shaggy gardens. A night watchman said that the party was being held on the set of the villa. Visconti had staged my party for me. Lights blazed from every corner of the immense set, fires crackled, a bar ran the length of one room, and the entire cast and crew was present, dressed in their best frocks and suits, all laughing and applauding as I walked, bewildered, to the high-backed chair in the centre of the great hall where Visconti sat smiling brightly and offered me a brimming glass of champagne.

  “Is such a ‘orribile place, the studio canteen, no? And we have this, all this, free; and the party is so big, everyone has come to honour you.” He meant himself, but no matter. I accepted the wine and the compliment intended. “It is Krug, non-vintage,” he said, looking at my worried face. “Beer is not right for this kind of parting.”

  It was a night of great happiness and also great sadness. I hated the idea of leaving them all tomorrow; we had fought such a tremendous battle together, from Unterach onwards, that I wanted to be there to the end. However, that was not possible; I would have to put “Götterdämmerung”, for myself at least, into cold storage. At eleven-thirty, an enormous cake arrived in the shape of the dreadful, ornate villa, and amidst cries of delight and much applause I was presented with a cigarette case inscribed by every member of the unit. The gesture brought me to the edge of tears, it was so entirely unexpected, and Visconti, in his great chair, nodded smiling and demanded a little speech which I made, appallingly, in fractured Italian, with a very full heart.

  It had been a splendid party, we
all agreed. All that remained for me to do was to pick up the bill. Which rocked me gently when it arrived the next morning at the Hassler just before I left for Tunis. It had all been most tactfully done, Visconti had smiled only, waved a vague hand and called, “Ciao, Bogarde” as we parted, and I was left to walk alone through the night, under the sighing parasol pines to my car. He knew how to handle his horses.

  * * *

  Arnold was at the airport at Tunis to meet me. The sun sparkled on the blinding white city, on the dusty roads, on the walls of livid bougainvillaea. Rome was only forty-five minutes away by air, but already lost to me.

  We settled into the car for the journey to the hotel on the beach where I would stay during the location. Arnold was full of news, but first of all, after a separation of some months, wanted mine.

  “How’s the family, Dad? Your Mum?”

  “Oh fine … how’s June? And your boy?”

  “Great … he’s almost talking. Visconti all right?”

  “The greatest ever. I miss him.”

  Arnold stared out of the window at some passing camels. “You will, gov, you will. It is all a bit of a cock up here.”

  “Oh God! Not another?”

  “This is the revised script.” He handed me a fat package. “And there is one other thing which will make you happy, I hate to tell you, but we have to go to Hollywood for the studio work. Not Paris.”

  “What!”

  “Changed their minds. L.A. now.”

  “I can’t go to Hollywood! I haven’t finished the Visconti thing … there is a week’s work left to do.”

  “You’ll have to fly back from lovely L.A., that’s all.”

  In the dusty road a small boy thrashed a plodding donkey.

  “What about Mr Strick, is he all right?”

  Arnold lit a cigarette and blew smoke steadily ahead of him. “He’s a nice man. A bit lost: they’ve only been working a week. It’s early days. You know; it’s a funny thing, do you know the aggregate age of the camera crew is three hundred?”

  “The aggregate what?”

  “The age. Is about three hundred and I’m not kidding. Everyone is into sixty knocking seventy … maybe more even. Goldie, now he’s really nice, told me he already bought a double-plot at Forest Lawn. Cost him a bomb. It’s on a hillside, see? No seepage. You pay more to stay dry. The Sound Mixer can’t get around too well so they push him and his equipment about on a cart.” He spun the spent match through the open window. “Trouble is they made the thing too wide for the doors, so he has to stay outside the Sets mostly and can’t get to see the action. It’s all a bit weird. Most of them did their first Movies with Constance Talmadge and the Gish Sisters. You’re in for a few surprises, Gov.”

  “I have already had a few.”

  He laughed nervously: “Oh well … that’s Show Business.”

  Hollywood has always been praised for its extraordinary efficiency. A German inheritance? It does not work, alas, outside the city itself. We were a lost rabble. Nothing was just exactly what it should be. Except for Mr Strick who was calm, apparently genial, and enthusiastic even though little of Mr Durrell remained in the revised-from-Hollywood script. Anouk Aimée was wan and sad for most of the time, since she had suddenly realised, too late, that her decision to accept “Justine” had most probably been, for one reason or another, a serious error of judgement on her part, and was now feeling abandoned and lonely; she had brought her two cats with her from Paris to keep her company and fed them on fillet steak which angered the waiters in the hotel who had to make do with chick-peas. Everyone got some form of Tunis stomach; the company flew in Jumbo loads of American Press weekly, whom we had to entertain and deal with socially in the “fabled city of Tunis” while they watched, with some degree of boredness, and eye irritation from the constantly blowing dust, the shooting of this “great saga of literature”; and I shortly discovered that none of my costumes fitted nor were right for the seedy character of Pursewarden with which I was trying, against all these odds, to come to terms. I was swamped by the gravest misgivings.

  After four incredible, unorganised, miserable weeks we were flown off to lovely Los Angeles just in time for Christmas, and a total overhaul. That is to say, Mr Strick was replaced by George Cukor, the four weeks’ work in Tunis was all scrapped, and everything started from scratch again. Cukor, once again stepping into the breach, employed three Literature students from nearby U.C.L.A. to sift through all four books which comprised Mr Durrell’s masterpiece, and had restored, to what characters remained, some of the original dialogue, so that at least one felt one was speaking the writer’s written word; it gave a little courage in a sagging epic. Cukor, as ever filled with boundless enthusiasm, struggled and fought and began wresting shape into the soggy mass. But the Studio, now alerted to the early disaster in Tunis too late, sliced the budget and applied the brakes; we were also constantly trapped by the idiotic rules of Old Hollywood. Forbidden, because of the Decency Laws or something, to use real children in the Children’s Brothel, we were forced to employ elderly dwarfs instead, swathed in veils or strategically placed back to camera. Most of the sets looked like the Coffee Shop in the Tunis Hilton; everything was clean and neat; and even wretched Michael York was forced to wear a flesh-coloured pair of briefs for his seduction scene on a beach, and striped flannel pyjamas when he was in bed. Hollywood’s decadent, fabled Alexandria had all the mystery, allure and sin of Derry and Toms’ roof garden.

  None of this was Mr Cukor’s fault, perhaps the most cultured and erudite of all Hollywood directors. It was the Studio system to which he was, of necessity, bound. He had generously taken over an established production and just had to make do with what he found, and although he found some pretty rum things he made do marvellously, although he constantly longed to return to Durrell’s books and remove the whole benighted effort out to Alexandria itself and shoot it all there. However, this was not to be; we struggled on under his blazing enthusiasm, his infectious love of the cinema, his boundless energy and quite extraordinary capacity for teaching. He wanted one to learn, and by Heaven, one learned. He swept us all along on a glorious wave of mounting excitement and determination, it was really very much like working with Visconti. The same dogged battles for perfection as far as it could possibly be achieved. And sometimes he was fighting against immense odds, and the perfection which he sought became ever harder to accomplish. There were some incredibly awful bits of original casting which he was powerless to change, and half his vibrant energies were spent in bullying, cajoling, pleading and encouraging performances of one kind and another out of these wooden, self-indulgent method actors. However, in spite of these harrowing vicissitudes, he fought bravely on, with the enthusiastic assistance of the splendid Philippe Noiret and Anna Karina, and we took every opportunity which he offered, and he was prodigal, to profit from his experience and knowledge.

  “How nice it would be,” he once said ruefully, “if some time, somewhere, you and I could do a whole picture together right from the beginning!” It was a compliment to cherish, but, alas! we were never able to manage it. And so we worked on into a wet, fog-shrouded, December.

  But Christmas was coming, and after it I would be that much nearer to my return to Italy. Visconti sent constant sad little notes asking me when I thought I could come, and reminding me sternly that he had an Opera, a real one, to stage in Milan and that nothing should come in the way of it … please would I ask Hollywood and Mr Cukor, whom he much admired, to hurry a little? No one wanted to hurry away more than I did. It was a forlorn Christmas when it finally came, spent in pouring rain; the plastic Christmas trees dripped and sagged along every street, absurd and vulgar among the palms, and “Jingle Bells” blared from speakers at every corner. Down on Wilshire Boulevard there was a small cage of reindeer, rhinestone in their antlers, coats dyed pink and hoofs gilded. They stood huddled in the rain in mute subjection while the pink puddled round their shabby golden hoofs, and the rhinestones scaled off like
shining scabs.

  “Happy Yuletide,” cried my chauffeur as he dropped me at the hotel on Christmas Eve. “I don’t wish you a Happy Christmas on account of this is a Jewish Town and they don’t care for the connotation; so it’s Yuletide; saves a lot of feelings; we don’t have Christmas here.”

  In the bungalow, set amidst sodden palms and the squelching lawns of the hotel garden, a log fire crackled in the sitting room, a handful of cards cluttered the mantelshelf. Robins, a Mickey Mouse with plastic eyes, Tower Bridge in a blizzard. Arnold came in with presents and we had a beef stew for supper, cooked in the kitchenette, with a couple of bottles of Nappa Valley Beaujolais and watched the first men round the moon trying, agonizingly, to fire their motors and break away from its orbit. Which they did eventually; as they came round from the far side of the moon a low, and relieved, voice was heard to say, “Let it be known that Santa Claus does exist!” which put all the idiocy and vulgarity of Hollywood firmly into perspective.