Later. Wanda is asleep in a motel room, in broad daylight, curled up naked under a sheet. Her empty, oversized vinyl handbag hangs from a hook like a piece of armor. She’s fast asleep; the man from the bar is moving about quietly; he tiptoes past the bed, furtively picks up his shoes; bends down then stands up again with theatrically quick movements: the silent, nimble ballet of the betrayer. That’s it, done. He grabs the suitcase, he’ll get away no problem; in a few minutes now he’ll be on the road, driving without a care in the world—but he bumps into a piece of furniture and she wakes up, hey, she jumps from the bed (suddenly, her fragile nudity), hurriedly starts pulling on her clothes, wait, she turns away, not from him but from us, from our gaze, a brief nod to modesty, wait a minute, he is leaving, she runs after him, wait! He hurries toward his car that’s parked by the motel room, she grabs her bag, still pulling on her blouse she runs after him, he starts the engine, she reaches the door, opens it, throws herself into the passenger seat, they leave. A few moments later the car stops in front of a small diner, he must have told her to go and get something to drink, but she doesn’t even have time to order a milkshake before he has driven off at full speed, leaving her behind on the side of the road.
I find out that when she was fifteen, Barbara Loden could have been crowned Miss Black Mountains, Miss Patriotic Bikini, or Princess Boondock, why not? She always said that North Carolina, where she was born, was hillbilly country. She escaped from there when she ran off to join Robert Brown’s Science Circus, where she earned $2 a show doing acrobatics to demonstrate simple laws of applied physics. She arrived in New York in 1949, seventeen years old and already quite knowing when it came to men. As Candy Loden she posed for photo novellas and women’s magazines. Here she is on the cover of FotoRama, illustrating the story “Where to find a girl,” in the classic pose of the 1950s pin-up girl, wearing a bathing suit, her hair a luxuriant blonde mane, her legs folded beneath her, looking directly at the camera with a knowing smile—though we can be quite sure that this knowing look conceals its opposite, the not-knowing-anything-at-all. It’s the same pose that Marilyn holds, without the bathing suit, in the photographs that Tom Kelley took for a calendar in 1949. Where does it come from? In what distant Neanderthal boudoir was it invented? Is it the sophisticated invention of a 19th century that saw the creation of so many objects designed to fulfill the desires of men? Is it an instinctive gesture of seduction, or the fruit of a long apprenticeship? I find out that for a while she earned a living dancing at the fashionable night club, the Copacabana (in 1950, in All About Eve, the suavely charming George Sanders introduces the ravishing blonde on his arm, it’s Marilyn Monroe of course, in one of her early roles—“Miss Casswell,” he declares, with exaggerated deference, “is an actress … a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art”). I learn that in 1957 Barbara Loden acted in Compulsion by Meyer Levin, on Broadway; in 1959 she played a floozy in Look After Lulu; she appeared on television in the Ernie Kovacs Show (yes of course, that’s her, that tiny little thing who has been miniaturized with special effects, the little elf, the dream woman poking out of Ernie’s pocket, dancing on the tip of his cigar, chatting on his shoulder, so vivacious, always so vivacious. That’s her—always so lighthearted, even when she gets a cream pie or a dart thrown in her face by the entertainer; that’s her too, the woman that Ernie saws in half, always cheerful, of course, always laughing). I learn that she took acting classes with Paul Mann, an excellent teacher of Stanislavsky’s school of Method Acting, and she took other classes too—dance, elocution, singing. She met Elia Kazan when she was twenty-five and he was twice her age. He followed her into the bathroom of the recording studio where he was coming to the end of filming A Face in the Crowd; he wanted to fuck her right there. “Not so fast!” she said; she told him that a woman with any self-respect never does it the first time—the second time maybe (in Breathless, Belmondo puts it this way: “Women are never going to want to do in eight seconds’ time what they will be more than happy to do in eight days’ time”). I find out that Kazan kept trying to break up with her; and that in 1967 he married her.
On February 21, 1971, Barbara told the Sunday News: “I was nothing. I had no friends. No talent. I was like a shadow. I didn’t learn a thing in school. I still can’t count. I hated movies as a child, people on the screen were perfect and it made me feel inferior.” Later on, in the Post: “I used to hide behind doors. I spent my childhood hiding behind my grandmother’s stove. I was very lonely.” Later still, in Positif: “I’ve gone through my whole life like I was autistic, convinced I was worth nothing. I didn’t know who I was, I was all over the place, I had no pride.”
I also discover that she liked Journey to the End of the Night by Céline, Nana by Zola, Breathless by Godard, Maupassant’s short stories, and Andy Warhol’s films.
And so Wanda is killing time in a shopping mall; walking slowly, she stops in front of a shop window, examines the mannequins’ white plastic bodies posed between huge bouquets of yellow and orange flowers, elegant hands hinting at movement, gazes turned toward some obvious common point, as time passes, oozing down the plate-glass window. Wanda is taking refuge in the descriptions of what she sees: a plain dress with opaque tights, a double-breasted check suit, a blonde fringe, a price tag, each detail more charged in substance and meaning than she is (what joy to find your life vindicated at last by the detailed and endless enumeration of everything that passes in front of your eyes), while beyond her the air shudders beneath endless lines of neon lights. Then we see her in full sunlight, walking even more slowly, almost as though she were counting her steps so that her journey won’t come to an end, won’t run its course too soon; occasionally, when she comes across a group of men, she smiles vaguely in their direction to give the impression that she’s busy, trying to look like other people. She goes into a cinema to watch a movie at random. She craves darkness, a love story, some miracle to bear her away. She falls asleep.
I gave up writing the notice—or rather I decided to take it much further, in spite of myself—and instead spent several months trying to piece together the life of Barbara Loden, especially during the time when she was trying to invent a character as close as possible to herself, using another woman’s life as a template. I didn’t have much to go on: a few press cuttings, some photographs, an archive recording of a long interview that she gave in 1970 that was published five years later in Positif, the memoir of her husband Elia Kazan, an American television show that Yoko Ono and John Lennon invited her to appear on. I searched for her name in the indexes of various histories of American cinema, but found no mention of her anywhere. I looked for the names of people who had known her. I was hoping to find the screenplay for Wanda, letters, press cuttings of the news story that originally inspired her, but there were so many obstacles. One person never answered the phone, another wanted money before they would grant me access to anything, another refused to show me the photographs that she had taken of her in the last year of her life. Cultural organizations had better things to do; there were legal complications that meant that I couldn’t get permission to see any files on her. The librarian responsible for the Elia Kazan archives told me she was sorry, but there was nothing in his papers about his second wife. As for those who had worked with her on the film, they were either dead or didn’t want to talk about it. I went to see Frederick Wiseman, the pioneer of interview-free, commentary-free, documentation-free documentary—a film-maker who glides so slowly with his camera into the heart of what he is filming that everyone forgets he is there. I told him about all the difficulties I found myself up against in trying to piece together the life of Barbara Loden. And he said to me—this man, who never works on anything that isn’t real, said to me quite calmly—“Make it up. All you have to do is make it up.”
I think of two characters in La Salamandre, the film by Alain Tanner. A journalist and a novelist go in search of an unknown woman who has just been acquitted of attempted murder. The first one says
, “It’s reality that interests me. Things. You have to be able to touch what can be touched. The first thing you need to do is carry out an investigation.” The other, stooped over his Olivetti, says, “Remember: I don’t want to know anything about her at all.” I find myself wavering between wanting to know nothing and wanting to know everything, writing only on condition that I know nothing, or writing only on condition that I omit nothing.
Barbara said that she had no grand story to tell. No wind of History, none of the political turmoil of the times, nothing illustrative of any social drama. Poverty, perhaps, but not destitution. Violence, yes, but the acceptable face of violence, the kind of banal cruelty enacted within the family. That was all she said. Her own story, enmeshed in this one, is probably no more than the ordinary story of a lonely, unloved child, a child who has been silenced, forced to submit to someone stronger than they are; the kind of sadness that it is not easy to get over—a commonplace story. That is the only reason Barbara made films. To soothe. To heal the pain, assuage the humiliation, process the fear. “Wanda’s character is based on my own life and on my character, and also on the way I understand other people’s lives. Everything comes from my own experience. Everything I do is me.”
Once, during an interview, Marguerite Duras lost her temper: “Self-portrait, I don’t understand what that means. Really, I don’t. How do you want me to describe myself? You know, knowledge is a difficult thing, something that would need to be reassessed, the knowledge of a person. Who are you? Go on, answer me … see?”
Wanda never cries. Actually she does once, much later on, standing at the sink in a motel bathroom. She’s crying and keeps saying I can’t do this, I can’t do this. And perhaps one other time too, but it’s difficult to tell; after that time in the darkened cinema when someone stole what little money she had: night has fallen, she walks into a bar and goes straight to the bathroom, she’s splashing her face with water for a long time, we don’t know if she is crying then. When I cry I overdo it, I am overwhelmed, incapable of holding back the tears, incapable even of dissembling. Tears are perhaps the only articulation, however monstrous, of the part of me that is completely shameless. Sometimes when I am alone I find myself howling silently in front of the mirror as if I wanted to verify a hypothesis. All I can see is a frozen mask of tears, the twisted mouth, its perfect symmetry contorted, its fine lines glistening, my breath in apnea, its silence brutally imprinted on damp skin, a voice asking who is there, beneath the deformed skin. I look. I search for my face in vain, for the one so familiar that looks like a stone.
In the months preceding her death, Barbara Loden consulted numerous doctors. One of them explained to her that her cancer came from the fact that she did not cry enough. He knew how to apply pressure on certain parts of her body to make her cry. She was devastated by the torrent of emotions that erupted like a sudden revelation, even if its meaning was enigmatic. Precious weeks were lost in useless weeping while the illness spread throughout her body.
There are noble words, painstaking words that take time, sublime, fateful pronouncements proffered for eternity; there are simple and profound words; there are sluggish, erratic, deformed, incoherent words—but Barbara’s words, her last, are the only words that manage simultaneously to express both rejection and powerlessness in the face of death: no cliché, rude outburst, or tautology. As she lay dying all she said was, Shit, Shit, Shit, then she spat out some tiny stones—it’s the liver, the nurse said—and died.
And no doubt one bright morning, a still and radiant day, she too had once stood like Clarissa Dalloway at eighteen, “musing among the vegetables,” full of hope on a glorious spring morning as she looked toward the sky, watching the birds swoop through the air, mistaking a brief moment of abundance for the promise of long-lasting happiness.
We will never know the source of the wound that condemns Wanda to this loneliness. We will never know what ancient betrayal or long distant neglect plunged her into this state of constant and absolute distress. We will never know what loss, what absence she cannot get over. We accept her the way we accept ourselves, in blind ignorance, unable to put a name to the grief of existing. Her face, Wanda’s face, inscrutable, sad, obstinate.
To the journalist who asked him one day, “What is the best early training for a writer?” Ernest Hemingway answered, “An unhappy childhood.” How he must have sniggered as he helped himself to another Scotch.
Cap 3000 is situated between Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the right bank of the Var, near the mouth of the river. It was built on the site of a vast marshy area along the coast, a no-man’s-land strategically situated at the crossroads of several major transport routes, near the Nice Côte d’Azur airport. Inaugurated on October 21, 1969, the shopping mall was at the time the largest in France, built on the ultramodern American model and described in the press as “futuristic” and “visionary.” The original promotional brochure proclaimed: “Cap 3000 is a retail center where dreams and leisure are brought together in a pleasant environment with all the necessities of everyday life.” In the yellowing pages of the brochure we see photographs of the rooftop pool whose transparent floor allowed customers at the shopping mall to watch the swimmers from below; we see pictures of brightly colored seating, wide and well-lit walkways, ornamental tiling, the huge glass roof, the lights and decoration. The day we sat and watched Wanda together on the small sofa in her living room, my mother told me how, when she left the courthouse the day that her separation from my father was finalized, leaving the courthouse in Grasse, having lost as a result of the violence that had been inflicted on her all sense of congruity with herself, she said that the only thing she wanted, she thought, that’s what she told me, the only thing she wanted was to go home and see her children; that day she told me how she wandered for hours around Cap 3000 and then, at dusk, how she drove down the coast all the way to Nice where she had lived as a child, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing, falling, time passing, in a state of unendurable grief.
My mother finds it weird that I am interested in this film. Nothing happens, she says, clearing away our dinner tray. Then, from the kitchen: I wonder why you have a taste for sad things.
For hours she wandered around Cap 3000, just wandered around, for hours. From the outside, she says, I must have looked like a doctor’s wife doing some shopping, from the outside what can you see of the deepest despair? We see nothing on Wanda’s face as she drifts around town; all we see is a woman waiting, killing time. I ask my mother whether she met anyone. No, whatever do you mean, no, no one, nothing to write home about, no story, really nothing, no one.
It is nighttime. Wanda has been walking all day. She walks into a bar, a man crouching behind the counter stands up, tells her she can’t come in, hey, we’re closed, walks around the bar, comes toward her, stops her from coming in any further, hey, they nearly collide, but she dodges him and walks briskly toward the bathroom, just one moment, disappears behind us—he paces up and down, nervous, he waits for her to come out, stops abruptly, turns around, stares toward us, beyond us, slim, stern, so nervous that we don’t realize that he is a good-looking man with regular features—we will never know, in fact—so tense, so nervous, again he turns around, stares, paces up and down, comes back—she is still in the bathroom; at long last she is still, silent, she looks at herself in the broken mirror above the washstand, searching for calm, as though she would like to stay here forever, in this tiny space that encloses her, constrains her, protects her; he is like a madman now, his face disfigured by fear and anger, pale with anxiety; she turns on the tap, washes her hands and face, stays there for a long moment with her face in her hands under the stream of water—he can hardly breathe, he dashes forward, turns back, yells at her to come out. At last she does. Between them, concealed behind the bar, lies a man’s body—he must have been knocked out—tied up and gagged. Wanda sits down on a bar stool and asks for a beer, a towel, a comb; she gets all girlish, fixes her hair, whines, picks from a bowl of chips, ch
atters, you know what, tells him she’s just had all her money stolen. His mind is somewhere else, he tries to force open the till, all he can think about is the body of the barman, but he manages to serve her a beer, he looks for a towel but the only one he can find is the one that he used to gag the body stretched out at his feet, he hands her his comb, he lifts one of the window shades, peers out, then suddenly he switches off the lights, says to her let’s go—she answers, sure, thanks.
In February 1972, John and Yoko were invited to present the Mike Douglas Show, a daytime television talk show created in 1961 for a viewing public of middle-class housewives. Each week Mike Douglas would invite a celebrity to choose the week’s programming. It was Yoko’s idea to have Barbara Loden on the show, “because I feel empathy with her.” Barbara, blonde, slim, radiant, joins them in the studio to talk about her film. She explains that Wanda doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows what she doesn’t want; she’s trying to get out of this “ugly type of existence,” but she doesn’t know how to go about it; she’s doing her best; she can’t cope with life, all she knows is that she’s no good at anything. She doesn’t know how to take care of her children. Her only option seems to be to drop out. “Life is a mystery to her.” A pause. No one says anything. Then Mike Douglas invites Yoko Ono to sing her latest—“how shall I call it, Yoko, your latest hit?” “Yes, my latest hit.” Barbara takes a tambourine and joins the Yoko Ono Band on stage while Yoko bellows out postmodern squawks. Lennon is like an overgrown toddler, narcissistic yet timid, a genius worshipping at his muse’s knee, bent over his guitar. Barbara conscientiously plays her part, beating out the rhythm on the tambourine, gently swaying with the music.
Suite for Barbara Loden Page 2
