—If I went to Washington … I could register in the hotel under the name Miss None. —N-u-n? —No, “n-o-n-e”—like nothing. Miss None. I made it up once ’cause I can never remember a fake name, so I just have to think of nothing, and that’s me!
“I thought it was about me,” Barbara told a journalist. “When I read the script I thought, Oh, but how did he know who I was?” Miss None. “Playing Maggie was a real catharsis for me. It was so close to me, so obvious, it was very therapeutic. After the Fall was my destiny.” After the interviewer left, Barbara stayed in her dressing room at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, the bright mass of her blonde wig sitting in front of the mirror. She could hear noises backstage, the dresser going back and forth carrying costumes between dressing rooms, the squeal of hangers on clothes rails, the echo of footsteps in the wings abruptly muted by thick carpet, a door closing, murmurs, little laughs fading away in the distance. Deliciously numbed by the silence, she thought of what Mankiewicz had said about Marilyn: “She remained alone. She was not a loner. She was just plain alone.”
I know from experience that to gain access to the dead you must enter this mausoleum that’s filled with papers and objects, a sealed place, full to bursting yet completely empty, where there is barely room for you to stand upright. What will you find there? Boxes, scraps, fakery, piles of things sweating excess and incompleteness and, in spite of brief triumphs, defeat. You must enter this place as though it means nothing to you, don’t exaggerate but hide your excitement. You go in backwards, groping your way, your restless hands lift heavy layers, you find yourself rummaging through wounds that are yet to be avenged but are you really going to find what you’re looking for lodged between the pages of this notebook filled with names? “There are twenty-five boxes of archives,” Barbara Loden’s son told me over the telephone. “What are you looking for?” he asks in a friendly tone of voice, the kind of tone someone adopts when they have already decided that they aren’t going to let you see anything at all. For a moment I allow myself to imagine that the son is a bit like Andy Warhol with Madame Warhola—that he will have preserved, just as Warhol did in Time Capsule 27, a small collection of his mother’s possessions. He will open up a box, carefully show me each object and, having perhaps grown weary of these little things, perhaps even having grown weary of the memory of his mother, the only pleasure he will derive from this moment will be from watching me look. “What are you looking for?” I should find a balance between involvement and detachment, but I don’t have time to adjust my position. I tell him I don’t know. I can’t tell him that I am desperate to find Barbara Loden’s journal. I can’t tell him that what would interest me in the journal—if it even exists—is not joy, enthusiasm, happiness or fulfillment, but grievance, powerlessness, strange lists, scorned emotions. What secret, other than that of failure, what else do we feel we must hide as carefully as we hide our disappointment? He and I are going to behave as though we know nothing, he of what I’m asking, I of what he is withholding. Buying time, I tell him again no, really, I have no idea. He doesn’t say anything. I should impress him somehow. Doubtless this man doesn’t want to be begged for the thing he has in his possession, nor does he want to be asked for it arrogantly. At this point my dream of a fictional archive seems simpler to fulfil—finding the little yellow Moleskine notebook in Embers, by Sándor Máraï, in which he wrote about the passionate love of a woman for the best friend of the man she had married; the bundle of love letters tied up with red thread in Effi Briest, the letters from the lover whom Effi didn’t love, or at any rate not as much as he loved her, but which she kept anyway, in her sewing box (and once they were discovered, it meant death); the folded sheet of green paper on which is written “the truth speech” that the Klingenfeldt son in Festen is going to read out in front of the guests celebrating his father’s birthday, clutched in the moist hollow of a hand thrust deep in his pocket; my father’s notes for a lecture on forgiveness which he was invited to give—unless he suggested it himself—to members of the Rotary Club of the small provincial town where he lived. Or the heap of letters that Bartleby, employed at the Dead Letter Office, is slowly filing away: “Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: —the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity: —he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers anymore; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” And when Barbara died, Kazan’s discovery, in the chaos that her bedroom had become, hidden among piles of manuscripts, notes, screenwriting projects, heaps of clothes and other bits and pieces, of an old dentist’s cabinet in which are packets of notebooks tied together with string and held in place by magnetic bands, her diary, and a letter, an unanswered letter from a man whom Barbara was in love with, who wrote to tell her that he was not in love with her. “What are you looking for?” he asked me, again.
Barbara’s closest professional associate, with whom she made Wanda and with whom she co-wrote other screenplays, planned other movies, dreamed of another life, wrote to me one day: “I don’t want to talk to you. For me that film, made forty years ago, is no longer part of my life. It is no longer part of my life, do you understand, it is no longer part of who I am.”
I wasn’t able to gain access to any of the papers that might have allowed me, documents in hand, to retrace the life of Barbara Loden. In the end it was a novel that allowed me to get closer—though still not very close—to what I was trying to find. In 1967 Kazan published The Arrangement, a novel which he said gave him deep satisfaction, “I was more proud of this book than I was of any of my films or plays.” For the director of On the Waterfront, Splendor in the Grass, and America, America, The Arrangement gave him “a tremendous sense of liberation.” Today, we would call it autofiction. Kazan wrote it after the deaths of his father and his first wife Molly, and after Barbara had left him because he didn’t want to marry her. “A true expression of anger, love, and bewilderment, this book was nothing other than the recreation, pure and simple, of my own life, in fiction.” But between the writing of the book and its publication, he and Barbara got back together and married. The Arrangement came out the year he married Barbara and was a success. To sum up briefly: one day, without warning, Eddy Anderson decides to renounce everything—his career as a brilliant publicist, his loving and indulgent wife, the beautiful house and swimming pool. He’s had enough of lying, he’s sick of the slick, dishonest arrangement of his life; he says he wants to find meaning in his existence. But there is Gwen Hunt, his mistress, a woman who “had it all … scent, taste, touch, pressure, urges, a voracious appetite, subtle joy, a delicate hand, a desperate sequence of naked sounds and expressions, telling of the danger that is to come—she had it all.” The book recounts the tortured path the hero takes to find himself, through his relationship with this woman. Wait a moment. Even if Kazan does claim that “truth is the best basis for fiction,” there is no reason to read this text as anything other than what it is (a novel), or to assume that Gwen is who she isn’t (Barbara). Nor is there any reason to look for the truth about a woman in a novel written by her husband. What is the “arrangement” of the title anyway? Apparently Barbara Loden vehemently reproached Kazan for his lack of discretion regarding her privacy—not only in the fact that he recounted many intimate details of their relationship that were easily recognizable to their close friends, but also elements of her personal history. Nonetheless it seems that the real betrayal was not that Kazan used her and their story to create a character and a novel; the real betrayal was that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—insist that she be given the role of Gwen when The Arrangement was adapted for the screen in 1969. The producers cast Faye Dunaway in the role, in the wake of her performance as the dazzling heroine of Arthur Penn’s 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. It’s not hard to imagine how bitter Barbara must have felt: a major role sli
ps from her grasp, a chance at last of real recognition, and the part, her own character, dramatized on the page without her prior knowledge, performed by the woman who had been her understudy in After the Fall back in 1964, her shadow who suddenly became more than her very self. The Arrangement. Some of Barbara’s closest friends hated the book. They were torn between hating it because it was a novel and hating it because it was true—they thought that these were two different things. When Gwen talks about her unhappy childhood, her violent father and passive mother, the incestuous rape by an uncle who would slip into her bed at night, how she ran away as soon as she could and joined a little troupe doing sales events in local malls, these were the stories that Kazan and other people used to tell about Barbara, and some were things that Barbara herself used to talk about. “I thought it was about me.”
I can still see Wanda’s face in the hotel room, I can see her face when she is standing in front of her boss at the sweatshop, when he’s telling her that she’s too slow and he doesn’t need her, I can see her face when she has been left at the side of the road, or when Mr. Dennis suddenly sits up shouting, I can see her eyes switching off, her face going pale, the lines as they set around her mouth. I don’t know how an actress manages to make her face turn so realistically wan and haggard as soon as the camera is switched on. They must have had to reshoot some scenes, how did that work? Humiliation? Action! How do you believe yourself humiliated—but no, it’s not a belief—how do you act humiliated, or, crazier still, make yourself be humiliated but without any motive for the humiliation? Is it a state of being; is it the imitation of a state of being? Is it something glimpsed, grasped in complete clarity? Or is it extracted, dragged out, almost in spite of yourself? When I put this question to a group of actresses most of them said that they didn’t know, that it sort of happened on its own; one of them, quoting Jouvet and Stanislavski, talked about “dramatic situation” and “affective memory”—like some ideal theoretical horizon, like those pamphlets about how to die, and as for what happens afterwards, well, then it’s everyone for himself; one said to me, “It’s very simple—you can’t act an emotion that you haven’t experienced”; one talked at length about what Lacan wrote about playing Hamlet, how the actor uses his unconscious, and she ended up saying the same thing as the others, that she didn’t know (I don’t know, they each said, I don’t want to think about it, I just want to carry on making these movements, saying these words, without knowing where they come from, in blissful ignorance, I don’t want to think about it because I don’t want to risk losing it. But losing what? That’s the point, I don’t want to know, knowing what it was would destroy it, I don’t want to think about it so that I don’t risk losing it; and so on, and so on). Finally one stood up and said that in order to talk about it you have to talk about something else; she looked away into the middle distance as if she were searching for that other thing even though I think that she had already found it, then she went and took a book down from a shelf, found the page straightaway, and read aloud in a beautiful, low voice: “Everything we invent is the truth, do not doubt it. Poetry is as precise as geometry. The conclusion is as good as its deduction, and, at a certain point, we no longer deceive ourselves in matters of the soul.” She fiddled with the top button of her jacket, with its too-short sleeves: “This is what Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in August 1853, it’s more interesting than Madame Bovary, c’est moi, don’t you think?” I had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that I must have dozed off for a moment and lost the thread of our conversation, I had no idea which one of us was waiting for an answer to what forgotten question. A kind of vibration hung in the room, the echo of a phrase that she had read out: “I lack both the idea and the words, I have only the feeling.” The last word was unnecessarily stressed; it weighed like the illusion of some private knowledge between us, something grotesque and a little improper that perhaps we shared.
To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.
On the set of India Song, Delphine Seyrig said, “The common denominator that I share with all women is that I’m an actress. I think that every woman has to be an actress. Actresses do what all women are expected to do. We just throw ourselves into it more.” Barbara Loden, through Wanda, shows us just one thing: a woman who throws herself into acting the role of a woman—not yielding, charming, or irresistible, not ironic, powerful, or dangerous, but absent, elusive, trying to slip away, completely indifferent to wrongdoing. A woman on the run or in hiding, concealing her pain and her refusal, putting on an act in order to break free. A woman, through and through: an actress. “I was like the living dead,” Barbara told Michel Ciment in an interview in 1975, “I lived like a zombie for a long time, until I was nearly thirty.” It is the pale, silent figure of Wanda that provides the avatar that allows her to come alive. Describing Marilyn’s acting, Arthur Miller said, “Ultimately something nearly godlike would emerge from this depersonalization.” But what Barbara does is the opposite: she knows that what matters is to be true to oneself—a secret, difficult thing—and she pieces herself together as a person through Wanda. “I used to be a lot like that. I had no identity of my own. I just became whatever I thought people wanted me to become.” She says she was anesthetized, purposeless, that fortunately Wanda wasn’t a difficult role for her because she’s so passive; she says, “I feel very close to her emotionally.” “An actor is linked to his character like a corpse to his coffin,” one of the actresses said to me.
Barbara Loden, Post, September 1971: “Well, I am me and I made it. That’s all.”
My favorite: the interview in Cahiers du Cinéma with Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert. Cahiers du Cinéma: Tell me about what happens between now and filming. Chabrol: Napping. Huppert: Sleeping, withdrawing. Disappearing inside oneself. Later on she says: “The more one is absent, the greater chance one has of being present in front of the camera.” And he says: “I don’t think the art of the actor is about leaving oneself behind, it’s the opposite: going more deeply inside oneself.” And she says: “I think the most important characteristic of an actor is passivity.”
During a conversation in the lounge of one of the grand Parisian hotels, after Barbara Loden had died, Duras said to Kazan, “Wanda is a film about somebody. Have you ever made a film about somebody? When I say somebody, I mean somebody whom you’ve singled out, whom you can see for who they are, detached from the social context in which you first came across them. I think there is always some trace of something in yourself that society can’t touch, something inviolable, impenetrable, determining.” She added: “There is an immediate and definite coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda.”
The light goes on. I can see Barbara’s face. The light goes off. Wanda is leaning over the man lying beside her, watching him. The light goes on. A woman is walking alone through a shopping mall. The light goes off.
But the encyclopedia entry, the writing of the entry, is precisely about turning away from coincidence. Please, just write me an entry for the encyclopedia, not a self-portrait, the editor begged me. Later, when I set off on the road to Connecticut and Pennsylvania to locate some of the sites where Wanda was filmed, I asked myself if all writers of short encyclopedia entries have to grapple with coincidence, as I found myself doing. I explained to the editor that I wanted to put in everything about Wanda and everything about Barbara—the impossible truth and the indescribable object, a soul that is lucid and afraid, hiding within another, and that I wanted to add an elegy in praise of wandering beneath the bleached Pennsylvania sky, without forgetting the grandiose comic-heroic game of inner disaster. The editor took off his glasses and breathed rather longer than necessary on the lenses, misting them meditatively before carefully wiping them clean. He seemed relieved when I told him I was leaving.
&nb
sp; It took me a while to find the name of the woman who inspired the character of Wanda, the actual woman whose story was told in newspaper articles, the one who expressed such relief when her long sentence for being the accomplice of a bank robber shot dead at the scene was pronounced. There was no clue, no date (Barbara used to talk about the newspaper report without mentioning either the name of the newspaper or the date). Was it in 1961 or 1966? Was it by some fluke the 5th of August 1962, the date when Marilyn Monroe was discovered dead on her bed, or February 21, 1965, the day Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem? In New Jersey, Connecticut, or Pennsylvania? Just a brief paragraph or a complete news report? I wrote one more time to Barbara Loden’s son to ask him for a copy of the clipping which must surely be among her papers. He didn’t reply. After a long period of mind-numbing research in the archives of various American newspapers from the 1960s, with the help of my friend Hélène—an outstanding researcher who, by strange coincidence, had once managed to locate the newspaper article that had inspired Marguerite Duras to write the screenplay for the film The Long Absence, when by an accident verging on genius she came across an article, one page among literally thousands, in the Parisien Libéré, as she was rewinding a microfilm—after a long period of sifting through the archives together she finally found the article in the section “Justice Story” of the Sunday Daily News of March 27, 1960, entitled “The Go-For-Broke Bank Robber.” Totally overwhelmed by the sheer mass of documents and discouraged by the enormity of the task ahead of her, she decided at the end of a long and exhausting day of research to pick a newspaper at random from the voluminous batch that the archivist had just brought to her desk, and the moment I heard her victorious cry all the thrill of the quest evaporated. An overwhelming sense of sorrow overtook me during the exhausting period of going through these pages and I immediately lost all interest in the subject for a period of several weeks, filled with regret for ever having allowed myself to be overtaken by the urge to pinpoint the source of the story. What I wanted was an ending, not a new beginning.
Suite for Barbara Loden Page 4
