Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  ‘So you have someone special for me this time, Brian?’ the Marquise asked, all eager. ‘Yes, he works in Harrods. The fish counter. Simon. Special. And reliable, won’t steal the silver. Real gentleman’s gentleman. He’s looking for work in Paris, with someone … sympathetic. I can send him over.’ ‘I’d like that, except … the fish counter?’ ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, he’s scrupulously clean. They’re fussy about that sort of thing in Harrods.’ I think the favours that la Marquise had done Brian earlier on his Paris visits, and was to do again that evening, were to advance him good whacks of cash-in-hand in return for Brian’s flesh-in-hand arrangements for him.

  In any case Brian always had big bundles of thousand-franc notes on him in Paris and we would go on, with Gerard Oury and others, to Allard, the small old brass and velvet restaurant on the rue St André des Arts, where Brian knew the head waiter and had his usual dishes – foie gras, then delicate lamb chops in a fennel sauce or with redcurrant jelly, a lemon sorbet and a ripe camembert to finish. And then the wine. ‘Old Clos de Vougeout is the best here,’ Brian told us that first evening in the restaurant. But this Burgundy wasn’t available and the wine waiter brought a Premier Cru Margaux for Brian’s inspection instead. ‘Oh, that’ll do,’ he said. ‘That’ll do.’ This was his standard reply in life or in a restaurant when offered something even better than what he’d first expected or ordered.

  The next day we went to see what for Brian was the best, the most beautiful sight in Paris, the stained glass windows at Sainte-Chapelle. ‘Always answers my prayers,’ he told me on the way over the river to the chapel. And indeed he did pray sometime after we’d arrived, at the marvellous, rose-gold, ethereal windows in the upper chapel, standing head bowed, very much the seeming penitent.

  Afterwards he said: ‘Real Choir of Angels stuff, isn’t it? In the late twenties, when I first saw these windows, I was living with a woman – a good woman, but she didn’t appreciate them. But I was so excited by them I couldn’t think of anything else, couldn’t sleep. Painted versions of the windows all night back at my studio, slept in an armchair and when I woke next morning she’d upped and gone.’ ‘Were you in love with her?’ He thought a moment, then said, ‘Yes, I was.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Yeats’s “Perfection of the life, or of the work?”’ he said. ‘I was going for the great work then, when I should have taken up with her properly, even married her. But what does it matter …’ He turned, and hands on hips, very upright, strolled away in his leisurely John Wayne-style walk into the blaze of coloured afternoon light from the windows.

  There were other equally illuminating moments for me with Brian in France in the autumn of 1956. One of Brian’s Paris friends was the American Cynda Glen who years before had come to Paris to pursue her talent as a show dancer, had met Erich von Stroheim and had later become his companion at the Von’s chateau out at Maurepas, a village twenty-five miles south-west of Paris. The great Erich von Stroheim, of Greed, Queen Kelly and Renoir’s La Grande Illusion.

  This last film, and Stroheim’s performance as the Prussian officer, the brutish-looking, neck-braced but sensitive First World War prison camp commandant, had moved me as much as any film when I’d seen it at the Everyman in Hampstead. And now Brian, offhand, said he was going out to see Cynda and her friend the Von and would I like to come too? Well, I would. And I did.

  We were staying at the Raphael, and Brian, who never visited people in less than his Bentley, hired a chauffeured Cadillac and off we went that autumn day out to Maurepas. The château, behind high walls and elm trees at the edge of the village, was hardly that, more a Gothic Charles Adamish villa. The old master, then in his last months, was upstairs, bedridden. Cynda Glen met us in the salon. She was a wonderfully vibrant little woman, in her late fifties, red-haired, quick eyes, funny, sassy, subtle, provocative, but with an underlying toughness. The salon was extraordinary. It was a setting straight out of one of von Stroheim’s extravagant 1920s silent epics: a large, dark, tatty room crammed with decrepit furnishings, a vast grand piano, Prussian sabres on the walls, pistols and spurs, a great dusty ship’s lantern hanging from the ceiling, frayed carpets, together with a lot of knick-knacks everywhere, ashtrays in the shape of stirrups, a high-backed brass-studded Spanish saddle on a wooden horse, Hollywood photographs all over the piano, silver cigarette boxes engraved with messages from Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson. But the pièce de résistance in this old movie set were the ducks – a little flock, tame and vociferous, wandering in and out, pecking at the piano legs and relieving themselves happily on the Turkish carpets while we sipped Kir Royal.

  Brian asked me to wait while he went upstairs with Cynda to see how things were with the Von. I went outside, and walked down the gardens, along a back drive towards a little gate lodge. It was a dank, misty autumn afternoon and the cotton wool mist swirled around me as I passed a series of rotting parallel bars and hand swings in the gloom, von Stroheim’s old exercise yard.

  The gate lodge was deserted, locked in front, but a door round the back was ajar. I peered in, and went inside. It had been adapted long before as a cutting room. There was a rusty movieola on a bench and cans of his old nitrate films piled up beneath it. On one wall were various notices, mementoes from other cutting rooms and sound stages, in Paris, Hollywood, Berlin: ‘Silence – Le Rouge Est Mis!’ ‘No Smoking!’ ‘C’est Interdit de …’ ‘Verboten …’ On the opposite wall were pale photographs with scrawled signatures: D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Chaplin. A room beyond was filled with other tatty bits and pieces from von Stroheim’s movie career: cabin trunks bursting with old props, scripts and call sheets. In corners lay larger objects: a twisted First World War aircraft propeller, a German army commandant’s uniform and a collection of stiffened corsets and neck braces, all from La Grande Illusion no doubt. Elsewhere lay a wardrobe of gilded jackets and cloaks, a spiked Prussian helmet, sabres, jodhpurs, riding boots, the buckles tarnished, the leather green with damp – the romantic, violent detritus of von Stroheim’s life, half fact, half fiction. The Von’s life was fading back at the château, and so was his fiction here in the gate lodge – in the cans of nitrate film scattered about, together with the sabres, jodhpurs and corsets, all imperceptibly decaying, the autumn mist seeping through the cracked windows.

  Later Cynda brought me up to see the Von. He lay flat out in a small austere bedroom, beneath a blackened crucifix, a shrunken figure with a strangely innocent face, a shadow Prussian officer, where the child had now indeed become father to the man, a white sheet tucked right up under his chin like a great nursery bib. But his eyes were alight, filled with glittery life, unblinking, fascinated by something, gazing straight upwards as if at some last, extravagant, perfectly imagined, uncut epic of his being projected on the ceiling.

  Then, as I was quietly introduced, Cynda said I was working in pictures and hoped to be a director and the shrivelled bullet head turned towards me. A momentary glance, then a finger raised for an instant above the sheet: a blessing in disguise, I thought, recommending me to that thronging celluloid world I was entering and he was about to leave forever.

  Towards the end of that year I was back running around Pinewood again and no nearer getting a union ticket. But then in the spring of 1957, luck came my way again. At the time Rank was extending their production empire overseas and had opened up an operation in Paris, financing French movies. Brian heard about this and talking to the right people in Pinewood, got me a job as a runner on the first of these Rank-financed pictures: a James Hadley Chase thriller, Retour de Manivelle – Kickback – being shot on location along the Riviera and at the old Studios de la Victorine in Nice. Apart from board and lodging the job was unpaid, but Brian said he’d send me out a few thousand francs now and then, which he did.

  The unit was already down in Nice and I was to join them. I expected a long slog on a slow train south. But those were still the big free-spending days in movies. And since Rank were paying the costs anyway, the French production manag
er, when I met him in Paris, gave me a ticket for Le Train Bleu – which was why the following day I was on the all-first-class silver bullet approaching Lyon at ninety miles an hour, getting in to Nice just before six o’clock, and taking a taxi to the Hotel Negresco where the unit was staying. In fact they weren’t there that evening – they were out night shooting somewhere, and I missed them again next morning when they’d left early. Something of a panic then. Where was I to go? But a few minutes later a chauffeur approached me deferentially in the hotel lobby. ‘Monsieur Hone? Your car is ready.’ And I was taken out along the coast road in a big American limo to the location, Edouard de Rothschild’s sensational villa and exotic glass-walled gardens perched right on the tip of St Jean Cap Ferrat.

  Here, expecting to start my most menial tasks as a runner, I was treated instead with unexpected deference, offered a canvas chair by one of the assistants and given a front-row view of the first set-up; Daniel Gélin, as the crooked chauffeur in the story, pulling up repeatedly in an elegant old Rolls Royce in front of the even more elegant villa. It was some days before I managed to play any active part in the production – keeping the crowds away, calling the actors and so on. And when I started to do this the reaction to my labours was one of surprise and mistrust.

  Eventually, I discovered why. The French lighting cameraman – a wry, withdrawn, amused soul, fluent in English when he wasn’t pondering the sun and the clouds through a smoked eye-glass – told me the producers believed I was a spy, sent out directly by Lord Rank himself, assigned to the unit in the guise of assistant, but in fact sent down here to see that milord’s money wasn’t being squandered on fripperies and extravagances.

  Of course, a film unit in those days, especially on location, drew its life’s blood from just such excess, and Retour de Manivelle was no exception. It was an expensive production in any case, with a three-month schedule, extensive locations and studio sets, and with Michèle Morgan – then France’s number one female box-office draw – as co-star with Gélin, together with a number of other major French and German actors. And all devoted to this trivial série noire thriller, a serpentine but banal tale of murder, blackmail and double-dealing. Claude Charbrol might have made something of it all. But this, in 1957, was just before the onset of the French New Wave, when the industry in France, fatigued after its long brilliance, was settling for less, with Hollywood gangster imitations, costume romps, theatrical adaptations and general run-of-the-mill bourgeois-titillating pap.

  The director, Denys de La Patellière – a quick-thinking, tubby, pipe-clenching little man in a suede jacket – did his best with the rigmarole of a script, transforming many of the trite scenes and much of the flat, tough-guy dialogue with deft invention, encouraging the actors to play against the lines, promoting ironies, games between the players, which were never in the script to begin with.

  As for me these flaws in the movie didn’t matter at all. Here I was, working in the illustrious French cinema, on location around Eden Roc or at Rothschild’s villa all day, in a back room of the fabled Negresco by night, with several months of the same to come, in the company of the very approachable Gélin and the less approachable, and therefore the more idolized, Michèle Morgan. She was the ultimate in ever-cool suavity: the palest honey blonde hair, arctic blue eyes, bamboo thin, in drifting white voile dresses – an ice maiden in those voluptuous southern airs.

  They were halcyon days of wine and roses: but above all sharing in that completely engrossing, adrenalin-pumping business that is movie-making. We were playing God with life, which is the heart of feature making: the setting up and then filming, with vast concentration, care and expense, a succession of quite unrelated images that one day will cohere in the editing room, displaying their secret design. But first trapping those vivid, free-floating images – the lovely old Rolls driven over a cliff and spinning down the rocks into the turquoise sea near Antibes (this piece of extravagance would have given milord Rank a real fit); Gélin, in just his underpants, gingerly climbing into bed with the similarly clad maid – the sheet pulled up slowly over their heads, leaving provocatively moving shapes against the camera; the grizzly, time-stopping alibi ploy of the murdered body put in a deep freeze, then unfrozen weeks later, and murdered again.

  These seemingly incoherent parts – the common currency of the garish série noire thriller – were here transformed into something possibly of vital import, the birth of quite a different story, which, in the haphazard blessings of the celluloid recording angel, might transcend the banal genre. Here was the magic that, as we stood behind the camera, took us all away from every other concern. Intent, gazing into a circle of dazzling light, we were all celebrants in a mysterious rite, where time, stuttering through a little mechanical gate, was snatched from oblivion and trapped forever.

  On most days, at the end of shooting, the unit was treated to aperitifs by the producer, director or one of the stars. Glasses were set out on trestle tables, pastis and vermouth stuffed into buckets of ice. And it was during one of these little herb-and-aniseed get-togethers, when we were filming back at the Victorine studios, that Gélin, knowing I was Irish, told me of another Irishman (indeed he had gone to St Columba’s College), the silent movie director Rex Ingram, who had created these studios and made them famous back in the mid-twenties. I hadn’t heard of the man.

  ‘But you’ve heard of his movie, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, of Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro,’ he went on. I had. ‘Ingram made them both famous in the Hollywood silent days. Then he had a row with MGM, came out to Nice and set up the Victorine studios here, and made a silent epic called Mare Nostrum. He was a great silent director, a “primitive”, a friend of Griffith and von Stroheim. But a much more mysterious figure. The prints of most of his movies never survived. And nor did he as a director. Disappeared when sound arrived. Never made another picture.’

  Gélin finished his pastis. ‘Come along and take a look at this guy working on the lot outside.’ I followed him onto the back lot, where another company was setting up some night shooting, on a ghastly ultra-modern suburban street set, with an even uglier, futuristic plasterboard house dominating one end of it, and two cold round upper windows, like eyes, staring down at one. A beanpole of a man, with a pipe, a pork pie hat and a mac that was far too short for him, was pondering this monstrous house, seeming to relish its horrors, rehearsing beneath the ten-kilowatt arc lights. Jacques Tati was putting the finishing touches to his film Mon Oncle.

  ‘Look at him,’ Gélin said. ‘Tati’s really another great silent director. Like Rex Ingram. Another primitive. No dialogue. Can’t be doing with words.’

  A little later they started to shoot. ‘Dégagez le champ! Silence partout!’ The clapper board snapped and Tati cagily embarked on some manically comic business with secateurs. Against the side wall of the house, having earlier broken one branch of a very neatly espaliered tree, he was trying to even it up – by cutting the opposite branch. After making things even more unbalanced he had to cut another branch, then a third and a fourth, ending up by ruining the whole tree.

  Silence. Just the faint hiss of burning carbon from the arc lights, a vague whirr from the peering camera; and beyond, an ever-more-agitated, wildly stabbing figure, pipe rampant, pork pie hat askew, doing battle with the ever-diminishing tree. That magic again, taking shape in the silence. An epiphany beyond words. The silence was golden.

  Afterwards, when I was back in Hampstead staying with my aunt and uncle, Sally and Stanley, there was a letter waiting for me from my father, dated earlier that year of 1957:

  Dear Joe

  We are writing to you to wish you many happy returns on your 20th birthday. I am sorry that we did not write to you at Christmas – we were upset that we did not know where you were and we had a difficult and awkward Christmas ourselves. Your letter at Christmas was most enjoyable, though I did not think much of the card! Save your money and don’t buy any more of these pseudo-intellectual nonsenses in future! I
hear you are on the Riviera at the moment and I congratulate you on a good deal more common sense (and perhaps ability and application) than I have ever had.

  Your mother would appreciate it, indeed she would be very happy, if, on your various travels you could find time to come and visit us. We still patronise the Restoration Inn and Gina sends you birthday greetings. We have it in mind to hire a boat in Devon or Cornwall next July for a couple of weeks – let us know if you would like to be in on it.

  I have been building a road for the past six weeks – a risky occupation in view of the old health – and my associate, whom you don’t know, seems to have played naughtily with the payments on account so that I have got nothing out of it and am very angry. Fortunately the slate down the road is still good!

  Love, Daddy.

  A letter far from the hectoring, legalistic tone of his earlier letters to me. And there is his health again, now apparently very dodgy. So what on earth was he doing building a road for six weeks? Looking at the letter now, the biro handwriting almost as fresh as if it had been written yesterday – this letter with its rather stilted phrases, my father’s admission of his lack of common sense, ability and application, his suggesting that I might take some pleasure with them on a holiday boat down in the southwest (which we never did), and his hope that I should visit my mother meanwhile in Cheltenham – I feel a real sadness for Nat.

  Is there guilt here, for the way he’s behaved to my mother and to me over the years? And a glimmer of hope that he might set things to rights with my mother and me by having us all on board together for a jolly family boating trip in the summer? As my grandfather remarked in an earlier letter to Hubert, Nat’s was a tragic life. It needn’t have been, since, apart from his fabled charm, he had other more reliable gifts and many opportunities to promote them happily and successfully. But it was a silver-spoon life early on, and it was this spoon that choked him later. So he ended up with a rogue pal on a road-building job, but with the slate still good down at the Restoration Inn and Peter’s Bar.