Loose Living

by Frank Moorhouse

  So, apart from wanting to discuss my use of commas in great detail, she had also come to visit me at the château so that she could sleep in my bed. Her request seemed reasonable enough and I could see no harm in it. After due consideration and consultation with the butler’s brother, I agreed to indulge her whimsy.

  I did ask that her boyfriend sleep in another chamber but this seemed to be understood between them. I did not fancy him in my bed. As Robert Hughes says, ‘You could almost hear the viruses mutating in him.’

  She said it was important that I not change the sheets so that she could absorb my ‘aura’.

  I could see no harm in this either, although I was a trifle embarrassed by the idea of her finding ‘comma stains’ on the sheets. But, regardless, I instructed the Maid to this end. The Maid raised an eyebrow in a typical Gallic manner.

  It being summer and unseasonably warm, I, myself, slept in the wicker basket of the hot-air balloon anchored at 150 metres above the château to catch the night breeze off the Juras and to keep me out of the hands of the Bulgarians.

  I was awoken in the morning by the Queen of Commas tugging on my rope. I descended slowly. I was looking forward to having a long, animated breakfast on the east terrasse and hearing from her about my ‘aura’.

  She said my bed had the odour of a man engaged in a mighty battle with words, yet, at the same time, a man afraid.

  I explained to her my encounters with the Dutch Sensible Living Inspector and how there were still warrants out for my arrest on charges of Loose Living.

  She said that probably explained the peculiar nature of the terror which she detected in my sweat.

  She was impressed that I was now a gastronomic outlaw. ‘You say in your country “the bushranger of food”? Yes?’

  She said there was also a metallic odour which she couldn’t explain.

  I laughed, wiping flakes of croissant from the steely grey hairs of my chest, exposed beneath the monogrammed silk robe.

  ‘That is easily explained,’ I said. ‘Apart from what would come from my steely grey hairs, on some nights after revels I am too tired to change and I sleep in my armour.’

  She became interested in that. She said that she thought of me as a man in armour with a mace over his shoulder.

  I suggested gruffly that we should finish breakfast, that I had much to do on the estate.

  She reached across and put a hand on mine. I glanced uneasily at the boyfriend, who was paring his nails with a table knife.

  She said, ‘I did not mean that in a critical way. A World Spirit like yourself has to be somewhat cruel to carve your way through the obstacles and enemies of art.’ What she called my need for a Hard Self to protect the Soft True Self from the psychic assaults of my mother. She said that I must learn that there was both redemption and atonement in taking from life as generously as one gave to life.

  This made a lot of sense to me and I was much reassured. I announced to all that I would begin my book tomorrow.

  The announcement was received with much jubilation among the servants at the château and raised morale, and the news spread rapidly to the village where the priest rang the church bell for an hour.

  I was touched to see the servants prepare my desk with freshly pressed paper and newly ground ink.3 Peasants soon arrived with metre-long peacock quills.

  Finishing breakfast at about eleven-thirty, we all piled into the 1932 Citroën and I drove them to the Fête des Escargots in the nearby village of Pace.

  On the way to the Fête des Escargots I joked that at the fête we might meet the Comte of Semi-colons.

  I thought everyone enjoyed the joke immensely and that they were genuinely impressed by my clever and warm sense of humour, even if it did conceal a cruel nature.

  Later the boyfriend took me aside and asked me aggressively what I had meant by ‘meeting the Comte of Semi-colons’.

  For one moment, I feared that he considered himself the Comte of Semi-colons. It is true that he was proving himself to be something of a comte.

  He said he didn’t understand the gag.

  I drew him a picture of the semi-colon and pointed out how it resembled a snail, un escargot, seen from above.

  He said he couldn’t see that at all. I explained that it was an abstracted version of a snail.

  ‘I don’t comprehend,’ he said stubbornly.

  I drew him a number of pictures and placed a live snail on the page beside an enlarged semi-colon. He shook his head.

  I asked him to stand on the table and look down on the snail and the drawing of the semi-colon through half-closed eyes. He did so.

  ‘See,’ I said patiently, ‘the full stop is the shell and the comma, in this case, is not a tadpole or a spermatozoa, it is the tail of the snail.’

  ‘Is a dot and a comma,’ he said, looming above me as he stood on the table in his Doc Martens. I edged aside, fearing one of his rages.

  I said calmly, ‘It is not a dot and a comma. It is a semi-colon and I was likening it to a snail.’

  He got down from the table.

  ‘The comma can be seen as a tadpole,’ I said, ‘you understand that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the semi-colon can be seen as a snail.’

  ‘It is a tadpole with a dot. The dot is a flea, maybe.’

  He refused to make the imaginative leap and I gave up. He picked up the drawing and turned it around and around, then, folding it into an origami shape, he put it in his pocket.

  Something worried me, too, about the way he then crushed the snail with the heel of his hand and licked off the raw snail and shell fragments.

  To lighten him up, I told him some of the snail gags from my old nightclub act.

  First man: So you went to the Fête des Escargots. How was it?

  Second man: I found it a bit slow but it was strange to see snails in the (s)limelight.

  First man: Was it expensive?

  Second man: I ended up shelling out quite a lot.

  He refused to laugh and said he didn’t get it. I decided that maybe it was a language problem.

  I left him to his own moody devices and went over to where the others were drinking champagne and eating escargot sandwiches from the massive cane picnic hamper we had strapped to the Citroën.

  The butler’s brother was, for once, doing a proper job of his butlerage.

  All in all, we had a pleasant day, although the boyfriend continued to glare at me from time to time.

  Now and then he would take out the drawing of the semi-colon and, unfolding this dirty little package of folded paper, would stare at it.

  Talking of snails:

  I don’t know about you, but I am forever staining my silk Forward Australia tie with food. Here’s a tip. Rub the stain with the edge of a silver coin. Of course, a silk tie can only be truly cared for by taking it apart, cleaning it and restitching it. This should be done weekly. If your valet isn’t doing this, fire her/him. I had a nasty incident of this kind only recently with the butler’s brother. But that is another story.4

  CHAPTER SIX

  No one can can)

  CANNES like I can can

  Cannes

  AT THE Cannes Film Festival, instead of being an official entry, I was part of the Ex-American Express Card holders’ Club, which was forced to meet in a poky pay-by-the-day-in-advance hotel in the back lanes of Cannes.

  We didn’t get good service, in fact, we could hardly get a drink order taken because the staff held us in such utter contempt for being Ex-American Express Card-holders. We were the poor white trash of the Riviera. But it is a rapidly growing club and has some great names as members.

  We are considering doing a television advertisement where we sing, ‘Brave enough to leave home without it.’

  We go to the most unfashionable and unnewsworthy places and hang around being treated with utter contempt by all retail outlets and service staff. We live in a state of utter contempt.

  After Cannes, I used the Duc’s 19
35 Dragon Rapide to fly a party of brilliant young, new, new wave Australian film-makers up to the château.

  The young film-makers were seated around me in the great hall of the château, drinking their Vittel, their Evian and their Volvic, and pressing me for stories of the old days in the film industry.

  I felt like George Smiley from Le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim, where, now retired, George Smiley tells the young spies how it was in the Cold War when you could kill people if you felt you should. In the old days, the Australian film industry was like that.

  I had earlier in the evening given a lecture on ‘Credit Cards, the Cinematic Arts, and Gender’.

  ‘You are all,’ I said, sipping my Cognac, my eyes twinkling, ‘a much happier cultural and commercial blend than we were in my day.’

  I cleaned my glasses on the bow tie of my dinner suit, which I’d undone to put them at their ease, although they all seemed surprised and bemused that bow ties undid and were tied.

  I noticed some of them came over later and had a closer look at my bow tie and at my Order of Australia medal.

  ‘In our day,’ I said, immediately gripping their attention, ‘we worried about whether we were being “too commercial” or whether, on the other hand, we were being “too arty”. We had not realised that we were falling into a trap. We were making an erroneous description of the “economy” of art by using this distinction.’

  They were all great admirers, as I am, of Michael Thornhill, with whom I worked for many years in charge of the gates at the studios and backlot of Edgecliff Films (Between Wars, Everlasting Secret Family, The Third Man, The King and I, Casablanca) before I was fired from the set for Having Dubious Friends and for Loose Living.

  They asked about surviving in a recession.

  I told them how in the early days during one of the tough years for Edgecliff, Mr Thornhill had to fall back to living on his Frequent Flyer Points.

  If he could have cashed his FFPs he would have been a very rich man.

  As it was, Mr Thornhill and I had to gain breathing space financially by living on the FFPs. Off we went First Class, in what he called the Big Restaurant in the Sky, with only his FFPs to see us through. Going out into the world on a smile and a shoeshine, as Willy Loman says in Death of a Salesman.

  I remember once that we’d landed at Frankfurt airport on our way to Amsterdam or some other film capital, and the plane emptied. We stayed seated because we couldn’t afford stopovers or, in fact, to leave the plane, even though the barman at the airport bar in Frankfurt calls Mr Thornhill by his first name and we were travelling First Class.

  The cabin attendant came to where we were seated and told us that we had to vacate the aircraft, explaining that the plane had to be cleaned and serviced—something about a 100,000 kilometre service.

  Mr Thornhill explained to the cabin attendant that we preferred to stay on the plane. ‘The 100,000 kilometre service only takes forty-eight hours,’ he said, ‘we’ll stay on board.’

  She went to the chief steward and we saw them whispering. The chief steward came down the aisle to where we were seated, both reading our single copy of Variety. She tossed Mr Thornhill the keys to the aircraft galley and said, ‘It’s your plane, Mr T.’

  Even I was impressed.

  So while the plane was having its engines stripped down in the maintenance hangar and going through the steam cleaner (it was like spending a few days in an auto mated car wash), we stayed on board and washed our pair of socks in the toilet (the one who was to do the pitch wore the socks) and we watched in-flight movies.

  I set the attendants’ cabin up as an office and wrote a script.

  This was before the big breaks came for Edgecliff. In those years, it looked like Mr Thornhill and I would have to live on his FFPs by sitting out the bad times on a plane going around the world, me looking out the window and saying, ‘It looks like Mascot again, Mr Thornhill.’

  I can still see Mr Thornhill now, striding up and down the aisle of the plane practising his pitch.

  Looking around the young film-makers there in the château, their intelligent, determined Australian faces lit by the warm glow of the big open fire, I said, ‘Yes, we were learning that the whole of the world is the “economy” of the arts. The “marketplace” so called, for the arts, is everywhere and everything. There is no distinction between the public and private sector.

  ‘Of one thing I am glad,’ I said, looking at their fit bodies, their rugged immune systems, ‘that you are a new breed who will not be made martyrs to your art. You have put that behind you and said to Society, “No—I will not be an alcoholic, I will not live in poverty, I will not be a drug addict, I will not have a thousand divorces just to be recognised as an artist.”’

  I think I must have fallen into a deep sadness about my own wasted and blighted life because I felt someone tugging at my elbow and handing me a clean handkerchief made from rough recycled paper with which to dry my eyes, but which, instead, caused one eye to bleed. I didn’t say anything, having myself been accustomed to only the finest silk.

  I apologised, managed a smile and said, ‘“The black ox hath trod on my foot”, sorry.’

  I said that they were all probably familiar with the story of how I’d been made a martyr to my art.

  I could tell from their faces that some had not been aware of this. I could tell that they were uncertain which art it was I practised.

  Before I could tell them how I became a martyr to my art, the Queen of Commas’ boyfriend blundered in with the rather soiled drawing of the semi-colon with the snail slime on it, and a couple of bruised snails.

  The last thing I needed.

  He was still working on the relationship between the semi-colon and the snail. He does not know it yet, but I have plans for him to become a human canon.

  The Queen of Commas is in England sleeping in Bruce Chatwin’s bed (I wish her luck).

  I shooed the Queen of Commas’ boyfriend away. The eyes of the young film-makers followed this frightening-looking man with his snails.

  I could see that Europe was a place of endless surprise to them. This endeared them to me.

  As an illustration of the Old World Meeting the New, I told them how I rose in the estimation of the local peasants by showing them how one could start a fire which is slow to catch by blowing on it.

  The young film-makers applauded my bush skills and asked me to teach them the trick, which I quite willingly did.

  A young employee of the South Australian Film Corporation put up her hand and asked what they should eat to be successful in the arts. I was pleased by this question.

  ‘Would you recommend against red meat?’ she asked.

  She was probably prompted to this question by the sight of the oxen roasting on the spit. She said later that there was much pressure on young film-makers in Adelaide not to eat meat or touch men.

  I said I could see a case for not touching men, but as for red meat, I couldn’t disagree more.

  I stood with my back to them, one foot on the hearth, looking into the fire, which I occasionally poked with my poker.

  I watched the roasting oxen. I said there was a lot of silly talk about humans and animals. The fact is that humans and animals are different things, and this must always be kept in mind.

  If you’re in any doubt, try to pick an argument with an animal at a party. Or taste a martini mixed by a kangaroo.

  The only thing that changes over the centuries is the reason these people give for not eating animals. I sipped my Cognac.

  I warned them to beware of any position that kept changing its ground. It was a sure sign of a hidden obsession. ‘Of course, nevertheless, one day they might come up with an argument which is correct,’ I said, turning from the fire and giving them a playful wink.

  Until that happened, I urged them to enjoy the remarkable culinary abundance of the world. The dependency of humans on animals for warmth, for various services such as that of guards, simple companionship, and also fo
r nourishment, was itself a deep, primeval relationship to the animal kingdom.

  It was the eating of plant matter that has always seemed to me to be somewhat unnatural. If they thought about it they could see why.

  I could see they were thinking about it too hard. I looked up at them and smiled. ‘Just teasing,’ I said.

  I went on to tell them that the important change in our life since the Middle Ages is the way that meat is served.

  The animal or large parts were once brought whole to the table. Whole fish, whole birds with their feathers still attached, lambs and pigs.

  The Sunday joint is a relic of these grand days. From this comes the idea that a gentleman should be able to carve meat at the table.

  As Erasmus said in 1530, ‘Discenda a primis statim annis secandi ratio.’ (In reply to a question about what course of studies I would advise for a young film-maker, I advised the learning of Latin and Greek.)

  I loosely translated this for them as meaning that the correct way to carve should be taught to the child from the early years. I explained to them that the carver should avoid dramatic movements and useless and foolish ceremony. He or she must never be nervous. Deftness and fine judgement in the distribution of the choice parts was the secret of good carving and good film-making.

  I could see that they found this fascinating and that it was the first time that anyone had spoken sensibly and openly to them about eating and carving of meat and that I was rising in their estimation.

  We finished the evening with silent films of First World War trench vermin—footage which the Queen of Commas’ boyfriend enjoys excessively: his maniacal giggling can be heard far into the night after the screening is over.

  I have been gratified that a few of the young film-makers, upon returning home, took the trouble to write to me saying how much they appreciated the talk, the ox, the Mouton-Rothschild, the films and the medieval orgy which followed.

  Quite a few said that it was the latest they had ever stayed up.