A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 52
The person I most wanted to visit in Normandy was Monsieur Brobant, in Colleville-sur-Mer, the first civilian our squad had encountered after surviving the amphibious assault. Still ebullient, Monsieur Brobant was then in his eighties. He lived in the same little house above the beach, the first sign of civilization we'd seen that terrible day in 1944. I was thrilled to introduce Monsieur Brobant to my family. When we gave him the cognac and flowers we'd brought along, there were tears in his eyes. He was the high point for me of a memory-laden visit.
The Liberation article filled two entire pages under the headline FULLER DEBARQUE SES SOUVENIRS ("Fuller Unloads His Memories"). A good freelance writer named Laurent Joffrin wrote the piece, mentioning little Samantha running among the tombstones in the cemetery where I'd been looking for the names of dead comrades from the First Division. They ran a picture of me wearing a steel helmet with the Big Red One on it. The photo had been taken in my office back at the Shack. It made me feel homesick for our little house up in Laurel Canyon, for my old rolltop desk surrounded by all my books, for America.
On Omaha Beach, I held Samantha's and Christa's hands as we walked along the sand down where the sea rolled in so peacefully. Forty years before, I'd struggled through those bloody waters, shells exploding overhead, dead soldiers strewn across the beach, Nazi mines and machine guns popping all around me. I was so grateful to be standing there once again, now with my young wife and my beautiful nine-year-old daughter. Samantha tossed stones into the ocean, playing where so many had fought and died. It was cleansing to see it through her innocent blue eyes, still unaware of the burden of memory or history. I thanked God that she still didn't have the faintest idea of the violence man could wreak on his fellow human beings.
By then, Samantha was speaking perfect French. She turned to her mother and asked: "Quand est-ce que nous allons revenir en Amerique?"- "When are we going back to America?"
Neither of us knew the answer.
Breadwinner
in France
52
I n over eight decades of very active life, I've rarely been ill enough to be confined to a bed, even for one day. Directing pictures on tight schedules requires vigor and durability. My stamina developed from running around the streets of New York as a crime reporter in my teens, bumming across the country in my twenties, and fighting with the infantry in my thirties. Not to mention smoking cigars, which keeps the lungs clean and the mind tranquil. In my seventies, I still ran circles around all the young people working with me on a movie set. While we were editing Thieves After Dark, in 1984, a minor incident showed me my limits.
Early on a cold winter morning, I'd left our apartment to go out to the Boulogne-Billancourt Studio. As if I were in California, I wore a summer shirt and a light jacket. There was just too much on my mind. Christa ran after me outside our apartment and made me put on a wool sweater and a jacket. That evening, she joined me along with Samantha for a big party to celebrate the centennial of the studio. I'd worked hard all day long in an editing room and forgotten about eating. We all met on a big soundstage where hundreds of guests munched hors d'oeuvres and sipped champagne. There was loud music, and young people were dancing. The last thing I remember were the clips from old French movies being projected on specially erected screens. I fainted dead away. Horrified, Christa and Samantha got down on the floor, trying to revive me. People crowded around.
"It's Samuel Fuller," somebody said calmly. "He's had a heart attack."
"Fuller's dead," said another person.
I came around. Claude Chabrol and his wife, Aurore, took us home. Claude and Aurore even helped get me into bed. I thanked everyone and said I was okay, but I still felt weak. The next day our French doctor told me that I'd passed out because of abnormally low blood sugar, or hypoglycemia. It wasn't anything serious, but it made me realize I'd better take care of myself.
For months after that, the rumor went around that I'd died of a heart attack in France. Incredibly, the "news" traveled to the four corners of the globe and back. F. Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life. Here I was starting my third, and I was already dead. I got calls from kind people on every continent. I thanked everyone for their concern, laughed, and reassured everyone that I was just fine, stealing Mark Twain's line that "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
All the fuss about my dying was funny but disquieting. Having already stared death in the face a few times, dying really didn't bother me. I regretted it more for my wife and daughter than for myself. The only thing about kicking the bucket that worried me was how it would put a crimp in my ability to tell any more stories. Hell, not being able to spin any more yarns would have really killed me!
A little while after the hypoglycemia incident, we got a call from producer David Brown, who was in town making Target (1985), directed by Arthur Penn and starring Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon. We invited David over to our place for a home-cooked meal. He was missing his wife, Helen, who had to stay in New York in her capacity as editor in chief of Cosmopolitan. David loved Christa's cooking, kidding around that her delicious poulet aux morilles-chicken with special wild mushrooms-was "chicken with morals." David ended up spending a couple more evenings with us. He'd been a story executive at Fox under Zanuck, then rose to production chief and went on to start his own company, partnering with Darryl's son, Richard.
Witty and worldly, David was a great raconteur. He laughed just as heartily about his flops, like Steelyard Blues (1973), as he did about hits like The Sting (1973) and Jaws (1975). David would go on to produce Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and The Player (1992), among many other quality pictures. We talked about our days at Fox and the atmosphere at the studio under Zanuck's reign, making me miss old Darryl more than words can describe.
It was David Brown who'd offered me the directing job on The Young Lions (1958). I'd turned him down because I thought it was ridiculous having Marlon Brando play a Nazi soldier in that picture, though I don't think David held any grudges about it. Then again, David never bought one of my scripts or hired me to make another picture after I passed on that one. For Chrissakes, when I thought about all the movies I'd turned down, I felt like kicking myself in the ass. But what about all those directing jobs on major films for which I'd been passed over? As long as a good director got the gig, it was okay by me. Many good directors needed somebody else's story to make a movie. I took pride in being an original, a direc tor who creates characters, dialogue, and action out of his own experience and imagination. From a blank piece of paper, I made motion pictures.
One evening after dinner, David and I smoked cigars until late into the night, comparing the Hollywood of the eighties with that of the fifties. Holy shit, it was like night and day! For me the biggest difference was that we used to have handshake deals back then. A man's word still meant something. Not to mention that those deals were struck by colorful characters, every one of them a story lover and gambler at heart. We reminisced about that dying breed of risk takers-men like Zanuck-who'd launched this crazy business, then made it grow into an international gold mine. David and I remembered some of the unsung heros, guys like Buddy Adler, my producer on House of Bamboo, a helluva moviemaker who'd gone on to do Bus Stop (1956), A Hatful of Rain (1957), and South Pacific (1958) before lung cancer cut him down at age fifty-one. Buddy was responsible for getting Ingrid Bergman back to Hollywood, to star in Anastasia (1956). All said and done, David and I agreed that we were lucky old farts to still be working, getting invitations to lunch, and most importantly, blessed with loving wives at our sides.
Christa and I decided to prolong our stay in France, paying another year's rent up front to our landlord on rue de la Baume. We were assisted by the dollar's strong exchange rate at the time. I was tremendously home sick, but Samantha was doing beautifully at the ecole bilingue. It seemed right to let her continue her French education uninterrupted. Besides, jobs were coming my way-not well-paid gigs by Hollywood standards, but steady bread
winning projects. Some wheeler-dealer producers in San Francisco paid me to write a script on the Iran hostage situation. I delivered it, but they never produced it. Two Hollywood gals, Anne Kimmel and Cathy Rabin, took an option on The Charge at San Juan Hill, then couldn't get the financing together. A young director named Bertrand Fevre asked me to play a part in Bleeding Star, his debut short film. Telerama, a widely read TV magazine, hired me to write a children's book entitled Pecos Bill and the Soho Kid, a Western based on an idea I'd had for a TV show. Like the treatment for the show, the book featured an adult who'd never grown up and a kid with a Cockney accent and mature beyond his years, who took imaginary trips together, catching clouds with lassos. Illustrated by Belgian artist Frank le Gall, my little book was dedicated to John Ford. I was thrilled when my publisher received hundreds of enthusiastic letters from young French readers.
With David Brown, a first-class guy and highly successful independent producer. Both of us were tickled to still be alive and in the movie business.
Next door to us in Paris lived the Cerrato family. They had twin daughters, Claudia and Sabina, Samantha's playmates. I vividly remember those three little girls getting dressed up and presenting numbers from American musicals for the adults. I can still hear them belting out "Tomorrow," from Annie. Mr. Cerrato worked at the American embassy as a "commercial attache," whatever the hell that was. I veered away from talking politics, as it would have surely soured our neighborly relations. Those were the Reagan years, and I was fundamentally against old Ronnie's politics. On our yearly trips back to the States, we saw how Reaganomics had created a widening gap, with more wealthy people controlling a greater share of the resources and more and more poor people undernourished and badly educated. I was shocked to see so many homeless people on American streets. Our country was supposed to be the richest country in the world. How could we still have so many people without roofs over their heads? How could we still have one of the highest rates of illiteracy? Living in France under their special brand of socialism had been eye-opening for me about what a government can do when it's committed to decent education and health care for all its citizens.
No matter how good life was in Paris, serious offers for making films were in short supply. But that didn't stop the unending flow of invitations from film festivals in France, Europe, and around the world that came in at an astounding rate. There was no way we could attend more than a tiny fraction of all those enticing events. Edinburgh, run by the wonderful Murray and Barbara Grigor, and Locarno, programmed by our good friend Marco Mueller, were delightful. We had a great time at San Sebastian, its festival managed by the industrious Diego Galan, a critic from Spain's leading left-wing paper, El Pais. In the years to come, I'd also attend Sundance and Telluride, both great events.
Deauville, on the coast of Normandy, became a regular autumn weekend outing for the entire family. The American Festival there, run by Lionel Chouchan and Andre Halimi, invited us each year. We'd take the train to Deauville and check into one of those grand hotels built at the beginning of the century. Samantha enjoyed the beach, and Christa, all the schmoozing and seafood. Since the war, Normandy would always occupy a special place in my soul. One year at the festival, I was delighted to run into two guys from the old days who had my complete respect: Richard Brooks and Joseph Mankiewicz. Richard came to France to show his last picture, Fever Pitch (1985). It was great getting back together with him, one of my closest buddies in Hollywood in the fifties. Mankiwiecz was unique, a great director and one helluva writer. Yet Joe hadn't made a movie since Sleuth (1972). Hollywood had a horrible habit of putting its most talented and experienced artists into mothballs before their passion and their creativity had dried up. Directors over sixty were judged "too old" to work. It was goddamned age discrimination! If I'd hung around Hollywood waiting for some thirty-year-old studio exec to green-light one of my scripts, I'd have seen myself as part of that group, too.
My only regret about the movie business, if I had to name one, was not having become my own producer along the way. I could have financed my own pictures and backed great filmmakers like Mankiwiecz, allowing masters like him to get behind a camera again to make their dream movies. My big problem in Hollywood was that power and money never gave me a hard-on.
At Deauville, we also ran into members of Hollywood's new generation, guys like Walter Hill and Jonathan Demme. I enjoyed Hill's hard-hitting, entertaining pictures, like Red Heat (1988), which he brought to the festival that year. Walter was a no-bullshit kind of director with whom I got along right away. Demme was presenting Married to the Mob (1988). I'd been friends with Jonathan since the seventies, when he'd directed Caged Heat (1974). His films would get better over the years, and, just as importantly, he'd always remain a down-to-earth, unpretentious man with strong democratic ideals.
Another festival the entire family enjoyed attending year after year was Avignon. In that beautiful Provencal town on the banks of the Rhone, Jerome Rudes had concocted his unique crossroads of French and American independent cinema in the shadow of Avignon's medieval Palace of the Popes. Writer and teacher, Jerry was crazy about movies. I'd first met him at a dinner in Deauville where we'd sat with the veteran director Robert Wise, cracking jokes and exchanging stories all night long. Jerry was a warm, genuine guy, and we immediately struck up a friendship that would deepen over the years. Every June, Christa, Samantha, and I would go down to Avignon for a week to enjoy the Provencal sun and the hospitality that Jerry and his team showered on us.
In Avignon, I met up with a helluva lot more fine filmmakers, whether veterans, like Louis Malle, or youngsters breaking into the business, like Quentin Tarantino. Malle was a great director and a gracious human being who told me he was fed up with shooting films in America. At that time, he was developing one of his greatest yarns, Au Revoir les Enfants, which he'd shoot in France. Tarantino had a passionate and voracious mind for movies. Holy cow, he'd memorized entire dialogues, word for word, from my films! I hit it off right away with Quentin and thought he did a damn good job on his debut picture, Reservoir Dogs (1992), a heist movie about a bunch of dumb crooks. I hung out with Quentin, Alexandre Rockwell, and other young directors during late-night parleys on a terrace overlooking Avignon's red-tiled rooftops, drinking vodka and telling stories. I admired the cordial atmosphere of the Avignon Film Festival and supported Jerry's inexhaustible efforts to give young directors a break, so I accepted his offer to become the organization's honorary president.
Meanwhile, something ugly was happening in the eighties to French politics. The National Front, an extreme right-wing party, was rising in popularity and winning large percentages in local elections. Their leader was a hatemonger named Jean-Marie Le Pen. Arab people from North Africa were Le Pen's primary political scapegoat, but his tirades against immigrants were loosely aimed at anyone not white and Catholic. If that wasn't enough, Le Pen and his followers had the audacity to proclaim that the Holocaust wasn't really that bad, that the German concentration camps were "a minor historical episode." I decided to take a stand against the sonofabitch's ranting by helping a committed filmmaker named Emil Weiss make a cherished documentary about the Holocaust.
As his documentary's centerpiece, Weiss asked my permission to use those twenty minutes of 16-mm film that I'd shot in May 1945 in the Falkenau death camp. I said yes. I'd stored that footage away for all those years because it was so appalling. Now it was time to let people see those terrible images. Christa brought my forty-year-old reels back to Paris on one of her trips to California and entrusted them to Emil Weiss. As part of the story Emil wanted to tell, he took me back to the town of Falkenau in Czechoslovakia, today renamed Sokolow. Emil interviewed me on camera with the site of the old Nazi camp in the background. It was painful to relive those terrible times, so many decades old yet so fresh in my mind, but I felt we were honoring the memory of the camp's prisoners. In my own way, I was also paying tribute to my squad's decent-minded commander, Captain Richmond, who had made
sure some of the camp's victims got proper burials that day.
Emil's film, entitled Falkenau, Vision of the Impossible (1988), was invited to the Cannes Film Festival and praised for its straightforwardness and soul. I was proud to have participated, finally getting an opportunity to show my own proof of man's inhumanity to man. After all, I'd been an eyewitness to the crime of the century. There will always be fundamentalist bastards trying to minimize the Holocaust's significance. The truth won't let them. People can see the horrible reality for themselves in grisly images like those I recorded at Falkenau with my old Bell & Howell. Fanatics can never-never!-revise history to suit their political agenda. Film doesn't lie.
Half Full,
Not Half Empty
53
t was a joy to live in Paris, but after five years it seemed time to go home. Samantha was nine already, and we wanted our daughter to spend some of her formative years in the States. She came back from her ecole nibbling on a baguette, like a real little Parisian. She spoke perfect French, though she retained her American candor.
Once we attended a prestigious human rights colloquium at the Sorbonne. We brought Samantha to the reception at the Elysees Palace afterward. There was a gorgeous buffet, but, as is the custom in France, nobody could eat until the president had formally greeted his guests. Francois Mitterrand finally showed up. As soon as we got through with all the handshaking, our hungry daughter said in a loud voice: Jai serre la main du President, maintenant en pent tous manger!'-"I shook hands with the president, now we can all eat!" Everybody in earshot laughed at our little girl's sincerity, then hurried over to enjoy the delicious chow.
In 1986, like a lightning bolt striking, we got the shattering news that Samantha had Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that attacks the lymphatic tissues. Distraught is hardly a powerful enough word to describe Christa's state. I tried to stay calm, but everything turned inescapably dark for me, too. We put aside all our plans until they figured out the appropriate remedy for Samantha at the Marie Curie Hospital in the Latin Quarter, one of the best cancer clinics in Europe. Samantha was put under the supervision of the wonderful Doctors Zucker and Quintana, who told us that Hodgkin's was curable when detected at that early stage. My daughter's treatments were successful, thank God. For the next year, without missing much school, Samantha was admitted to Marie Curie every six weeks for checkups. To make sure the Hodgkin's was eradicated, the doctors advised us that Samantha needed regular checkups over the next ten years. Any hope of returning home evaporated in the twinkle of a little girl's eye. We'd have to hang on in Paris as best we could until our daugh ter was completely healed. What a relief that Samantha had pulled through the crisis!