Between Eternities

by Javier Marías

  However, this new interest is not confined only to Hollywood: in Italy, people express their unreserved admiration for Nino Rota, who composed for Fellini and Visconti; in France, the same goes for Michel Legrand and Georges Delerue – the latter wrote the soundtrack for Jules et Jim; in England, it’s John Barry, who is best known for his Bond film soundtracks and for perhaps his best score: The Chase. Alex North – The Dead and Viva Zapata!; George Duning – Two Rode Together and Picnic; Jerry Goldsmith, Jerome Moross, André Previn, Lavagnino and Alfred Newman are all names that were once looked down upon, but whose work might become the classics of the twenty-first century. All that’s needed is for the prejudice against their unpretentious music to fall away, music that people remember and even occasionally hum.

  (1996)

  Earthly Sighs

  One unconditional crush usually excludes another, and my crush on Ann-Margret, when I was about fourteen, rather rudely buried the enduring, but much more childish crush I’d had on Hayley Mills – the daughter of the British actor John Mills – who managed to rescue from saccharine sentimentality such Disney productions as The Parent Trap and Pollyanna.

  Ann-Margret’s irruption into the lives of adolescents in the 1960s was quite something. It was, I think, my first platonic love affair, which was only platonic because of the very different dimensions in which we moved, her and me and my classmates. That is, it was a frustrated carnal love affair, but a love affair nonetheless. It’s not hard to understand even today: if you watch the video of Bye Bye Birdie, a wonderful musical comedy directed by George Sidney, and to which Grease owes an enormous amount, you will see that the first thing to appear on the Panavision screen, with no warning whatsoever (even before the credits), is a very young Ann-Margret in a dress made of some semi-transparent yellow fabric and set against an intense blue background, singing and cavorting to the song ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. This was an overwhelming sight on the vast screens of the old cinemas, especially for fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds, whose desires tend to be impossible to disguise.

  Ann-Margret was also close enough to the childish model of that desire to allow for a smooth, unhurried transition from boyhood to adulthood. She was a fresh, healthy, very clean young girl; there was nothing grubby about her, and she was innocent enough to be ideal and naughty enough to be real, in one’s dreams of course. That film was followed soon afterwards by Viva Las Vegas alongside Elvis Presley, again directed by George Sidney, and in which, perhaps because of her legendary co-star, Ann-Margret seemed far more inaccessible and infinitely less innocent and more lascivious. It’s worth remembering that she had appeared before this in Pocketful of Miracles, Frank Capra’s farewell to cinema, a film, alas, that was deemed unsuitable for children.

  It’s interesting and highly indicative that she has still not been entirely forgotten, as have so many other transient idols of our youth, who disappear for ever, having brought a little joy to a couple of years’ worth of schoolchildren, not even a whole generation. She sang wittily and danced brilliantly, she had a sense of humour and knew how to send herself up; and she soon summoned the courage to play slightly older women, for example, in Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid (Sam Peckinpah was the film’s original director and he certainly left his mark) and Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, a rather weak, pretentious film that owes its best moments to her and her brief appearances in the nude. It should be said that Ann-Margret deliberately put on weight for the role – a forerunner of Robert De Niro’s wilful and much-applauded metamorphoses.

  Overall, she was under-used as an actress, and was also unlucky enough to have been working in the 1970s, the worst decade in the history of cinema. If I remember rightly, she suffered a bad fall while filming in Las Vegas and had to submit her childlike face to plastic surgery and, for a while, was absent from the screens. When she returned, her moment, even that of mere superficial popularity, had passed. Nevertheless, she still appears from time to time and has grown older very gracefully, as can be seen in Grumpy Old Men, alongside Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Or perhaps I still look fondly upon someone whom I loved and desired as a youngster (when I was young and so was she). I remember that in the unstoppable succession of long-distance crushes, she was replaced in my sighs by Audrey Hepburn during that period of greater spirituality through which all adolescents pass; replaced, that is, in my more celestial sighs, but not, of course, in my more earthly desires.

  (1996)

  The Man Who Appeared to Want Nothing

  What fascinates me about George Sanders is that he always gave the impression that he could have been somewhere else and not in the many films he appeared in or, indeed, in the film industry itself. It wasn’t so much that he seemed scornful of the art that brought him fame and money as well as an Oscar, it was more that he seemed to have been dropped into that world against his will, which is why he couldn’t take it seriously, like a nobleman destined to lead a nobleman’s life, but who finds himself obliged to do an ordinary bourgeois job, comfortable but somewhat undignified, beneath his status and rather too easy. And given the few facts I know about his life, there may have been an element of that. As if he were a second Nabokov, he was born in the city of St Petersburg – but seven years later in 1906 – the son of a factory-owner and a horticulturist, both of whom were, I believe, British, and again like Nabokov, he had to leave Russia with the coming of the Revolution. I also know that, initially, he worked in the textile industry and as a farmer growing tobacco, and that only in the 1930s, in the Depression, did he begin to take on small roles in the theatre and the cinema, until he was signed by Hollywood in 1936 for the film Lloyds of London. Perhaps he was just that, a businessman exiled to a puerile fantasy world of heroes and villains in which the real life he had led gradually moved ever further off, becoming blurred or lost. I never thought anyone could outdo James Mason in the role of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, until, that is, I imagined George Sanders in the part.

  He had a strange air of superiority about him, which could have proved disastrous for an actor, but not for him, perhaps because he soon began to specialize in playing rather aloof, mocking characters, and perhaps because, along with that sense of superiority came an elegant acceptance of the inferior world surrounding him. George Sanders could create a sense of unease and disquiet because he himself was someone who never gave in to self-deception – neither he nor his characters, who were, of course, never ingenuous or smug, still less self-indulgent. George Sanders could always tell good from evil, he knew about moral rectitude and, what’s more, recognized it when he saw it. And yet he consciously removed himself from it, he wounded and mocked it, fought and perverted it, and hurt it if he could, although rarely physically. He wasn’t a classic out-and-out villain as other wonderful supporting actors went on to be, for example, Jack Palance, Lee Marvin and the inimitable John Carradine. He was someone who could have been something else, someone like us, but who appeared to have chosen evil, or perhaps evil chose him. It wasn’t in his blood as it was with those other actors or less eminent ones like Jack Elam or Neville Brand, he wasn’t destined to play that role by his appearance or his manners or his character, which was neither irascible nor neurotic nor despotic nor resentful, but ironic and patient and often sarcastic. He didn’t usually hit anyone or resort to violence – at most a slap – his sole weapons were his words and his attitude, cynicism rather than hypocrisy, and often nothing more than a hat and a pair of gloves. When he played a cruel character, he knew he was being cruel, he had chosen to be; when he played a coward, he was aware that the opposite of a coward also existed, and was a calm and tolerant witness to his own cowardice; when he played an intriguer, he knew by heart all the dirty rules of the game and allowed himself no vacillations, no regrets. What was so moving and troubling about him was that he accepted his character’s evil nature for what it was and never excused or disguised it. He didn’t delight in it, but rather incorporated it into his persona, as something that he could have avoided, but hadn
’t, as if resigned to bearing the consequences and seeing to its conclusion an option that was perhaps hard to assimilate on one far-off day that Sanders doubtless remembered perfectly, but on which he wouldn’t allow himself to brood overmuch, far less feel any self-pity or regret about the day his life took a wrong turning.

  Sanders wrote an excellent detective novel that I read ages ago now, Crime on My Hands, as well as an autobiography entitled Memoirs of a Professional Cad, which I haven’t read. The novel contains an amusing parody of the films featuring the detectives The Saint and The Falcon, roles that he played a number of times and got so heartily sick of that, in the end, he managed to offload the latter role on to his older brother, the actor Tom Conway, known mainly for his appearances sporting an evil-looking pencil moustache in Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie (both directed by Jacques Tourneur), and who had far less luck in his career despite having the same chilling voice as his brother, that rich, suave voice that seemed to go from outside in, as if every word spoken in those cool, disdainful, indifferent tones involved a tremendous effort on his part to silence inside him warmer, more affectionate words that had been buried and forgotten for ever when he chose the dark path. You can hear Sanders speaking when, in I Walked with a Zombie, Conway says: ‘Everything good dies here, even the stars.’

  Some women I know find George Sanders enormously attractive, although he didn’t look the part of the romantic lead at all. He was too tall somehow and his head too large, and with his thin, receding hair, he didn’t look young even when he was, and there was something rather mild and soft about him which belied the brazen, cynical behaviour of the characters he played. Rex Harrison called him a ‘perfumed parlour snake’ in The Ghost and Mrs Muir, in which he plays an unscrupulous cad, as he did in Rebecca and All About Eve. In that last film, he treated Bette Davis appallingly, slapped Anne Baxter and talked down to Marilyn Monroe better than anyone, even Louis Calhern (another marvellous supporting actor) in The Asphalt Jungle. He was equally memorable playing a monocled Nazi in Man Hunt, directed by Fritz Lang, with whom he also worked on While the City Sleeps and Moonfleet. He had a thin but somehow full mouth, as if it changed size and shape depending on the intensity of the feelings he was inflicting on others, a rather large and far from straight nose, a somewhat flaccid face, which became slightly doglike as he aged, a broad forehead, and mobile but sober eyebrows. His eyes were terrifying, icily mocking and woundingly impassive. If he never deceived himself, it would have been still harder for others to deceive him. Sanders was someone who saw and knew not only his own weaknesses, but, even more unbearably, everyone else’s, and instantly too. Confronted by him, any other character – any other actor or actress – seemed vulnerable and naked and as if struggling to gain his respect. If someone was greedy or envious or cowardly, embittered or full of hate, Sanders would spot it at once; he knew who he could persuade or bribe and who he couldn’t, and, in the latter case, he wouldn’t even try. Sanders was a very knowing villain, perhaps the man who knew most about what went on around him, on screen that is.

  In Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy), he had one of his few lead roles, alongside Ingrid Bergman and directed by Rossellini. The truth is that, as a fictional husband, he oozed unreliability, and yet one presumes he must have had a certain weakness for his second wife, the frivolous Hungarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated husband-hunters, since the fourth and final Mrs Sanders was her older and less famous sister, Magda Gabor.

  He had divorced them all by the time he committed suicide, after his final years when he dragged himself, more ironically and loftily than ever, through various substandard made-in-Europe co-productions, some of them directed by my uncle, Jesús Franco, who had some excellent tales to tell about that professional cad. He killed himself in Spain, in a hotel room in Castelldefels, if I remember rightly – in harsh exile – from an overdose of sleeping tablets. He left a note complaining that he was bored and in which he addressed the world in the same scornful, pitiless tone he had so often used in the cinema: ‘I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool.’ That was in 1972, when he was sixty-six. Perhaps that was the only time when he really wanted something, because the frightening feeling George Sanders communicated in his performances was that he seemed to be a man who knew what everyone else wanted, even before they knew it themselves, while he appeared never to want anything.

  (1996)

  The Supernatural Master of the World

  Film ‘baddies’ who began their careers in supporting roles and then, at some point in their careers, went on to become stars, often lost their most admirable qualities in that rise up the ranks. The most obvious and most painful example of this is Lee Marvin, who, after winning an Oscar for what was his worst performance, continued to be hard and grim-faced (although slightly less so), but was never again properly perverse. None of his subsequent performances contain half the cruelty, madness and sadism that made him such a favourite with more enlightened filmgoers in, say, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Big Heat, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Killers and even The Comancheros.

  The great Vincent Price is a completely different case in several respects. True, he did go from being a supporting actor to playing lead roles, but he never won any awards that would allow him to take himself too seriously and he never starred in any big-budget productions. In fact, he gained enormously from his promotion to stardom without ever losing any of the striking characteristics cultivated and honed in his days as a lowly bit-part player. In films like Laura, Leave Her to Heaven or While the City Sleeps, before he began to specialize, he was a clumsy, overly tall figure, whose build only accentuated the contrast with the characters he played: devious, cowardly creeps lacking all integrity or nobility. Not that Vincent Price renounced those qualities in his later incarnations; indeed, he preserved his easy capacity for treachery, meanness and cowardice, while simultaneously acquiring and developing other previously unnoticed characteristics, which he elevated to almost canonical status. We have grown far too accustomed in recent years to seeing the ‘baddies’ or the ‘monsters’ as rather attractive characters with an element of pathos about them that arouses our pity or even sympathy. However, that ‘type’ did not always exist. We felt pity for the poor monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein, but not fascination. The precursor, the inventor of that ‘type’ was Vincent Price.

  Vincent Price endowed his characters with what one might call greatness, because there is no real greatness without irony, a quality Price had in spades, an irony aimed both at others and at himself. Forget the burlesque humour of The Comedy of Terrors; in his more or less serious roles, in The Tomb of Ligeia or The Master of the World, Price’s mocking cynicism is evident in almost every scene, but always mingled with its possible contrary: a kind of hidden nobility. Vincent Price succeeded in doing what few actors in any genre have managed to do, namely, he gave us the immediate, unequivocal impression that he had a past, that he was once quite different from the person he appears to be – the vengeful criminal or the crazed megalomaniac. I can think of only one other actor who shared that ability – although he used it quite differently – and that was John Wayne, from The Quiet Man to The Searchers. It is a quality to be found only in the truly great actors. It is a rare gift that expands and multiplies an actor’s resources, because it allows the viewers to see not only what the plot wants us to see, but also affords us a glimpse of what is being concealed or kept from us, so that we can enjoy both the actual performance and what lies hidden outside the time of the film.

  Vincent Price often played very contradictory characters, men who are both taciturn and histrionic, wary and salacious, sullen and grandiloquent, fierce and amusing, solemn and comical, and those who consider him repetitive, limited or monotonous are quite simply wrong. He could play any register, it was just that his mastery of them was such that he ended up combining them all into one higher register, that of his own imposing physique, his own name. Like Jo
hn Wayne, he was an actor who, however rich in variety and resources, never erased himself, as Alec Guinness and Laurence Olivier did and John Gielgud did not. Vincent Price was always Vincent Price playing someone else. But far from seeming monotonous, I would say that he could have played any role without ever ceasing to be himself. There is something almost Shakespearean about him, because, in common with many of Shakespeare’s villains, even at his most vile and malevolent, he seems touched with genius. It is a shame he was never cast as Richard III or even Macbeth, roles he would have doubtless played as, respectively, evil and pusillanimous, but always with that touch of greatness.