The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Travel writers were invited to Haiti specifically to dispel the ‘lies’ spread by The Comedians. Duvalier pulled out all the stops to publicize a visit by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia as well as the opening of the Dr François Duvalier International Jet Airport, constructed at a location known infelicitously as Maïs Gate (Rotten Corn). Emperor Selassie was on a visit to the Caribbean, and Haiti was one of his stops. Decked out in top hat and tails, Duvalier greeted the Ethiopian ruler at the new airport, which together with the architectural monstrosity known as Duvalierville was one of his pet projects.

  When Aubelin Jolicoeur first learned about the book and its characters he was delighted to find himself in a novel by such an illustrious writer as Graham Greene. But when he weighed the potential consequences of his enthusiasm, he became uncharacteristically aloof on the subject. He knew the dangers of attracting the wrong publicity in Papa Doc’s Haiti. He was careful for a time not to mention or write a word about The Comedians. It did not take long, however, before, true to form, he was bending over feminine hands and introducing himself as Petit Pierre. He confided to his friends, ‘If Greene had described me as he knew me, I would have looked like an angel among devils — and that would have made me vulnerable to the Tontons Macoutes. I was grateful to Greene.’ However, years later he complained to me, ‘Greene is haunted by spies, and he made me into a spy, which I was not. The government saw me as against the regime because I had appeared in a book that was anti-Duvalier. I suffered both ways. People were afraid of me, both sides were afraid of me. The truth is they couldn’t touch me because I had no greed for money or power. I don’t care for either … I live in harmony with myself.’ Sitting in his art gallery in Port-au-Prince among unframed, unsold paintings of primitive artists during a 1991 interview, and by then sixty-seven years old, Jolicoeur had lost little of his joie de vivre. ‘How could I worry? I don’t drink or smoke. I indulge only in sex. Oh, la, la!’ he said his high-pitched laugh, making the paintings on the wall dance. ‘More champagne?’ In 2005 Jolicoeur passed away. He was buried in the Jacmel cemetery in which he claimed he had been born. He died a poor man.

  In a letter to me dated 20 December 1965 Graham announced, ‘I am leaving England on January 1 to take up residence abroad and my address will be 130 Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris 17. Do look me up if you are ever in Paris at the same time as me.’ Just as The Comedians appeared in the bookshops, he was busy writing the screenplay for the movie version of his novel. In another letter to me, written from his new base in Paris and dated 5 January 1966, he could hardly conceal his excitement. The film rights had been sold, he reported, even before the book was finished. Hollywood’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had bought the rights and intended to make it a big-budget film with a stellar cast; the studio hoped to begin filming within days. In his letter Graham added:

  It was a very happy surprise when I came back here from Canada after Christmas to find your long letter. Even more pleasant was the fact that you liked The Comedians. I was very much afraid that you might find that I had got everything wrong owing to my short acquaintance with the country, and it gives me enormous pleasure that you praised it. I had heard in Havana that they were broadcasting extracts from the book so Papa Doc must be quite irritated by it.

  He was also pleased, he said, that the film’s director would be Peter Glenville, a Brit who had directed Graham’s play, The Living Room. Glenville had abandoned his law studies at Oxford to pursue a career in the theatre. He became a celebrated stage director in London and eventually moved to Hollywood.

  In Port-au-Prince, the poet—sycophant Gérard Daumec broke the news to Papa Doc: The Comedians was going to be made into a movie. A dangerous silence ensued, Daumec recalled to me. When Papa Doc finally lifted his head from his desk he uttered one word. ‘Conspiracy!’

  To Duvalier, this was another phase in a plot to sabotage his self-styled ‘revolution’. His terror apparatus continued to operate but on a slightly more sophisticated level, as he was making an effort to entice tourists back to Haiti. In fact, a government communiqué had recently instructed Haitians to go out in the evenings and enjoy themselves. The government wanted to make the capital’s night life more attractive, and the official communiqué directed ‘state employees and Duvalierists in general … to frequent bars, restaurants, and the International Casino’. During the height of repression the regime had turned the city after sundown into a morgue. Now the Duvalier faithful were under orders to bring it back to life. It was not an easy transition. Only the highest-ranking bureaucrats and gun-toting Macoutes ventured out at night to paint the town red.

  Meanwhile Papa Doc had triumphed over Rome. His excommunication was revoked, and he returned to a state of grace in the Catholic Church. The Holy See had agreed to Duvalier’s choice for the post of Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor François Wolf Ligonde. He was Haitian-born and considered a Duvalierist.

  To Papa Doc the film version of The Comedians was a distraction of the worst kind. Feeding his paranoia, Duvalier’s palace ghostwriter, Gérard de Catalogne, who was also in charge of reviving Haitian tourism, suggested that the impact of the film version of The Comedians could be disastrous for tourism. The film, according to Daumec, was suddenly seen by Papa Doc as a threatening monster. Foreign Minister René Chalmers and Gérard de Catalogne were called to the Palace for what amounted to a council of war. Daumec sat next to Papa Doc. Various options and plans were presented and studied. Duvalier was more than ever convinced that the film was part of a larger CIA conspiracy and that Graham was working for the CIA.

  According to Daumec’s account, Chalmers was instructed to deprive the producers of the movie of a location in which to film it. He was to inform each and every country where the film could potentially be shot, including the United States and the Caribbean and African nations, that allowing it to be made on their territory would be interpreted as a hostile act against Haiti and its President-for-Life and that it would lead to grave consequences. In retrospect, Papa Doc’s attempt to extend the long arm of his censorship around the globe must go down as one of the more bizarre episodes in diplomatic history.

  The Comedians (the book) was still being reviewed in the United States when Peter Glenville began his search for the film location. It would have to be a place that resembled Haiti yet offered all of the necessary amenities to shoot a major motion picture. ‘I must have done the world looking for a location,’ Glenville recalled. He said he had visited Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, Martinique and Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean and several other islands in search of a Haiti lookalike. ‘French Guinea wasn’t bad, but it had its limitations, and I finally settled on Dahomey in Africa,’ Glenville explained in a 1993 interview with me at his summer home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

  Dahomey, now known as Benin, was chosen for a number of reasons, he added. Dahomeyans spoke French in addition to their native Fon language; and there were daily flights to Paris, which meant the film rushes could be sent back to the editing studio there every day. Not least important for an all-star cast working on location in West Africa, ‘We could receive food flown out daily from Paris.’ The President of Dahomey, General Christophe Soglo, was hospitable and wise enough to understand that the film would bring business and an influx of money to his country of 2,300,000 people at a time when its economy was at a standstill. Revenues from Dahomey’s principal exports of palm-tree products and castor oil were not enough to cover the government’s $29 million annual budget. Moreover, the government had guesthouses available, which it was only too happy to rent. The country’s largest city, Cotonou, is close to the sea on the Gulf of Guinea, which was important for the film. The government had also built an impressive four-lane sodium-lit boulevard along Cotonou’s seafront. ‘And I had six stars to worry about, so I chose Dahomey,’ Glenville concluded.

  In another important step in preparing for the movie Glenville decided it was worth the risk to visit Haiti. Posing as a tourist, he flew to Port-au-Prince in
October 1966 to see the country for himself and savour the character of the Grand Hotel Oloffson. Glenville was accompanied by a French architect (Glenville identified him to me as an interior decorator) whose job would be to design the movie-set replica of the Oloffson, which would be reproduced in the film as the Hotel Trianon.

  Glenville had barely been shown into his room at the Oloffson — the ‘John Gielgud Suite’ — when, as if on cue, Aubelin Jolicoeur appeared and introduced himself, adding that he was the famous Petit Pierre of the Graham Greene novel The Comedians. Years later Jolicoeur charged that Glenville ‘lied to me, saying he was here to make a film on the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, our great revolutionary hero’.

  Glenville got more than a taste of the fear and anxiety that permeated Duvalier’s police state. His most memorable experience occurred while he and his architect colleague were waiting at the Port-au-Prince airport preparing to depart. ‘It was a horrendous experience,’ Glenville recalled. A Haitian friend had informed him that an edition of a New York publication containing an article about The Comedians being made into a movie had just arrived, and a Duvalierist airport censor was dispatching the article to the Palace. The article mentioned that Glenville was going to direct the movie.

  ‘There we were waiting at the airport when an announcement said our plane was delayed. I really thought they were going to nail us at the last moment,’ Glenville recounted. ‘The American ambassador had warned us that there was very little foreign embassies could do for their nationals in Haiti when they were imprisoned.’ Glenville and his architect worried about the innumerable photographs they had taken for reference to recreate Haiti in Africa. Had Papa Doc by now got word of their mission? Finally their flight was called, but neither allowed himself a sigh of relief until Haiti was far behind.

  When Papa Doc read the news that Dahomey would be the location for the filming of The Comedians, he was, as described by Daumec, apoplectic. Dahomey of all countries! Duvalier saw this as a treasonable act. The people of this West African nation have a special kinship with Haitians. Dahomey was the ancestral home of many Haitians whose forebears had been taken away and sold as slaves. Besides being their original home, the country had spiritual significance for Haitians, who still practised the Dahomey Voodoo rites. Duvalier ordered Foreign Minister Chalmers to make a strenuous protest to Cotonou. President Soglo, no shrinking violet himself — he had been instrumental in ousting three of his predecessors since the country’s independence — shrugged off Duvalier’s efforts to quash the filming.

  The cast of The Comedians began descending on the small African nation and setting up house. Their behind-the-scenes experiences during the filming were a saga in themselves. Cotonou was not exactly a replica of Port-au-Prince. Although it is near the sea, it lacks the backdrop of mountains. Still, there were plenty of similarities. Dahomey was also a tropical black country that had been colonized by the French. Following independence in 1960 it also suffered a series of coups d’état.

  The film luminaries arriving in Cotonou included Elizabeth Taylor, her husband and co-star Richard Burton and actors Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, James Earl Jones (who played Dr Magiot) and Raymond St Jacques, whose character was the sadistic police officer Concasseur. Roscoe Lee Browne, who was an uncanny Jolicoeur lookalike, was on hand as Petit Pierre. Max Pinchinat, a Haitian painter who lived in Paris, was persuaded to act as the fictional houngan (Voodoo priest). (During the filming Pinchinat insisted on biting the head off a live chicken and not a fake one, despite worries about protests from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.)

  ‘In the papers yesterday there is news that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor … have received anonymous threats of what will happen to them if they play in the film which is starting in a few days in Dahomey,’ Graham reported in a letter to me. ‘I hope to go there for ten days in February to see how things are getting on.’

  When Graham arrived in Dahomey, he recalled, he got a ‘terrible shock’. While driving from the airport to the capital, he was marvelling at certain similarities to Port-au-Prince when suddenly an iron sign loomed ahead along the roadway, with a look of permanence, that announced: ‘Welcome to Haiti.’ Although the sign was only a prop for the movie, for an anxious moment Graham thought he had landed at the new Dr François Duvalier International Jet Airport in Port-au-Prince instead of Cotonou.

  Because of various misfortunes that plagued the set, many members of the film crew began to suspect that Duvalier had laid a Voodoo curse on them. In his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise, Alec Guinness relates:

  There was an ugly rumour that Papa Doc, who bitterly resented Greene’s account of his country and its politics, had sent a Voodoo priest to Dahomey to disrupt the film. Apparently Voodoo spells cannot travel over water and have to be operated close at hand. All great nonsense, I am sure, but, whether the rumour was true or not, on the first day of filming one of the unit stumbled on the beach, possibly from a heart attack, and drowned in a foot of water before anyone could assist him. Several people complained of difficulty in breathing, suffering from acute headaches and deep depression; one or two had to be sent home.

  There were also real-world concerns. In his book Rich: The Life of Richard Burton Melvyn Bragg recounts that because the book of The Comedians had upset many people the threat of kidnapping hung over the Burtons through their connection with the film. The family were receiving a number of kidnapping alarms a week, and their children all had individually assigned guards accompanying them when away from their home in Gstaad or school.

  By September 1966 the Dominican Republic’s civil war and US intervention had ended. Following the truce and elections, the long-time Trujillo bureaucrat, Joaquín Balaguer, a seasoned, crafty politician, was back in power, and Washington was appeased. The Haitian exiles in the Dominican Republic, including their leader Fred Baptiste and his brother Renel, scattered as if to the wind. They were no longer welcome, partly because they had fought on the side of the Constitutionalists. In retaliation they had become targets of La Banda, right-wing death squads. Balaguer also re-established diplomatic relations with Papa Doc. The Dominican Republic was no longer hospitable territory for anti-Duvalier exiles. Time magazine transferred me to its Mexico City bureau, so again my family, and I also started a new life in a new land.

  In a letter from Paris, dated 4 May 1968, Graham wrote, ‘I feel a little sad about having shot my bolt as far as Haiti is concerned, and wish I could find another arrow in my quiver.’ Despite intensive research into Graham’s background, the team at Duvalier’s Foreign Ministry had learned relatively little about the real-life Mr Greene. Yet even Graham admired the amount of work that went into producing what would become Papa Doc’s official exposé of Graham’s ‘flawed character’.

  In Haiti, as in any nation where politics are personal and partisan, character assassinations of writers were as old as the publishing business. Nevertheless an attack in the form of a slick government-printed booklet, as was produced on Duvalier’s orders against Graham, was unprecedented even in Haiti. This was no ordinary government protest. It was an official highly orchestrated effort to discredit an internationally renowned author. Styled as an official Haitian Foreign Ministry bulletin, the 92-page document was devoted entirely to denouncing Graham Greene and the dark conspiratorial forces that allegedly motivated him. It was a classic example of the paranoid’s complaint — ‘It’s all a plot against me’ — while cheering the achievements of Dr Duvalier and his ‘revolution’. The main text consisted of ten essays. The authors, who were duly credited, were all staff members of the Foreign Ministry, with several drawn from the protocol section. Father Bajeux has referred to them as Papa Doc’s ‘intellectual Macoutes’. The broadside’s purple prose was interspersed with gripping photographs reflecting Papa Doc’s paranoid narcissism — the President-for-Life himself, the Dr François Duvalier International Airport, the Dr François Duvalier Police Headquarters, the Dr François Duvalier Tax Offi
ce. There were pictures of the still-uncompleted Duvalierville, which Graham had described in The Comedians as a ‘wilderness of cement’.

  A memorandum dispatched by Foreign Minister René Chalmers to all Haitian chiefs of diplomatic missions abroad, and to all foreign diplomatic missions in Haiti, left no doubt as to the seriousness of purpose of the government bulletin. Dated 15 January 1968, the book-length memorandum announced that it was being distributed to ‘call attention to the film The Comedians staged by the Metro Goldwin [sic] Mayer, the theme of which is inspired by Graham Greene’s novel of the same name’.The document, printed in French and English, warned:

  The frankly hostile character of this film in which the Republic of Haiti, its government and its Chief are criticized, the acrimonious tone of each sequence in which the most unlikely facts are supposedly true to life, the very price paid for staging of the film permit one to infer that Graham Greene’s novel and the film drawn from it are part of a vast plan tending to prepare international public opinion for an action that might be carried out on a larger scale against the Republic of Haiti, the last episode of which could be an invasion of our territory with all its detrimental incidences [sic].

  Therefore, this Chancellery is inclined to believe that the shooting of this film and its showing in different countries constitute an act of indirect aggression against the Republic of Haiti. This is why it would appreciate it if the Chiefs of the Diplomatic Missions of Haiti accredited in foreign countries would lodge protests in the name of the Haitian Government, with the Chancelleries of the countries to which they are accredited, against the showing of this film that is considered an act of indirect aggression against the Republic of Haiti, and consequently likely to weaken the traditional bonds of friendship existing between those countries and Haiti.