“That’s sensational,” said Pete, who pushed aside his pompadour, desperate to enter Kosinski’s tale. “We’ll work her into the script. Chauncey will visit Bendel’s after he’s thrown out of his garden; he’ll buy some trinket from Evelyne. It will be a perfect cameo for Sophia Loren.”
Jurek ignored his chatter.
“I didn’t even attempt to catch her eye. What was the point? To win Evelyne back and have her decompose under my lens? It was my camera that had been killing Evelyne—it soiled her, took her outside her playful seduction at Bendel’s. I’d broken the simple cord of her life. . . . I was in love with Evelyne. That’s why I left her alone. Not for her sake, but for mine. I couldn’t experiment with her, reenact the same poses under the lights.”
He walked out of Sellers’ suite with the baroness, while I wondered what kind of romance she’d had under his lens. But I had the feeling that he’d never photographed the baroness, or she would not have been able to last. There were no killer cameras in Kosinski’s studio. It was the man behind the camera who killed.
I listened to Sellers sulk.
“I’ll never be the gardener. . . .”
And then Jurek suddenly reappeared, smiling like a fiendish cat.
“Peter darling, did you know that Little Ian saved my life?”
Pete had a brooding, murderous look. “That wanker isn’t supposed to save your life. It’s not in his job description.”
“Two crooked undercover cops were bludgeoning me to death. I could hear the devil call my name—that’s how far gone I was. And Ian demolished them, shades of his grandfather. He broke their hands. They’ll never be able to clutch a gun again . . . or a blackjack.”
“And why were these crooked cops after you, love?”
“I’m the patron saint of prostitutes. But that’s not important, Peter dear. We now have irrefutable evidence that Ian will go all the way.”
“Go all the way?” Pete asked, as bewildered as ever.
“Don’t fret. He wouldn’t bash his own employer. But you might pay him to silence your enemies—or silence me, for that matter. But it wouldn’t get you a mite closer to Mr. Chance.”
And he was gone again, like some irritant, some pestilence put there to infuriate Peter Sellers.
— 10 —
I WASN’T CLEVER ENOUGH TO KEEP PACE with Pluto. He’d written Being There as the skeleton for a film script. That’s why the novel seemed to lack an interior life. It wasn’t out of Chance’s apparent aphasia. It was the reductive language of a screenplay.
Perhaps the scenario itself had been shopped around. All I can say is that Sellers wouldn’t give up. He had a pacemaker sewn into his chest; he suffered from periodic fainting spells, worried that the simplest cough might provoke a heart attack, but he was determined to play Mr. Chance before he died. And he did. Kosinski relented after six years. A deal was put together, and filming began in January 1979 at Biltmore House, a castle in North Carolina that had once been the most humongous private residence in the United States; even its current keepers couldn’t recall how many rooms, turrets, and dungeons Biltmore House had. It was the summer residence of the Vanderbilt clan at the beginning of the last century, with more than 100,000 acres, and now it was a gigantic movie prop.
Pete had never allowed me on the set of his other films, but he’d consulted with his mountebanks, and they had decided that I might bring him luck, particularly when Jurek was hovering around like some hawk that seemed to have swooped down from one of the castle’s million turrets. Whenever Jurek came to North Carolina, he scrutinized every scene, every image, every inch of dialogue. But he could enchant cast and crew, win them over with tales of the illustrious guests who had visited the Vanderbilts at Biltmore House. He mentioned a quarrel Henry James and Edith Wharton had had on the castle’s front lawn.
“What did they fight about, love?” Pete asked with a bitter smile. I’m sure he’d never heard of Henry James or Edith Wharton.
“They fought over books,” said Kosinski. “The master had seen his own novels and Wharton’s in the library. He bet Wharton all his future earnings as a novelist that not one Vanderbilt inside Biltmore House had ever perused any of their books.”
“And what did they do, love? Write out a questionnaire and slip it under the door of each and every Vanderbilt?”
Jurek looked askance and sniffed at Sellers with his beak, as if that might make him disappear into dust.
“The Vanderbilts did find one reader in the mansion—their butler, who devoured every book. Henry James had won the bet, but he was appalled. He’d never heard of a butler who could read books. He left Biltmore House in a hurry.”
Members of the crew whistled and clapped their hands. They couldn’t get enough of Kosinski, while they kept away from Pete and his little tyrannies as much as they could. He would fall into a sudden rage, hurl his shoe at a cameraman, ask Hal Ashby—the film’s director—to fire some wardrobe assistant who was giving him bad vibes, he said. But if Pete was Ivan the Terrible on-and off-camera, then Kosinski was a rogue clown. He would seduce the prettiest extras by explaining how he suffered from an incurable eye disease and had to sulk inside a closet for six hours a day so that he could practice what it was like to be blind. And it wasn’t a prank: We’d open the doors of some armoire at the mansion and discover the future blind man sitting crumpled up in the dark.
Sellers was at a disadvantage here. On any other film, he would have gathered up all his comic flourish, closed his eyes, and morphed into Kosinski, but he was so involved with Mr. Chance that he couldn’t creep into another man’s skin. He rehearsed his lines, Hamlet-like, on the Biltmore’s marble stairs, and had his revenge if Jurek happened to be around when a scene was shot. He’d lost fifty pounds after his first explosion of heart attacks in 1964, and was quite gaunt in the Pink Panther films, but he decided to play Chauncey Gardiner as a fat man. He’d usurped a little of Stan Laurel’s childish voice, but without Stan’s hysteria and high pitch. Chauncey Gardiner talked in a baritone that seemed underwater; as near as he was to you, he always sounded far away. And Pete’s eyes lit with pleasure as he attacked Kosinski in the voice of Kosinski’s own creation—Chance. He’d cut into a piece of dialogue, shake his head, and start to shiver. “I’m so sorry, Mr. K., but you’re standing in my sight lines.”
No matter where Jurek placed himself, it wasn’t good enough.
“Gee, I just can’t act with that guy around.”
And he drove Kosinski off the set. But he was shrewd enough not to banish him entirely. Whole scenes had to be added or scratched, and he might need the rogue to create a new patch of dialogue.
When Mr. K. reappeared after a week of exile, Sellers would win him back in his own impersonation of Peter Sellers: part Cockney, part California, part Windsor Castle.
“Jerzy, be a good chap, Jerzy, and rewrite the scene where Eve wanks off while Chance is watching the telly.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with that scene,” Jerzy said, stealing up to Pete like some vampire prepared to suck blood.
Pete didn’t contradict Mr. K. or bother to rewrite the scene with Eve (Shirley MacLaine), but mouthed whatever madness came into his skull. It was brilliant. He was a dying man who played someone who was hardly half-alive. It wasn’t only the peanut in Chauncey’s pants or his addiction to the tube or the fact that he couldn’t drive a car and prepare his own breakfast; like Pete, he had a strange defection in his heart and could do little more than mimic and mime; and in Mr. Chance, Pete masked his own cruel rage and rambled about in the void of a man-child who couldn’t have recognized his own name.
I SHARED A ROOM WITH JUREK in a cottage on Swan Street that looked as if it belonged in a fairy tale; the winding streets of Biltmore Village were paved with bloodred brick; the outer walls of each cottage were dotted with a kind of rough, pebbly skin; the roofs were made of red tile. I had to wonder if this immaculate replica of a Norman village, with its cathedral, and rectory, and tiled roofs,
was the collective nightmare of the Vanderbilt clan.
I didn’t see much of my roommate. He was either rutting around with some script girl or flying off to another project. And while he was away, I read another of his novels, Cockpit, which tells the story of Tarden, a secret agent who has left “the Service”—some phantasmagoric CIA—and wanders the world, causing mischief wherever he can. Tarden was Kosinski, or at least a mock-heroic version of him. The book reminded me of Steps, with its leap from episode to episode, but Steps was about real paranoia and pain, and in Cockpit the pain was anesthetized, so that Tarden hops about like a superhero with little at risk.
And this was the Tarden-Kosinski I saw in ’79. He wasn’t Pluto any longer. He had little time for the night crawlers in Harlem’s Polish forest. He’d become akin to a rock star, with his birdlike profile appearing on Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson, and a hundred other talk shows. You found him in the society pages, photographed at a gala with the baroness and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kissinger, or at a writers’ conference, championing some Polish novelist in prison; it was hard to tell if Jerzy Kosinski himself belonged in Cockpit as one of Tarden’s masks.
At the Biltmore mansion, on and off the set, Jerzy was playing Jerzy. He bullied and seduced, bullied and seduced, like Tarden up to his tricks. But the span of his wings was nowhere as great as Pete’s. Pete didn’t have to manipulate or woo. He understood the murderous side of his own nature. He tolerated Jurek while there were still lines to be written, but once the film wrapped, Pete went for blood.
He took his revenge by shoving Jurek right out of the story. The film ends with Mr. Chance “levitating” on the water, like some wordless wizard. And with a touch of malice, Pete had a new ending tacked onto the film; as the final credits roll, we find Peter Sellers in a series of outtakes; he’s sitting on a table with his injured leg, waited to be xrayed in Benjamin Rand’s own labyrinthine hospital inside his mansion.
Sellers flubs his lines and starts to laugh; and he flubs the same lines again and again. He’s no longer Mr. Chance, but a comic actor, Peter Sellers, with dominion over the film and Kosinski’s own characters. And he obliges us to realize that Being There is all about him. He’s abandoned Stan Laurel’s meek voice. And with his own little laughing fit, he obliterates Jerzy Kosinski and Mr. Chance.
— 11 —
JUREK WASN’T THE ONLY CASUALTY of Being There. Sellers fired me a few months after the film wrapped. Wires had crossed somewhere in his skull, and I became Jerzy’s accomplice. There was no point pleading with him. He told me not to bother returning to the Dorchester. He’d married again—his fourth and final wife, Lynne, was a little-known actress much younger than Pete. But whatever “nest” he tried to build with his wives, he always ended up at his suite overlooking Hyde Park.
I’d been Sellers’ slave for sixteen years, his salaried sidekick, the straight man he needed to enhance his own cruel routines. He’d fired me before. I kept a tiny flat on Amsterdam Avenue, knowing that I’d be locked out of Manhattan if I ever tried to negotiate another lease. He’d call within a month, berate himself, and beg me to return at twice the salary. I should have told him to sod off. But I could hear a terrible loneliness in his voice, and I’d give in, accept his lucre.
It was different now. He had his young bride, and he’d wander with her to the Swiss Alps or Nice, flare up at customs inspectors who had the cheek to ask him for his passport—Inspector Clouseau should have been waved through—but he was like a walking death mask, according to the friends I still had in his retinue. His wife had gotten rid of whoever had been loyal to him—his bodyguard, his chauffeur—and had become sort of a nurse who connived.
But she couldn’t control Pete. He left her in Los Angeles and returned to the Dorchester in July of 1980 with whatever small retinue he still had. Pete nearly died at the Dorchester. He suffered a severe heart attack on the twenty-second of July and fell into a coma. He was carted out of the hotel and taken to a hospital, where he survived for two more days. I wasn’t even allowed to attend his funeral. I received a call from some secretary, who insisted that Pete did not want Archibald Diggers’ grandson at the services. And should I have the gall to arrive at Golders Green, I would be thrown out the door of the chapel. She talked as if Pete were alive and whispering in her ear. It gave me the willies.
The Pink Panther had ruined him; once he played that bumbling inspector, no comedian had the right to exist other than Peter Sellers. I’d fallen in love with George Smiley, John le Carré’s fat spymaster in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Smiley was a cuckold, like Leopold Bloom, and seemed to carry Bloom’s sadness about on his shoulders, but was brutal when he had to be and could run a whole gallery of secret agents. I’d begged Pete to play Smiley instead of Clouseau.
But Sellers wouldn’t read the book. And when Sir Alec Guinness usurped the role and played Smiley on the BBC, it was Pete himself who began to lament. “Ian,” he muttered, “you prat, you allowed that grand old lady, Alec Guinness, to get to the front of the line.”
Guinness had been knighted by the queen, and Pete had become persona non grata at Buckingham Palace once he lost all his privileges with Princess Margaret. And he’d also had his first success in film with Alec Guinness, playing a numbskull in The Ladykillers. So Guinness was always a sore point with Pete. “He’s my maiden aunt, love.”
And the last conversation I ever had with Pete was over Alec Guinness. It was a few months before Pete died. He must have watched Guinness in Tinker, Tailor on the tube, and he rang me up and started to cry like a baby.
“I’ve squandered it, mate, I really have. I’m the old tit, not Sir Alec. Ask me why he deserved to be Smiley.”
“Where are you, Pete?”
I could feel him seethe in that moment of silence. “That’s not relevant, Little Ian. Ask me.”
“Well, why?”
“Because his fingers are much fatter than mine—truly fat. And what you see of Smiley are his fat hands. My hands are like Popsicle sticks. All he had to do was gesture with his hands and he owned George Smiley. I would have had to hide my hands, love. They would have twitched in my pockets, and I’d have looked twitchy.”
“Where are you, Pete?”
“In some wankers’ hotel, a minute away from doing myself in.”
I didn’t believe him. He was always committing suicide on the telephone.
“Ta,” he said. “I’ll write you into my will.”
And then he had his fatal heart attack, and after his ashes were buried in Golders Green, I did receive one letter of condolence—from Kosinski. He’s the last person I would have expected to write me about Peter Sellers.
But there was little rancor in Kosinski’s note, and none of his usual mischief.
Little Ian, I was saddened to hear of Peter’s sudden death. I know how entwined you were with him. I misspoke when I called you his slave. I realize how dependent one was upon the other. And, in some perverse way, how dependent I was on him. He breathed upon my Chauncey and brought him to life. Meeting Chance through him, I also met myself. I would not have considered that possible.
He recognized in Chance the life and death of a necessary mirror. It’s Borges, I believe, who says that a man journeys as far and wide as he can, and instead of breaking new boundaries, he discovers that in all his multiple adventures he did nothing but mark the outline of his own face.
Your brother in grief,
Jerzy
I DIDN’T SEE MUCH OF MY BROTHER IN GRIEF. His star was rising. Not only was he a pundit on talk shows but the ex bird-boy Reds with had also become a movie actor. In 1981, he appeared in Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty; he had the role of a commissar, Zinoviev, but he was playing himself. The commissar was Jerzy Kosinski, with his fierce eyes and hawklike features, preying upon poor John Reed (Warren Beatty), and overwhelming the film.
Kosinski was also a presenter at the Oscars in March of ’82. He wore a shirt with many frills and a tuxedo that smoothed the outline of his chicken ch
est. But he would be dragged down in a matter of months; his entire career as a writer began to tumble like a meager house of cards.
In June, an article appeared in The Village Voice that would haunt Kosinski for the rest of his life. Entitled “Jerzy Kosinski’s Tainted Words,” it damned him as a plagiarist and a fraud, declared that The Painted Bird had been written in Polish and that parts of it might even have been plagiarized. Jurek had become a literary vampire overnight, a ghoul who stole from other writers, other books, and even vampirized his own childhood—he was the tainted bird. Manhattan’s favorite Polish-American novelist, an heir to Kafka and Conrad, was suddenly a pariah who could not have flourished without half a dozen ghostwriters.
Kosinski’s stable of friends, including Scheherazade and the Henry Kissingers, rallied around him; articles were scribbled in his behalf; meetings were called to denounce The Village Voice, but he appeared on fewer and fewer talk shows, and I never saw him again at the Oscars in a ruffled shirt, like some gallant who had walked right out of the Old World.
I couldn’t scan The Painted Bird for its authenticity, and I didn’t give a crap whether little Jurek wandered through the war, hiding in one place, or ran around with a comet to keep him warm. The book was a replica of his own secret life, and the monstrosities he revealed had the sting of truth; he was exiled from his parents, whether he lived with them or not. And even if some ghost had helped guide Kosinski’s hand, there was still nothing else remotely like The Painted Bird.
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