by James Salter
There was a film festival in Taormina she went to. She had looked forward to it for days. I languished in Rome. The week passed slowly. I heard her distant voice—I did not know where Taormina was, exactly—on the telephone. “Oh, darling,” she cried, “it’s so marvelous.” She was going to have the same agent as Monica Vitti, she said excitedly. A director had promised her a part in a James Bond film. She was not staying at the San Domenico Palace, she was at the Excelsior. Tomorrow she would be at the Imperiale—I understood quite well what all that meant—and on Sunday she was going to receive a prize.
“Which prize?”
“I don’t know. Darling, I can’t believe it,” she said.
At last there was a telegram—I had felt I might not see her again—Coming Monday Rapido 5. Afternoon, and signed with her name. It was sent from Ljubljana—Yugoslavia.
I met the train. It was thrilling, almost miraculous, to see her coming along the platform, a porter behind her with her bags. Some things are only good the first time but seeing her was like the first time. I knew she would say “darling.” I knew she would say, “I adore you.”
The exciting days in Sicily, the festival, had left a glow. At a big reception, among scores of faces, she had seen, directed at her, the brilliant unwavering smile of a young man in a silk foulard, a wide smile, “like a killer’s.” She was wearing a white, beaded dress. Her arms were bare. Fifteen or twenty minutes later she saw him again.
The second barrel, as the lawyers say, was fatal. She said only, “Let’s leave.” Without a word he offered her his arm.
He had a beautiful car. The steering wheel was made of gleaming wood. They went somewhere but found it closed. That was enough. “Let’s go to bed,” she said. He said simply, “Yes.”
At the hotel the portiere would not let him go up to her room, “Non, non, signorina,” he said. She began to make a scene. She was going to another hotel, she threatened loudly. Finally the portiere asked, “Where is he?” and allowed them to go up. Thirty minutes later he was ringing the room, to no avail.
I listened with some unhappiness but without anger. They say you should not tell these things to the other person, but in this case it meant little, faithfulness was not what I expected.
“You’ll get to the top,” I told her almost reluctantly, “but you shouldn’t …”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“If I don’t become too much of a whore,” she said.
We drove up to Paris. I remember the hotel and the first evening. We were at the window; I was behind her, standing close. Across the river the lights of the city glittered, as far as one could see.
We had come up through the Rhône valley and many small towns. Past Dijon we were on a back road along a canal and came to a wide dam from which the lines of fishermen dropped forty or fifty feet into clear green water. The dark shapes of fish—I took them to be pike—were coasting lazily about. We watched the biggest ones approach, ignore the bait, and move off to lie motionless. “Like sultans,” she commented. I felt she knew.
——
What I remember is a kind of glamour and sleekness. Travel, the great hotels. James Kennaway, the Scottish writer, coming into a suite at Claridge’s one January in a belted, supple black-leather coat—he had time for just one drink before catching the night train to Edinburgh, not alone, my impression was. He was sharp-nosed, laughing. I knew him only slightly, though I had once gone for a weekend to his house in Gloucestershire. One of the other guests was a lively old woman who had been his father-in-law’s governess and, at the appropriate period of youth, mistress. She remained close to the family. “Traditional,” they assured me.
I remember, in Santa Monica, beneath the palm-lined bluff on the beach, the brief row of houses, one of which—a large, imitation Normandy farmhouse—had been rented by Roman Polanski and his young wife, Sharon Tate.
I had met Polanski through Redford. A call had come from London, in a warm, faintly accented voice—the producer, Gene Gutowski. Could I come there to talk about writing a film, the film about a ski racer? Somewhere in the whirl of London nights—restaurants so in fashion that their telephone numbers were unlisted, headlong drives through parks and narrow streets—Polanski gave me in a single sentence his idea of the movie: It was to be something like High Noon; the sheriff has been killed—in this case the lead racer on the team has broken a leg—and they have to send for a replacement. I was impressed by the succinctness.
Polanski was already famous, in his early thirties, although he appeared younger. He had a small, speedy car with a telephone—innovative then—a large apartment, and an air of freedom from the dullness of being always and only oneself. With pride, but hastily, he showed me photographs of Sharon, to whom he was not yet married. There was something that both drew one to him and cautioned one—his eye seemed to skim over so many things. Beyond the shrewdness and candor, he gave the strange impression of not playing for anything real, as if chips were certain at some point to be redeemed. His banter was filled with confidence. One night in a restaurant we sat with Nureyev, who was eating a dish of magnificent strawberries with his fingers. “See? I told you he ate like a peasant,” Polanski said. Nureyev didn’t bother to smile.
He had passed, as a child, through the terror of massacre and war. He had seen a column of men being taken from the Krakow ghetto, doomed, his father among them, and had run alongside like a calf, wanting to go. His father ignored him and finally muttered threateningly, “Get lost.” The small boy of ten stopped, stung, and watched them leave him behind, to life, as it turned out, although, astonishingly, his father survived also. For such a miraculous escape and the rich life that followed, was there a price to be exacted?
That summer in Santa Monica—it was 1967—at the Mori Fencing Academy, Polanski was a prize pupil. He was also rehearsing an important film he was about to direct. In the enormous cavern of a sound stage, the floor of the apartment which would be in Rosemary’s Baby had been laid out with white tape. Polanski’s instructions to the actors had the same verve and precision he showed with the foil.
At the oversized beach house Sharon wore white pants and a long-sleeved black polo shirt, the buttons open. Her hands stole around me affectionately from behind. Polanski was weary from the long day with actors. We ate in the kitchen, steaks Sharon had thriftily bought at the post exchange in San Francisco—her father was an army officer—and just as Roman had shown pictures of her to me, she showed one of herself in some film magazine to him. An army brat, I was thinking, although I had never seen one like her. The ease and devotion of their life seemed plain.
For reasons not worth going into, Polanski was dropped from the movie I finally wrote, and thus I never lost the admiration I had for his energy and charm, a charm that was not learned but came from some deeper source, as well as his power to command. I could not imagine him being unable to reply to a question or think quickly. He had an instinct for the visceral; in his hands even familiar material could become interesting.
As for Sharon, she remains for me a kind of Hera, the emblem of marriage. If she was not a very good housekeeper, she was pure of heart and her flesh was a poem. One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman, looking at her, talking, touching, as well as other ways.
August morning. In a white nightgown, barefoot, with lovely arms and long hair she comes to the table in their suite in the Essex House. Polanski, barefoot too, has been watching television. We sit down to breakfast together. May I have the syrup? Mmm. The butter? A hand passes it. Would you like any toast? A crisscrossing of plates and offerings, together with his and her concealed smiles. It was a duet from Noël Coward. The suite was on the south side, high up. All of downtown New York spread before us. The previous night had been frenzy and excess, the morning freshness and reason. On top of the building were large red letters that spelled its name in neon, at night visible for miles. They were a landmark,
like a lighthouse, at the edge of the park, and also a schoolboy legend when for a time, inexplicably, the first “E” and “S” were burned out. In the ambience of pleasure and art we talked about the ski-racing script. He was at the time shooting the movie he had rehearsed in California. Ours would be the next.
I saw them at Cannes a year later, together, for the last time. He was serving as a judge at the festival. He was wearing a dinner jacket when we talked and a white, ruffled shirt. She was in a matchless gown. They were to come to the country for lunch, but never showed up.
When Sharon Tate, along with four others, was senselessly murdered in Los Angeles one night, there was, in addition to horror and disgust, the shame. America had slaughtered one of its innocents. It was incomprehensible, God would not permit it. Perhaps Polanski, who had been in Europe at the time, had overreached himself, achieved too great a happiness, and it had been taken from him. His child, unborn, had died, too—the karma his father had given him was not to be passed on. I felt the sorrow for him that one feels for kings. His powers defied simple grief.
I thought of the bedroom in Santa Monica. It was spacious, on the second floor, facing the sea. I had stood in its corner. The sun was burning the floor. The large bed in which they had slept was unmade, the sheets rumpled, the pillows tossed. In the drawers of the built-in dresser were narrow glass windows to enable one to see the color of the shirts in each. There were Matisse drawings in the beautiful bath.
Among the road maps, cards, old addresses—the lost world never put in order—there is, I know, a photograph: the brilliant, almost demonic director on a couch with the tall, graceful girl. It was taken one night when we had dinner. I envied him his wife. It is difficult now to imagine the woman she would have become. She remains as she was, as if among all the herd there had been this exceptional creature, slightly awkward perhaps, but without blemish and carrying in her person the essential traits, the true heart of the paradise he had somehow bargained for.
——
In first-class cabins, paid for with movie money—a good portion of the money, as it happened—in the warm autumn of 1967 we sailed on the France. Tremendous departure, crowds on the pier, the water widening, the ship assuming life. In the blue, oceanic evening, waiters brought drinks and packs of cigarettes to the table.
We dressed for dinner. Madeleine Carroll and her daughter were aboard, and Edward Albee en route to Paris and Leningrad for the openings of his play. As they entered, the bartender called out greetings to familiar couples by name. At afternoon tea there was an orchestra, and miniskirted girls without partners sat slumped in chairs. A theater producer told stories of Ireland—men who approached him in the street crying grandly, “Sir John!” He tried to correct them but could not. “A little something for charity,” they pleaded.
“What charity?”
“Sir John!” they wailed.
The second night at three in the morning, I woke abruptly. Someone was throwing gravel against the port-holes. It was heavy rain; we had run into a storm. The ship rolled, soared ominously, slid down. The steel shivered and creaked. We had three staterooms and four children, most of whom became seasick. His twin sister, Claude, was smiling and unaffected, but in the empty dining room I could see my son’s face—he was five, Fidi was his pet name—changing color as food was brought to the slanting table.
There was bingo in the calm of the next afternoon. Amid the old couples and children sat a dark-browed Edward Albee, two cards in front of him. The handsome blond boy he was traveling with we saw little of.
We were going to France for a year, to a village in the south, not far from Grasse, where we had rented a large, sparsely furnished farmhouse—a mas in the regional dialect—solidly built with walls two feet thick. It had been occupied the year before by Robert Penn Warren and his wife, Eleanor Clarke. I wrote to ask if they recommended it, and a letter came from her in reply. It described a paradise, from the windows of which the sea could be distantly seen. You will have the most wonderful year of your life, it concluded, if you don’t happen to freeze to death. The house, of course, had no heat. In the worst months of winter the sheets were so cold we could not turn over in bed—we lay like statues of saints, rigid, arms crossed.
La Moutonne, the house was called, the female sheep. The long, descending driveway was bordered by great eucalyptus trees, whose bark hung in sinuous strips. The front of the house more or less faced empty air. There was an embankment, the roofs of a few houses below and, far off, the tinfoil sea. The most wonderful year of your life—the simplicity of that promise.
All through the summer, to prepare them for regular French school—école communale—our two oldest daughters had been taking French lessons. In the Manhattan apartment of a professor, several times a week they sat and talked for an hour. The amount they learned, it turned out, was limited by a large wart the professor had on the tip of his tongue, visible when he spoke and absolutely mesmerizing to two little girls.
It was a long, beautiful fall. Many mornings I rose before dawn and went out on the bedroom balcony to read. Grasse rose blue in the distance. Its buildings had the luminous form and serenity of palaces. The only people we knew in the first months were Harvey Swados, the writer, and his family, half an hour away in Haut de Cagnes. It was they who had persuaded us to come to France—he was on a sabbatical.
Haut de Cagnes was on top of a hill, overlooking its then sleepy sister, Cagnes sur Mer, where Modigliani once lived and the gypsies used to come and bathe their horses in the sea. The Swadoses’ small house belonged to a sculptor or perhaps his children—he had abandoned his family, and his wife had died of drink, with empty bottles piled on the stairs. There were hundreds of books, many moldy, and often inscribed by famous figures from the 1920s, when a disheartened Scott Fitzgerald had sat in the square not far from the house and moaned, “Ernie’s done it,” of The Sun Also Rises, which had just come out.
The village of which La Moutonne was part was less distinguished, able to claim only some years when Renoir, the painter, had lived there. There was a stucco church and a restaurant or two, and beneath our olive trees with their silvery leaves a white goat danced on her hind legs, striving to strip the lowest boughs. This was Lily, sweet-smelling, graceful, and deeply unaffectionate. The children adored her, though treating her with caution. Her face offered little in the way of expression other than satisfaction at eating, and her yellow eyes, set high on her head, were as cold as those of a serpent. It was impossible to estimate what she knew, but whatever it was, we came to realize, was firmly ingrained. At night she was kept in a roomy stone shed attached to the house. During the day she would graze, often climbing onto the red-tile roof of the shed, from there stepping onto the balcony where I worked, and even, if they were open, through the french doors into the bedroom. It was only at milking time that she disappeared.
In memory my forehead is pressed against her round side and I am listening to the thin, metallic sound of milk shooting into the pail, which at a certain point, with seeming inattention, she will step in with a dirty rear hoof. I can only guess why this gave her pleasure.
She was, for a long time we hoped it—we had taken her in the car to her “wedding”—carrying a kid. Finally it was apparent. She was provided with a bed of fresh straw, to which she seemed indifferent, and one winter morning before school the children came running into the kitchen to say that there were four extra legs in the shed!
I have forgotten what we named Lily’s child, but in a matter of a day or two she was climbing the stone walls with her mother and learning the fundamentals of disdain.
I had my picture taken with Lily, holding her close while she looked the other way. One leg with its blackened, worn knee is visible and her mouth has the trace of a triumphant smile.
We were living in isolation. I had no one to talk to aside from my wife, no one whose opinion I could seek about what I had written. Late one afternoon I finished a story—it was about a man whose imaginary life s
lowly consumes his identity until ordinary events become fantastic—and in the panic that followed I gave it to my wife to read, desperate for a response. It was compelling, it was not. I went for a walk in the dusk. The path was desolate late in the year, but the house was lighted and alive as I returned. She was in the kitchen preparing supper. “Well, what did you think?” I asked.
“About what?”
“The story.”
“I couldn’t make head or tail of it,” she remarked.
In time we met people, among them John Collier and his wife. He was, at that time, essentially a scriptwriter. He had strong leftist convictions, though they did not affect his manner of living, which was lordly, if thinly funded. He had come through everything, marriages, leaving England, the blacklist, financial ruin, and somehow made it to shore near Grasse in a huge country house said to have once been the property of Pauline Bonaparte. He readily admitted his mistakes, they came bobbing along behind. He had been offered The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to write when he was working in Los Angeles, but failed to see a film in it. He was luckier with The African Queen and had a profitable interest, even though his script was not used.
He was in his sixties, smiling, cherubic, not old, still quite green in fact, virtually a youth, he concluded. Nimble and rosy-cheeked, his thrusts were light as air. One time he came to ask if Harriet, his wife, could borrow some birth-control pills. My wife apologized, she was sorry but she didn’t have any extra. “Well,” he said unperturbedly, almost gaily, “I guess I’ll have to come over here.”
The Colliers belonged to a small beach club—there were many of them—to the west of Cannes, where Picasso sometimes came; the owners possessed a napkin on which he had once sketched a fish. We swam there and farther along where there was nothing, only a lengthy strip of bare sand. The sea was our chief pleasure. Fleeing from the waves or dashing into them, lying up by the rocks, wind-sheltered, there was the sense that time and events had stopped. We drove back, wearied by the sun, at day’s end to the immemorial house where the goat waited, a sentry on the roof.
