by James Salter
“Who was Kropotski?”
“Dr. Kropotski. His digestion was bad,” she said.
She was big; she was lonely. She had tried to lose weight in a clinic near Grasse and had come to dinner with her food in a small paper bag—one meager slice of cold veal—but her main preoccupation was transportation, how to get places: she didn’t drive.
When we left that night she was singing in the street, something from times even more distant, a vanished girlhood when her homeliness seemed perhaps like a mark of character. “You’ll eat corned beef and cabbages,” she sang, “and miss your Abie …”
Rassam remained remarkable, the most extraordinary person they’d ever known, people said. Unforgettable words. A few years later he was living at the Plaza Athenée and producing films, among them Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and an outrageous, beyond category, so to say, obscene comedy called La Grande Bouffe. He married an actress and had a child, but his excesses were deeply ingrained and his talents inseparable from his flaws. Heroin was among his pleasures.
The last that I knew of him he was living on the Avenue Montaigne in a beautiful old apartment with hardly a stick of furniture. The living room was absolutely bare. In the dining room was a large table, able to seat sixteen, and two sofas. Not long afterwards he was dead, from an overdose of barbiturates. It was accidental, they said.
——
In the floating world, of those I knew, the one who seemed most to embody its contradictions was a prince of the blood, Christopher Mankiewicz, the son of not only a man but a family renowned for its talent. His uncle had written the film often named as the best ever made in this country, Citizen Kane, and his father’s achievements were even more celebrated—Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz, borne by the immigrant tide but destined to become the purest of American voices.
His father was in every respect large, and Christopher inherited the dimensions. Tall, blue-eyed, and arrogant, he had the satisfaction of knowing, whatever misfortune, that he would always possess a distinguished name. Misfortune seemed unlikely. He had charm, intelligence, and, not unexpectedly, a good measure of self-indulgence. In the familiar way, he suffered from the long life of a powerful father, a man of prodigious appetite and wit, famous for his love affairs with stars, Judy Garland, Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, who fell on her knees and cried that the baby might have been hers.
His mother was an Austrian beauty, Rosa Stradner, an actress who had come to Hollywood to be a star but despite marriage to an important director did not achieve it. There were fierce fights at the dinner table; the father would storm out and the mother begin drinking. On countless nights she would come to her son’s room to wake him and talk, sometimes passing out on the floor. She was still beautiful when she committed suicide at the age of forty-five.
Her son grew up to marry an Italian dancer. They met in Rome during the shooting of his father’s momentous failure, Cleopatra, with the strange excitement of catastrophe on a grand scale somehow increasing the passion. Christopher was a romantic in every way. Devoted to classical music, susceptible to literature, mad about women, it was only the lack of wealth that in the end served to protect him. As a young studio executive in New York where we first met, he wore expensive double-breasted suits with the enviable aplomb of a fat man, spoke perfect Italian, used a cigarette holder, and possessed a failing, to me invisible, but which his wife saw clearly: the millions he promised her he would have before he reached thirty were not forthcoming. Perhaps, like Rassam, he was too brilliant for ordinary success.
Still, his shrewdness and the momentum of his early career carried him far. He had strong friendships, many based on his wit and taste as well as his outspoken opinions which, despite their validity, were often undiplomatically rendered. The confusion of letters strewn about a large desk; the heaping meals in restaurants, quickly devoured; the apartments and luxurious suites—these began to slowly slip away. He worked in Los Angeles, where, in his father’s assessment, he ruined his chances on innumerable occasions. “Isn’t it time you left town?” his father commented finally. “You’re finished here.”
In Rome, in the early 1970s, he was working for Grimaldi, an important Italian producer. His life had become nocturnal. At four in the morning the lights were still on. In an undershirt he sits at his desk doing a vast jigsaw puzzle. His mother-in-law, of whom he is very fond, is asleep, his young son also. This son, Jason, is six years old, beautiful and petulant, a compulsive talker with a slight lisp. Early in the morning he comes into the room. “Do you know what this is?” he demands. “This is my favorite book. In this book you can learn about everything. You can learn about the stars, and what is the deepest hole in the sea, and about thunderstorms and how to stop them. This is my best book. And this,” he says, showing it to me but also to himself, “is a script I wrote. All alone. And this! This is a book—have you seen this book? This is about soldiers.” He then begins to explain to me, with remarkable accuracy, how children are born.
Now he is still sleeping, however. The blue haze of cigarette smoke hugs the ceiling. The third act of Aïda is on. Christopher passes his hand over the table. “I’ve done all this section here,” he indicates. His face is innocent, unweary, a face that will never show corruption.
We were working on a script, the odyssey of which had only begun. This was the best part, the freshness and hope at the start. There had even arrived an encouraging letter from his father, remarkable in that it was only the second, and turned out to be the last, Christopher had ever received from him. In addition to praise the letter went on to suggest an entirely different approach. Day after day we talked about it until it grew dark.
Once, late in the afternoon, there was a tapping at the etched-glass door to the garden. Pressed against the glass, arms spread, was a figure like a huge moth against a pane. “My God!” Christopher cried. “Bruna!” His wife, from whom he was virtually separated. In she came, out of the evening, smiling, her face filled with joy. She was working as a model. She had canvas luggage and a long, stylish coat. She went in immediately to surprise her young son.
A festive hour. All was laughter, excitement, familiarity. One would never dream they were a couple on the brink of divorce.
They had married too young, that was the trouble, Lydia, the mother-in-law confided. What did I think? “Bruna was too young,” she continued sadly, “Chris was too young.”
We dined, all of us, at a trattoria on Via Flaminia, beneath bright lights, as if on a stage. It might have been a play; the dialogue was polished, the actors had worked together many times. By the end of the evening they were at each other’s throat.
The next scene: London, a year or two later. The Grimaldi days were over. Chris was living in the basement room of a friend, trying to put together the elements of the film I had written. He had a Mercedes and a black overcoat, chalky with stains, but little else. He was, he said, keeping up with events by reading the newspaper under the cat dish.
I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.
We ate at inexpensive Greek restaurants with his associate, Ned Sherrin, who had considerable theatrical experience and had joined forces with him. We were definitely going to make the film; it was called Raincoat. “The deal is almost done,” they said.
They were like revolutionaries. For the cause, even if dubious, one gave everything. Their feet were not really on earth; they were leading a visionary existence, the life which was to come. One day they would walk up wide steps to tremendous applause. What was I doing now? they asked indulgently. Finishing a book, I explained.
“Is there a film in it?”
“There’s no film in anything I write, not even scripts,” I said.
Things, however, take time. The tide of battle wavered. They had a star, Alan Bate
s, who had agreed to play the lead, and based on that, much of the financing. A few months later the star was gone, though the money was still there. Then a studio materialized and someone wanted the script revised and the location of it changed. The drama moved to Los Angeles. For a while there was a flaring of interest and a flight to Rome to obtain the commitment of another star, Donald Sutherland.
Months passed, an uneventful week at a time. Years. At some undetermined point the whole thing slipped into an unmarked grave, the common fate, as it were. We spoke of it less and less, finally not at all. It had simply perished along the trail.
It is probably the common touch that is crucial in movies, not only for their success but for their very existence. Without it, one is at a disadvantage. I think of a producer Christopher worked for at one time, the hero, like a mobster or corrupt politician, of many favorite stories—Bruna rather liked him, as it happened. He once told Christopher the actual secret. He had made ten movies, he confided, and not one of them, not one, had ever made a penny. But he would go on making them, he said, you know why? “Because I know how the game is played.”
——
In Toronto, under amiable conditions, the last of the films I wrote was made. It was called Threshold, prophetically for me. Although I wrote other scripts, I had a deserter’s furtive thoughts.
The movie was about a cardiac surgeon and the first mechanical heart. The writing, as one sees often in retrospect, was imperfect, but I could not at the time imagine how to improve it. The budget was too small and the actors were not all ones we wanted. Some of the best scenes were dropped or awkwardly played as a result.
The entire screen, I wrote, is filled with an image too immense at first to have shape, a gigantic sun—big as a city, grainy, raging—that in silence or to strange, unnerving music slowly opens to reveal its core, for the heart is the sun of the body. There were a number of other defining metaphors, only one of which rather startlingly survived.
When I finally saw the movie, feeling as always naked in the audience, I saw mostly the flaws, quite a few of them my own fault.
Sometime in here, perhaps a little earlier, I flew to London one final time. I was with a producer who was said to have been one of two heirs, the displaced one, to a great studio. We had taken a night flight from Los Angeles over the Pole, bringing a script I’d rewritten to a director who was about to begin shooting, a delicate mission. We arrived at five in the morning and fell into the illusory world of the Dorchester’s luxurious rooms—rich woods, fabrics, carpet. I woke after a few hours, dazed, the winter light gray at the windows, muffled sounds in the hallway, an apologetic maid half-entering.
In the hotel’s dining room we sat down with the director, Mark Robson, a wizened man in a little hat, vicuña scarf, and camel’s-hair coat, far from what I heard were his Texas beginnings. The producer bravely introduced the subject. “The boys feel the script could be better,” he said.
Robson inquired calmly, “Which boys?”
“The boys,” the producer repeated, avoiding mentioning the name of the head of the company.
Robson nodded. That was enough; he understood completely, there was nothing to worry about. “I spent an hour on the phone with Robert Shaw this morning,” he commented pleasantly, naming the star. “He loves the script. He doesn’t want a word of it changed.”
“James,” the producer said to me, “will you tell him some of the proposals?”
The original script was weary cliché—no worse than many, certainly, and not difficult to improve. A large plate of pea soup growing cold before me, for twenty minutes, I described at some length the rationale behind the changes while Robson sat quietly. After I had finished there was silence.
“Well?” the producer asked.
Robson smiled politely with the gentle quality of a false priest. “I don’t understand,” he said simply.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just that I don’t understand anything you’ve said.” I could not but admire him.
He went on to make the original film. It has been forgotten, of course. It was designed to be forgotten. Its sole distinction was that the star, Robert Shaw, died during the shooting of it. It may be that Robson had been right in not wanting to complicate it or attempt to have it carry more weight. He may just have wanted to be done with it, like an ugly neighborhood one drives through on the way to something better. Perhaps he had run out of strength. The best is the enemy of the good, as my onetime agent, Kenneth Littauer, often cautioned me, and the same relationship probably exists between the passable and mere rubbish.
I wrote one (I thought) final script, years later—overwrote, I should say. Again only the seed of a story was provided: a reclusive star of the first magnitude who has not permitted an interview for years grants one to a very private, literary writer, one of whose books she happens to like. She has everything, he has almost nothing other than familiarity with the great dead and the world they define. Somehow it enthralls her, and for an hour or a week they fall in love.
Perhaps I dreamed I was the writer and the irresistible woman who had not, for years, had the least whim denied her was a symbol for film itself, though in fact the writer was closer to John Berryman, able to coax the birds with his cockeyed, intimate language.
I prepared myself—why, I cannot remember—by reading Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, and in a stifling upstairs bathroom, then outside beneath the trees, attended by swarms of yellow jackets, and finally in the airless upstairs reading room of the village library, I wrote the script. Something might have come of it but never did.
I had the failing of being interested in subjects too iconoclastic to be undertaken. I labored for months on a script about a fantastic imposter, a high-ranking German SS officer, tall, blond, long-nosed, once head of Interpol and later governor of occupied Czechoslovakia who some believe to have been, incredibly, a Jew, Reinhard Heydrich, eventually assassinated.
I drove to Taos to try and interest an actor named Dennis Hopper in the role. His self-intoxication frightened me away. I listened as late at night in a cowboy hat he sat delivering to his girlfriend an unrecognizable summary of world history. His going around armed, for some reason fearing for his life, did not encourage me. In all likelihood the audience would have ignored Heydrich had it been made.
There was another final script, which in fact ascended a bit before crashing as the result of a director’s unreasonable demands, and I suppose there might have been another and another, but at a certain point one stands on the isthmus and sees clearly the Atlantic and Pacific of life. There is the destiny of going one way or the other and you must choose.
And so the phantom, which in truth I was, passed from sight.
——
I have forgotten the names of the concierges at the Inghilterra and the Bauer au Lac, and they have forgotten mine. Images, though, remain, innominate but clear. Driving the roads of southern France—Béziers, Agde—the ancient countryside, husbanded for ages. The Romans planted quince trees to mark the corners of their fields; sinewy descendants still grow there. A woman, burnished by sun, walks down the street in the early morning carrying an eel. Many times I have written of this eel, smooth and dying, dark with the mystery of shadowy banks and, on that particular day, covered with bits of gravel. This eel is a saint to me, oblivious, already in another world.
And another time, in a brief recess from work at the end of summer, its very last hour, a few leaves already on the ground, in fields near Annecy. Huge poplars, solid as oaks. The sound of pears falling. Two thick-coated horses, full-grown and strong, stand near the barn, then slowly walk down to the fence to take an offered apple. One nips me, without malice, on the wrist.
And the old projectionist in the screening room in New York, whose name I knew, who had once been flyweight champion and had known Benny Leonard, Jack Dempsey, and K. O. Kaplan.
Harry Craig—there is a name I remember—a grand, bulky Irishman rich in literary knowledge w
ho’d once read poetry on the BBC. Seeing a book on the shelves, he would reach for it while beginning to recite from it beforehand. He had written movies for De Laurentiis—Waterloo was one of them—and also an epic about Muhammad, in which the prophet’s face could not be shown, and for which he was awarded the unforgettable and honorary title of Pen of Islam. A wife in Rome, many children, his hands held high and fluttering for emphasis as he spoke. He liked, even required, a hot lunch every day. I can hear his fine, sweet voice, “Do we have time for a drink?”
He was one of those prodigals—castaways, one might say—who find themselves, not undelighted, in the high-flying movie crowd. He was like a disgraced doctor or lawyer for criminals, brilliant but with a stain. His hand was capable of better things, but something within him—sad wisdom, surrender—allowed him to linger at the ball and find it entertaining.
Years before, in my youth, someone had made a remark to me that I had never been able to brush away. It was in Texas when we were lieutenants, confident and wild. At many parties I was among the loudest and most disheveled—the drinking and singing, the shouting of nicknames. One night a classmate I knew only slightly, standing beside me, asked in a quiet voice, “What are you doing this for?”
“Doing what?”
“This isn’t really the person you are.”
I looked at him as if in disbelief and made some evasive reply, but I knew the truth.
As he had spoken to me I sometimes felt like speaking to others. Harry Craig was older than I and in many ways wiser, but I wanted to take him by the arm and walk away from the crowd, the laughter and cynicism, the veneer, saying only, “Come, Professor. We must go.”
——
I loved you very much. I might say that of Paris; my memories are heaped there. Somehow I was constantly returning—the train gliding through the endless suburbs or in blue air the airplane banking as, face close to the window, I looked down. Far below the fabled city unifies itself, which it will not do when you are within it. The tangled, irregular streets create a kind of anatomy. A city which since Gothic times, as the poet says, has been ever increasing in deformity, and withal retaining more perfection than any other of its class.
