The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  The studio heads at Paramount were underwhelmed with Moana. They had been expecting another Nanook. “Where's the blizzards?” asked one Paramount executive. They found other reasons to nitpick, too. Having cheerfully waved off scenes of speared walruses and disembowelled seals in the Arctic picture, they now wondered if the tattooing sequences were not just a little distasteful. The Paramount booker scheduled Moana for a limited release in Lincoln, Nebraska; Pueblo, Colorado; Austin, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Asheville, North Carolina; and Poughkeepsie, New York, expecting it quietly to die, but it received enthusiastic audiences. The critics liked it, too. Surprised, and rather caught out, Paramount took another look at the film with a view to a national release. But the marketing department met with considerable resistanee from Flaherty himself. He reasoned that Nanook had flourished on word of mouth and he wanted the same for Moana. Director and studio were gridlocked. Paramount did not want to leave the movie's success to chance; Flaherty did not want it aggressively marketed. In the impasse, Moana was shelved. It came out a while later in a few more towns around the U.S.A., but did not, in studio speak, “do business.” Its moment had passed.

  Hollywood had not quite given up on Robert Flaherty though. Sometime after Moana, Irving Thalberg, head at MGM, got in touch. Thalberg had optioned O'Brien's book, White Shadows in the South Seas, and it was about to go into production in Tahiti with W. S. Van Dyke as director. Thalberg wanted Flaherty to lend his expertise in the area and co-direct. Seeing no objection to this, Flaherty set out eagerly for Tahiti, but it was clear from the start that the relationship between Flaherty and Van Dyke was doomed. Flaherty was a miniaturist who dealt in epic ideas and, for all his liberal stretching of the truth, his instincts lay always in the direction of documentation. Van Dyke wanted a garden-variety Hollywood blockbuster in an exotic setting. Before long, Flaherty took himself off the picture and returned home to New Canaan, Connecticut.

  He was to go back to Tahiti a couple of years later through a connection with the German director, Frederick Murnau, who was then working in Hollywood. Murnau had financial backing for a Flaherty-style observational film set in the South Seas and he wanted Flaherty to make it. For Robert, this meant leaving his family behind, because the girls were by now all at school, but he was not a man to be boxed in by his domestic circumstances, and he and his brother, David, took passage on a ship out of California, arriving in Tahiti on 7 luly 1929.

  The two men immediately set about finding a story and quickly settled on a seventeen-year-old beauty by the name of Reri to front the picture. Reri was a smiling, round-faced young woman with a thick mass of tarry hair, who might well have reminded Robert of Maggie Nujarluktuk. Tabu hung on a simple love story between a girl, played by Reri, forced to leave her island after a taboo is put on her, and a young pearl diver. Completed in eighteen months, the picture caused a sensation among critics. Film News called it “one of the most visually lovely films ever made.” Reri was picked up, brought over to New York and put in the Ziegfeld Follies. From there she went on to Europe and danced hula to titillated urban audiences, before marrying a Polish actor. The couple lived the high life for a couple of years, then separated. Reri's work dried up and she eventually returned to Tahiti a broken woman. “I feel bad about it,” Flaherty said later. “I guess in a way I'm partly responsible.”

  For all Tabu's critical success, though, the picture failed to please its backers. Flaherty was completely undisciplined about money. Every film he made went over budget and he got into endless jams with financiers, but the overruns on Tabu really finished him so far as Hollywood was concerned. His next job came to him through the British office of the French film studio, Gaumont, which wanted Flaherty to take himself to the tiny island of Aran, off the west coast of Ireland, and make a film about traditional life among the fishermen there.

  Around the same time a Nanook backlash began, kicked off by a woman called Iris Barry, who had once been secretary to the Arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Barry was now working as the film critic of the Daily Mail in London. Writing on the tenth anniversary of Nanook's premiere, Barry questioned the film's authenticity, calling it “an enchanting romance, which convinced us it was fact though it wasn't at all,” and claimed that her erstwhile boss, Stefansson, had always considered it a set-up. The Daily Telegraph followed up with an article headlined “Is Nanook a Fake?” For a while the picture lost its respectability and it looked as though its creator might lose something of his reputation. Flaherty was baffled by the accusations. In Nanook he had wanted to capture the struggle for survival, because, for him, it was at the heart of Inuit life. How he achieved this was of less concern. “Sometimes you have to lie,” he said. “One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.” It had never been his role, as he saw it, to depict actuality, only to relay its essence. He took it as a given that he had augmented reality. His responsibility as he saw it, began and ended at the lens. One of the first film-makers to wade in on Flaherty's side during the backlash was the radical leftist Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein had famously elaborated on historical events while filming both Battleship Potemkin, his rendition of the mutiny at Odessa during 1905, and October, a highly embellished account of the uprising of 1917, and he wrote that “we Russians learned more from Nanook of the North than from any other foreign film. We wore it out studying it. That was, in a way, our beginning.” In the end, Nanook was too popular to be shouted down and to most of its global audience the arguments against it seemed rather academic.

  Aran proved less easy to win round. Robert and David bought a patch of land on the main island in the Aran group, Inishmore, built two huts there and settled down for the duration, but for all Robert's celebrated bonhomie and charisma, the pair were never welcomed. Aran was an impoverished, backward little place whose population of Spanish-Irish still lived in a medieval world of feudalism and superstition. In the west of Ireland at the time, Flaherty was identified as a Protestant name and the Aran Islanders suspected the two Flaherty brothers of being descendants of the Soupers, that band of Protestants who had offered bowls of broth to starving Catholics during the potato famine on condition that they convert to Protestantism. Robert and David attempted to reassure the islanders but they remained wary all the same. They enjoyed the attention and the money the Flahertys were willing to give them though, and, in spite of a good deal of infighting between the leading man, a blacksmith with the enviable name of Tiger King, his on-screen wife, Maggie Dirrane, their on-screen son, Michael Dirrane, and other lesser members of the cast, the filming passed off as well as the fierce sea storms and rocky weather allowed. The result was a striking picture cast in what was now an established mould, the story of an everyday family living in extraordinary circumstances, surrounded, this time, not by ice, but by a stormy and intractable sea.

  Man of Aran won the first prize at the 1934 International Venice Film Festival and, for a while, Robert Flaherty settled down with his own family in England. Even there, though, Nanook still haunted him. His audience wanted more from him on Arctic topics. He tried to satisfy this desire by writing two Arctic adventure books, The Captain's Chair and White Master, but they were, inevitably, held up against Nanook and pronounced midgets standing in the shadow of a giant. What Flaherty needed was a film project which would allow him to outgrow the Arctic hunter and his smiling family. He alighted on a story about a boy and a bull in Spain and presented it to Paramount, but Hollywood had other ideas.

  Not long before, Alexander Korda had established a new production company with, among others, Douglas Fairbanks, and they were actively on the hunt for property. One of the fledgling company's first activities had been to buy up Rudyard Kipling's estate. Korda was taken by Flaherty's motif of a boy and his animal but he wanted to weave it in with his Kipling material, so he suggested Robert and David Flaherty go out to Mysore, where he needed some documentary footage to slot into director Zoltan Korda's fiction film. As always happened when Flaherty was asked to coo
perate with anyone other than his wife and brother, he and Korda soon fell out. Flaherty wanted the film to centre on the relationship between the boy, Toomai, and his elephant. Korda wanted something on a much larger scale involving big game hunters. The venture continued to be an uneasy one and Flaherty soon returned to his family in England. On the eve of the Second World War, the family set sail for America, where Robert passed the war writing, lecturing and shooting a documentary called The Land for the Department of Agriculture.

  By the time the war ended, Flaherty's incandescent energy was flagging. Now in his sixties, and still not much better off financially than he had been after Nanook came out, he took a small suite of rooms at the Chelsea Hotel on Manhattan's 23rd Street and began dividing his time between there and the 250-acre family farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. Frances had decided to quit travelling, pinning up a sampler over the fireplace at the farm which read “Wander No More,” but wandering had become Robert Flaherty's life and from the relative privacy of his rooms at the Chelsea he planned his next move.

  In The Land, Flaherty had tried to capture the romantic sweep of the American landscape, but the film was dour and went largely unnoticed. Flaherty still had a hankering to make a tribute to his homeland that would get more play. He needed to inject some drama, a sense of peril into his production. More than that, he needed money. The latter he found in the Standard Oil Company and the former in the Louisiana bayous.

  At the time, the traditional Cajun way of life with its slow, dank backdrop of creeks and Spanish moss was coming under threat from oil companies, eager to get at the black gold that lay under the bayou. The story appealed to Flaherty's heart. Like most romantics, he generally preferred what had been lost or was about to be lost to what was about to come. In the America of the 1950s, with all its optimistic bluster and faith in new technology, this may have seemed a particularly anachronistic view to some, but it was by no means an unpopular one.

  Flaherty took himself down to Louisiana and rented a house in Abbeville. Before long, he had found his lead, a bright-faced lad named loseph Boudreaux who was to play Alexander Latour, a Cajun boy growing up somewhere between the bayou and the oil fields. The film, Louisiana Story, premiered in 1948. Shortly afterwards, a telegram arrived for Flaherty from California. “lust saw your magnificent film. Do it again and you will be immortal and excommunicated from Hollywood, which is a good fate. Congratulations. Signed Oona and Charlie Chaplin, Ester and Dudley Nichols, Dido and lean Renoir.” J. Donald Adams, the book critic of the New York Times Sunday edition, gave over his entire page to the picture. Flaherty was, he said, “the only creative genius yet to appear in the field of animated photography” and Louisiana Story won a commendation at the Venice festival that year.

  In spite of his critical successes, Flaherty had really sidelined himself. A loner in a cooperative medium, he had fallen out with almost every studio, director and producer he had ever worked with. His stubbornness and dogmatism and his disdain for budgets sat ill in a world increasingly dominated by the money men. The eminent documentarist John Grierson once observed that Robert “wouldn't learn, or rather he wouldn't work at learning. Sometimes I thought he was too grand to learn or too indolent. But that was not really the secret. He just hated to conform to the disillusionments of the practical world.”

  In 1950, as the price of fox pelts in Inukjuak was taking a nosedive, Flaherty's spirit was beginning to fade. For most of his life he had managed to get by in a world of his own creation, an intense and heightened wonderland centred on the great and mysterious romance of human existence. The presence of this world had made the ordinary, quotidian grind of the day to day seem drab to him. Holed up at his suite at the Chelsea Hotel, he lurched between financial crises and the next big project. In the evenings he would take his seat at the Coffee House Club or at Costello's Bar on Third Avenue, where he would sit with his cronies, the poet Oliver St. John Gogarty and the architect Harrie Lindeberg, endlessly rehearsing tales of his old adventures. By all critical measures, he was a success, but Hollywood had long since turned away from him and his reputation in the wider world was still as the director of Nanook. No matter what else he had made, and been applauded for, it was Nanook which, more than any other, was to fix Flaherty in the minds of film buffs and Americans as a great film-maker and also as a great American. He was trapped.

  When John Grierson said, “He had the power of making you forget the trivial things in life and look only at the elemental things that build up the dignity of man. He has in him the expansiveness and generosity of the true American,” he was thinking specifically about Nanook. When Orson Welles called him “one of the two or three greatest people who ever worked in the medium” he had Flaherty's first picture in mind, as did John Huston when he claimed that Flaherty had influenced not only him, but John Ford, William Wyler and Billy Wilder. After all these years, Nanook, that paean to the self-dramatising romance of masculinity, still clung to Flaherty like a sick puppy. Everyone who had ever spoken about Flaherty always came back to Nanook.

  At the beginning of the fifties, the film-maker began to talk about going to Malaya or Borneo to make a movie about the tea plantations there, but Louisiana Story was to be his last work. His lifestyle had taken its toll on his health. In 1950, Flaherty was sixty-six but he looked older. Though he was still quick to smile and his blue eyes still shone, the skin on his face had been coarsened not just by age but also by alcohol and tobacco. His hair had gone ice-white, and a good deal of it had fallen out altogether. He was portly now and had trouble in his joints and he wheezed on his way up to his rooms in the Chelsea. Everyone round him knew that he would never make old bones. Only a couple of years before the New Yorker had given him an extended three-part profile which had, at the time, read rather like an obituary. A while later, the BBC had recorded a radio retrospective with him. He was himself well aware of the tick of the clock. At the urging of a publisher friend, he had begun an autobiography, but had quickly become self-conscious and given it up. Perhaps he sensed the interest in his private life that such a book would stir up, and wanted to avoid too much scrutiny. None of the profiles of him had yet revealed that he had fathered a half-breed son, much less that he had never supported the boy or his mother. Robert Flaherty was a big name in movie-going circles, an American hero. Nobody, not least Robert himself, would have welcomed a tarnish on the lustre.

  Flaherty's final illness began gently enough, some fluish symptoms, a nasty cough. Typically, he did not report feeling unwell for several days and it was only when Frances called from Brattleboro and picked up a change in his voice that he confessed to feeling sick. She rushed down to New York, but Flaherty was never going to be one to hang around for long and on 23 July 1951, almost exactly three years before Paddy Aqiatusuk lay down inside his tent on Ellesmere Island, Robert Flaherty made his last and most mysterious journey.

  By then Hollywood had almost forgotten him. He had been an innovator and his films had brought him prestige if not riches, but in the end he was someone who had too much of a sense of his own integrity as an artist to be able to work in a team or to budget and, so far as Hollywood was concerned, that made him too awkward a proposition. The Hollywood Reporter listed the death and printed an obituary, and it amounted only to three lines on page five, less than the space accorded to Paddy Aqiatusuk by Time.

  Some while later, John Grierson wrote a tribute to his old friend. The theme running through Flaherty's films, he claimed, was boyhood. In each of his pictures there was a boy who hoped one day to grow into the kind of solid, everyday hero America had made its own. Maybe, Grierson speculated, the theme had drawn Robert because he was the eldest son of an eminent American or perhaps there was another explanation. Maybe, Grierson wrote, the boy who appeared in all of Robert Flaherty's films was “the son he never had.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THREE YEARS and three days after Robert Flaherty's death, on 26 July 1954, the C. D. Howe returned to Inukjuak on the annual Easte
rn Arctic Patrol with Paddy Aqiatusuk's letter to Josephie Flaherty.

  The letter was taken to the police department. Word soon spread of its existence and, before long, Josephie Flaherty was on his way to pick it up. He had already guessed it was from his attataksaq, his stepfather, Paddy Aqiatusuk, because there was no one else who would write to him. The envelope was marked in Inuktitut syllabics, the system of swirls and hollow circles invented by a missionary for the Cree Indians over one hundred years previously. Before then, the Inuit had never written anything down, preferring to pass on their history and their news in stories and songs, for families had never been separated, as they were now, by hundreds of miles. It had been a year since Aqiatusuk left for the High Arctic and in all that time no one had heard any news of or from him. This fragile-looking letter was a reminder of his absence, but it was also, or so Josephie thought, welcome proof that Paddy Aqiatusuk was still alive. Josephie opened the envelope. He did not read well, but the point of the message was clear. Aqiatusuk missed his irniksaq, his beloved stepson, and he wanted to know if Josephie and his family would come up to the High Arctic to be with him.