Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “Should we feel excited by the Wow signal?”

  “I’ve often wondered,” Paul says. He puts on his coat. “What we’re doing is a fantastic and challenging task. It compels us to think about all the things we should be thinking about. What is life? What is intelligence?” He pauses. “And if nothing else, it is a great deal of fun.”

  Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes

  In 1996 I received a telephone call from a man calling himself Tony.

  “I’m phoning on behalf of my employer,” he said. “He’d like you to send him a radio documentary you made called Hotel Auschwitz.”

  “Who’s your employer?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “Oh, go on. Please. Who is it?”

  I heard him sigh. “It’s Stanley Kubrick,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Let me give you the address,” said the man. He sounded posh. It seemed that he didn’t want to say any more about this than he had to. I sent the tape to a PO box in St. Albans and I waited. What might happen next?

  • • •

  BY THE TIME I RECEIVED that telephone call, nine years had passed since Kubrick’s last film—Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a house somewhere near St. Albans—or a “secret lair” according to a Sunday Times article of that year—behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It was sixteen years since a photograph of him had been published.

  He’d gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the sixties (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films per decade in the seventies and eighties (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing at all. What was he doing in there? According to rumors, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30 mph. But now I knew what he was doing. He was listening to my BBC Radio 4 documentary, Hotel Auschwitz.

  “The good news,” wrote the Times that year, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, “is that Kubrick is reportedly a hoarder. There is apparently an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwickbury Manor. When that is eventually opened we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the Clockwork Orange Droogs and Jack Torrance.”

  The thing is, once I sent the tape to the PO box, nothing happened next. I never heard anything again. Not a word. My cassette disappeared into the mysterious world of Stanley Kubrick. And then, three years later, Kubrick was dead.

  Two years after that—in 2001—I got another phone call out of the blue from the man called Tony. “Do you want to get some lunch?” he asked. “Why don’t you come up to Childwick?”

  The journey to the Kubrick house starts normally. You drive through the St. Albans suburbs, passing ordinary-sized postwar houses and opticians and vets. Then you turn right, past the Private Road sign, into an almost absurdly perfect picturesque model village. Even the name, Childwick Green, sounds like A. A. Milne wrote it. There’s an electric gate at the end, with a Do Not Trespass sign. Drive through that, and through some woods, and past a long white fence with the paint peeling off, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate and you’re in the middle of an estate full of boxes.

  There are boxes everywhere—shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen Portakabins, each packed with boxes. I notice that many of the boxes are sealed. Some have, in fact, remained unopened for decades.

  Tony turns out to be Tony Frewin. He started working as an office boy for Kubrick in 1965, when he was seventeen. One day, apropos of nothing, Kubrick said to him, “You have that office outside my office if I need you.”

  That was thirty-six years ago and Tony is still here, two years after Kubrick died and was buried in the grounds behind the house. There may be no more Kubrick movies to make, but there are DVDs to remaster and reissue in special editions. There are box sets and retrospective books to oversee. There is paperwork.

  Tony gives me a guided tour through the house. We walk past boxes and more boxes and filing cabinets and past a grand staircase. Childwick was once home to a family of horse trainers called the Joels. Back then there was, presumably, busts or floral displays on either side at the bottom of this staircase. Here, instead, is a photocopier on one side and a fax machine on the other.

  “This is how Stanley left it,” says Tony.

  Stanley Kubrick’s house looks like the Inland Revenue took it over long ago. Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books.

  “This used to be the cinema,” he tells me.

  “Is it the library now?” I ask.

  “Look closer at the books,” says Tony.

  I do.

  “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”

  “Look in the drawers,” says Tony.

  I do.

  “It’s all about Napoleon too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”

  I must say I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband’s novel and finding it is consisting entirely of the line “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorized biography of Kubrick, “Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick’s passion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining.” This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear that comparison out.

  “Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of twenty-five thousand library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July twenty-third, seventeen-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”

  “Who made up the cards?” I ask.

  “Stanley,” says Tony. “With some assistants.”

  “How long did it take?” I ask.

  “Years,” says Tony. “The late sixties.”

  Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon. During the years it took him to compile this research, a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo was written, produced, and released. It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.

  “Did you do this kind of thing for all the movies?” I ask Tony.

  “More or less,” he says.

  “OK,” I say. “I understand how you might do this for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?”

  “Somewhere here,” says Tony, “is just about every book about ghosts ever written, and there’ll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world.”

  There is a silence.

  “Tony,” I say. “Can I look through the boxes?”

  I’ve been coming to the Kubrick house a couple of times a month ever since.

  I start in a Portakabin behind the stable block, with a box marked Lolita. I open it, noting the ease with which the lid comes off. I flick through the paperwork inside, pausing randomly at a letter that reads:

  Dear Mr. Kubrick,

  Just a line to express to you and to Mrs. Kubrick my husband’s and my own deep appreciation of your kindness in arranging for Dmitri’s introduction to your uncle, Mr. Guenther Rennert.

  Sincerely,

  Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

  I later learn that Dmitri was a budding opera singer and Rennert was a famous opera director, in charge of the National Theatre Munich and Glyndebourne. This letter was written in 1962, back in the days when Kubrick was still producing a film every year or so. This box is full of fascinating correspondence between Kubrick and t
he Nabokovs but—unlike the fabulously otherworldly Napoleon room, which was accrued six years later—it is the kind of stuff you would probably find in any director’s archive.

  The unusual stuff—the stuff that elucidates the ever-lengthening gaps between productions—can be found in the boxes that were compiled from 1968 onwards. In a box next to the Lolita box in the Portakabin I find an unusually terse letter, written by Kubrick to someone called Pat, on January 10, 1968:

  Dear Pat,

  Although you are apparently too busy to personally return my phone calls, perhaps you will find time in the near future to reply to this letter?

  (Later, when I show Tony Frewin this letter, he says he’s surprised by the brusqueness. Kubrick must have been at the end of his tether, he says, because on a number of occasions he said to Tony, “Before you send an angry letter, imagine how it would look if it got into the hands of Time Out.”) The reason for Kubrick’s annoyance in this particular letter was because he’d heard that the Beatles were going to use a landscape shot from Dr. Strangelove in one of their movies.

  “The Beatle film will be very widely seen,” Kubrick writes, “and it will make it appear that the material in Dr. Strangelove is stock footage. I feel this harms the film.”

  There are a similar batch of telexes from 1975: “It would appear,” Kubrick writes in one, “that ‘Space: 1999’ may very well become a long-running and important television series. There seems nothing left now but to seek the highest possible damages. . . . The deliberate choice of a date only two years away from 2001 is not accidental and harms us.”

  This telex was written seven years after the release of 2001.

  But you can see why Kubrick sometimes felt compelled to wage war to protect the honor of his work. A 1975 telex, from a picture publicity man at Warner Bros. called Mark Kauffman, regards publicity stills for Kubrick’s somber reworking of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. It reads: “Received additional material. Is there any material with humor or zaniness that you could send?”

  Kubrick replies: “The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany.”

  I take a break from the boxes to wander over to Tony’s office. As I walk in I notice something pinned onto his letter box.

  “POSTMAN,” it reads. “Please put all mail in the white box under the colonnade across the courtyard to your right.”

  It is not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is exactly the same typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of Eyes Wide Shut and 2001.

  “It’s Futura Extra Bold,” explains Tony. “It was Stanley’s favorite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant.”

  “Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to talk about?” I ask.

  “God, yes,” says Tony. “Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs.”

  Tony goes to his bookshelf and brings down a number of volumes full of examples of typefaces, the kind of volumes he and Kubrick used to study, and he shows them to me.

  “I did once get him to admit the beauty of Bembo,” he adds, “a serif.”

  “So is that note to the postman a sort of private tribute from you to Kubrick?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” says Tony. He smiles to himself. “Yeah, yeah.”

  For a moment I also smile at the unlikely image of the two men discussing the relative merits of typefaces late into the night, but then I remember the first time I saw the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, the way the words CRUISE, KIDMAN, KUBRICK flashed dramatically onto the screen in large red, yellow, and white colors, to the song “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.” Had the words not been in Futura Extra Bold, I realize now, they wouldn’t have sent such a chill up the spine. Kubrick and Tony obviously became, at some point during their relationship, tireless amateur sleuths, wanting to amass and consume and understand all information.

  But this attention to detail becomes so amazingly evident and seemingly all-consuming in the later boxes, I begin to wonder whether it was worth it. In one Portakabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes marked EWS—Portman Square, EWS—Kensington, and Chelsea, etc., etc. I choose the one marked EWS—Islington because that’s where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaners, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find to my astonishment pictures of the doorways of the houses on my own street.

  Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words “Hooker doorway?”

  “Huh,” I think.

  So somebody within the Kubrick organization (it was, in fact, his nephew Manuel Harlan) once walked up my street, on Kubrick’s orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth. Judging by the writing on the boxes, just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this Portakabin. This solves one mystery for me—the one about why Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, chose the St. Albans countryside, of all places, for his home. I realize now that it didn’t matter. It could have been anywhere. It is as if the whole world is to be found somewhere within this estate.

  • • •

  LATER I GET TO MEET Manuel Harlan. “How long did all this take you?” I ask him.

  “A year,” he says.

  “Every day?” I ask.

  “Pretty much,” he says.

  “Was it a good year?” I ask.

  “It was a great year,” he says. “I think I took thirty thousand photos in all. That’s a number I arrived at once. At first it was just going to be stately homes. Then I started looking for coffee shops. And then doorways. Then toy shops. Mortuaries. Oh! Costume places! That was a really long job. I was in every costume shop in the southeast of England.”

  “Did he look at them all?” I ask.

  “All!” he says. “With tremendous excitement! One time he wanted me to do the whole of Commercial Road. But he didn’t want the buildings tilting back or forward in the photographs. So I had to take a ladder. I’d climb the ladder, take the picture, get down, move the ladder twelve feet, and on and on. Commercial Road is a very long road. Stanley was constantly on the phone going, ‘Have you finished yet? How fast can you get here?’”

  Manuel says once he reached the end of Commercial Road, he hurried straight to the St. Albans branch of Snappy Snaps to get the pictures developed. Then he assiduously taped them together to form a perfect panorama of the whole of Commercial Road. Back at the Kubrick house he carefully laid the panorama out—like a homemade Google street view years before Google had conceived of such a thing—down a long corridor. Kubrick emerged from his room, looked at it, and said: “Well. It sure beats going there.”

  So was it all worth it? Was the hooker doorway eventually picked for Eyes Wide Shut the quintessential hooker doorway? Back at home I watch Eyes Wide Shut again on DVD. The hooker doorway looks exactly like any doorway you would find in Lower Manhattan—maybe on Canal Street or in the East Village. It is a red door, up some brownstone steps, with the number 265 painted on the glass at the top. Tom Cruise is pulled through the door by the hooker. The scene is over in a few seconds. It was eventually shot on a set at Pinewood.

  I remember the Napoleon archive, the years it took Kubrick and some assistants to compile it, and I suggest to Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s executive producer and brother-in-law (and Manuel’s father), that had there not been all those years of attention to detail during the early planning of the movie, perhaps Napoleon would have actually been made.

  “That’s a completely theoretical and obsolete observation!” replies Jan. “That’s like saying if Vermeer had painted in a differ
ent style he’d have done a hundred more paintings.”

  “OK,” I say.

  “Why don’t you just accept that this was how he worked?” says Jan.

  “But if he hadn’t allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he’d have made more films,” I say. “For instance, the ‘Space: 1999’ lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial.”

  “Of course I wish he had made more films,” says Jan.

  Jan and I are having this conversation inside the stable block, surrounded by hundreds of boxes. For the past few days I have been reading the contents of those marked “Fan Letters” and “Résumés.”

  They are filled with pleas from hundreds of strangers, written over the decades. They say much the same thing: “I know I have the talent to be a big star. I know it’s going to happen to me one day. I just need a break. Will you give me that break?”

  All these letters are—every single one of them—written by people I have never heard of. Many of these young actors and actresses will be middle-aged by now. I want to go back in time and say to them, “You’re not going to make it! It’s best you know now rather than face years of having your dreams slowly erode.” They are heartbreaking boxes.

  “Stanley never wrote back to the fans,” says Jan. “He never, never responded. It would have been too much. It would have driven him crazy. He didn’t like to get engaged with strangers.”

  (Actually, Kubrick did write back to fans, on random, rare occasions. I find two replies in total. Maybe he only ever wrote back twice. One reads, “Your letter of 4th May was overwhelming. What can I say in reply? Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.” The other reads, “Dear Mr. William. Thank you for writing. No comment about A Clockwork Orange. You will have to decide for yourself. Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.”)