It’s not bleeding at all now. I’ll tell you why it was bleeding. And I’ll tell you about Eddy. I met him in Paris. He was a friend of mine. I didn’t have a mass of friends in Paris. It’s a lousy town. When I first got there I rented a studio apartment in a fancy, ultramodern block near Trocadéro. It was amazing how fast my father’s dough was running out. I had to invest in my own self, make that self pay off.
The car for example. I moseyed over to the Champs-Élysées to see what was happening. There were tons of cars not worth a look, including the American models that everyone was now so blasé about. And in any case no Ondines, least of all like mine, with its rust patches behind the door handles and the scratched wing from when I sideswiped an idiot who was badly parked. I dumped that in short order. I then bought a scarlet Alfa Romeo and decorated it with decals of playing cards and naked women, but it still didn’t do it for me, so I sold that one too and eventually settled for a canary-yellow Matra with hidden headlights. This time I skipped the decals because the model’s lines were so pure. I was cool. I was happy.
The same with clothes. I went for a flannel jacket, fairly light gray, which looked from a distance like the gray smocks worn by teachers and pupils at country schools. Up close, however, the priciness of the material was apparent—a surprise which gave a good impression. With that I wore shirts with removable collars, rather furry English ties, and small round felt hats with rolled brims. Plus my usual cigarillos and shades. Was I cool or was I cool?
At first I knew nobody in Paris except for the twits at Hourgnon’s whom I wouldn’t trust to sweep my floor. I paid them a visit anyway. We did not see eye to eye. So long as I wasn’t a college professor, a tortured Rhodesian rebel, or a Hungarian émigré with existentialist leanings there was no prospect for me at their outfit. When I talked about actual actions, they seemed almost baffled. Why should I have expected anything else? They received you in a closet. They received you in suspenders. When I submitted a short article to them, they talked about what I was trying to express. I didn’t want to express anything—I just wanted a check. That didn’t even enter their heads.
Loafing makes a loafer. I loafed at Élysée-Store. I made acquaintances. There were some real characters there. One was a lingerie salesman whose specialty must have turned his head, because he was always madly chasing pussy. He wanted to be in pictures. And, apropos, he was drinking a Guinness on me when two jokers showed up, one of them being Eddy, whom I didn’t yet know. Introductions were made.
“You’ve got the pan for it,” said Eddy. “Are you available this afternoon?”
That was how I scored a small part in a dirty film. I played a suave gangster. Eddy took care of more or less everything. He was making films, but his real craft was pimping. He and his hookers (he had a whole stable) would hand old johns back and forth for soaking so fast that the geezers didn’t even have the time to see themselves being passed around. A bit like watching the Harlem Globetrotters.
My own film was quite something too. Strictly focused on tits and ass. Production company headquartered in Luxembourg so that the French censorship authority could not ban exportation. No filming license, obviously. All shooting done at a sole location, namely the country house of a paper and cardboard manufacturer, lover and protector of the female star—a real skank. Her mack was dubbed location manager. A fifteen-page script entitled Sadistic Nights, credited deadpan to “Walter Cocksucker,” and modified from one day to the next depending on circumstances. So when the girlfriend of a male actor showed up for the weekend she was instantly saddled with two days of shooting in the role of a lost hitchhiker who knocks at the door of a house only to be immediately sliced up with a handsaw by a mysterious pervert who begins with her ass. By contrast, one of the hookers who was supposed to stay throughout production suddenly took off to Sardinia with a Libyan. Her absence had to be covered up. We took a shot of me entering a barn with a satanic smile on my face; the previous night we had filmed me approaching the barn door with the intention of rolling the chick in the hay. Now, for the revised version, my smile vanished and a pair of feet were seen in close-up dangling fairly high up from the barn floor, while on the wall swayed the shadow of a woman’s body totally naked and totally hanged. You were expected to suppose that it was the girl. Someone had killed her. That way you never saw her again—except for me, a little later, throwing a body sewn up in a shroud into a pond. End of problem.
In reality of course it wasn’t the original girl’s shadow you saw, given that she was in Sardinia, but that of another one, but it made no difference. Nobody would understand anything anyway.
I witnessed worse excesses, and much worse last-minute switches. Once, on another shoot months later, there was a swimming pool scene with a broad in the drink and a killer racing along the edge fully intending to drown her. Luckily it was a nighttime scene because the bimbo wouldn’t get in the water because she had her monthly visitor. The assistant director had to go in instead of her, wearing an enormous blond wig. Fortunately, as I say, it was a night shoot.