11

Hollywoodism

May–December 1944

Fitful Family Man

Bill broke it to Meta that Estelle and Jill would be coming west for the summer. His daughter missed him and wanted to see Hollywood. He didn’t want Jill around her mother’s drinking now that school was out. Evidently, Meta did not think to ask, “What about Jill around you when you’re drinking?” He had already rented a house. “For the first time,” Meta felt “put upon cruelly.” Wife and family belonged in Oxford, not in Meta’s province: “I had the short end of the stick, the sweepings, the leavings. His wife and daughter had everything.” He tried to assure her nothing had changed. For Meta, everything had changed. It had been humiliating to share him with Estelle eight years earlier. Nothing he could say mollified her. She had finally made him choose, and he had chosen his family. She cut him off, refusing even to go out for drinks or dinner. Apparently he did not tell her that Estelle had gotten quite used to the idea of Meta.

To Buzz Bezzerides, Faulkner had simply used Meta, and he did not believe she ever understood that side of his nature: “He was a very selfish fellow and didn’t seem to be aware of the demands he was making, the burdens he was putting on people.” It could seem otherwise because Faulkner never asked for help: “You found yourself inviting him to do something because he needed it. You were very aware of his needs.” But then, Bezzerides seemed to take it back: “I didn’t feel used. I was glad to do what I did, and I don’t think Meta felt used. She was glad to do what she did because she loved him. I was very fond of Faulkner and I liked him very much.” How to reconcile two seemingly contradictory attitudes? Naturally enough, Bezzerides, like Meta, wanted more from Faulkner than he was willing to give, and more, perhaps, than he knew how to give. An aggrieved Bezzerides added: “I had contempt for his inability to recognize that one has responsibility when he accepts this kind of responsibility from others, but he showed no signs of recognizing it.” Why not? Bezzerides’s own explanation traced Faulkner’s inability to the example of his great-grandfather, a man who was forgiven much because he had been a writer and brought a certain glory to his family. Faulkner “took it as his privilege as a great writer to make demands on people, get what he wanted, what he needed.” Writing, in sum, was its own realm and made of Faulkner a sovereign. Bezzerides believed that Faulkner hated Hollywood and would never have returned if not for the income it provided. Maybe so. But the desire to escape home for somewhere else never abated.1 This counterpull made Faulkner, as a result, a fitful family man.

To Cho-Cho, Faulkner wrote that “after years of Rowan Oak and trees and grounds, maybe Big and Little Miss will enjoy living in a city apartment, with nothing to break the silence but the shriek of brakes and the crash of colliding automobiles, and police car and fire wagon sirens, and the sounds of other tenants in the building who are not quite ready to lay down and hush at 1 or 2 a.m. They may like it. At least we will be together.” They would enjoy music, riding horses—and he wanted Jill to take fencing lessons. He told Cho-Cho to tell her husband, Bill Fielden, “not to talk to me about gardening. I’m homesick enough without any nudging from him on the subject.”2

Estelle wrote to Malcolm to tell him what it was like that summer in Southern California. On Saturdays after lunch they went to a bookshop to pick up what they needed for the week’s reading, then did some food shopping: “Billy is really enjoying having a home, even if it is a small apartment, and it is a pleasure for me to cook all the things he is fond of because he eats with such evident relish.” For Sunday breakfast Estelle set out a huge spread: fresh figs, sausage, eggs, toast, coffee, and cake. After eating out (noontime sandwiches and Coca-Colas), they returned home for a hot supper.

Mrs. House, owner of a horse ranch, became a family friend. She had a large family, and the children were always underfoot, and that made it all seem “homelike.” Jill was “supremely happy” horseback riding. Fathers and daughters and horses were a natural combination. Toluca Lake was stocked with bass, and Estelle had been “invited to fish in it—hurrah!” When a boat slid up to a landing, who should emerge but “the Sinatra himself!” A thrilled Jill now had something to write home about. “Hope all this Hollywoodism doesn’t bore you,” she told Malcolm.3

That Malcolm would want to hear all this is obvious from his own detailed letters about his daily doings in New York, which included just then reading The Wild Palms and remarking that “Bill is truly a student of human behavior patterns.” But you had to stay awake to understand his prose, Malcolm said, and that’s why some people did not like to read him.4 In May 1944, now overseas, Malcolm wrote to his mother: “For some reason this country [England] reminds me of Billy. I think back over my years with him and realize how fortunate I have been in having him in my younger years. Now that I am becoming mature in my thoughts I realize that he has shaped my character & mode of thinking greatly. He is truly a great man, not because of his writings but because of his knowledge, his kindness and his understanding. I long for the day that you all can really settle down at Roanoak & Billy can start his great writing period which is yet to come.”5 Faulkner sometimes gave the impression that his family did not appreciate him. Their correspondence, at any rate, suggests otherwise—and also why he wanted them with him. “My own precious son,” Estelle wrote to Malcolm on July 11: “Your letters are the very breath of life to me. . . . Billy, Jill, and I read them avidly before I send them home. Bless your heart!”

Faulkner did not hesitate to take Estelle and Jill to Musso & Frank’s. “The ‘hoi polloi’ sit up in front, but Jean, the head waiter, greets us very grandly at the door, and ushers Jill and me back to holy-of-holies where the regular crowd meets,” Estelle reported to Malcolm. She reveled in meeting many fascinating and charming people, while Jill (the only child present) behaved so well that she seemed quite at home, although she was amazed that the patrons treated her father as a celebrity. Her mother had to explain to Jill that Pappy was equivalent to a movie star.6 Some of these people, for sure, knew about Meta, but evidently that did not trouble Faulkner, or he did not let on.

Eleven-year-old Jill swam and rode horses with Zoe Bezzerides, Buzz’s daughter. Jill wrote home about her “dearest little fox terrier puppy” and wanted to share every new experience with Vicki (Cho-Cho’s daughter): “I love you so much that if you tried to pick it up you would go through the ground. So please don’t try to pick it up.” Like her father, she missed home and family and sometimes complained about “nothing to do.” She wanted regular reports, she instructed Vicki: “tell Bro. Bill [William Fielden] if he doesn’t write me I’m going up there and tickle him good.” This was a family joke—about how ticklish Jill and Bill Fielden were. When he first arrived at Rowan Oak from the Far East in 1941, Jill had announced: “Brother Bill, I’m Sister Jill. If you don’t tickle me, I won’t tickle you.” Fielden got down on the floor and hugged Jill. He was part of what Jill and her father thought of as home. “Pappy and my father were immediate friends,” Fielden’s daughter Vicki recalled. The handsome Bill Fielden fit right in.7 Jill had a “nice time” at a Saturday-night dance and “danced with every boy but four.” She often added a P.S. like this one: “If the world was full of the Fieldens, the Faulkners and the Franklins everything would be just fine. I love all of you more than I can tell.”

Something about Buzz’s concern for Estelle touched a nerve. “Something went wrong,” she told Buzz, breaking down in tears about her marriage to Bill. “I don’t know what went wrong. We used to go fishing together. We loved each other.” At the end of September, after she returned to Rowan Oak, Buzz wrote her an extraordinary letter: “Nothing is wrong. You know I love you, always have, always will, you know I miss you, stay awake at night, dreaming of you. The only reason I have not written is because the things I want to say to you must be breathed, whispered, how I wish I were there. I would look at you mooneyed, hold your hand, besides I am lazy, negligent, careless, and slightly busy. Forgive me for not writing sooner.” This love letter—what else can you call it?—Estelle preserved, and it became part of her son Malcolm’s papers. Buzz felt Estelle had made him a better man, more courteous and thoughtful. Buzz had formed a fierce attachment to Estelle in such a short time. It was unusual, Buzz wrote. His daughter felt it too, and it moved Buzz that Jill had written to say she loved him and his family.

The summer of 1944, even with Faulkner’s family beside him, had sometimes been a trial. He worked indifferently and for brief periods on several films, including a vehicle for Errol Flynn, released in 1948 as Adventures of Don Juan. Assigned to rewrite the first draft, this “cut and polish job” yielded, in producer Jerry Wald’s words, a script that was not “quite right,” but good for “budgeting purposes.” He needed a writer with “experience doing this kind of costume picture.” Steve Trilling revised Faulkner’s script, but neither he nor Faulkner received any credit for the finished product.8 Other short-term projects also yielded no credits: “God Is My Co-Pilot” (the story of the Flying Tigers who fought the Japanese in China), “Fog over London” (a psychiatrist becomes involved with criminals), “Strangers in Our Midst,” also titled “Escape into the Desert,” about Nazis escaping from an internment camp. Bezzerides, a cowriter on this project, remembered they had trouble taking it seriously.9 Actress Jean Sullivan befriended Faulkner during the shoot and learned that he liked to ride horses, which they did two or three times a week. “What am I doing in Hollywood?,” he asked her. “They’ve messed up the script so badly. The only time I feel free is when I’m riding.” He later invited her to Jill’s wedding.10 But Faulkner’s efforts did not go unappreciated. When Wald had trouble with Background to Danger, he showed it to Faulkner, who diagnosed the problem: “too much running around.” He straightened out several scenes, Wald recalled: “He really did a magnificent job.”11

After Estelle and Jill left for home, “Billy had a mild bout,” Buzz confided to Estelle, “but we got him out of it in short order. I think this time he senses my outrage and impatience and anger because he has been apologetic . . . and a trifle worried. It pleases me to think that he values my friendship enough to be concerned about losing it.” Not to worry, Buzz assured her: “I like the guy, even with his faults, I don’t think I’d ever let him down, he gets pretty dependent and helpless. But he is fine now, the picture he is writing is to be shot very soon, and he is feeling tiptop.”12 And no wonder, since the picture would prove to contain so many of the elements that made up his own character and career—a project handed to him by the redoubtable Howard Hawks.

Faulkner had another reason to recover: the return of Meta Carpenter. Henriette Martin, Meta’s friend and a screenwriter, ran into Faulkner, who said he was looking for a place to stay—perhaps realizing he had overstayed his welcome at the Bezzerides household. He accepted her immediate offer of a room with its own bath and entrance. Meta, who had remained estranged from Faulkner, asked, “How does he look?” Henriette answered: “The way some boozers do. Absolutely marvelous. Your average teetotaler should look so good.” Meta began to get reports from Henriette, who told her that so far as she knew Faulkner never brought anyone to his private room. “Does he ever ask about me,” Meta wanted to know. “Always.” Then she heard from actor Victor Killian that a drunken Faulkner had told him: “Meta doesn’t love me anymore. . . . Tell me what to do, Victor. Tell me how to get her back.” She showed up at his apartment, offering to give him a lift to work. She remembered his voice breaking as he said her name. “And so we resumed,” she remembered, spending time alone but also with Henriette, the Crowns, the Paganos, and other friends.

The Faulkner Mystique

Buzz Bezzerides: “I remember one day walking with Faulkner over to the drugstore where he was going to exchange a stack of mystery stories for a new stack. I asked him, ‘Why do you read all of these damn mysteries?’ and he said, ‘Bud, no matter what you write, it’s a mystery of one kind or another.’ ”13 Detectives solve mysteries, but sometimes, as in the case of Philip Marlowe, the detective is the mystery and develops a mystique that enveloped William Faulkner for the whole of his working life.

It seems that nearly every screenwriter had some version of the Faulkner mystery to tell. It usually involved wanting to know how Faulkner wrote some story or character. So writer Elik Moll asked Buzz to introduce him to William Faulkner. Moll promised Bezzerides not to ask Faulkner about his writing. In the Warner writers’ building, Bezzerides introduced Moll: “This is a friend of mine, Elik Moll, this is William Faulkner.” Faulkner had only two words to offer: “Yes, sir”—which he said without even taking his hand off his pipe to shake hands. He walked away as Moll began discussing Go Down, Moses, climaxing his onslaught with, “How did you do that?” Faulkner acted as though he had not heard the question. Moll repeated the question to no effect and then “dropped back.” Bezzerides caught up with Faulkner:

“Bill.”

“Bud.”

“You know, Elik Moll.”

“Who?”

“The fellow I introduced you to; he asked you a question, and you did not answer. Why didn’t you answer?”14

Such a question deserved no answer, Bill told Buzz. Such a question that got no answer could also have been put to Philip Marlowe. Howard Hawks and William Faulkner had talked about working together on Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep. Hawks told Jack Warner he could produce a screenplay in less than a month15—a boast he probably would not have made if he had not counted upon Faulkner, who could produce thirty pages in a day to the typical screenwriter’s three. Hawks, impressed with Leigh Brackett’s hard-boiled dialogue in No Good for a Corpse, teamed her with Faulkner, famous for breaking down a novel into filmable segments. She remembered his elaborate courtesy: “a parody of the way in which a Southern gentleman might treat a nice young lady on her very first job.”16

Marlowe does not smoke a pipe like the taciturn Faulkner, but he smokes his cigarettes quietly and rarely gives away much to his interlocutors. Marlowe seethes with “repressed anger,” as the screenplay puts it, confining himself to two words: “Get out”—said to Carmen Sternwood, one of two sisters (the other is Vivian) who make a play for him while he investigates what happened to Shawn Regan, the man whom both women loved and, it turns out, Carmen murdered. Regan, a good man Marlowe knew and admired, was also loved by General Sternwood, the sisters’ father, who is attracted to the straight-shooting Marlowe. In short, Shawn Regan, who for much of film is merely missing—supposedly having run away with a casino owner’s wife—fills a need in the dying general’s life that is the same need his two daughters have to remedy their “rotting blood”—as Vivian acknowledges. Regan has been the general’s new blood he has lost even as he sits blanketed in a hot house, decaying with cold, no longer the whole man depicted in the portrait with “battle-torn pennons” in the noir decadence of this mansion and family. Could Faulkner have wished for a better project? Like Faulkner, Marlowe never telegraphs what he thinks. By the time he does explain himself, what he has been thinking all along is becoming plain to everyone else in the plot.

No actor could have played Marlowe better than Bogart, who began in Casablanca and continued in To Have and Have Not to withhold what he thinks and what makes him mad. Gary Cooper also knew how to underplay, but he was too tall and just too loftily attractive. Clark Gable was too bluff, too extroverted to keep so much of himself repressed. Jimmy Stewart did not have enough grooves in his face to play the battered but handsome detective. In The Big Sleep, Marlowe might as well be Faulkner walking into a room: “You’re not very tall are you?,” Carmen Sternwood says when she first meets Marlowe. Bogart was five feet, ten inches (five inches taller than Faulkner) but not an overwhelming physical presence, and not the husky fellow described in the shooting script. Bogart-Marlowe’s reply to Carmen applies as well to Faulkner: “I try to be.” No one tried to walk taller than William Faulkner. He stood up so straight while walking that Buzz Bezzerides wondered why Bill did not fall over. For all his tough-guy, understated style, Marlowe, like Faulkner, is a romantic, and in the shooting script he even gives his hard-boiled version of a Nobel Prize speech: “Pride is a great thing, isn’t it? And courage—and honor—and love. All the things you read about in the copybooks—only in copybooks nothing ever gets tangled. The road always lies so straight, and clear, and signs say to love and honor and be brave.” Marlowe might as well be a writer, with a sense of narrative pace, since he saves what is for him a long speech until near the end of his story—for it is his story, one that he makes the other characters tell to him.

What happens in The Big Sleep is confusing and subject to much critical discussion—“figuring it out makes you faint,” Manny Farber remarked.17 James Agee called it “wakeful fare for folks who don’t care what is going on, or why, so long as the talk is hard and the action harder.”18 Herbert Cohn in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (August 24, 1946) spoke for many reviewers when he concluded that he did not understand any more about the film than if it had been written by Gertrude Stein. Here is the shortest version of the plot: “[The screwy behavior of] Carmen Sternwood, daughter of a retired general, brings forth a blackmailer. This brings Philip Marlowe . . . private dick into the scene. And this in turn causes Vivian Sternwood . . . Carmen’s somewhat predatory but smart sister to step in and try to close the case in an effort to protect Carmen” (Big Spring [TX] Herald, October 6, 1946). What matters is Marlowe’s strength of character, admired again and again by everyone—including the police who resent his scoops, the women who try to manipulate him, and even the men who try to kill him. Eddie Mars, the casino owner who wants Marlowe killed, calls him a “soldier”—as do others because Marlowe is so committed to doing his duty. Mars is sarcastic, and yet he is respectful, realizing that Marlowe will not be deterred from finding out what happened to Shawn Regan, and Marlowe, like Faulkner, treats his case as a kind of trade secret he won’t share with anyone until he figures out what happened to Regan. Soldiers do their duty and follow orders—except when they don’t because they have an even higher sense of duty to the truth. Marlowe ultimately figures out that the Sternwood sisters have collaborated with Eddie Mars in covering up a crime because he understands the passions of love—of Eddie’s wife, for example, who perpetuates the ruse that she ran off with Regan in order to help Eddie cover up a crime. The only honorable thing for Marlowe to do is to sort out these conflicting passions, even after General Sternwood has paid him off.

Marlowe becomes what the war was about: courage and honor and love. He becomes, as a result, yet another way for Faulkner to express the values that inspired “The De Gaulle Story” and “Battle Cry.” Marlowe gives no speech about honor and pride and love in Chandler’s novel. The Hollywood Faulkner signed on to write such speeches as a testament to what soldiers like Marlowe believed could be restored in postwar society. The Sternwoods allude to a decline in their line that fits Faulkner’s conception of the Compsons and Sartorises. General Sternwood, for all his hard, bitter demeanor, wants to believe in love—that Shawn Regan has not abandoned him—and Marlowe allows the general to believe that Regan has only gone away and wishes the general well, rather than stating the truth: Carmen killed Regan in a fit of jealousy. Marlowe’s gift to a dying man is also the hope that men like Regan and Marlowe inspire. The gentleman-hero survives in Marlowe for all his tough monosyllabic talk and his silences. In effect, Marlowe becomes a family man, when Norris, the family butler cum all-purpose servant, “takes the liberty” of moving Marlowe’s car into the driveway and expresses “our gratitude” for what Marlowe has done for the Sternwoods—much as a black servant might do in a Faulkner novel. Marlowe inherits, like an eldest son, the Sternwood mythos. At the end of the film, Marlowe, who hardly ever has time to even sleep in his apartment, says to the arriving cops that they will have no trouble catching up with him: “I’ve decided already myself to stay.” Hardly ever at home in Hollywood, Marlowe, whose office has been everywhere, like the displaced Faulkner,19 has finally found a refuge. Although Jules Furthman rewrote the picture’s final scenes, they depend on Faulkner’s and Brackett’s opening sequence: “The mutual affection and respect that develop so naturally between Marlowe and General Sternwood . . . is barely hinted at in the book.”20

Leigh Brackett disparaged Faulkner’s unwieldy dialogue but delighted in his story construction, which makes the shooting script a marvel of interlocking scenes featuring a moving in and out and returning to several interiors similar to the opening and closing of doors in To Have and Have Not, creating the effect of following the characters into scenes in the most natural, fluid way. In The Big Sleep, we become a part of Marlowe’s itinerary—visiting the Sternwood mansion, the orchid house, various Sternwood bedrooms, the Geiger bookshop (the blackmailer’s lair), Geiger’s house, Marlowe’s living room, Marlowe’s bedroom, Marlowe’s car, Marlowe’s office, Joe Brody’s apartment (another blackmailer’s lair), the district attorney’s office, Eddie Mars’s casino, Mars’s private office, the automobile shop where Marlowe is roughed up. Very few scenes occur outside: on a few streets, a fishing pier, and a highway. All this coming and going in “transitory spaces”21 is the point of the film as Marlowe’s wit and strength are tested from every conceivable angle in a film of “hopeless enclosure within an ominous universe.”22 Losing a grip on exactly what is happening and who is guilty has never seemed to bother many viewers because Bogart’s Marlowe is so resilient and so much his own man, impregnable in many of the same ways as William Faulkner even as it is apparent that beneath that impervious mien is a smoldering fury.

Marlowe has been a hired hand. “I try to do my job,” he says, as Faulkner did. But what a job in this case, since the novelist cum screenwriter did not so much adapt another writer’s novel for a screenplay as participate in a screenplay that worked out the existential dimension of his own Hollywood career: the detective story as displaced autobiography. Faulkner rarely had much to say about a finished script, but after doing his final rewrites he told James Geller, head of the story department, he had worked on them, even after receiving final payment, “in respectful joy and happy admiration. WITH LOVE, WILLIAM FAULKNER.”23