Passionate Falsehoods

I was sitting in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside, going from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Points of rain appeared on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine—the models, maddeningly prim, wore little hats and white gloves—there was an article that caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plump Welsh poet, with a beguiling photograph taken outside the door of his studio in a seaside town, a manuscript stuck in the pocket of his jacket. The poet was Dylan Thomas, and the tribute, written by John Malcolm Brinnin, had somehow ended up in Mademoiselle. Brinnin’s lyrical description of the poet’s seedy, romantic life was an introduction to the poem that followed. It was “Under Milk Wood,” roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. The drops of rain became streaks as in the soft, clicking comfort of the train the voices spoke: housewives, shopkeepers, shrews, Captain Cat—the blind retired sea captain dreaming of a strumpet, Rosie Probert (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”).

I was at the time an officer in the United States Air Force. With me in that Bundesbahn car, which had, I suppose, survived the war—within me—was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem I had read, and the longing to do so rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?

The war I had survived was the Korean War. I had returned from it two years before, rich with memories of flying as a fighter pilot. I had kept a journal. I had written before: stories and poems as a schoolboy, and later, in the Air Force, a novel, which was sent to a publisher and turned down. The fateful letter, however, offered encouragement. If I wrote another book, the publishers would like to see it. And so, on an iron cot in a Georgia barracks one afternoon, seemingly without effort, I wrote the outline of a novel, and on weekends and at night over the next two or three years completed the book. It was called The Hunters and was immediately accepted. That was 1957.

The hour had come. I resigned from the Air Force, probably the single most difficult act I had ever performed, with the idea of becoming a writer. I had been in the military for twelve years. I had a wife and two small children. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down in despair and tried to write. A few years later, a second novel was published. It was more ambitious but also more derivative, and it disappeared without a trace. But I was, despite that, a writer, and could be introduced, at least for a while, as such. The problem was that I had no way to support myself. Then, almost as if on cue, a door opened to another world.

My entry was by way of a cluttered back room, toppling with papers. The room belonged to Howard Rayfiel, a junior member of the staff of two prominent New York theatrical lawyers. Rayfiel—large, soft, animated, the son of a lawyer and brother of a movie writer—was an impresario of a phantom company on his own time. The company had one other member, a theater director who had had some limited success, and the two of them invited me to write a script. Flattered, needing money, bored by the loneliness of writing a new book—the usual circumstances—and also believing that I could put my hand to almost anything, I returned the brief smile the movies had just given me—it was an intoxicating moment—and began what turned out to be a long affair.

My script, called “Goodbye, Bear,” was a sentimental bouquet laid at the feet of a certain type of young, irresistibly cynical New York girl, the flower of every generation. In this case, she was nurtured in such bygone hothouses as El Morocco and the Stork Club and was seen through the eyes of an infatuated but unforceful man. The story had no barb. It was merely a history and would have been better as a poem, but it possessed a kind of lovely dignity. It also produced an unexpected result, reminiscent of the Chinese fable of the mandarin who stood by the river fishing with a straight pin instead of a hook. When word of this curious behavior reached the emperor, he came to see. “What could anyone hope to catch with such a hook?” The answer was serene. “You, my emperor.” The emperor, uncrowned then, was Robert Redford, just becoming known on the New York stage. Somehow, he had gotten hold of the script, and we met for lunch, two naïfs in the sunlit city.

There come back to me many memories of Redford when he was new and his image that of purest youth. One morning in London at the entrance of the Savoy, three or four women came up asking for an autograph. As he signed, he gave me a sort of embarrassed smile. “You hired them,” I said to him afterward. He broke out in a wonderful laugh—no, no, he hadn’t. The car that was driving us to the airport that day broke down in the tunnel just before Heathrow, and we got out and ran for the plane, carrying our bags. That was how easy and unattended his life was then.

Later, in 1968, we went together to the Winter Olympics and Grenoble, slept in corridors, since rooms were unavailable, and rode on buses. By then, I was the author of several scripts, although none had been made into movies, and had been hired to write “Downhill Racer,” a ski film that Redford would star in. We travelled for weeks with the United States team.

At dinner one night, I remarked that I saw Billy Kidd as the model for the main character. Kidd was the dominant skier on the U.S. team and, in the manner of champions, was somewhat arrogant and aloof. He was tough—from a poor part of town, I imagined, honed by years on the icy runs of the East.

Redford shook his head. The racer he was interested in was at another table. Over there. I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself—which of course should have marked him from the first—sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times.

“Him?” I said. “Sabich?”

Yes, Redford said; when he was that age he had been just like him—vain, savvy.

So easy, all of it, such play. Back in New York, when I went into restaurants with Redford, eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well. There was a dreamlike quality also, perhaps because Redford seemed to be just passing through, not really involved. It was washing over him, like a casual love affair. He wore black silk shirts and drove a Porsche, disliked being called Bobby by eager agents, and more than once said, “I hate being a movie star.” Nevertheless, he became one, with the life of evasion that went with it, of trying not to be recognized, a life of friends only, of sitting at the very front of the plane, the last to board, like a wanted man.

Years later, at forty, he looked better than when we had first known one another. The handsome, somewhat shallow college boy had disappeared and a lean, perceptive man stood in his place. From a kind of unconcerned amusement and a natural caution he had made an astonishing success. His days had a form; he accomplished something during them. As if glancing at a menu, he was able to choose his life.

We drifted apart. I wrote another film for him, but it was never made. “My presence in something,” I remember him saying, perhaps in apology, “is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” He knew his limitations.

I saw him last at a premiere. A mob was waiting. Inside the theater every seat was filled. Then in the bluish gloom a murmur went across the crowd. People began to stand. There was a virtual rain of light as flashbulbs went off everywhere, and, amid a small group moving down the aisle, the blond head of the star could be seen. I was far off—years, in fact—but felt a certain sickening pull. There came to me the part about Falstaff and the coronation. I shall be sent for in private, I thought, consoling myself. I shall be sent for soon at night.

As I think of early days, an inseparable part of them appears: the thrilling city—New York was that—and a kind of Athenian brilliance over everything, which might well have been the light coming through the tall glass archways of Lincoln Center, where, in the fall, the Film Festival was held. It drew what I felt to be the elite, the great European directors—Antonioni, Truffaut, Fellini, and Godard—presenting a new kind of film, more imaginative and penetrating than our own.

The city was leaping with films, schools of them, of every variety, daring films that were breaking into something vast and uncharted, as an icebreaker crushes its way to open sea.

I was living not in New York itself but thirty miles from it, with my wife and children, in a half-converted barn in Rockland County. By chance, I met a writer named Lane Slate—he had a place just down the road—and was drawn to him immediately. He was irreverent and well read, an expert on Joyce, on films, on painting—the very companion I had been longing for. Together we made a short documentary called Team, Team, Team, some twelve minutes long, about football, the sweat and dirt of practice. It was my first film. A few months later, to our astonishment, it won first prize at Venice.

On the strength of this initial success, Lane and I formed a company and made documentaries—ten or twelve of them, scraped together, some of them eloquent. We travelled over the country, flying, driving, checking into motels, the mindless joy of America, beer bottles lying by the roadside, empty cans tumbling like paper. It is his curious charm that I remember, and how quickly he could make himself liked.

Our final film was on American painters: Warhol before his real recognition, Rauschenberg, Stuart Davis, a dozen others. Then Lane’s older son was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and died a few days afterward. We had already begun gradually to separate. Perhaps we had lost the power to amuse each other.

In 1963, about the time that Lane and I stopped working together, a friend introduced me to Peter Glenville, an Englishman who had directed Rashomon on the stage and the film Becket, and had an undeniable gift. I was invited to dinner—there were four of us, all men, in his New York town house—the meal served by a uniformed maid. Toward the end of the meal, Glenville asked if I would be interested in writing a script, a story he wanted to make in Italy. The mere proposal seemed a reward. He was showing his faith in me; he had tapped me, as it were.

I was sent a typewritten outline and felt, upon reading it, disappointment. It was trash: a young man in Rome, a lawyer, meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl who is strangely evasive about her personal life. She is either uncertain and innocent or—the evidence is flimsy, but his suspicions mount—a call girl. He marries her anyway, but incidents recur that are disturbing. I have forgotten the cliché climactic moment: Does she attempt suicide? Is there a final reconciliation amid the white sheets of the ospedale?

It was called “The Appointment.” I told Glenville frankly that it would never possess the least merit. He understood my misgivings, but still the theme of jealousy was interesting and the locale . . .

The film’s producer called from California. He had talked at length to Glenville. They were confident that I was the one to write the film. Forgetting everything, I inhaled.

I arrived in Rome with the name of a Count Crespi, Glenville had supplied it. The Count was cool on the telephone. I had to wait several days for an appointment.

He came out of his office to introduce himself, tan, handsome face, ears close to his head, shattering smile. “I am Crespi,” he said, taking me into a small, plain room, where he sat down across from me.

I told him the story of the film, and he began without hesitation to suggest things. The girl, instead of being a model, which was rather commonplace, might work at Vogue, where his wife’s former secretary, a very clever girl who spoke four or five languages . . . but Vogue is already a little too fancy, perhaps, he decided. A salesgirl in a boutique, he thought, or perhaps, yes, even better, a mannequin in one of the couture houses—Fourquet on Via dei Condotti, for example. “She may earn only eighty thousand lire a month, but it’s interesting work, she meets people, a certain kind of person with money, taste. If she has something to attend, Fourquet will probably lend her one of his expensive dresses.”

With heroic charm he began to describe the man in the film, the somewhat proper lawyer. He has a good car, he goes dancing, to the beach. He loves sport, like all Italians, though not as a participant, of course, and there is also something traditional about him—he still goes home every day at noon to eat with his mother.

Crespi’s enthusiasm and his willingness to provide details increased my confidence. There might be a tone, I began to feel, a manner of presenting the film, that would redeem it. As we talked on, Crespi began to shift his view, to see the lawyer as less sophisticated, not from Fellini’s Rome, where people had seen everything, but from a place in a more provincial town, Piacenza or Verona. Yes, he said, he saw it as a really romantic story.

At a dinner in the country a week or so later, I tried to follow the conversation and the bursts of laughter at the table. It was all wicked and in Italian. We were in a garden, grouped around an animated woman named Laura Betti. She was a singer and an actress. Pasolini and Moravia had written lyrics for her songs, and she performed all the Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht repertory in Italian. She talked constantly, a cigarette between her fingers. Her laugh was irresistible. Smoke poured from her mouth. She was blond, a bit heavy, perhaps thirty years old, the sort of woman who proudly wore a sadness.

We were in the ancient world, it seemed, in the cool air, the darkness beneath the vines. There were six or seven of us. They were eating from one another’s plates and talking about everyone: about the famous actress who liked to make love in two ways at the same time—you could always recognize such women, Laura Betti said, by the way they looked over their shoulder with a knowing smile; or about the madwoman who walked the streets singing about a little boy’s dove that she had touched with her tongue. It was all about love, or, more truly, desire. Rome was a village that had no secrets. They knew everything, even the names of the four countesses who had picked up an eleven-year-old Gypsy girl one night and brought her to a noted journalist to watch him have his pleasure with her.

The script I was writing, they asked, what was its nature? Though feeling that it sounded naive, I described it. Perhaps it should not take place in Rome, I suggested—someone had mentioned Piacenza.

“Bologna,” Laura Betti said. “That’s where it could take place. It is famous for three things. Its learning—it has the oldest university in Italy; its food; and, lastly, its . . .” Here she used the most common word describing fellatio.

“It’s a specialty,” she said. “All the various forms are called by the names of pasta. Rigate, for instance, which is a pasta with thin, fluted marks. For that the girls gently use their teeth. When there used to be brothels, there was a Signorina Bolognese—that was her specialty.”

But I remained in Rome. The heat bore down. Dark Sicilians rose at two in the afternoon. The Tiber was green and stagnant. On Sunday mornings, the highway to the sea was jammed with cars, the music from hundreds of radios beating the blue, exhausted air. Rome was a city of women: you saw them everywhere, women in expensive clothes at the Hassler or the Hotel de Ville; women travelling with their husbands and without; young women claiming to be actresses—who knows what became of them; pairs of women in restaurants reading the menu very carefully; women stripped of illusion but unable to say farewell; women who owned shops and went to Circeo in the summer; divorced women who had once had a life in Trastevere; girls who looked unbathed, sitting in skimpy dresses in the restaurants, with young white teeth; principesse born in Vienna, living in the solitude of vast apartments; and aging fashion editors who seldom strayed far from the Hilton.

Against them, the legions of men: the handsome scum; men whose marriages had never been annulled; men who would never marry; men of dubious occupation; men from the streets and bars, of nullo, nothing; men with good names and dark mouths; swarthy men from the South, polished and unalterable, the nail of their little finger an inch long.

One June evening I was introduced to a woman whose apartment might be for rent. She was small, well dressed, and untrusting—French-Canadian as I found out. Gaby was her name—Gabrielle, I suppose. She was seductive and at the same time disdainful; life had taught her hard lessons, among them, I sensed, to think always of money and to hate men. The result was a passionate interest in human frailty.

She rejoiced, somewhat bitterly, in the weaknesses and secret vices of those in the film and literary worlds: Moravia, Italy’s most famous writer; Visconti; John Cheever (who had lived for a season or two in Rome); Pietro Germi, who left his wife for a young actress and was betrayed by her in the most humiliating way; Thyssen, the rich art collector; countless others.

She told me the story of a singer I’d met once. She had begun as an actress, a shy, sweet girl who was given a chance to sing in a revue. She had to sleep with the star of the show and afterward the producer. But they cut her part. She went to bed with the star’s brother and, finally, the stage manager. He took her to a house, a large one, and into a room upstairs. It was dark. “Take off your clothes,” he told her. When she had done this, he said, “Put these on,” and handed her a pair of very high-heeled shoes. Then he had her get on her hands and knees on the bed. Suddenly the lights came on. There were other men in the room, all the previous ones, the star, the producer, the electrician, and they all came toward her laughing.

Gaby told the story of Corinne Luchaire, a prewar French star. “She was Göring’s mistress.”

I vaguely recalled a slender, beautiful blonde. “Göring’s mistress? Not really?”

“Of course!” she hissed. “Don’t you know anything?”

Corinne Luchaire, she said, had been arrested in her apartment in Paris by the French Resistance and kept there all night while forty-one men raped her. She spent three years in jail. At her trial, her lawyer read aloud the entire de Maupassant story of collaboration, “Boule de Suif”—about the whore who didn’t know that the soldier who came to see her was German. “He was naked.” I had never read the story, which was the first de Maupassant ever published, and even now I’m not sure if Gaby’s version is correct, but it is the one I remember.

Gaby had been pursued, of course—that was one of the roots of her obsession. The Sicilian prince who, as they were dancing at a ball, took her hand and said, “Here. What do you think of it?” having placed his naked member in her hand. The lecherous journalists and lawyers. She rained images on me, some of them so intense they remained in my flesh like wounds.

She also introduced me to Fellini. She brought him stories. “Talk to me, talk to me”: he wanted nothing in writing; he was inspired by listening, he said. It was often remarked that there were, at the time, only two real artists in all of Europe, Picasso and Fellini. Picasso, a god, was ancient and remote. Fellini was a man who sat in shirtsleeves: he resembled his photographs, rumpled, with black hair growing out of his ears, like an unsuccessful uncle.

I met him at the studio where he was working. The conversation began in Italian; he did not speak English, he apologized. I had recently been to the Vorkapich lectures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were essentially a tribute to Slavko Vorkapich, the master of a kind of montage used in the nineteen thirties and forties: pages of a calendar falling away to indicate days or months passing; an ocean liner, then a train to show travel over great distances. The entire film world of the East Coast had attended the lectures, I said. It was difficult to obtain a seat, and of all the directors whose work had been chosen to illustrate concepts Fellini was the one most often used, with Eisenstein second. Fellini gave a modest nod. He seemed grateful, the honor. He had only one question. “Who is Vorkapich?” he wanted to know.

On a slip of paper he wrote his telephone numbers—if there was anything that might be of some help, he urged me to call him.

I was sitting one night in a restaurant, and two women sat down at the next table. One was American, older, with thin hands, and the other young, blond, with a striking figure. They had just been to Capri and were talking with animation about it. Soon they were sampling a dish I had ordered and I was tasting their wine. The younger one’s glances were open and friendly. I could read palms, I told them—I found myself eager to touch her. “Tell me your name,” I suggested.

“Ilena,” she replied.

I examined her palm with feigned authority. “You will have three children,” I said, pointing to some creases. “You are witty—it shows that here. I see money and fame.” I felt her fingers pressing mine.

“You are an ass,” she said gaily. “That means nice, no?”

Ilena may have been her name or it may have been simply the name she wore, like a silk dressing gown one longed to peel back. Warmth came off her in waves. She was twenty-three years old and weighed sixty-two kilos, the absence of any part of which would have been a grave loss. She was, I learned, a mistress of John Huston, who was in Rome directing a film. She had also been the companion of Farouk, the exiled king of Egypt. She had met him at the dentist’s office. He was there with his lawyer, she said, a detail I felt no one could invent.

Farouk’s days had started in the evening. Like a true playboy, he rose late. He liked fine cars—he had a Rolls and a Jaguar. He loved to eat. I thought of the large men I had known, many of them good dancers, graceful, even dainty. Was it true of him? “Darling, we never danced,” she said.

It was clear that she had been fond of him. They had travelled to Monte Carlo together, to the chemin de fer tables, where, a prodigious gambler, he was known as the Locomotive. The night he collapsed and died in a restaurant on Via Cassia she was allowed to leave by the back door before the press arrived.

Whether or not she was an actress or ever became one, I do not know. Of course, she wanted to be—she had already played great roles.

We had a drink, the three of us, at the Blue Bar and a gelato on the Piazza Navona. On Via Veneto she stopped to talk with a group of elderly Italian businessmen. It was lovely to watch her. Her legs, the silk of her print dress, the smoothness of her cheeks, all of it shone like constellations, the sort that rule one’s fate.

We dropped the American woman at her hotel, the Excelsior. Sitting in the car, I turned to Ilena and said simply, “I adore you. I have from the first moment.”

In response she kissed me and said, “To the right.” It was late; she had an appointment in the morning at Elizabeth Arden and wanted to go home.

“Are you married?” she asked as we drove.

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

It was to a man in his eighties, she explained. I recognized the story from the newspapers—she had married him to get a passport. He was in an old people’s home, an istituto. She went to visit him there, she said.

We went on to the Parioli, where, in a somewhat dubious building on Via Archimede, Ilena lived. The apartment was small and drearily furnished, but on the wall was a large picture of John Huston that had appeared in Life. Lying on the floor were books that Huston had given her to read. He might just as well have given her a chemistry set or a microscope. “You must never stop learning,” he told her—she could do him perfectly. I could hear the rich, rolling, faintly cynical voice that I knew from his documentary on the battle of San Pietro.

“Never stop learning,” he repeated. “That’s very important. Promise me that.”

“Of course, John,” she answered.

In an album were clippings of the two of them, Huston with a white, patriarchal beard. He was a coccolone—someone who likes to be babied—and very tight. “To get a thousand dollars from him is so difficult,” she said. He was also lonely. He would call on the phone: “What are you up to, baby?”

“Nothing.”

“Come right over. Right away.”

He had no friends, she said, and hated to go out. He was living in a suite in the Grand Hotel on a diet of vodka and caviar. “John,” she would ask him, “do you want some girls?”

“Bring them around,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”

She brought three, one of them eighteen years old—she liked young, tender girls, she explained. The late afternoon was best. “Darling,” she said to me after describing a scene that might have taken place at Roissy, “you’re a writer, you should know these things.”

Huston had fought at Cassino, she told me, as if in justification.

“No, he didn’t.”

“But he did. He’s told me stories.”

“He was a film director in the war. He never fought.”

“Well, he thinks he did,” she said. “That’s the same thing.”

I liked her generosity and lack of morals—they seemed close to an ideal condition of living—and also the way she looked at her teeth in the mirror as she talked. I liked the way she pronounced “cashmere,” like the state in India, Kashmir. Her cosmetics bag was filled with prescriptions, just as the shelf in her closet was crammed with shoes. Once we passed a big Alfa Romeo that she recognized as belonging to a friend, the chief of detectives in Rome. She had made love with him, of course. “Darling,” she said, “there’s no other way. Otherwise there would have been terrible trouble about my passport. It would have been impossible.” There was, I discovered, besides Huston, an Italian businessman supporting her.

There was a film festival in Taormina. She had looked forward to it for days, and when she finally went I languished in Rome. The week passed slowly. I heard her distant voice—I did not know where Taormina was, exactly—on the telephone. “Oh, darling,” she cried, “it’s so marvelous.” She was going to have the same agent as Monica Vitti, she said excitedly. A director had promised her a part in a James Bond film. She was not staying at the San Domenico Palace; she was at the Excelsior. Tomorrow she would be at the Imperiale—I understood what all that meant—and on Sunday she was going to receive a prize.

“Which prize?”

“I don’t know. Darling, I can’t believe it,” she said.

At last there was a telegram—I had felt that I might not see her again—“Coming Monday Rapido 5. Afternoon,” and signed with her name. It was sent from Ljubljana—Yugoslavia.

I met the train. It was thrilling to see her coming along the platform, a porter behind her with her bags. Some things are only good the first time but seeing her was like the first time. I knew she would say “darling.” I knew I would say, “I adore you.”

The film festival had left a glow. At a reception there, among scores of faces, she had seen a young man in a silk foulard with a brilliant unwavering smile, a wide smile, “like a killer’s.” She was wearing a white beaded dress. Her arms were bare. Fifteen or twenty minutes later she saw him again. The second barrel, as the lawyers say, was fatal. She said only, “Let’s leave.” Without a word he offered her his arm.

I listened with some unhappiness but without anger. Faithfulness was not what I expected.

“You’ll get to the top,” I told her, almost reluctantly, “but you shouldn’t . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“If I don’t become too much of a whore,” she said.

We drove to Paris, coming up through the Rhône Valley. Past Dijon we were on a back road along a canal and came to a wide dam where fishermen’s lines dropped forty or fifty feet into clear green water. The dark shapes of fish—I took them to be pike—were coasting lazily about. We watched the biggest ones approach, ignore the bait, and move off to lie motionless. “Like sultans,” she commented. I felt she knew.

In some mysterious way that I accepted without wonder, the film I had been writing with little conviction went into production in 1968. At Cannes, the following year, its screening was less than a triumph. The audience, at a moment when it should have felt fulfillment, broke into loud laughter. On the terrace of the Carlton afterward, I could not help overhearing the acid remarks. There was some brief pleasure in having my doubts confirmed.

Movies are like passion, brilliant and definitive. They end and there is an emptiness. “The vulgar falsehoods of the cinema,” as someone has put it. They are narcotic; they allow one to forget—to imagine and forget. Looking back, I suppose I have always rejected the idea of actors as heroes, and no intimacy with any of them has changed this. Actors are idols. Heroes are those with something at stake.

During the war, I remembered, we went to movies almost nightly. We laughed at them as the men and women in evening dress at Cannes had laughed at mine.

Nevertheless, filled with ambition, I had wanted to direct a film of my own. I had a story by Irwin Shaw, and a star—Charlotte Rampling—who had agreed to be in it. Then she changed her mind. At the last minute, after we flew all night to Rome, where she was shooting something else, she was persuaded to be in the film again. Visconti, she said—he was just then directing her—was a true genius. I tried not to be disheartened. I was judging her unfairly, by her conversation and personality, while there she was, flesh and blood and willing to perform. She refused dinner—to get back to a boyfriend, I was sure—and after twenty or thirty minutes raced off in a car. Her agreement to be in the film, however, enabled us to get the money to make it.

I was to learn many things about her: that she chewed wads of gum, had dirty hair, and, according to the costume woman, wore clothes that smelled. Also that she was frequently late, never apologized, and was short-tempered and mean. The boyfriend, a blond highwayman, was a vegetarian. He prescribed their food. “Meat,” he murmured in a restaurant, looking at the menu. “That’ll kill you.” In the morning sometimes they danced maniacally in the street, like two people who had just had an enormous piece of luck. During the day, after every scene, she flew into his arms like a child while he kissed and consoled her.

Midway through shooting—we were near Avignon—she refused to continue unless her salary was doubled and her boyfriend took over as director. She got the money, but the producer refused to back the mutiny. When I heard what had happened, I found it hard to suppress my loathing, although in retrospect I wonder if it might not have been a good thing. The boyfriend might have gotten some unimagined quality from her and made of the well-behaved film something crude but poignant—something compelling.

The truth is, the temperament and impossible behavior of stars are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties—these are the stuff of the myths. Modern deities should be no different.

In the end the film we made, Three, was decorous and mildly attractive. It was popular at Cannes and had some flattering reviews in America. A young women’s magazine voted it the selection of the month and critics had it on their ten-best lists, but they were alone in this. Audiences thought otherwise.

There were opportunities to direct again, but I remembered lying on the stone beach at Nice late one day, when we were close to finishing, wearing a pair of Battistoni shoes, and feeling utterly spent. I felt like an alcoholic, like Malcolm Lowry. It seemed the morning after. I looked down and saw the white legs of my father. All of it had demanded more than I was willing to give again.

For its real adherents the life never ended. I liked the stories of producers driving down to Cap d’Antibes in convertibles with two or three carefree girls. I had had notes placed in my hand by the wives of leading men, bored and unattended to, that said in one way or another, “Call me,” and had seen actors emerging from the Danieli in Venice, wrapped against the fall weather in expensive coats, fur-lined within and cloth without. The fur was the luxury in which they lived, the cloth a symbol of the ordinary world from which they were removed. Off to Torcello for lunch, jolting across the wide lagoon, the wind blowing the dark green water to whiteness, past San Michele with its brick walls, the island on which Stravinsky and Diaghilev lay buried—the real and the false glory, one moving past the other, though there are times when one cannot tell which is which.

The best scripts are not always made. There are so many factors: timing, impulse, frivolity, accident. The films that are made are like menhirs, standing amid the rubble of everything broken or lost, the marvelous lines, scenes, the great effort lavished like milt over roe. The agents and stars kick through it idly. Perhaps it is this waste, this vast debris, which nourishes the glory.

I was a poule for ten years, fifteen. I might easily have gone on longer. There was wreckage all around, but it was like the refuse piled behind restaurants: I did not consider it—in front they were bowing and showing me to a table.

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 artificial 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. 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.

Years later, I wrote one (I thought) final script—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 that I was the writer, and the irresistible woman who had not had the least whim denied her was a symbol for film itself.

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 the 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 Baur au Lac. 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, walked 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 covered with bits of gravel. This eel is a saint to me, oblivious, already in another world.

To write of people thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well—in describing a world, you extinguish it and in any recollection much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.

There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable, too pleasurable, perhaps—the lights dancing on dark water, as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.

The New Yorker

August 4, 1997