In the early thirties, when I was working at Paramount, Ernest Hemingway came onto the lot for a screening of A Farewell to Arms. He didn’t think much of the picture, and said so unequivocally—though, to be fair, not many did. Not even those like myself who had worked on it. The script had only come past my desk because Frank Borzage, the director, had heard I’d driven an ambulance like the protagonist, Frederic Henry—like Hemingway himself. Normally, any personal experience with a picture’s subject matter was enough to get you removed from a project, but Borzage admired Hemingway and thought he might be impressed by the touch of authenticity.
But he wasn’t impressed. He could scarcely have been less interested in trading war stories with me. And by the time of the screening, I couldn’t have said what I’d contributed to the film and what I hadn’t, which was the case just as often as not.
I do remember, however, that I tried and failed to save the novel’s famous lines about the meaninglessness—even perniciousness—of military rhetoric. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, he’d written. Finally, only the names of places had dignity, he’d written. The language was beautiful, the sentiment true enough, but I did wonder if Hemingway ever considered what it was like to live in a place with the dignity of Verdun. What it was like to walk along a river with the dignity of the Meuse.
Part of what first seduced me about California was that the names of its streets and sites had almost no meaning, and certainly no dignity—not in the way Hemingway meant, anyway. Sea View Avenue. Briarcrest Road. Or Rockingham Drive, where Paul lived, and where I drove for lunch the Saturday following Dr. Kepler’s funeral.
It was a tony address—north of Sunset, just down the street from Cole Porter. Visiting homes on this sort of street was a part of life in the pictures, even if I hadn’t been doing much of it lately. I’d reached a rather interesting moment in my career, where I no longer needed to attend tennis parties and Sunday drinking sessions in order to work. The arrangement suited me, I found, and I discovered a shyness in myself that I’d never had the chance to cultivate.
Nevertheless, I was pleased to receive Paul’s invitation. The house was smaller than the others on the street, and, though it was built in the same Spanish style, a slight shabbiness set it apart.
The man who answered the door looked marvelously healthy, however—all the more so now that he wasn’t dressed for a funeral. He wore a white linen shirt, open at the collar, and asked if I’d like to take my drink in the backyard, where three golden retrievers waited patiently on the lawn.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked as he handed me a boomerang.
“I believe so.”
“The dogs love it. Care to throw?”
I said I’d prefer to watch. He gave an order in German, and the dogs lined up at his heel. We stood like that for quite a while, chatting in the late afternoon sun, Paul throwing the boomerang, the dogs tearing out into the lawn and leaping in turn. There was something pleasant about watching them hurl themselves into the air with such abandon, then wait at our feet with such apparent calm. And their game made our conversation easier. Sometimes I regretted that I’d never had many of those talks that take place in backyards, two boys throwing a baseball. Paul and I were a bit old for that, however.
“I didn’t train them,” he said. “If I had I would have used English, not German.”
“Have you been back to Austria since the war?”
“My wife discourages me—I’m sorry you won’t meet her today, by the way.”
“Won’t I?”
“She’s visiting family in the east before the weather changes. Her mother’s been ill for quite a long time, actually.”
“My sympathies. And what about your family?”
He said nothing, but he didn’t release the boomerang, his rhythm of throwing and retrieval briefly syncopated. “My father’s newspaper was quite outspoken on Anschluss. Once the Nazis came to power, I suppose it was only a matter of time. Quite funny—somehow, I assumed you already knew that, but of course there’s no way you could have.”
We took a second round of drinks at a small table on the back patio, the dogs panting at our feet.
“I’ve been meaning to say, I saw one of your pictures this week.” Paul said the name.
It wasn’t one of mine, and I told him so.
He rubbed a hand over his face and laughed. “Dear god. I only went because I thought I recognized the name in the paper, I thought you mentioned it last week.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Did you like it?”
“Yes. Well, are they all like that? So melodramatic?”
“Some are much worse. Most of the ones I’ve worked on, in fact.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.” He paused, took a drink, and made a face. “I saw Robin Hood just this last year. A friend screened it. I didn’t know what it was until it was too late.”
“With Douglas Fairbanks,” I said, slowly. “What did you think?”
“He was very graceful, forceful. I couldn’t think of a worse sobriquet for that poor creature in Bologna. Could you?”
I’d driven there knowing that we’d be obliged to talk about Bologna and the man there we’d referred to as Douglas Fairbanks, about Drummond Green and Dr. Bianchi, about Sarah and Lee Hagen. I knew, also, that it would do me no harm to discuss those things—but that didn’t mean the prospect was pleasant. The fact was, I didn’t know how revisiting that time—those places, those people—would feel. I did know that I felt very well at the moment, more content probably than was typical for me. The fizz of the gin and soda, the perfect weather, and especially the old friend before me. I didn’t answer. And when it was clear that I wasn’t going to, Paul nodded in a genial way that could have meant anything, though I took it to mean that he understood perfectly, and said, “Well, you probably met Douglas Fairbanks, the real one.”
“No. I never did,” I said. “But I met Douglas Jr. Now there’s a poor creature.”