Evening In Byzantium Part 12
He drove back to France slowly, carefully, not stopping at the spot where he had nearly been killed the night before. When he reached Saint-Jean-de-Luz, quiet in the preseason lull, he registered in a small hotel, went out and bought a ream of paper. I am now armed, he thought, as he carried the paper back to the hotel, I am re-entering my playground. By a different entrance.
He stayed in Saint-Jean-de-Luz two months, working slowly and painfully, trying to shape the story of Kenneth Jarvis, who had died at the age of eighty-two, three days after he had read in a newspaper that the girl of nineteen whom he loved had married another man. He had started it as a play, but bit by bit it had slid into another form, and he had gone back to the beginning and started it all over again as a film script. He had worked since his first days in the theatre with writers, suggesting changes, whole scenes, the addition of new themes, but it was one thing to work on the basis of another man's ideas and quite another to have a blank page in front of you and only yourself to try to bring it to life.
Aside from two weekend visits from Constance, he kept to himself, spending long hours at the desk in the hotel room, taking solitary walks along the beach and around the harbor, eating alone in the hotel dining room.
He told Constance what he was doing. She voiced neither approval nor disapproval. He didn't show her what he had written. Even after two months' work there would have been very little to show anyone-just a disconnected jumble of scenes, bald ideas, sketches of possible sequences, notes for characters.
By the end of the two months he realized that simply telling the story of the old man and the young girl was not enough. It wasn't enough because it didn't leave room for him, Jesse Craig, in it. Not the actual Jesse Craig, not the recital of the history that lay behind the man who sat day after day at the desk in the quiet hotel room, but his beliefs, his temperament, his hopes, his judgment on the time through which he had lived. Without all that, he came to realize, whatever he finally accomplished would be fragmentary, useless.
So he invented other characters, other pairs of lovers, to people the great house he had imagined on the north sh.o.r.e of Long Island for the summer in which he hoped to concentrate all the action of the film. He had transposed the locale of the story from Normandy. He didn't know enough about Normandy to write about it, and he knew about Long Island. He brought in a grandson, aged nineteen, in the first raptures of pa.s.sion, taken with a promiscuous girl three or four years older than he. And drawing on more recent experience, he involved a comfortably adulterous couple of forty.
Using everything he had learned from his reading, his working on other men's plays and films, on his own observation of his friends, enemies, acquaintances, he tried to intertwine his characters naturally and dramatically so that in the end, without ever speaking in his own voice or in using anything but his characters' words and actions, the final result might be Jesse Craig's statement of what, in the second half of the twentieth century in America, it was like to love as a young man or woman, a middle-aged man or woman, and an old man on the brink of death, with all the interplay, the compromising, the wounding, of money, moral stances, power, position, cla.s.s, beauty and the lack of it, honor and the lack of it, illusion and the lack of it.
After two months the town began to fill up, and he decided it was time to pack and move on. On the long drive north toward Paris, thinking about how he had spent the two months, he knew that he would be lucky if he could get the script written in a year. Maybe lucky if he could ever get it written at all.
It took him the full twelve months. He had written bits and pieces of it in Paris, in New York, on Long Island. Whenever he had come to a point in the script where he couldn't see his way ahead, he had packed and restlessly moved on. But he hadn't once fallen asleep at the wheel on any of his trips.
Even when he had finished it, he showed it to no one. He, who had pa.s.sed judgment on the work of hundreds of other men, couldn't bear thinking of strangers' eyes reading the words he had written. And any reader, he felt, was a stranger. When he sent it off to be typed, he put no author's name under the t.i.tle. Merely the legend, Property of Jesse Craig. Jesse Craig, once the boy wonder of Broadway and Hollywood, once known as a keen judge of the dramatic and cinematic art. Jesse Craig, who had no notion whether or not a year of his work was worth anybody's attention for two hours and dreaded to hear either a yes or a no.
When he put the six copies of the script into the valise the day he took the plane to Cannes, there was still no author's name under the t.i.tle The Three Horizons.
The telephone rang. He shook his head dazedly, like a man being suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. Once more he had to remind himself where he was, where the telephone was. I am in my room in the Carlton, he thought, the telephone is on the table on the other side of the big chair. The telephone rang again. He looked at his watch. It was one-thirty-five. He hesitated, almost decided not to answer. He didn't want to hear any more incoherent messages from America. Finally, he picked up the phone.
"Craig speaking," he said.
"Jess." It was Murphy. "I hope I didn't wake you."
"You didn't wake me."
"I just finished reading your script."
"Yes?"
"That kid Harte can write," Murphy said, "but he's been seeing too many old French movies. n.o.body's interested in an eighty-two-year-old man, for Christ's sake. You'll never get off the ground with it, Jess. Forget it. I wouldn't even show it around. It'll do you more harm than good, believe me. Drop the option and forget it. Let me work on the Greek thing for you, and we'll keep our eyes peeled for something good for later on."
"Thanks, Murph," Craig said, "for reading it. I'll talk to you tomorrow." He hung up, stared at the phone for a long time. Then he went back to the desk at which he had been sitting. He looked down at the typed list of questions Gail McKinnon had given him, read once more the first question. "Why are you in Cannes?"
He chuckled dryly to himself, picked up the pile of papers and tore them into small bits, dropped them into the wastebasket.
Then he took off his sweater, put on a jacket, and went out. He took a taxi to the casino where he knew the bar would be open all night. He bought some chips, sat down at a chemin de fer table, ordered a double whisky, and played and drank until six in the morning. He won thirty thousand francs, nearly six thousand dollars, mostly from two of the Englishmen who had been in the restaurant with Pica.s.so that evening. It was unfortunate for Ian Wadleigh that he wasn't patrolling the Croisette as Craig walked, almost steadily, through the growing dawn toward his hotel. At that hour Wadleigh would have gotten his five thousand for Madrid.
POLICEMEN with flashlights were guiding the cars toward an open field where many cars were already parked. The air was heavy and cold. When Craig turned off the ignition and stepped out, his shoes squished on the wet gra.s.s. He walked up the path toward the big, chateaulike house from which came the sound of an orchestra. The house was on a hill beyond Mougins, and it dominated the land around it like a small fortress.
He was sorry that Anne had not yet arrived. She would have enjoyed going into a house like that on her father's arm, to the sound of a French song, attended by policemen who were diligently engaged in lighting the way for you under dark old trees rather than lobbing tear-gas bombs in front of the Administration Building. He had Anne's cable in his pocket. Surprisingly, she had decided to visit her mother in Geneva and would be coming down to Cannes the next day.
Walter Klein, the host, was standing in the hallway greeting his guests. He had rented the house for a month, choosing it because it was large enough for parties. Klein was a small, powerfully built, youngish man with a deceptively easygoing manner. In the turbulent breaking up and realignments of agencies that had been taking place in the last few years, he had walked away from a decaying organization, taking with him a list of stars and directors, and while other agencies and movie companies were collapsing, he had accommodated himself to the new conditions of the industry so shrewdly that a good proportion of the movies being prepared or shot in America or England at any given moment had one or more clients of his in some key spot or were indebted to him in some way for financing or distribution. Where others cried havoc, he smiled and said, "Kids, we've never had it so good." Unlike Murphy, who had grown to affluence in an easier time, and who scornfully kept aloof from the soul-like atmosphere of Cannes during these two weeks, Klein could be seen at all hours talking earnestly in corners with producers, distributors, money men, directors, actors, wheeling and dealing, promising, signing. For his lieutenants he chose soft-spoken and personable young men who had never known the fat, easy old days, who matched him in avidity and ambition, and who, like their boss, hid their honed-down sharpness under a careful display of charm.
When Klein had met Craig in New York some time before, he had said lightly, "Jess, when are you going to leave that old dinosaur Murphy and come to my office?"
"Never, I guess, Walt," Craig had said. "Murph and I have sworn our bond in blood."
Klein had laughed. "Your loyalty does you credit, Jess," he said. "But I miss your name on the old silver screen. If you ever decide you want to come where the action is, give me a call."
Now Klein was standing in the marble front hallway of the mansion talking to some other people who had just arrived. He was dressed in a black velvet jacket, a ruffled shirt, and a bright red bow tie. Beside him was an anxious-looking woman who ran public relations for his firm. It was she who had sent out the invitations for the evening, and she looked pained when she saw Craig standing there in slacks and a blue blazer. Most, but not all, of the other guests were in evening clothes, and Craig could tell by the look on the woman's face that she sensed a small betrayal in his choice of clothing.
Klein shook his hand warmly, smiling. "Ah," he said, "the great man. I was afraid you wouldn't come." He didn't explain why he was afraid Craig would not come but introduced him to the people whom he had been talking to. "You know Tonio Corelli, of course, Jess," he said.
"By sight." Corelli was the beautiful young Italian actor from the Hotel du Cap swimming pool, now resplendent in a jet black, Roman-tailored dinner jacket. They shook hands.
"And if you will introduce the ladies, carino," Klein said. "I didn't quite catch your names, dears," he added apologetically.
"This is Nicole," Corelli said, "and this is Irene."
Nicole and Irene smiled dutifully. They were as pretty and tan and well-shaped as the girls who had been with Corelli at the pool, but they were not the same girls.
He goes in for matched pairs, Craig thought, he must run them in and out on a schedule. Craig recognized envy as easily in himself as in the next man.
"Honey," Klein said to the public relations woman, "take them in and get them a drink. If you want to dance," he said to the girls, "be careful you don't catch pneumonia. The band's outside. I couldn't make a deal on the weather, and winter came up. The merry month of May."
The trio, led by the public relations woman, drifted beautifully away.
"The only thing to be," Klein said, "is Italian."
"I know what you mean," Craig said. "Though you don't seem to be doing so badly." He made a gesture to take in the luxury of his surroundings. He had heard that Klein was paying five thousand dollars for the month he had rented the house.
"I'm not complaining. I go with the flow," Klein said, grinning. He took an honest pleasure in his wealth. "It's not an uncomfortable little pad. Well, Jesse, it's good seeing you again. How're things going?"
"Fine," Craig said. "Just fine."
"I invited Murphy and his frau," Klein said, "but they declined with thanks. They don't mingle with the lower orders."
"They're here for a rest," Craig said, lying for his friend. "They're going to bed early this week, they told me."
"He was a great man, Murphy," Klein said. "In his day. You're still with him, of course?"
"Of course."
"As I once told you," said Klein, "your loyalty does you credit. Is he working on something for you?" He threw away the line carelessly, turning his head as he spoke to survey his guests through the archway that gave into the great living room.
"Not that I know of," Craig said.
"You have anything on the fire yourself?" Klein turned back toward him.
Craig hesitated. "Maybe," he said. He had told no one but Constance and Murphy that he was considering doing a picture again. And Murphy had made his position clear. More than clear. Craig dropped his hint deliberately now. Of all the men gathered for the Festival, Klein, with his energy and his labyrinthine network of contacts, could be the most useful. "I'm playing with an idea."
"That's great news." The enthusiasm in Klein's voice was almost genuine. "You've been away too long, Jess. If you need any help, you know where to come, don't you?" Klein put an affectionate hand on his sleeve. "Anything for a friend. We put combinations together these days that make even my mind whirl."
"So I've been told. Maybe I'll give you a call one of these days and we can talk some more." Murphy would be hurt if he heard. He was a man proud of his ac.u.men, and he took it ill if clients and friends didn't follow his advice. Murphy was contemptuous of Klein. "That punk little hustler" was Murphy's description of Klein. "In three years he won't even be a memory." But Murphy these days did not come up with combinations that made the mind whirl.
"There's a swimming pool out in the garden," Klein said. "Come any time you like. You don't have to call in advance. This is one house in which you're always welcome." There was a last affectionate little pat on the arm, and Klein turned to meet a new group that was arriving as Craig went into the salon.
The room was crowded because it was too cold to go outside where the band was playing, and on his way to the bar Craig had to say, "Excuse me," several times to get past guests cl.u.s.tered around easy chairs and small sofas. He asked for a gla.s.s of champagne. He had to drive back to Cannes, and if he drank whisky all night, the trip over the winding dark hillside roads would be a tricky one.
Corelli was at the bar with his two girls. "We should have gone to the French party," one of the girls was saying. She had a British accent. "This one is for the dodoes. I bet the average age here is forty-five."
Corelli smiled, offering the room the glory of his teeth.
Craig turned his back on the bar and looked at the room. Natalie Sorel was seated at a far corner, deep in conversation with a man who was lounging on the arm of her chair. Craig knew that she was so nearsighted that she could never recognize him at that distance. His own eyes were good enough to see that no matter what the English girl said, Natalie Sorel was no dodo.
"I used to hear about the parties in Cannes," the English girl said. "Wild. Everybody smashing gla.s.ses and dancing naked on the tables and orgies in the swimming pools. The fall of the Roman Empire."
"That was in the old days, cara," Corelli said. He had a heavy accent. Craig had seen him in some English films, and now he realized that Corelli's voice had been dubbed. Probably, Craig thought, his teeth aren't his own, either. The thought comforted him.
"This is about as wild as tea at the vicarage," the girl said. "Why don't we just curtsy and say good night and leave?"
"It is not polite, carissima," Corelli said. "And besides, it is full of important people here who are not to be offended by young actors."
"You're a drag, darling," the girl said.
Craig surveyed the room looking for friends, enemies, and neutrals. Aside from Natalie there was a French actress by the name of Lucienne Dullin, seated, as though by some unfailing instinct, in the exact center of the room, attended by a shifting honor guard of young men. She was one of the most beautiful women Craig had ever seen, in a simple, bare-shouldered white dress, with her hair pulled back severely so that the feline bone structure of her face and the long elegance of her throat descending to the perfect shoulders could best be appreciated. She was not a bad actress, but if you looked like that, it was unfair if you weren't Garbo. Craig had never met her, and he didn't want to meet her, but looking at her gave him enormous pleasure.
There was a huge, fat Englishman, well under forty, accompanied, like Corelli, by two young women. They were laughing hysterically at some joke he had just made. He had been pointed out to Craig on the beach. He was a banker, and the anecdote about him was that the month before in the bank in the city of London over which he presided, he had personally handed over a check for three and a half million dollars to Walt Klein. Craig understood why the two girls flanked the banker and why they laughed at his jokes.
Near the fireplace Bruce Thomas was standing talking to a hulking bald man by the name of Hennessy whom Craig recognized as the director of a film that was to be shown at the Festival later in the week. Thomas had a picture that had already played six months in New York and was still running, and Hennessy's picture, his first hit, was doing record-breaking business in an art house on Third Avenue. It was already being touted for a prize at the Festival.
Ian Wadleigh, not in Madrid, a gla.s.s in his hand, was standing talking to Eliot Steinhardt and a third man, portly in a dark suit, the face, bronzed by the sun, under a shock of iron-gray hair. The third man looked familiar to Craig, but he couldn't exactly place him. Wadleigh bulged out of his dinner jacket, which had obviously been bought in better and thinner days. He was not yet drunk but was flushed and talking fast. Eliot Steinhardt listened amiably, a slight smile on his face. He was a small twinkly man of about sixty-five, his face sharp and foxlike and slyly malicious. He had made a score of the biggest hits in the business, going all the way back to the middle 1930s, and although the new critics now sneered at him as old-fashioned, he calmly continued to turn out one hit after another as though success had made him immune to defamation or mortality. Craig liked and admired him. If Wadleigh hadn't been talking to him, he would have gone over to say h.e.l.lo. Later, when he's alone, Craig thought.
Murray Sloan, the critic for one of the trade papers, whose tastes were surprisingly avant-garde and whose most intense emotions seemed to be experienced in darkened projection rooms, was seated on a big couch talking to a man Craig didn't recognize. Sloan was a round, mahogany-tanned, smiling man whose devotion to his profession was so great that he had confided one evening to Craig that he had stopped sleeping with a girl he had picked up at the Venice Festival because she didn't appreciate Buuel sufficiently.
Well, Craig thought, looking over the room, whether Corelli's English beauty is intelligent or not, she's right in saying it certainly isn't the fall of the Roman Empire. It was rich and decorous and pleasant, but whatever cross-currents were flowing through the room and whatever corruption lay beneath the fine clothes, it all was well hidden, the loved and the unloved, the moneyed and the moneyless observing an evening truce, ambition and desolation politely side by side.
It was very different from the old parties in Hollywood when people who made five thousand dollars a week would not invite people who made less to their homes. A new society, Craig thought, out of the ashes of the old. The movement of the proletariat toward Met and Chan-don and the caviar pot.
He saw the man who was talking to Wadleigh and Eliot Steinhardt look in his direction, smile and wave, and start toward him. He smiled tentatively in return, knowing that he had seen the man somewhere and should remember his name.
"Hi, Jess," the man said, putting out his hand.
"h.e.l.lo, David," Craig said, shaking hands. "Believe it or not, I didn't recognize you."
The man chuckled. "It's the hair," he said. "I get it all the time."
"You can't blame people," Craig said. David Teichman was one of the first men he had met when he first went to Hollywood, and even then there hadn't been a hair on his head.
"It's a wig," the man said, touching the top of his bush complacently. "It takes twenty years off my age. I'm even having a second run with the girls. That reminds me-I had dinner with your girl in Paris. She told me you were down here, and I told her I'd look you up. I just got down here this morning, and I've been playing gin all day. That's some girl you got there. Congratulations."
"Thanks," Craig said. "Do you mind if people ask you why you suddenly blossomed out with a mane?"
"Not at all, not at all. I had a little operation on my dome, and the doc left a couple of foxholes in my skull to remember him by. Not a very happy cosmetic effect, you might say. No sense in an old man going around frightening small children and virgin daughters. The studio hairdressing department fixed me up with the best d.a.m.n hairpiece in the business. It's the only good thing that G.o.dd.a.m.n studio has turned out in five years." Teichman's false teeth clamped fiercely in his mouth as he spoke about the studio. He had been forced out of control more than a year ago, but he still spoke of it as though it were his personal domain. He had run it tyrannically for twenty-five years, and the habit of possession was hard to break. Bald, he had been a formidable-looking man, his head suggesting a siege weapon, his features fleshy and harsh, half-Roman emperor, half-merchant skipper, the skin deeply weathered all year round as though he had been in the field with his troops or on deck in storms with his crew. His voice had matched his appearance, brutal and commanding. In his palmy days many of the movies that had come out of his studio had been tender and wistfully comic, one more surprise in a surprising town. With the new wig he looked a different man, gentle and harmless, and his voice, too, as if to accommodate to the new arrangement, was soft and reflective.
Now he put his hand affectionately on Craig's sleeve and said as he looked around him, "Oy, Jess, I am not happy in this room. A flock of vultures feeding off the bones of giants. That's what the movie business has become, Jess. Great old bones with little patches of flesh still left on it that the birds of prey are tearing off bit by bit. And what are they turning out in their search for the Almighty Dollar? Peep shows. p.o.r.nography and bloodshed. Why don't they all go to Denmark and be done with it? And the theatre's no better. Carrion. What's Broadway today? Pimps, wh.o.r.es, drug pushers, muggers. I don't blame you for running away from it all."
"You're exaggerating as usual, David," Craig said. He had worked at Teichman's studio in the fifties and had caught on early that the old man was addicted to flights of rhetoric, usually to put over a shrewd and well-taken point. "There're some d.a.m.n good pictures being made today, and there's a whole rash of young playwrights on and off Broadway."
"Name them," Teichman said. "Name one. One good picture."
"I'll do better than that. I'll name two. Three," Craig said, enjoying the debate. "And made by men right in this room tonight. Steinhardt's last picture and Thomas's and that new fellow talking to Thomas over there, Hennessy."
"Steinhardt doesn't count," Teichman said. "He's a leftover from the old days. A rock that was left standing when the glacier receded. The other two guys-" Teichman made a contemptuous sound. "Flashes in the pan. One-shot geniuses. Sure, every once in a while somebody shows up with a winner. Accidents still happen. They don't know what they're doing, they just wake up and find out they've fallen into a pot of gold. I'm talking about careers, boy, careers. No accidents. Chaplin, Ford, Stevens, Wyler, Capra, Hawkes, Wilder, yourself, if you want to include yourself. Although you were a little too special, maybe, and all over the place, if you don't mind my saying so."
"I don't mind," Craig said. "I've heard worse about myself."
"So have we all," Teichman said, "so have we all. We're living targets. But okay, so I made a lot of junk. I'm not too proud to admit it. Four hundred, five hundred pictures a year. Masterpieces don't come in gross lots, and I'm not saying they do. Junk, okay, ma.s.s production, okay, but it served its purpose. It created the machinery the great guys found ready to their hand, the actors, the grips, the scene designers, the audience. And it served another purpose, too. It won the world for America. I can see by the look on your face you think I'm batty. No matter what the fancy intellectual critics said, in their dreams the whole world loved us, we were their mistresses, their heroes. Do you think I'm ashamed of having been in on that? Not for a minute. I'll tell you what I am ashamed of. I'm ashamed that we p.i.s.sed it all away. And if you want, I'll tell you the moment we did it. Even if you don't want." He poked a strong finger into Craig's shoulder. "The day we gave in to the yokels in Congress, the day we said, 'Yes, sir, Mr. Congressman, Mr. FBI man, I will kiss your a.s.s, you don't like this writer's politics or that actress's morals or the subject of my next ten pictures, yes, sir, by all means, sir, they're out. I will slit my best friend's throat if you lift your pinky.' Before that we were the lucky, beautiful people of the twentieth century, we made jokes the whole world laughed at, we made love the way the whole world wished they could, we gave parties the whole world wanted to come to. After that we were just a bunch of sniveling Jews hoping the guy next door would get killed in the pogrom instead of us. People turned to television, and I don't blame them. In television they come right out and tell you they're trying to sell you a bill of goods."
"David," Craig said, "You're getting red in the face."
"You bet I am," Teichman said. "Calm me down, Jess, calm me down, my doctor would appreciate it. I'm sorry I came to this party. No, I'm not. I'm glad I got a chance to talk to you. I'm not finished yet, no matter how I sound. I'm in the process of putting something together-something big." Teichman winked conspiratorially. "Some men of talent. With old-fashioned values. Discipline. Captains, not corporals. A man like you, for example. Connie told me you had something cooking, I should speak to you. Am I talking out of school?"
"Not really," Craig said. "I have something in mind."
"It's about time. Call me in the morning. We'll talk. Money is no object. David Teichman is not a maker of B pictures. I have to get out of here now, excuse me, Jess. I find it hard to breathe these days when I get angry. My doctor warns me against it constantly. Remember what I said. In the morning. I'm at the Carlton." Rubbing his excellent gray wig, he marched off, defying ruin.
Craig watched the stiff, erect figure, patriot of defeated causes, historian of decay, shouldering toward the door and shook his head. Still, he decided, he would call Teichman in the morning.
Craig saw the man who was talking to Natalie Sorel get up and take Natalie's gla.s.s and start toward the bar, threading his way through the crowd. Craig moved away from the bar in Natalie's direction. But before he had covered half the distance, the door from the patio opened and Gail McKinnon came in with a small sallow man whose face was vaguely familiar. He was about thirty-five, with scruffy receding hair and unhealthy, grape-colored puffs under his eyes. He was wearing a dinner jacket. Gail McKinnon was wearing a cheap print dress, the skirt above her knees. The dress didn't look cheap on her. She smiled at Craig, and there was no avoiding her. For some reason that he could not explain, he didn't want her to observe him in conversation with Natalie Sorel. He hadn't seen her since the lunch with the Murphys, but then he had stayed in his room most of the time nursing his cold.
"Good evening, Mr. Craig," Gail McKinnon said. "I see we make the same stops."
"It looks that way, doesn't it?" he said.
"May I introduce ...?" she started to say, turning to her companion.
"We've met," the man said. His tone was unfriendly. "A long time ago. In Hollywood."
"I'm afraid my memory isn't as good as it should be," Craig said.
"My name is Reynolds," the man said.
"Oh, yes," Craig said. He recognized the name, although he didn't remember ever having met the man. Reynolds had written movie reviews for a Los Angeles newspaper. "Of course." He extended his hand. Reynolds seemed to have to make up his mind to shake it.
"Come on, Gail," Reynolds said. "I want a drink."
"You go have a drink, Joe," Gail McKinnon said. "I want to talk for a minute with Mr. Craig."
Reynolds grunted, pushed his way toward the bar.
"Whats the matter with him?" Craig asked, puzzled by the man's open antagonism.
"He's had a couple too many to drink," Gail McKinnon said.