Burning the Days (41 page)

This was the Coast, the fabled Coast. Girls with hair blowing and sunburned limbs. Driving there in the summer of 1976, coming out of the desert, the crushing heat and emptiness on the road to Barstow. Then tired and heat-stained, along the freeways, into Santa Monica and up along the sea.

The house had a garden looking towards the hills, hibiscus and jade trees and a single huge palm, the fronds of which one could touch from a balcony on the second floor. Visible from the same spot was the bare, alluring corner of a tennis court. Silence. Birds fluttering in the branches.

Of the mysteries, the first I recall was a lily stalk bending over in strange, jerky movements to disappear into the ground, A small animal was gathering supper.

Cool morning mist and the sound of waves, cries of children in the street, the fronds plunging down from the heights of the tree. Malibu. Dank sand beneath one’s feet in the narrow passageway that led to the beach, the vines overhead glittering with sun. A steamer basket arrived from my new agent, Evarts Ziegler; fruit and wine in a frock of apricot-colored cellophane.
Welcome to California,
the card read. It was signed simply,
Ziggy.

Lorenzo, who was a favorite of his, had praised me and persuaded him to take me as a client. When I went to meet him he immediately told me how much he admired my work on a film I’d had nothing to do with. I nodded modestly, taking it as a good omen. He was, even then, an anachronism. His hair was gray; he wore three-piece suits and had gone to France for the first time in 1929 with his mother. Later he went back and forth across the country on the Super Chief, a train so luxurious it had a barbershop and waiters who would ask at dinner if you would like a nice fresh trout, caught in a mountain stream and picked up at the last stop.

In the bathroom adjoining his office were signed photographs of Sinclair Lewis and Hemingway, left to him by his father, and in the private sauna one of a naked girl ravenously drinking, water pouring down her chin.

He had a ravaged, sharp face which he was constantly working with his fingers, pushing it together, fixing it. He looked like a naval lieutenant who had been burned in a turret explosion. Over
the decades he had acquired certain nervous gestures—I remember him habitually touching his right lower eyelid as he talked or thought. He was married to his second wife at the time, a blonde woman who seemed to hint society, but along the line he got divorced and after an interval married again. One had the feeling he was resigned to the idea of matrimony, that he regarded it as a necessity like good clothes. He was in his sixties though seeming to lack any mortal anxiety. “My health is innate,” he confided to me one day.

“Innate?”

I had misunderstood him. “But my marriage is a two,” he added.

He had a house in Pasadena, another in the desert, and a beach house near Santa Barbara. Business was conducted in his offices in Beverly Hills and occasionally over lunch, where he would discreetly point out various studio heads of enormous wealth. For me he performed the usual functions—negotiating, preparing contracts—but in many ways he was more of a companion than an agent. I could rely on him for unenthusiastic opinions delivered with the realism of a criminal-court judge.

I wrote during the day. At night as the sea disappeared, we drove, shooting past the canyons, along the coast. In the darkness the clouds were low over distant Santa Monica—beneath was a band of imprisoned light. Everywhere cars were speeding, not in urgency but in aimlessness, leisure. We drove in the redolent darkness, the undefined city drawing near.

California life, the film extra’s life, cool night air and sea winds from the 1930s or whatever decade one’s images of it dated back to. Despite my indifference, even dislike, there was something—the blue legend, the inexhaustible sea. On the cover of the telephone directory was a bit of description which explained that as late as the 1940s—the heart of my lifetime—such and such a part of the city had been almost all small ranches and now was entirely shops and homes. A melancholy came over me as I read it, almost
sweet, a pang like thoughts of someone I had loved and would never see again. I envied those who had grown up here or had given it countless wasted days.

At the studios, like the gates of royal enclaves, one was waved through. There were huge blow-ups of famous movie scenes framed in the hallways at United Artists though no one bothered to look at them. The majesty of the present required scorn of the past, and movement was always towards newer and greater things. The hopeful came from everywhere, like suitors in a fairy tale, to try their luck. The appeal was irresistible. Even polished figures from the East, more like university presidents than hustlers, arrived with their dreams. I saw Peter Gimbel there. He had come with his wife, a blonde actress, Elga Anderson, and Billy, their dog. They had a script, of course, that they hoped to make. Now to business, he seemed to say, and from the breast pocket of a bush jacket drew a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to read over a list of possible agents.

Gimbel, his wife called him, with the trace of a German accent. I had met her in Rome years before when she was a gleaming colt, proud and indifferent to stares. She was still beautiful, European, with an occasional haughty expression of disdain crossing her mouth—an actress, with something of the word’s meaning in the time of Molière or Goethe clinging to her, a natural mistress to the aristocracy with the requisite behavior.

She and Gimbel had no luck, then or afterwards. In a way she’d had hers, and he was like a gentleman drawn to the Regency gaming tables. He could afford to lose and would have been pleased to win, though there was not much chance of it.

It is beyond conquering. You may taste it, even reign for an hour, but that is all. You may not own the beach or the girls on it, the haze of summer afternoons, or the crashing, green sea, and the next wave of aspirants is outside the door, their murmuring, their hunger. The next tide of beautiful, uninformed faces, of perfect limbs and an overwhelming desire to be known.

——

They all, in a way, were like schoolmates, some popular, others to be avoided, some lazy though not without appeal. Like schoolmates, they scattered and found various fates.

Jean-Pierre Rassam I met first in Paris at La Coupole. He was there every night. It was a belief of his that in any city one should have a single restaurant, that way people always knew where to find you. For him in Paris, it was La Coupole. Later, in New York, it was Elaine’s.

We had been talking about him, though I had not met him, Helen Scott and I. He had been at a film conference, she said, and standing at the podium had introduced himself, “My name is Jean-Pierre Rassam. I live with my mother.” I admired the bravura and self-effacement. He was the brother-in-law, difficult and romantic, she said, of a director, Claude Berri. He was a mythomaniac, happy only in dreams, appealing and self-destructive.

As if summoned by the lure of her description, he came to the table. I should say someone came to the table and I recognized him immediately: the suicidal face, fine black hair, curved nose, thin lips, a face as perfect as an animal’s, as sleek. He was urbane and unmanageable. His history was one of glorious tatters, yet he had the power to make one believe in him, in the infinity of possibilities he represented. For his university degree, the oral examination, he’d announced the work of a writer he had never even read, Charles Péguy, an obscure poet. He dazzled the questioners. They sat nodding in approval. At the end, one of them asked, as a matter of interest, which book of Péguy’s he preferred. He didn’t know, Rassam said, he’d never read any of them. They failed him for honesty, but the story would have been much less interesting if he’d lied.

Rassam had many friends at La Coupole. With some, passing among the tables, he sat a long time, with others he exchanged a greeting and a word or two. He was almost always alone. It was because
of the dream that one night he would meet the woman of his life there, and he didn’t want to be with anyone else at the time. It was a misconceived idea; you are always with someone else.

Helen Scott had been a mother to him—whether the one he had referred to or not, I cannot say—during a long year when he suffered from serious depression. He emerged from it at last. “In his own milieu,” Helen confided, “he is unbeatable, and he always finds his milieu.”

She drank that night and talked about the past, her father who had been an actor. When military music used to play, he would salute and march around the room. He didn’t speak to her mother except through the children (“Tell your mother she’s a murderous bitch”), and it was only at his funeral that Helen began to understand him, she said. His funeral marked his reentry into her life. We continued to drink. There was something of the coquette in her, unlikely as it seemed, beneath the heavy body and crude features. She knew Truffaut very well, and once in a hotel had come to his room in a negligee, hoping to seduce him. He had to lock himself in the bathroom. Before Paris, she had worked for the United Nations in New York, for the Polish delegation. Scottka, they called her. She had worked with Kropotski.

“Who was Kropotski?”

“Dr. Kropotski. His digestion was bad,” she said.

She was big; she was lonely. She had tried to lose weight in a clinic near Grasse and had come to dinner with her food in a small paper bag—one meager slice of cold veal—but her main preoccupation was transportation, how to get places: she didn’t drive.

When we left that night she was singing in the street, something from times even more distant, a vanished girlhood when her homeliness seemed perhaps like a mark of character. “You’ll eat corned beef and cabbages,” she sang, “and miss your Abie …”

Rassam remained remarkable, the most extraordinary person they’d ever known, people said. Unforgettable words. A few years
later he was living at the Plaza Athenée and producing films, among them Robert Bresson’s
Lancelot du Lac
and an outrageous, beyond category, so to say, obscene comedy called
La Grande Bouffe.
He married an actress and had a child, but his excesses were deeply ingrained and his talents inseparable from his flaws. Heroin was among his pleasures.

The last that I knew of him he was living on the Avenue Montaigne in a beautiful old apartment with hardly a stick of furniture. The living room was absolutely bare. In the dining room was a large table, able to seat sixteen, and two sofas. Not long afterwards he was dead, from an overdose of barbiturates. It was accidental, they said.

——

In the floating world, of those I knew, the one who seemed most to embody its contradictions was a prince of the blood, Christopher Mankiewicz, the son of not only a man but a family renowned for its talent. His uncle had written the film often named as the best ever made in this country,
Citizen Kane,
and his father’s achievements were even more celebrated—Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz, borne by the immigrant tide but destined to become the purest of American voices.

His father was in every respect large, and Christopher inherited the dimensions. Tall, blue-eyed, and arrogant, he had the satisfaction of knowing, whatever misfortune, that he would always possess a distinguished name. Misfortune seemed unlikely. He had charm, intelligence, and, not unexpectedly, a good measure of self-indulgence. In the familiar way, he suffered from the long life of a powerful father, a man of prodigious appetite and wit, famous for his love affairs with stars, Judy Garland, Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, who fell on her knees and cried that the baby might have been hers.

His mother was an Austrian beauty, Rosa Stradner, an actress
who had come to Hollywood to be a star but despite marriage to an important director did not achieve it. There were fierce fights at the dinner table; the father would storm out and the mother begin drinking. On countless nights she would come to her son’s room to wake him and talk, sometimes passing out on the floor. She was still beautiful when she committed suicide at the age of forty-five.

Her son grew up to marry an Italian dancer. They met in Rome during the shooting of his father’s momentous failure,
Cleopatra,
with the strange excitement of catastrophe on a grand scale somehow increasing the passion. Christopher was a romantic in every way. Devoted to classical music, susceptible to literature, mad about women, it was only the lack of wealth that in the end served to protect him. As a young studio executive in New York where we first met, he wore expensive double-breasted suits with the enviable aplomb of a fat man, spoke perfect Italian, used a cigarette holder, and possessed a failing, to me invisible, but which his wife saw clearly: the millions he promised her he would have before he reached thirty were not forthcoming. Perhaps, like Rassam, he was too brilliant for ordinary success.

Still, his shrewdness and the momentum of his early career carried him far. He had strong friendships, many based on his wit and taste as well as his outspoken opinions which, despite their validity, were often undiplomatically rendered. The confusion of letters strewn about a large desk; the heaping meals in restaurants, quickly devoured; the apartments and luxurious suites—these began to slowly slip away. He worked in Los Angeles, where, in his father’s assessment, he ruined his chances on innumerable occasions. “Isn’t it time you left town?” his father commented finally. “You’re finished here.”

In Rome, in the early 1970s, he was working for Grimaldi, an important Italian producer. His life had become nocturnal. At four in the morning the lights were still on. In an undershirt he sits at
his desk doing a vast jigsaw puzzle. His mother-in-law, of whom he is very fond, is asleep, his young son also. This son, Jason, is six years old, beautiful and petulant, a compulsive talker with a slight lisp. Early in the morning he comes into the room. “Do you know what this is?” he demands. “This is my favorite book. In this book you can learn about everything. You can learn about the stars, and what is the deepest hole in the sea, and about thunderstorms and how to stop them. This is my best book. And this,” he says, showing it to me but also to himself, “is a script I wrote. All alone. And this! This is a book—have you seen this book? This is about soldiers.” He then begins to explain to me, with remarkable accuracy, how children are born.