by James Jones
But now suddenly in my apartment it all came out. Louisa did care. She had only been putting up a front. The story I had heard was substantially the story Louisa unfolded to me that day in September of ’59 in my apartment. And not only that, the same thing had been going on a long time before, even out on the Coast, long before Harry fled Hollywood and the Un-American Activities Committee for France. And now the crowning indignity had come.
Harry had been writing a screenplay for a French producer which was designed to hit the American market with a new young French male star, and for it two beautiful American actresses had been imported. One of these was very young and beautiful, and in fact would soon marry the French producer and go on to become a big international sex-star. And the other, while older, was still not anything to be sneezed at. Well, each girl had (individually and privately, of course) invited Harry down to Cannes to visit her, where each hoped he would be able to enhance and expand her role in the film. Each girl felt that her role was not quite up to snuff and needed expanded characterization, particularly when confronted with the role of the other girl. Each had written a warm letter to Harry, after her private dinner conference with Harry and the producer. And Harry had gone, Louisa said. Of course, he had had to go anyway, to work on the script with the producer. But both ladies had written him very warm thank-you letters to his Paris address after his return from Cannes, each saying how much she had enjoyed working with a writer of his understanding, of his sensibilities and discernment about roles and characterization.
“And he didn’t even bother to hide the damned letters!” Louisa said, red-faced, and blew her damp hair back off her forehead. She was 31 then in 1959, and exceedingly attractive. “Neither the first ones, nor the thank-you letters that came after!”
Insensitive as it was, I had to fight down a grin, and swallow to keep from laughing: thinking of Harry down there in Cannes, slyly doing both of these girls, these ladies, turn and turn about every other night apparently, and paying them for their favors by working secretly on each’s role against the other’s in their greedy competition.
But there was nothing funny at all about it to Louisa. “Maybe he didn’t think you would stoop to going through his mail?” I suggested gently.
“Well, I did,” Louisa said, totally without guilt here. Her guilts all seemed reserved to pulling down her skirt, which she suddenly and primly did. “And my family is perfectly willing and capable of taking care of us, of Hill and me.”
That, they certainly were. Unlike Harry, whose wealthy, conservative Boston-Irish background did not go back much beyond 1880, when the first of his Irish forebears broke out upward from the Irish working class via banking, Louisa’s intellectual heritage, unhampered by the need to earn a living, went in unbroken line back to Emerson and far beyond. She was even a distant cousin of the Jameses. They certainly could take care of her. Particularly they could, mélanged as they were of equal parts iron self-restraint and strict New England Puritanism.
“Well, what are you coming here telling me all this for?” I asked. For a moment I thought she would cry. But of course New England would not let her.
“I just had to talk to somebody about it, Jack,” she said. “I had to.”
“You’re not even going to tell him you’re leaving?” I said. It had somehow sounded like that.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’ll leave a letter.”
“And how old is Hill,” I pressed her grimly.
“Almost eleven.”
“Almost eleven! Louisa, Louisa! Good heavens!”
She looked back at me with a powerful New England stubbornness. “I know. That’s the worst part. But it can’t be helped.”
I drew a deep breath. I was sitting there beside her on my Second Empire couch. For a moment I thought of reaching for her hand. But I knew better. She would have run. But good God! Even divorced, particularly because divorced, how could I countenance and be party to breaking up a marriage—especially this marriage? “Well, you know that I’m Harry’s friend,” I said tentatively. “Maybe one of his best ones.”
“The best one,” she said.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” I said, making my voice cold and quite literary, as I’ve often had to do when rejecting manuscripts—though it always pains me. “I’m going to call Harry up on the phone, right now, and tell him what you’ve told me. Unless you promise me right here and now on your honor that you won’t leave Paris till you’ve talked this thing thoroughly through with Harry. And you must come and tell me that you have, afterwards!”
“But that’s unfair!” she cried, “I came to you! That’s not fair at all. I came to you as a friend.”
“Unfair or not unfair,” I said in my best tough-editor’s voice. “There’s no choice.”
Louisa looked helpless, a little stunned. “You’d really tell him!” she said. “Then I guess I don’t have any choice then, do I?”
“You do not,” I said. I reached out for the phone.
“All right! All right! Don’t do that! I’ll promise!”
“That’s on your New England honor,” I said.
“It’s on my honor,” she said. “That’s enough.”
“It is,” I said. “Now, you go on home and see Harry.”
She sent young Hill over to stay with me that night. I assume that they had it out then. Young Hill, aged ten and a half was a little disgruntled.
“What’s goin’ on at home?” he asked me with angry suspicion.
“Why, nothing that I know of. Why?” I said.
“Well, what’re they sendin’ me over here to stay with you for then? This is only the second time I’ve ever stayed at your house. And the other was when I was only a little kid.” He meant a year ago.
“I just thought you might like to see your old Uncle Jack,” I said, “and have dinner with him for a change. So I asked your mother.”
“Well, I think there’s somethin goin’ on,” Hill persisted.
“Well, if there is, I don’t know about it. Look, I’ve got some great steaks. Or would you rather have a big hamburger steak?”
“I like escargots. Have you got any escargots?”
“You know damn well I haven’t got any escargots. All right. We’ll go out then. Down the block. Quasimodo has excellent escargots.”
“Great!” Hill cried. “Fine! Oh, boy, do I love my Uncle Jack!” But afterwards, walking along the quaiside to the restaurant, he still looked at me narrowly, even sullenly, as if he suspected I knew something he had not been let in on. “I suppose you know about Dad’s girlfriends, don’t you?” he said finally. We were just crossing the rue Boutarel. It was one of those lovely, winey September Paris days. The restaurants were full or filling, but it was not yet dark. In the west behind the loom of Notre-Dame the sun had not yet lost its influence, and was shooting last rays up into that special Île de France fair-weather cloud structure.
“Girlfriends?” I said. “Girlfriends? Do you mean lovers?”
“I guess I mean lovers. Lots of them. He’s got loads of them. It’s pretty important. Not many fellows got so many.”
“Where did you pick up all this nonsense?” We had almost reached the restaurant, I noted gratefully. I looked into its picture windows with their potted plants, but Hill was too short to see in. It was crowded with smiling diners.
“Just keep your eyes and ears open. That’s all. Like I do. And you’ll learn,” Hill said. “It upsets Mom a lot, I don’t know why exactly. But she hides it. Dad doesn’t know. But I can tell.”
“I think you’re just making up a story,” I said. “If your Dad had girlfriends, I would know. He would tell me.” I stopped at the door to take a last look at the evening, and the evening’s sky. Why couldn’t we all be as serene as that was?
Hill didn’t answer. And we went on in. The portly old maître d’, who has owned and run that place since before the Third Republic I guess, knew Hill and knew me, and made a big fuss over us as residents of
the Island, who are always treated special in his restaurant. He made a big thing of Hill the jeune monsieur out for an evening with a friend, without his parents. Hill ordered and ate a dozen escargots, sopping up the butter sauce from the little cups in the tin plate with his bread, then tried to bring the subject up again. But I avoided it, and tried to give the impression that I considered the matter closed, as we ate our coq-au-vin. I don’t know what else I could have done. But I was to suddenly remember that evening four years later that day up on the Marne—particularly, strangely enough, I remembered the way the sky was. However, he slept very well that night at my place, and nine months later in late June, nine months almost to the day, my Godchild McKenna Hartley Gallagher was born, a small level-eyed girlchild whose New England background could never be mistaken.
I value it highly in some way that Louisa never thanked me. Not only did she never thank me. She never even mentioned it again. In fact, it was as if it had not ever happened.
I think that after this near break-up, which I averted, the Harry Gallaghers became that perfect happy-American-family I once imagined them being. I know Harry stopped going out with his young actresses. Certainly there was no more gossip. And Louisa seemed completely happy.
I know Harry stopped going out with the actresses because he told me. There was no reason he should tell me, but he did. I believed him simply because there was no reason for him to tell me.
This was a long time after the birth of McKenna. Six years after. And Harry had no idea of the part I’d played in that.
It was, also, quite a while and almost two years before Samantha Everton and the May Revolution, the Events of May as the French still like to call it, came down upon our heads. No, there was no reason Harry should tell me except that it happened.
I know it was after McKenna’s sixth birthday because I gave a special Halloween party for her at my apartment that year, which was her first year in serious school. I invited all her little school playmates. Hill was thus at least 17, and already a student at the Sorbonne. God, you never saw a happier, more delighted kid than McKenna was at that party.
My confessional session with Harry that same winter came about because Harry was trying to decide whether to take a job or not, and he wanted my advice. Why he should ask my advice about a film job has never been explained. But that was the reason, the excuse, that I was asked for dinner that night. The job he had to decide about was whether or not he should contract to write an Italian Western in Spain.
He had invited the two producers, one French and the other an American, to dinner at his place that night. That was the real reason I was there. I was to be his ploy, his foil, in his Hollywood one-upmanship battle with the two producers. Around film people, I was always sort of Harry’s literary weapon, his artistic broadsword. The Two Islands Review was known by this time, and I as its editor was known with it. Harry liked to defer to me as his expert on artistic and esthetic points. He also liked to bring up as a throwaway that he had put money in the Two Islands Review, which indeed he had.
The Frenchman fought him back valiantly that night, with that over-loquacious, over-adrenalized valor which the French are addicted to, and could not avoid even if they wanted. The American, who was a former distributions executive for Warner’s or Fox or M-G-M and looked like one of those hairless pink cupie-dolls you win at a village fair, listened and watched everything keenly in pregnant silence and did not say more than one or two words all evening. I found out later that he was not smart at all. That was just his gimmick. As I was Harry’s. And loquacious valor was the Frenchman’s.
This thing of a film-job thing is a complicated matter. Nobody tells anybody anything. It is like pulling teeth to get anything out of somebody.
The mechanics themselves are complex enough. Harry’s writing job was only a part of it. The whole thing entailed a lot of film world high-finance shenanigans, a lot of reputational jockeying back and forth, demanded much talk about markets and distribution deals. I tried to understand it as they tossed it all back and forth between them after dinner, but I’m afraid I did not understand it at all well.
The trouble seems to be that nobody knows or can figure out ahead of time what will sell. So most film makers (and I don’t mean just the small fry) are copiers. That is, if a Broadway musical is a hit, they will rush to make a Broadway musical; if a Western is a hit, they will make a Western; if a Pinter play is a hit as a film, they make a Pinter-like film.
Harry’s Frenchman and American were after making an Italian Western in Spain. Mainly this was because Italian Westerns had become a big hit in America and therefore now were big business. Italian Westerns (I found out) were distinguished by the fact that they were made in Europe at a cost the Americans with their high union wage could not compete with; they were also different in that the Italians had thrown out the classical American morality-play angle, done away with the concept of hero and villain, and were making their Westerns into an entirely new thing: tough, extremely violent, and totally amoral. And American audiences were loving it. Our two producers thought they could compete with the Italians on their own ground, and even beat them at it, by making the films in Spain where it was even cheaper than Italy. The American had a deal to use the Dupont-Bronston studios and facilities. They had a great deal of money behind them to do it. They wanted Harry to write the first one for them. And if the first one was a hit, there was no reason there couldn’t be a series of them.
All this was not only just for the money and profit, mind you. Even moreso the film maker wants the notoriety a big hit brings, the fame of being famous, a globetrotting celebrity, the right of success which is the right to give lots of people lots of orders and spread much largess, and be like Mr. Darryl Zanuck or one of those. You could almost smell it oozing, exuding from our two.
But there were further complications. For example, almost all films today are what they call “packaged”. This presents another problem. “Packaging” means that the “independent” producer (who isn’t really independent at all) must first set up all of his whole film production ahead of time, before going to his major studio or big-money people who are advancing the million or millions required to actually make the film.
Thus a producer must first get a “property”, which means a story, then find a writer who will write it as a script, and then a director, and if possible a star actor who will agree to act it,—all the while laying out out of his own pocket, the producer, the 20 or 30 or even 50 thousand dollars to bring all these people together, while hoping against hope as he does so that they all can get along together and work together congenially, something which according to Harry apparently happens very rarely.
I felt rather sorry for the poor producers. But Harry didn’t, although he pretended to at the appropriate times.
I knew from the moment we sat down that Harry was going to take the job. I don’t know if anyone else could have seen it. Certainly the two producers didn’t. And Louisa had left us immediately after a coffee. Dear Louisa. But over the second coffee and the brandy, Harry began to bring out a formidable and almost interminable battery of objections. These lasted through the brandy and well into the Scotch. And they were pretty devastating, and pertinent, objections. Or seemed so to me. The whole thing must have lasted until well after three o’clock.
In between belts at their Scotch, and sunk down in the cloudlike wreathes of expensive cigar smoke which gave me a fearful headache, they continued to throw it back and forth, as they called it, and Harry went on elaborating his list of objections. He demolished those poor producers (and they were not small fry) so thoroughly and with such relish that I was embarrassed for them.
I was his esthetic objection. I had read it (I hadn’t; but here I nodded and frowned) and I agreed with him that their property, the novel they had bought, was worthless. Harry would have to do it all. Only one or two scenes could be used at all, and these only when highly modified by Harry. He looked at me, and I hastened to smile and no
d my agreement.
Then there was the objection of Harry’s reputation. As they well knew, it was based on, and he was noted for, writing good old-fashioned American morality-play Westerns, complete with dovetailing love stories he was famous for and that touched and moved his audiences. Harry was not sure he wanted to leave that role, step out of that well-fit suit of clothes, to take on some new gimmick like this Italian-Western, so-called “modern” stuff. It might easily ruin his other reputation.
And what about the director? He could not write for just any director. Harry elaborated on this for a while.
And the star? They had no real contact with a star for it, yet. And Harry could not write the star role properly unless he had some idea what star he’d be writing for. As they well knew, a Burton role was not a Steve McQueen role. They discussed this a while.
No, he just did not think he was the man for their job, Harry said finally.
They came back with all the right answers. They knew the original story was not much good, they said, but they were depending on Harry to fix that. As for his reputation, they thought such a film would enhance his reputation, not damage it. And the director and the star of course depended a great deal on whether they had a Harry Gallagher script or not. They were really ladling it on. They both looked a little puzzled somehow, as though somehow they could not quite figure out how they had got put into this position, this role. Matter of fact, they went on, they could even use a phony name, something like Enrico Galignani, say, if Harry liked that idea. Of course, the director and star would know Harry Gallagher really wrote it. After all, Harry Gallagher was a “star” writer, the kind whose work directors and stars delighted to do. Who did he have in mind, who did he think he would like, as the star and director?
There then followed a long discussion, over more Scotch and cigars, as to what director and what star would be good for it and could work together well. It was flattery of the worst order really, and I could see that Harry was quite aware of that. Finally they left with the tentative agreement that Harry would think about it a few days and let them know whether he would accept or refuse, or whether he wanted to discuss it further.