by Amis, Martin
Flanking the Palais, in festive contrast, are the two main see-and-be-seen cafes, the Bar Festival and, more fashionable still, the Blue Bar. It takes colossal stamina to fritter away your money in these places. Only occasionally, nowadays, do the harassed and contemptuous waiters simply promise to attend to you and then go away again. Seldom, even, do they claim that your table is the preserve of some mythical colleague. What they do now is pretend you're not there. When you rugby-tackle them, bring them crashing, tray and all, to the pavement, and yell Monsieur, Monsieur, MONSIEUR! in their ears, they pretend you're not there. An intelligent procedure. During Festival fortnight these places are going to be clotted with the rich anyway, no matter how negligent the waiters contrive to be. So why do we come?
We come to watch. The routine, quotidian viewing, while varied enough in itself, sticks to a predictable schedule. All day the lovelies and hugies thread past to the sands, as stooped cineasts trudge up the Palais steps. By late afternoon, spidery transvestites - who look remarkably like the Platonic ideal of a British tart - flit among the tables, chatting to the Japanese nabobs and bejeaned Swedish por-nographers who slump grumbling there. Minor thespians sometimes join us. A pretty French actress sat down next to me one evening. I wasn't very excited. I had already seen what her breasts looked like the day before, in La Dentellière.
By seven o'clock, in preparation for the far grander evening showings, the dour procession of Moguls' Wives forms along the parade. Sweating in their crinolines and farthingales, in their flounced gowns of flame-coloured taffeta, like so many Queens of Hearts, the Moguls' Wives seem to comprise a suspended, forgotten enclave in this teeming town. The result (one imagines) of alliances formed long before their husbands' success, they tend to approach in girlish pairs, joined at the last moment by their errant, tuxedoed consorts. Only the Moguls' Wives — and they only at evening — dress in a manner remotely appropriate to their years. Everyone else in Cannes divides their age by three and dresses accordingly. 'How far did you have to go,' I used to wonder, watching the clownishly spruced menfolk convene on the Palais steps, 'how many helicopters and jungle-beaters and water-diviners did you have to hire, before you found a dinner jacket as comical as that?'
From eleven until three, after the moguls have dispersed with the Moguls' Wives, ritzy yahooism simmers along the strip — and suddenly Cannes is very much like anywhere else where people come to exchange high-spirits for cash. Sounds of brutish revelry that you would be startled to hear in, say, Yates's Wine Lodge in Blackpool mingle with the familiar clatter of dropped glasses and upended chairs. At one of Cannes' premier venues, the Night Bar at the Carlton, I sat at a table smothered in 1,000-franc notes and untouched champagne; I watched a fat little millionaire climb a graph of drunkenness so unswerving that it would have offended the sensibilities of a Glaswegian publican. The millionaire shouted, sang, danced, fought, sobbed - at one point managing to do all five at once. 'Why are they here so late?' I asked a regular visitor to the port — 'Have they been to late films or are they just nightowls?' 'No,' said my American friend. 'They just didn't get laid yet.'
*
Promotional gimmicks of one kind or another supply the main distractions. These gimmicks are often endearingly low-budget - a kid giving away oranges in the interests of some indeterminate forthcoming attraction, a little bouncing badge called a 'gizmo', designed to whet your appetite for a film called Gizmo. The presence in Cannes of a mauve taxi made you all the keener to see Un Taxi Mauve. A line of cars with girls in them went past beeping their horns (you couldn't tell why). A very competent brassy jazz-band struck up on La Croisette, and momentarily one's spirits lifted; but within seconds the band had been asphyxiated by photographers, and gaiety lapsed once more into staged frivolity.
Yum Yum Shaw, the oriental pornographess, drew attention to herself at the Martinez Hotel, thus doubling speculation about her Concubine film. Bigger breasts by far (the biggest I ever saw in Cannes) were being tensed down on the beach; they belonged to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Surrounded by starlets, Arnold showed photographers the appalling shape he had let his body get into. A pair of aeroplanes tirelessly circled the shore, day after day, bearing streamers saying superman now shooting and brando hackman and superman. By their thirtieth circuit or so, I felt I had made myself master of this information. 'Nah,' I heard a nearby mogul moan, 'the Superman hype has been building for years.'
Dunaway was there. People arched in their chairs when people mentioned Dunaway's name. Heston out-hyped Mon-tand (was it he?) in Carrier. Bronson was there, with Ireland, his wife. Loren was there, at a Lord Lew lunch thrown in the Eden Roc: 'All my films are great,' cracked Lord Lew. 'They're not all good, but they're all great.' Savalas was there. They threw a party at the Carlton, to welcome Telly to Cannes. Telly won a bomb that evening at the Cannes Casino (a repulsive gin-palace from whose Doric portals I was jeered away two nights later: it costs a fortune to join for huit jours, and a star's ransom to join for la saison). Ustinov was there. Finney was there . . . On La Croisette, closely ringed by personal bodyguards, secretaries, agents, shoe-polishers, tie-straighteners and about a dozen municipal policemen, an unseen star moved down the strip, raising heads, blocking traffic. This must be big. Nicholson? Streisand? Redford? Brando?
'Quinn,' someone muttered appreciatively — 'Quinn.'
Now it was only after mature thought that I decided not to let Quinn know I was in Cannes. Many years previously, when the present writer was no more than a boy, I had co-starred with Quinn in a Fox production based on the Richard Hughes novel A High Wind in Jamaica (Price, Ventura, Frobe, Kerdrova and Coburn had all co-starred along with Quinn and me). It was my only experience of motion pictures - and one so traumatically embarrassing that it can still make me gasp with shame. I had got the part at the last minute, by pure chance. I was a plump and bewildered pubescent, with no theatrical talent whatever. My RADA-spawned kid co-stars could weep or giggle to camera at the drop of a hat; I said such things as 'hello' and 'yes' as if I had been heavily bribed to do so. (I once fainted with self-consciousness. During my death-scene, the distracted director, McKendrick, asked me to vivify matters with a death-scene death scream. 'Try one now,' he said, between Take Twenty-three and Take Twenty-four. 'What, now?' I asked, 'Now.' 'What, now?' 'Now.' I released a barely audible moan, and blacked out.) Luckily my part was a small one, and most of it was cut.
To complete my humiliation, adolescence went and broke my voice during the course of shooting. In a series of great lurches and leaps, it descended from a piping soprano to its present didactic baritone. As you probably know, films aren't shot chronologically; as you probably don't know, when kids' voices collapse in this fashion they employ old ladies to dub you over. I never dared actually see the film, and only a couple of years ago, when it was shown on the small screen, did I catch a glimpse of the nauseous eunuch they had made of me.
Anyway, Tony and I had tangled over a game of chess. I had beaten the star — or at least the star was clinging on to a hopelessly compromised board, knowing full well that he would soon be rescued by a summons to the set. Quinn was ludicrously vain about his chess-playing prowess (he used to like playing simultaneous chess, so that he could get beaten by two or more people simultaneously). 'Will Mr Quinn please come to the set?' a megaphone inquired. Quinn cracked shut his pocket board. 'I think you lost,' I said, in a variety of octaves. But the great man, Fischer-like, had stalked off. In the four months of shooting it was the one recognisably human gesture I saw him make. For the rest, like virtually every other movie high-up, he was distinguished only by his celebrity from the hypocrites, hysterics and hangers-on that people his world.
The British contingent over here is depressed — with some show of reason, it would seem. An obsessive British cineast told me that the entire British budget for the Festival was a lousy £2,000, as compared to the Canadians' £50,000 and God knows what for the Australians (down under delivers, says their poster). I could not establish whether
this £2,000 defrayed the courtesy visit of HMS Apollo, the frigate in the bay whose ketchup-nosed, centime-less crew miserably walks the streets. The £2,000 does defray Britain's incompetently run booth up on the despised third floor of the Palais. The facilities for doing deals are apparently quite inadequate. The British Film Producers Association, the obsessive cineast told me, is not doing its stuff; obsessively he went through a list of British representatives in Cannes and explained how second-rate most of them were, The obsessive cineast was named Rex, by the way — so obsessive that he is even called a cinema.
Rex is not as depressed as some of the people here. The beggars are more depressed than Rex is. I grew fond of the beggars - they cheered me up. Apart from the itinerant hippies and the odd knapsacked desperado, everyone here looks so healthy, happy and rich that the heart soars like a hawk to see this little lunatic fringe, to see these people so spectacularly down on their luck.
Or are they? There's a pair of self-mutilators, a toothless cowboy in a fringed jacket and his swarthy, Tonto-like side-kick, who work the strip thrice daily. They munch on lit cigarettes, eat entire kitchen-boxfuls of flaring matches, and gobble up razor-blades while the café crowds snicker and wince. I contributed to their purse, on the understanding that they would both need to be fed intravenously by the time la saison was over. One night I saw them flouncing up La Croisette, as sumptuously dressed as any of the butterflies.
There's a trio of fire-eaters, moustachioed lads in denim, who drunkenly ask you for money ('Un franc? Un franc? Non, deux francs, deux francs') whether they're eating fire for you or not. They approached me three times in half an hour, but were very apologetic when I said I had already coughed up. Then they coughed up — for my delight. They filled their mouths with paraffin, placed a taper to their mouths, and hawked out great zeppelins of flame. I contributed again, and handsomely, in lieu of their imminent deaths from internal combustion. The leader juggled a bottle of wine with his cask of paraffin; he confused the two quite frequently, taking a refreshing swig of high-octane hemlock to wash away the taste of that nasty vin ordinaire.
There are, of course, real beggars in Cannes, people who don't just beg for the hell of it. They haven't the effrontery to disfigure La Croisette (perhaps the gendarmes restrain them), and tend to drop back to rue d'Antibes, which runs parallel some way inland. There's an old hooked woman who holds out a bent hand, saying Monsieur, Monsieur, Monsieur in the pitiful tone which I use on waiters.
There's a little girl who crouches all day on the pavement; making a bowl of her skirt, she counts centimes with rapid fingers. These beggars don't seem to be doing very well. The appearance of suffering may be good for a laugh, but the evidence of poverty amuses no one, least of all the golden denizens of Cannes. We don't like thinking of these people. We wish they weren't here. We wish they wouldn't hang about the place like this, trying to spoil our holiday.
Sunday Times, 1977
ISAAC ASIMOV
Professor Isaac Asimov sat in the opulent lobby of his New York apartment block, counting on his fingers. 'It took me nine months to write my autobiography.'
'Really?' I said. Isaac Asimov's autobiography is considerably longer than War and Peace.
'Sure. It took me so long, I only published seven books the next year.'
'And that's well below average?'
'Yeah! People thought I was dead!'
This week Gollancz publish Asimov's Casebook of the Black Widowers, a collection of waggish mystery stories. It is his 212th book. For the last decade he has averaged a dozen books a year. The Monthly Asimov' is no longer a joke: it is a statement of fact.
Asimov has been called 'the world's foremost science writer'. The description is inadequate. A random selection from the eight-page catalogue which ends his autobiography gives a more telling glimpse of Asimov's extraordinary energy and range: Quick-and Easy Math; What Makes the Sun Shine?; Mars; How Did We Find Out About Antarctica?; The World of Carbon; The Roman Republic; Understanding Physics; Animals in the Bible; Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright; Constantinople; ABC's of Ecology; Asimov's Annotated 'Paradise Lost'; Ginn Science Program — Advanced Level B; The Sensuous Dirty Old Man; Still More Lecherous Limericks. When I spoke to Asimov last spring, he was up to Opus 216. But that was several books ago now.
Asimov is probably best known in the UK as a pioneer of 'hard' science fiction - one of the old school, along with Robert Heinlein, Fred Pohl, Arthur Clarke, Poul Anderson and Clifford Simak, the men who filled the pages of magazines like Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Universe, Super Science Fiction, Satellite and If in the 19405. Like his peers, he wrote mock-technical conundrums about robots and computers (I, Robot), ecological jeremiads (Earth is Room Enough), schmaltzy space opera (Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids) and mediaevalised colonial fantasies (the Foundation trilogy). But Asimov started to diversify very early on and, by his mid-thirties, SF was for him no more than a sideline.
'My interest in science-fiction ended on 4 October 1957' — when the USSR sent up Sputnik I. After Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn in 1958, Asimov produced no full-length work of original fiction until 1972, when he managed to complete his worthy, wordy epic, The Gods Themselves. Nearly a hundred non-fiction books separate the two titles; and, since 1972, Asimov has published a hundred more. Nowadays, he is not an SF writer so much as a writing phenomenon.
Before going off to meet the great man, I took the trouble to absorb — or, at any rate, to buy and stare at — the hulking twin volumes of his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt (1979 and 1980). Asimov says that the books took about nine months to write. Well, they take about eight months to read. 'I had forty years of diaries to use,' Asimov would later tell me — and it shows.
Structurally, the autobiography makes an average collection of showbiz memoirs look like Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Furthermore, and on Asimov's own admission, nothing ever happened to him. I toiled through the first volume in a mood of scandalised admiration. How could anyone dare to record a life with such fidelity to the trivial? The book reads like an outsize experiment in tedium by Andy Warhol or Yoko Ono. After a while the effect is hypnotic and remorseless: you read on in tortured fascination.
The heroic tale begins in 1920. Born 250 miles southwest of Moscow, Asimov sailed to New York with his parents and younger sister at the age of three. The family ran a candy store in Brooklyn. In the best pages of the book, Asimov describes how he taught himself to read English at the age of five. (If you ask Asimov whether he was a child prodigy, he will reliably answer: 'Yes, I was - and still am.')
Punctuating his narrative with phrases like 'Another memory is this one' and 'Oh well. I apologise for the interruption', Asimov tells us how his interest in science fiction took shape. Through his father's shop little Isaac had access to the SF magazines that had started proliferating in the 1920s. By the age of nine, he was an addict; by eleven, he was a scribbler. In 1938 he sold his first story.
Asimov contentedly explains that he was 'a major figure' in the genre at the age of twenty-one. The claim is probably justified: the awkward, friendless, pimply boy, still shackled to the candy-store counter, was also being hailed as a seminal figure. Asimov devotes the odd hundred pages here and there to his vicissitudes in academe (the Columbia University Graduate School) and in military service during the war (the US Navy Yard at Philadelphia); but his writing schedule provides the main thread of the book. At one point Asimov recalls a short story that he never managed to place anywhere. Startlingly, he then reprints it, in full. It is terrible. Such failures were rare, however, and the Asimov writing robot soon came stalking off the assembly line.
Two books a year, five books a year, ten books a year! A cent a word, a dime a word, a dollar a word! A $1,000 advance, a $10,000 paperback sale, a $50,000 royalty cheque! ... All autobiographies are success stories, and we share Asimov's gratified awe as fame and money start pouring in.
After a while, the reader
is in some danger of feeling like a bailiff or a tax-inspector. Fortunately, though, Asimov often puts his ledgers aside to keep us up to date on everything else: problems with the air-conditioning, buying a new car ('This time it was going to be a Ford'), his children's bouts of measles, a faulty incinerator in his flatblock. All this information is quite unreflectingly compiled, with no variation of tone or style. Asimov writes about his divorce and remarriage in the same way he writes about tussles over contracts with Doubleday or Abelard-Schuman. And the ills which afflict most middle-class lives are given their dutiful due: there are consecutive chapters entitled 'My Thyroid' and 'Janet's Breast'.
But the book's most persistent theme is Asimov's inexhaustible, all-conquering self-love. Every anecdote is subtly, or openly, gauged to bolster his charm. His reported jokes begin with the phrase 'I said at once', and end with the phrase, 'Everyone laughed'. The mock-mandarin boasts transmit a serene collusion with their own coquetry. It is all meant to be very 'disarming'.
I went along to meet Asimov having just let In Memory Yet Green crash to the floor, and having just winched In Joy Still Felt on to the lectern. I knew more about Isaac Asimov than I knew about anyone else alive. What could there be left to add?