Henri Matisse died November 3, 1954.
René Clair and Vittorio De Sica
I met René Clair through Leonard Bernstein, in 1949. Lenny was in Paris conducting the Radio Orchestra. He had managed an introduction to the great movie director we all admired.
He reported that Clair and his wife, Bronia, were most affable. They were celebrating their dog’s birthday and gave Lenny a piece of the cake.
For the young enthusiast of Dada and Surrealism that I was, René Clair’s first-ever film, Entr’acte (1924), was heady stuff. The cast for this splendidly illogical macédoine included Marcel Duchamp playing chess with Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Erik Satie (who composed the music, which before talkies was performed by a live orchestra), and a camel pulling a hearse.
So it was with excitement that I went to meet its creator. He looked just like a Parisian in a René Clair film. He was a Parisian by birth, slight, quick, charming. His wife, Bronia, had come to Paris from her native Poland in the 1920s. She was a favorite of the habitués of the Dome and the Coupole. When I met her, she was, of course, fully dressed. But I kept remembering the famous photograph of her with Marcel Duchamp, as Adam and Eve, with the appropriate lack of costume.
The Clairs were more than affable, taking me under their respective wings. We used to go to the flea market on a Sunday afternoon. One time both René and I spied a very pretty piece of what must have been stage jewelry: a wide bracelet of black filigree sprinkled with small pink and green sparklers. Sarah Bernhardt might have worn it, we fantasized. We both wanted it. But gallantly, René insisted that I take it. I did, I still have it.
One time René telephoned to summon me: it was of utmost importance, he said, to accompany them to the premiere of a film. I joined them in the equivalent of the royal box.
It was the premiere of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. We were deeply moved by the poignant but never sentimental tale of an impoverished man and his son losing their only possession. No one cares. There is no happy ending.
René was overwhelmed. It was the greatest film since Chaplin, he said. He of course was well aware of De Sica and of his creation of a new genre of Italian realism: nonprofessional actors, natural lighting. De Sica’s Shoeshine, made shortly after the war (I must admit I had missed out on this entirely), had made a sensation.
After the projection I was introduced. De Sica was besieged on all sides with flashbulbs popping, but with relaxed Italian charm he agreed to be interviewed.
But before I set out on a walk through Paris streets with De Sica, I went to Brussels with the Clairs for the premiere of René’s latest film, Le Silence Est d’Or (Silence Is Golden, 1947). This saying had particular relevance for René. His whole career had been with silent films. I think he had reservations about the new genre.
However, he went mano a mano with the new medium and wrote and directed a musical. It was about the old music hall days, and an old-time star gave one of his last turns: Maurice Chevalier.
For the interview with Vittorio De Sica, I thought that since Bicycle Thieves had been filmed entirely in the open air, in the streets of Rome, by daylight, an anonymous studio setting was not indicated.
I asked him if he liked the idea of walking through the narrow streets of the Quartier Latin. We would talk as we went along. He liked the idea.
He was a handsome man, tall, well built, a strong face with a good nose, slightly uneven dark eyes. He was carefully dressed, Italian chic: a brown Prince de Galles suit and of course a hat (brown). I could well imagine that as a good-looking young man, in his native Naples, he had been what used to be called a matinee idol. He could even sing and dance. I can vouch for this: because of the miracle of Google I got Vittorio on my screen, doing exactly that. He even sang “Parlami d’Amore, Mariù,” that staple of the tenor repertoire that was a surefire encore for the Three Tenors.
A bit of research and I found out that he had made his cinema debut at sixteen. Throughout an amazingly productive career he had worked as an actor in other people’s films, first to make a living, then to finance his own. He was to direct literally dozens of films. The early prewar efforts were mainly lightweight comedies, but the tone changed during and after the war with his collaboration with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, with Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948). The themes were the harsh conditions faced by the poor and helpless in a hostile world. There were plenty of those in postwar Italy. Incidentally, both of these films won Oscars for the Best Foreign Language film, an award especially created for them.
As we strolled along, he chatted easily in French spiced with Italian. Every now and then a few words in pure Italian twirled out happily, like the pirouettes of an accomplished ballerina. He had that peculiarly Italian gift of immediately establishing a human contact. How well it must have served him working with the nonprofessionals he chose for his films.
The film itself was shot in a month and a half, he told me, but the preparation had taken over a year. The whole thing was so clear in his mind that once he started shooting, he never even looked at the script. Lack of funds led to using nonprofessional actors, real-life locations—no building of sets—and whatever light was available.
He had asked over the radio for applicants to play the small boy in Bicycle Thieves to come and see him. “The man who plays the father brought his little boy; he had never intended to try out for a role for himself. His boy was too old, but the father had just the kind of face I needed—narrow and mobile—so I chose him.
“He was a metalworker in a big plant in Breda. I made him promise on his word of honor to go back to his job after the film was over. I didn’t want him to have any false hopes for the future. Then I went to his employers and made them promise, too, that they would take him back.”
I told De Sica that René Clair had said Bicycle Thieves was one of the finest pictures of the last thirty years—up to the level of the great Chaplin pictures of the early days. Naturally, he was pleased, but modest in his reaction. He asked me, “Do you think foreign audiences can understand enough without catching the dialogue? Is it clear to you?”
I asked him how he had managed to work in the streets with such crowds surging around the camera. “It was easy. We blocked off the streets; the police were very helpful. Whenever we needed people for the film, they were already planted in the crowd. You know how the artificial is often more convincing than the real? Those casual effects of people in the streets were all calculated.”
I asked about the little boy who plays such an important part in the film. “He was eight years old. He came from a very poor family. His mother sold flowers in the street. He lived in a kind of cave, five people in one miserable cave. Sometimes we would go to a café together—he never asked for anything. He would eat one of the cakes I would order for him, but the second he wrapped in a napkin to take home to his mother.
“Have you noticed, as soon as the little boy comes on the screen, the whole audience is for him, he wins them right away?”
I said that the boy had great dignity.
“Yes, dignity, and a kind of responsibility too great for his years. A wonderful face, that plain little face with the big nose. Very sensitive and expressive without being maudlin. I wanted to avoid the overly pathetic quality which a prettier child might have given.”
There is no sentimentality in the film, no class angle. The father is not exploited by any particular group. He is alone in the world, not responsible for his own misfortune, unable to cope with his surroundings.
De Sica watched with interest the people we crossed in the street as we walked. “The French are extraordinary, everyone an original type.”
“More than the Italians?” I asked.
“Yes, more. I have never seen as many curious and interesting faces as here in Paris. I am thinking of finding some characters here for my next film.”
“But what about the language problem?”
“That does not matter much, nor if they can act or not. I
can make them do what I need if only I have a face to work with—that is what counts.”
We walked on. I saw an agreeable little courtyard, good for our shot. There was a forlorn statue against the back wall. I wanted to photograph De Sica in front of it, but he was too tall, his head was not where I wanted it.
Without a word of direction, he sunk to his knees on the paving stones, bringing his head just in line for our picture.
A head popped out of a top-story window, and an old lady with disheveled hair looked out in amazement at the well-dressed man on his knees. He smiled up at her and said cheerfully, “Vous voyez, madame, ce qu’il faut faire pour gagner sa vie!”—“You see, Madame, what one must do to earn a living!” She beamed and nodded.
As we left the courtyard, the old lady waved, and we waved back. It seemed like a De Sica film. We were assembling the cast already.
On My Own for Vogue: First Visit to Picasso
I came back to Paris in my new capacity of reporter writing about the arts in general. I had no training, no directives. I simply lit out toward what seemed to be of interest.
It was in this capacity that I went to Geneva to meet the hard-drinking Albert Skira, whose publications were the sensation of postwar art books circles. There followed a number of long evenings spent with Albert in Geneva nightclubs, I nursing a single scotch while Albert dove into the hard stuff.
But it was worth it. It was Albert who arranged an introduction to Picasso. And later, also invaluable, an introduction to the Swiss printers who were to print the magazine I founded, L’ŒIL.
“Don’t wear a hat,” Skira warned me, about meeting Picasso, “and don’t ask any questions.” I was surprised about the hat veto because Picasso had created so many fanciful, if not outrageous, hats for his favorite sitters.
At that time, 1947, Picasso had been living and working since 1937 in the top floors of a large, once-aristocratic building at 7, rue des Grands-Augustins. In earlier years the actor Jean-Louis Barrault had used these spaces for rehearsals.
By an amazing coincidence, this was the very house Balzac chose as the setting for his “Le Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu” (The Unknown Masterpiece), which Picasso had illustrated for Ambroise Vollard in 1931. Balzac’s story is about a fictionalized seventeenth-century artist whose thirst for the absolute leads him further and further away from representation until finally nothing coherent is left.
I showed up for my appointment with Picasso looking properly inconspicuous and hatless. I walked through a large stone archway, across a cobbled courtyard, and up two flights of leg-breaking stairs, lit only by the occasional glimmer of a single bulb. A hand-lettered sign by Picasso, “ICI,” was tacked to the door to identify his quarters. There was no bell. I knocked.
The door was opened reluctantly by a parchment-pale sharp-nosed apparition who peered at me through thick spectacles. It was Jaime Sabartés, Picasso’s boyhood friend from Barcelona. He had come to Paris at Picasso’s urgent request, in the 1930s, as companion, watchdog, and secretary and had never left. His main job was keeping people at bay who wanted to see the master. He had devoted his life to treading gingerly in Picasso’s shadow, adoring him, and complaining every step of the way. Picasso teased him mercilessly but couldn’t have done without him.
Sabartés led me through a small antechamber and into a barnlike studio where ancient beams held up the high ceiling. There was a large stove there that Picasso had relied upon during the terrible winters of wartime, when he chose to stay here all through the German occupation.
It was about noon when I went for the first time—the hour when he usually got up. Like many Spaniards, he lived by night.
He liked to work late at night and didn’t care a hang for natural light. If anything, he preferred the strong projectors that Dora Maar, a photographer, had left behind at the end of their stormy love affair. It is thanks to Dora that we have a photographic record of the evolution of that great work, Guernica.
When I arrived, there were, as usual, about a dozen men standing around, waiting. I never saw a woman at these noonday receptions. There were editors, publishers, dealers, collectors, poets who hoped for illustrations, unemployed bullfighters.
Picasso finally came in, wearing an old brown dressing gown. The first thing you noticed was the extraordinary intensity of those remarkable eyes—the mirada fuerte. I understood what Gertrude Stein meant when she said his dark gaze was so intense he could see around corners.
Picasso went around in European fashion and shook hands with each person. He had a ritual greeting, “Please sit down,” but there was no question of that. There were sagging sofas and a chair or two, but every one of them was completely covered with papers, catalogs, fragments of sculpture, portfolios, not to mention dust.
I was extremely nervous, for in spite of his simplicity of manner, one was very conscious of being in the “presence.” But I was in luck, because from all those years in Mexico, I spoke Spanish, albeit with a Mexican accent, which amused him. When he heard his native tongue, he lit up with friendly incandescence.
He was so passionately attached to his native country and its language that from that moment on I felt accepted. He beamed, he asked questions, he used the familiar tú form, he stuck around, and before long he began to show me things.
He was immensely proud of a Still Life with Oranges (1912) by Matisse that he had bought during World War II. I know, because Matisse told me himself that he was very pleased Picasso had chosen it. Perhaps in its honor, Matisse would send Picasso a crate of oranges from the south of France every New Year’s Day.
I got a glimpse of some other paintings that Picasso had collected (they are now in the Picasso Museum in Paris). One was a self-portrait by the Douanier, Rousseau.
Then Picasso led the way to an informal arrangement of recent work, balanced somewhat precariously on a scaffolding. One was a grim still life dominated by an ox’s skull that dated from the occupation years. “I didn’t paint the war,” Picasso said. “I’m not that kind of a painter, but the war is right there in the work.”
I was introduced to Picasso’s Afghan hound, Kasbec, whose elongated snout turned up on some of Picasso’s more devastating female portraits.
All around was the astounding accumulation that became part of Picasso’s décor wherever he lived and worked. He could never bear to part with anything. Every book, every magazine, every catalog, every piece of wrapping, and every last length of string lay where it had fallen, together with flea-market finds, a stuffed owl, bulging portfolios of drawings and engravings. If anyone ever left anything behind, there was no hope of getting it back. It stayed on to enrich the loam.
There was no visible line between junk and treasure. Picasso’s incessant compulsion to turn one thing into something else filled what he called his “museum,” with such objects as former cigar boxes made into miniature theaters with pin-sized actors, pipe cleaners turned into jaunty figures. There were towers of empty cigarette boxes glued together waiting their turn for another incarnation. He smoked incessantly until late in life, when his doctors forbade it.
Sabartés gave a vivid description of Picasso as pack rat in his Picasso: An Intimate Portrait:
When he finally gets out of bed, he would take the letters and papers and pile them on the buffet or a chair, or a table, or even in the dining room or bathroom. This new pile is added to another begun some other time: everything has been placed here or there in order not to mix here or there with this or that, with the intention of going over it more carefully, but he always receives new mail and never finds time to reread any of it.
He has a mania for collecting everything, without rhyme or reason. His pockets testify to this: filled with papers, nails, keys, pieces of cardboard, pebbles, pieces of bone, a pocketknife, a small knife, notebooks for his literary lucubrations, matchboxes, cigarettes, cigarette lighters without fluid … letters and bills, very crumbled—irretrievably ruined because of his fear of losing them—seashells, a stone which sugg
ested something to him on seeing it on the ground, pieces of string, ribbons, buttons, an eraser, pencil stump, his fountain pen, etc. Of course his coat is very heavy and his pockets bulge and split.
Then Picasso brought out a book—Aragon’s translations from Petrarch—that had a frontispiece by him. He opened it and put it on the floor so that we could all take a look. On a blank page at the back, he had drawn a girl’s head in colored crayons with five stars across her forehead. It was lovely and he knew it. “Très jolie,” he said in his rolling, Spanish-accented French. It was my first look at his new love, Françoise Gilot.
Then, with an incredibly mischievous look, he went and got out another book: poems by Tristan Tzara with black-and-white illustrations by Matisse. Picasso had colored all the illustrations. Sometimes the color accompanied the drawing. Sometimes it destroyed it, riding across the lines, creating a completely new entity. He knew that I knew Matisse. He shot me a glance: “Matisse doesn’t know about this.”
Not long after my first visit, I heard rumors that Picasso was working in Antibes in an old fort. No one was allowed in. Naturally, there was great curiosity everywhere about what he was doing.
Just then, I heard Picasso was back in town briefly. So I went to see him. There was the usual noonday cast, and Picasso made the usual round. After a while he came over to me and said, “You’re the only one here who hasn’t asked for something. What would you like?”
One had to jump fast when Picasso was in a good mood, and shut up when he wasn’t. I said I was longing to know what he was up to in Antibes.
To my surprise he said, “Why not come down and see for yourself? You have all my benedictions.”
Picasso and Antibes
Some of My Lives Page 11