My Last Sigh

by Luis Bunuel

  Although the director of the museum, Alfred Barr, advised me not to give in, I decided to resign, and found myself once again out on the street, forty-three and jobless. Another black period followed, worse than before because my sciatica had become so painful that on certain days I could walk only with crutches. Thanks to Vladimir Pozner, I finally got work recording texts for documentary films on the American army.

  After my resignation, I made an appointment to meet Dali at the Sherry Netherland bar. We ordered champagne, and I was beside myself with rage. He was a bastard, I told him, a salaud; his book had ruined my career.

  “The book has nothing to do with you,” he replied. “I wrote it to make myself a star. You’ve only got a supporting role.”

  I kept my hands in my pockets so as not to strike him; and finally, soothed by the champagne and old memories, we parted almost friends. The rupture was nonetheless a serious one, and I was to see him only once more.

  Whereas Picasso was a painter and only a painter, Dali went much further. Despite his mania for publicity, his exhibitionism, and his frenetic search for the original phrase or gesture (which usually turned out to be something as banal as “You have to love one another”), he is an indisputable genius, a peerless writer, talker, and thinker. We were intimate friends for a very long time, and my marvelous memories of our harmonious collaboration on Un Chien andalou are still intact. Although few realize it, Dali is hopelessly impractical. People think of him as a prodigious businessman with a real talent for manipulating money; but, in fact, until he met Gala he had no money sense whatsoever. My wife, Jeanne, for example, always had to take care of his train tickets. I remember one day in Madrid when Lorca asked Dali to go across the street and buy us tickets for a zarzuela at the Apollo. Dali was gone for a good half hour, only to return without the tickets. “I can’t figure it out,” he said. “I just don’t know how to do it.”

  When he lived in Paris, his aunt used to take him by the hand when they crossed the street; and when he paid for something, he would walk away without his change. Under Gala’s iron hand, however, he made money the god that was to dominate the second half of his life; and yet, even today, I’m sure he still has no sense of everyday practicalities.

  One day I went to see him at his hotel in Montmartre, where I found him stripped to the waist, an enormous bandage on his back. Apparently, he thought he’d felt a “flea” or some other strange beast and had attacked his back with a razor blade. Bleeding profusely, he got the hotel manager to call a doctor, only to discover that the “flea” was in reality a pimple.

  Dali has told many lies, and yet, paradoxically, he’s incapable of lying. Much of what he says is only to scandalize, like the time he went to the Museum of Natural History and claimed to have been so stimulated by the dinosaur skeletons that he’d had to take Gala out into the corridor and sodomize her. This was obviously a joke, but Dali’s so bemused by himself that everything he says seems to him the absolute truth.

  Dali’s also a great fantasizer, with a certain penchant for sadism; but in fact his sex life was practically nonexistent. As a young man, he was totally asexual, and forever making fun of friends who fell in love or ran after women—until the day he lost his virginity to Gala and wrote me a six-page letter detailing, in his own inimitable fashion, the marvels of carnal love. (Gala’s the only woman he’s ever really made love to. Of course, he’s seduced many, particularly American heiresses; but those seductions usually entailed stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the women’s shoulders, and, without a word, showing them to the door.)

  During the 1930s, when Dali came to New York for the first time, he met several millionaires, whom he adored. At this time, the entire country was in a state of shock over the Lindbergh kidnapping, but when one of Dali’s conquests invited him to a costume party, Gala arrived on his arm, dressed as the Lindbergh baby, her face, neck, and shoulders dripping with fake blood. The scandal was unprecedented; Lindbergh was a sacred cow, and the kidnapping was not exactly a subject for satire. Read the riot act by his agent, Dali retreated, and in his best hermetico-psychoanalytic jargon he explained to the journalists that Gala’s costume was a purely Freudian representation of the infamous X complex.… When he returned to Paris, however, he had to face trial, for his error had been serious—the public retraction of a surrealist act. Breton reported to me that during the meeting Dali fell to his knees, clasped his hands, and, his eyes filled with tears, swore that the press had lied, that he’d never denied the fact that the disguise was well and truly the Lindbergh baby.

  Another revealing anecdote about Dali occurred many years later, when he lived in New York during the 1960s. One day, three Mexicans who were making a film came to see him. Carlos Fuentes had written the scenario, and Juan Ibañez was directing. The Mexicans asked Dali to authorize their filming him entering the bar at the St. Regis with a baby panther on a golden chain. Dali sent them to Gala, who, he said, “took care of that sort of thing.”

  When the men had sat down and repeated their request, Gala replied: “Do you like steak? Good steak? Cut thick? Very tender?”

  Speechless, but thinking they were being invited to lunch, all three nodded.

  “Well,” Gala went on impassively, “so does Dali. Do you know what a good steak costs?”

  Apparently, she demanded ten thousand dollars for Dali’s services, and the three men left in a hurry, speechless and emptyhanded.

  Like Lorca, Dali had an enormous fear of pain and death, yet he once wrote about how titillated he’d been at the sight of a third-class railway compartment filled with workers who’d been crushed to death in an accident. On the other hand, he claimed to have discovered death the day that Prince Mdivani, one of his good friends, was killed in an automobile accident. Apparently, both he and Dali had been invited to spend some time with the painter José-María Sert in Catalonia, but at the last minute Dali decided to stay in Palamos and work. He was the first to learn of the prince’s death, as he was driving to Catalonia, and when he arrived on the scene claimed to be totally prostrate with grief. For Dali, the death of a prince was a reality and had nothing whatsoever to do with a carriage full of working-class corpses.

  We haven’t seen each other for thirty-five years, but I remember one day in 1966, while I was working in Madrid with Carrière on the scenario for Belle de jour, I received a cable from Cadaqués. It was in French (the quintessential snobbery), and Dali demanded that I join him immediately to write the sequel to Un Chien andalou. “I’ve got ideas that’ll make you weep with joy,” he said, adding that he’d be delighted to come to Madrid if Cadaqués was inconvenient for me. I replied with a Spanish proverb: Agua pasada no rueda molino, or, Once the water’s gone over the dam, the mill won’t run anymore. Later, he sent another telegram congratulating me on winning the Golden Lion for Belle de jour at the Venice Film Festival and inviting me to collaborate on a journal he was getting ready to launch, called Rhinoceros. I decided not to answer.

  In 1979, I agreed to loan the Musée Beaubourg in Paris the painting Dali had done of me while we were students in Madrid. In this meticulous portrait Dali had divided the canvas into little squares, measuring to the centimeter my nose and lips. At my request, he’d added a few long, slender clouds like the ones I so admired in one of Mantegna’s paintings. We’d planned to meet at the exhibition, but when I heard that there was to be a formal banquet, complete with photographers and press, I declined.

  Despite all the wonderful memories from our youth and the admiration I still feel for much of his work, when I think about Dali I can’t forgive him for his egomania, his obsessive exhibitionism, his cynical support of the Falange, and his frank disrespect for friendship. I remember saying a few years ago, during an interview, that I’d nonetheless like to drink a glass of champagne with him before I died, and when he read the article, he responded, “Me too. But I don’t drink anymore.”

  17

  Hollywood Sequel
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br />   NINETEEN FORTY-FOUR found me in New York, jobless and tormented by sciatica. (The president of the Chiropractors Association used such brutal methods that he came close to making a permanent invalid out of me.) One day, I hobbled into Warner Brothers on crutches and was miraculously offered the chance to go back to Los Angeles and work on dubbing. This time I agreed, but as I traveled across the country with my wife and two sons (the second, Rafael, was born in New York in 1940), my sciatica was so painful that I lay on my back on a board for most of the way. Luckily, once in Los Angeles, I found another chiropractor, a woman, and after a couple of months of gentler treatment, my pain disappeared completely.

  This time, I stayed in California for two years. During the first, we lived normally on my salary, but the second year, my work came to an end and we had only our savings. The era of “different versions” was over; with the end of the war, it was clear that every country wanted American films and American actors. In Spain, for example, the public preferred Humphrey Bogart speaking Spanish, even if poorly dubbed, to a Spanish actor playing the same part. As a dubbing capital, Hollywood was finished, since it was being done in every country where the film was to be shown.

  During this third sojourn in L.A., I often saw René Clair and Erich von Stroheim, whom I liked enormously. Resigned to the fact that I’d never make another movie of my own, I nonetheless still had the habit of jotting down ideas—for example, the lost little girl whose parents search for her everywhere and can’t find her, while all the while she’s actually right beside them (a situation I used in The Phantom of Liberty), or a movie with characters who act exactly like insects: a bee, a spider, and so on. One day while I was out driving, I discovered the enormous two-mile-long Los Angeles garbage dump, with everything from orange peels to grand pianos to whole houses. Smoke from the fires rose here and there; and at the bottom of the pit, on a small piece of land raised slightly from the piles of garbage, stood a couple of tiny houses inhabited by real people. Once I saw a young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, emerge from one of the houses, and I fantasized her involved in a love affair in this infernal decor. Man Ray and I wanted to make a film about it, but we couldn’t raise the money.

  Instead, I worked with Rubia Barcia, a Spanish writer, on a screenplay for a mystery called The Midnight Bride, about a young girl who dies and then reappears. It was a perfectly rational story, since everything is explained at the end, but here too we couldn’t get it produced.

  I also tried working for Robert Florey, who was making The Beast with Five Fingers, starring Peter Lorre. At his suggestion, I thought up a scene that shows the beast, a living hand, moving through a library. Lorre and Florey liked it, but the producer absolutely refused to use it. When I saw the film later in Mexico, there was my scene in all its original purity. I was on the verge of suing them when someone warned me that Warner Brothers had sixty-four lawyers in New York alone. Needless to say, I dropped the whole idea.

  It seemed as if I’d really touched bottom, until I ran into Denise Tuai, whom I’d known in Paris when she was married to Pierre Batcheff, the actor who played the lead in Chien andalou. (Later she married Roland Tual.) Out of the blue, she asked if I was interested in returning to France to do the film version of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, which had been a terrific hit in Paris but which I didn’t very much like. Nevertheless, I agreed to give it a try, and since Denise had to spend a few days in Mexico City, I went with her. Once there, I phoned Paquito, Lorca’s brother, in New York, who told me that some British producers had just offered him twice what Denise had for the rights to the play. And so once again the deal fell through, and once again I found myself jobless, this time in a strange city. Denise introduced me to the producer Oscar Dancigers, whom I’d met with Jacques Prévert before the war at the Deux Magots.

  “I just may have something for you,” Oscar said to me. “But would you mind staying in Mexico?”

  When people ask me if I regret not having become a Hollywood director, like so many other European filmmakers, I say that I don’t know. Chance is a matter of one-shots; it rarely takes anything back or gives you a second opportunity. Given the Hollywood system and the enormous budgets, I’m sure my films would have been very different, and should you ask which films, I’d again have to say I don’t know. (Since I never made them, I don’t have any regrets.)

  Years later, in Madrid, Nicholas Ray invited me to lunch and asked how I’d managed to make such interesting movies on such small budgets. I told him that money had never been a problem for me; what I’d had, I’d had. It was either that or nothing at all; all I had to do was arrange my story to fit my budget. In Mexico, I never had a shooting schedule longer than twenty-four days (except for Robinson Crusoe). In fact, I felt strongly that the size of my budgets was a measure of my freedom.

  “You’re a famous director,” I said to Ray. “Why not try an experiment? You’ve just finished a picture that cost five million dollars. Why not try one for four hundred thousand dollars and see for yourself how much freer you are?”

  “But you don’t understand!” he cried. “If I did that in Hollywood, everyone would think I was going to pieces. They’d say I was on the skids, and I’d never make another movie!”

  It was a sad conversation, because he was absolutely serious.

  In the course of my career, however, I did make two “American” movies that I happen to be very fond of—The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1952 and The Young One in 1960. The producer George Pepper and Hugo Butler, the screenwriter, who spoke fluent Spanish, first proposed the Robinson Crusoe idea to me. In the beginning I wasn’t very enthusiastic, but gradually, as I worked, I became interested in the story, adding some real and some imaginary elements to Crusoe’s sex life, as well as the delirium scene when he sees his father’s spirit. The shoot took place on the Pacific coast of Mexico, not far from Manzanillo. Frankly, I followed orders from the chief cameraman, Alex Philips, an American who lived in Mexico and who was a specialist in the close-up. Crusoe was the first Eastmancolor film in America and as such, a sort of guinea pig. It took us three months to make (a record for me), partly because Philips waited a long time before giving me the green light. The rushes went off to Hollywood at the end of each day.

  When all was said and done, Crusoe was a very successful movie, with a budget that came in under three hundred thousand dollars. I have strange memories of the shoot—like the time we had to kill a little boar, and the sensational exploit of Crusoe’s stand-in, an American swimmer, who sliced through those colossal waves in the opening scenes. Ironically, despite the fact that it was an American film, shot in English, co-produced by Oscar Dancigers, and a box-office success, all I managed to get out of it was the derisory sum of ten thousand dollars. Financial negotiations irritate me, and I had no agent or lawyer to advise me. (When they found out what my share of the pie had been, Pepper and Butler offered me 20 percent of their percentage of the profits, but I refused.)

  As unlikely as it may sound, I’ve never been able to discuss the amount of money offered to me when I sign a contract. Either I accept or refuse, but I never argue. I don’t think I’ve ever done something for money that I didn’t want to do; and when I don’t want to do something, no offer can change my mind. What I won’t do for one dollar, I also won’t do for a million.

  My second American film, The Young One, which most people think was filmed in South Carolina, was in fact shot in the area around Acapulco, and in the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. Pepper was the producer, while Butler and I collaborated on the screenplay. The technicians were Mexican and the actors American, with the exception of Claudio Brook, who played the pastor and who spoke perfect English. (I worked with Claudio several times—on Simon of the Desert, The Exterminating Angel, and The Milky Way). The actress who played the young girl was barely fourteen and had had no acting experience. Nor did she have any particular talent for it. In addition, her formidable parents never let her out of their sight, forced her to wor
k nonstop, and to obey the director to the letter. Sometimes she cried; but perhaps because of these conditions—her inexperience and her fear—her presence in the film is very powerful. That often happens with child actors; in fact, the best actors I’ve worked with have been children and dwarves.

  One of the problems with The Young One was its anti-Manichean stance, which was an anomaly at the time, although today it’s all the rage. Without quite knowing what it is, the fledgling writer in his first youthful effort is sure to warn us of the dangers of dividing things too clearly into black and white. In fact, the fashion for gray zones is so widespread that I’ve often dreamed of declaring myself an out-and-out Manichean and acting accordingly. In any case, once upon a time, the movies reflected the prevailing morality very closely; there were the good guys and the bad guys, and there was no question of which was which. The Young One tried to turn the old stereotypes inside out; the black man in the movie was both good and bad, as was the white man. In fact, the latter’s confession to the black man, as he’s about to be hanged for a supposed rape, is devastating: “I just can’t see you,” he declares, “as a human being.”

  The film opened in New York at Christmastime in 1960 and was promptly attacked from all sides. Frankly, no one liked it. A Harlem newspaper even wrote that I should be hung upside down from a lamppost on Fifth Avenue, but by then I was more than accustomed to violent reactions. Ironically, this film was made with love, but American morality just couldn’t accept it. Its reception in Europe was scarcely enthusiastic, either; and even today, it’s hardly ever shown.

  There were several other American projects of mine which never came to fruition—like The Loved One, adapted from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, a love story set in a California funeral home. Hugo Butler and I wrote the screenplay, while Pepper tried to sell it to a major company; but, although I liked this project enormously, death was apparently a subject best left to rest in peace.