by Dirk Bogarde
The hotel was a scatter of pseudo-Spanish bungalows around a vast kidney-shaped pool, amidst hibiscus, banana palms, carmine bougainvillaea and a constant soaking mist from thousands of water-sprinklers buried in the plastic grass. There were also humming birds, two swans on a stream, and the street on which it was set was called Charing Cross Road.
The bungalow allotted to me was filled with flowers, baskets of yet more fruits in stiff yellow cellophane, packets of nuts, pretzels, bottles of drink, and a deep canyon-like gloom. Everything was off-white. Chairs, carpets, walls, lampshades even the logs in the fake Louis fireplace. There were screens at every window to keep out the bugs, and the lintel between my bedroom door and the lounge was splintered violently down its entire length, ripped into jagged pieces, as if someone had used a dagger or an axe to force an entry. A four-inch shard of wood rammed into my hand and I bled like a stuck pig.
My fist wrapped in an off-white towel I dialled the desk clerk.
“Yeh?”
“Um … it’s about the bedroom door here.”
“So?”
“It won’t close. The lintel is smashed.”
“The what?”
“Lintel.”
“Where are you?”
I told him.
“Who are you?”
I told him my name. A long silence … rustling sounds, eventually a tired voice. “We don’t have you listed here.”
“I must be listed here. I’m here. In your bungalow.”
“You with a firm? Colgate or something? You with Sunkist-Krispies?”
“Columbia Pictures.”
“Oh … you the British actor, right?”
“Right. And the lintel is smashed …”
“Yeh … I don’t rightly know what a lintel is; what number did you say?”
Again I told him.
“Ah. Yeh … okeydokey … that’s the Lana Turner Suite … you say the door’s smashed?”
“That’s right, can you fix it or move me?”
“Can’t do a thing; Sunday, you know. How about a coffee or juice or something? We’ll get it fixed Monday morning for sure.”
I sucked the wound mournfully; staring across the room through the cellophane fruit and bottles of imported gin. Under a plastic rubber tree, a wide dummy piano keyboard glistened. Beside it a foot-high pile of records in neat, crackly, orange covers.
“What do you suppose that all is?”
Forwood picked up a disc and turned it to the light.
“Concerto No. I in E Flat. Liszt.” He placed it neatly back on top of the pile. “Your music, I imagine.”
“A foot high? All that … they said they were using a double.”
“Well, you’ll have to know the music, even if they do …”
The telephone rang.
“Hello? Hello?” a breathless, whispering voice.
“Who do you want?”
“You’re British, aren’t you?” the voice gasped softly.
“Yes.”
“I heard you talking by the pool a while back … I’m British, I need help. Help me.”
“Where are you?”
“It’s my feet, oh God! My feet …”
“What do you want?”
“I’m next door, across your patio … help me. They’ve strung me up by my feet, from the ceiling … my feet … I’m hanging here; help me, please help me.”
I hung up swiftly.
Forwood looked curious. “Who was it?”
“A man hanging by his feet in the next bungalow.”
“Call the desk clerk.”
The same tired voice. “Can’t do anything about the lintel today, I told you …”
“There is someone in the next bungalow who needs help urgently.”
“Which bungalow?”
“Across from mine. He just called. He’s British.”
“Oh God, again … they’re crazy in there. Was he drunk?”
“Strangling.”
“Okeydokey, we’ll take care of it.”
We looked at each other dully across the off-white room. “I think,” I said, “I’d like to go home.”
A week later I was more determined; I had done costume tests, make-up tests, acting tests with sundry people hoping to be cast as Countesses, George Sand, Chopin and my Mother. I had also been faced with the prospect of having to learn eighty-five minutes of piano music accurately enough for my hands to be examined by the giant Cinemascope camera, within five weeks. Since I couldn’t even play a Jew’s harp with any degree of confidence this was a severe challenge. My music coach, a gentle, gifted, Russian with rimless glasses and thirty years experience of music, called Victor Aller, sadly shook his head and pronounced it impossible.
An urgent meeting to request my immediate withdrawal from this débâcle was demanded and resignedly agreed to. The cast was all assembled, Charles Vidor, the director, Victor Aller, Mr Goetz, the producer, Forwood, and my extremely gentlemanly, calm, and pleasant American agent, Charles Feldman. And all the Top Brass. I was assured that it had never happened before in Columbia, and was I sure I knew what I was doing? I knew all right; I was going home as soon as possible. Before the meeting Vidor asked me to go to his office to have a “final little chat, just to see if we can’t come to some arrangement … this is a desperate step you’re taking.”
Rubber trees again, a small Renoir, a Manet with poppies, airconditioning, Mr Vidor, a symphony in grey and cream, cashmere and silk, alligator shoes winking like glass boats. His desk neat and tidy. A copy of the script, a telephone with fifty extension buttons, a photograph of Liszt aged twenty-five, a swatch of red and yellow suede, an onyx pen holder.
“This is a terrible state of affairs, kid … terrible.” He shook his spiky white cropped head and pulled out a deep drawer on his right. There were four, chilling, Martinis, each with a twist of lemon. He offered me one, and when I refused sipped his own with worried eyes fixed on Manet’s poppies.
“I hope you’ll be reasonable … just think of all the people who have been working so hard for you for months. Researchers, musicians, writers. The little people who work on the sets with such care and love. The costoom people, hours and hours they’ve spent designing just for you … 35,000 dollars worth of costooms we have, all authentic, all his stuff … so dedicated, so devoted … all for you.” In my silence he took another Martini, dribbles of condensation puddled his grey leather desk-top. “You know we have five million dollars invested in you, kid?” The question was gentle, mild, there was no rebuke.
“Yes. I know.”
He was startled, but only showed it by the trembling of his glass. “You know?”
“They told me in New York. They said that five million dollars was on my shoulders.”
“They said five? Not three?” He was anxious.
“No. They said five.”
He finished his Martini, a hint of satisfaction.
“Just because of a little bit of music, you know, it doesn’t seem fair to throw all this away?” He waved the empty glass gently round the air-conditioned room and the grey leather desk.
“Everyone told me in London we’d use a double. I simply can’t do what you ask me to do. You must re-cast and let me go back to Europe.”
“Be reasonable, please. So many heads could fall … you want that?”
The Executive Office was on the top floor. The cast assembled, uneasily, all in dark suits, a convention of coroners. A Fiscus Benjamina wept motionless in one corner, an iced-water machine bubbled occasionally. Papers were shuffled, seats creaked, Victor Aller stared dully at the deep pile carpet, his lips pursed, glasses winking. Someone behind a vast desk cleared his throat comfortably.
“What seems to be the trouble, Mr Bogaarde?”
“I’m here under false pretences. You engaged me to play Liszt and presumably play a piano. I cannot do this. At the first meeting I had at the Connaught in London I explained this point carefully, and it was accepted, it was agreed then that a double would
be used for the piano work and what I would merely do my job as an actor. Since it is now deemed necessary that I must do both, I must ask you to release me from the contract, and re-cast. There has not been very much publicity so far; at this stage I can simply announce that I was not able to perform my duties and so have withdrawn. It is very simple …”
The man behind the desk smiled a cosmetic smile.
“I suggest it is more than that. I suggest that you are not too happy with your Co-Star …”
“I refute that. I am extremely fond of Miss Capucine, she is absolutely charming.”
“Then you dislike Mr Vidor …”
“Not at all. He has been very kind and sympathetic …”
“The script then; you say you don’t agree with the story line.”
“Not true.”
He leaned across the desk and killed the smile.
“There has been an item to this effect in the last five editions of the Los Angeles Times … we have already bought out two whole morning editions … how do you account for that?” His eyes were lasers.
“I can’t account for it at all. I have never spoken to a member of the Press.”
He turned to the room at large, expansive hands.
“Gentlemen, didn’t Mr Goetz here have to buy out two entire morning editions of the Los Angeles Times because of some very, very unattractive comments made by Mr Bogaarde about the script, Mr Vidor and Miss Capucine’s height being too tall for him by a good ten inches. Isn’t that a fact?”
Mr Goetz agreed. “But I do not think that Mr Bogarde voiced those opinions.”
“Then who the hell did? Khrushchev?”
Mr Feldman now leaned forward quietly.
“We have been very distressed by these paragraphs, we have checked on them, and it would seem that they were all written, and despatched, by the Front Office in New York. My client has had no contact whatsoever with any member of the Press since his arrival here in Los Angeles. Front Office do not wish his participation in this motion picture, they would prefer he be replaced by a Contract Artist from Columbia, as you well know; Mr Goetz and Mr Vidor have fought long and hard to have him for their project, because they believe he is emotionally capable of such a role.”
The man behind the desk took the top off his fountain pen, and snapped the clip nervously with his fingers. He swivelled suddenly like a bird of prey on the hunched figure of Victor Aller.
“You are the music coach on this production, right?”
“Right.”
“You coached Cornel Wilde to play Chopin, right?”
“Right. But Cornel Wilde could play tennis.”
An aching stillness.
“What the hell has tennis got to do with the piano?”
“A matter of co-ordination. Cornel Wilde could swim, ride horseback, play tennis and squash.”
“So?”
“So my pupil here can’t even play ‘Happy Families’.”
“He lacks, er, co-ordination, I take it?”
“Completely.”
“How long will it take you to teach him to play piano?”
Victor Aller sat upright; courage flooded his weary, stocky, frame. “If my pupil had just one degree of co-ordination, which he has not, if he had one iota of understanding for the piano, which he has not, I could probably get him to learn, and to play, the first eight bars of the Moonlight Sonata, the very simplest piece in the repertoire chosen for this motion picture—if you gave me one thousand years.”
I heard an ambulance bell far away on Hollywood Boulevard, the elevator rattle down to a lower floor; the man at the desk stared worriedly at Mr Vidor.
“Charlie … say, can we compromise? We are too deep in. He can fake the long shots, you come in close over the keyboard for the rest, we use a double for the hand inserts. OK?”
It was agreed. My heart plummeted. We left in a draggle and stood in silence waiting for the elevator. I said I’d walk down, Victor Aller came with me. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
“That’s the first inquisition I ever attended in this town in over thirty years; I feel sick to my stomach.”
“You were very brave, thank you.”
“You shouldn’t bring your good British manners here; they don’t want ’em.”
“Anyway, thank you for speaking the truth.”
“They don’t like the truth here, that’s another thing, the truth’s dangerous.”
“I know … it could have meant your job, that’s why I said ‘thank you’.”
“Shit. Sometimes it’s nice to tell the truth once in a while.”
“You are a very good friend.”
He laughed mirthlessly, paused and removed his glasses, and wiped them carefully on his tie.
“Well, you got plenty of time to find out … plenty of time …” he settled the glasses back on his nose and hurried on down the concrete steps, “ … like one thousand years.”
Chapter 9
Back in the Lana Turner Suite with its squashed porridge carpet, Forwood steadily played through the entire foot-high pile of records required for the film, while I sprawled, numb with misery and full of Hennessy and self-pity, half in and half out of one of the porridge tweed armchairs, staring hopelessly at the splintered woodwork of the unmended lintel. After an hour and a half of sonorous organs, crashing cymbals and a run-amok piano, I slid into a heap on the floor and begged most earnestly to be carried to the next flight for London.
Forwood carefully replaced “Fantasy on Verdi’s Rigoletto” in its crackly new orange paper sleeve, and took my empty glass; and bottle.
“Come on. Stop whining. They’ve made a compromise … you only have to play from the back. And it’s a dummy keyboard, not a real piano …”
“Oh God help me … but I still have to play the exact keys … it’s got to be musically accurate.”
“No one has ever done it before, of course, you know.”
“Done what?”
“Played eighty-five minutes of piano music without a double.”
“Oh shit! Who’ll know? Who’ll even care?”
“You will.”
“I can’t do it! I have no co-ordination; you heard what Aller said. He should know, he’s been teaching the piano for years and years …”
Forwood blew some dust off the plastic rubber tree.
“Seems a bit undignified finally coming all this way to a place which you have avoided for so long and letting it beat you; a kind of Dunkirk retreat; without valour.”
* * *
Victor Aller and I worked together in a dank brown soundproofed room with a picture of Myrna Loy on one wall and a view of Naples on another for twelve to fourteen hours a day. Every day, with Sunday afternoons off for rest. By the time we got to Vienna, one month later, I played my part of Liebestraum No. 3 before “all the Crowned Heads of Europe” including half the Court and many hangers on, in the ballroom at Schönbrunn Palace. With the camera on my hands. It had not, as Aller had predicted, taken a thousand years after all, and although it was a slow piece we had made a start, and with his patience and devotion, Forwood’s unending encouragement and Capucine’s constant loving support (she was never to miss a single performance all through the weary seven months of work), plus ten to twelve hours work at the keyboard daily, including all day on Sundays latterly, I lost three stone in weight but managed to get through all the pieces selected for me to play, ending up eventually with the major chunk of No. I in E Flat with entire orchestra in the Cuvillies Theatre, Munich, accurately enough and with some degree of Lisztian panache; it brought the house to its feet voluntarily, and the orchestra applauded beaming brightly. Aller turned his back and burst into tears. I had no retreat without valour; and although I frequently choked to death on the dialogue, I almost began to enjoy my steady walk to the piano in every palace, church, concert hall and drawing room from Bayreuth to the Hungarian border.
How I did it I do not know nor ever will. I invented a private code for the keys whic
h only I could comprehend, leaving Aller mystified but pleasantly amazed as he corrected posture, wrists, thighs, back, feet, head and every form of musicianly behaviour. One piece of behaviour which vexed us considerably was the blood. After so many days, weeks and hours of practice, my fingers were inclined to split from time to time, leaving sensationally blood-splattered keys for the eager eye of the Cinemascope camera to delight in. During the Campanella there was a veritable cascade, which although quite inaccurate for a pianist, even one as passionate as Lovable Liszt, pleased the Studio Chiefs enormously since it proved that I had worked hard for my money and that audiences would be quite electrified by such intensity. I very much doubt that they were. However, I had done it; that is what mattered to me. Capucine and Aller both felt that God had leaned out of Heaven for a while, and although I seriously doubted that He had the time to spare, I was bound to agree, in private, that He might perhaps have sent a friend along. It was the nearest thing to a miracle that I have ever personally encountered.
The full story of the making of this unhappy epic is so distressing that it cannot, yet, be written. Although I managed, eventually, to overcome my lack of co-ordination, it was a grinding and profoundly unhappy experience. After the first three weeks of shooting, Charles Vidor died of a heart attack in his hotel bedroom and the film foundered like a holed galleon. Capucine, Aller, Forwood and myself, now a solid block of four, were overwhelmed with relief. Not so much at Vidor’s untimely death—although his apparent illness before made all our lives unbearable, particularly Capucine’s whose first film this was—as the fact that everyone was convinced that the whole sorry mess must surely be abandoned before any more money was spent, any more tears were shed, or any more people were humiliated. Surely now there would be calm and a chance for the survivors to move quietly away from the wreckage. No more candy-floss hair styles, no more appalling dialogue to struggle with, no more oaths or yells sent ripping across the bewildered Austrian technicians and small-part actors. “Don’t give me that goddamned ‘lampshade’ look, Kraut!”; above all no more endless piano practice long into the night in the Bristol Hotel room which had seemed now to become my tomb.