by Dirk Bogarde
Closing the gate on the mint fields for the time being I took up the corn bucket and the kitchen stuff and wandered up in the evening sun to the hen-run. Sitting on the upturned bucket among the scrabbling pullets where I had heard of her death made me feel nearer; she had taught me more about loneliness than anyone else I had ever known.
* * *
I didn’t see Visconti again for a long time. Nor did I expect to. He went off to his castle in Ischia to prepare. I spent the rest of the summer driving about looking at houses for sale with the fading idea of living in Italy permanently, fading because the prospects were always poor rather than good, and the astounding amount of bribery and corruption which seemed to be a regular part of the life disconcerted me deeply. It appeared that you could do almost anything if you knew who to speak to and absolutely nothing if you did not.
Every transaction, from registering one’s car, leasing a villa, applying for a carte de séjour, receiving a parking ticket or obtaining a table in a restaurant was accompanied always by a flurry of paper money, or surrogate contracts. Nothing was above board, nothing ever seemed to be exactly what it was. This, coupled with the agonizing poverty crushed against quite nauseating and overt richness, made me miserably apprehensive and aware that this, apparently, smiling, sunny, extrovert country was marking time before catastrophe. I had gone through one cruel and bloody war of Liberation in Java as a soldier: I had no wish, if it could be avoided, to repeat the experience in Italy as a middle-aged civilian. Once was quite enough.
I made up my mind that as soon as the premiere of “La Caduta degli Dei” was over, in October, I would leave for France and see what possibilities lay there.
It was a very grand premiere indeed. The Barberini Cinema had been closed and redecorated especially for the event. Visconti and I took our places in the front row of the balcony in a theatre smothered with a million pink and white carnations and an audience composed of all Rome society and the entire Government, in lounge suits in deference to Visconti’s apparent political sympathies. He claimed to me to be Communist but I found it hard to accept the fact among the palaces, Picassos, footmen and cooks and the splendour and abundance of his living style. So I placed him vaguely Left, which irritated him constantly and made him promise that one day he would explain it all to me. For the moment none of that mattered. The film was received as a masterpiece, and at the finale, as the lights came up in the vast auditorium, Fellini leapt from his seat in the stalls and facing us, he saluted Visconti with a great cry of “II maestro! II maestro!” which brought the entire audience to its feet cheering and applauding and Visconti to his, modestly bowing in his dark grey suit and neat blue tie. He smiled but never moved a muscle, suffused with quiet triumph. Rome had restored its Emperor.
Chapter 14
I suppose it is fair to say that I fell hopelessly in love with Simone Signoret the very first time I clapped eyes on her in a modest Ealing film called “Against the Wind” some time during the period that I lived in Chester Row and was attempting my own passage into the cinema. I placed her then on the very peak of the profession, and as far as I am concerned she has never budged from it and I still love her dearly. For many years we were often not more than paces apart; my table at the Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence was just across from hers summer after summer, year after year, whenever we managed to get there. But we never spoke, nor did we ever recognise each other by nod or smile. There was no reason indeed why she ever should, but every reason that I might. However, apart from an occasional slow, considering, look out of those extraordinary eyes, the years passed in total silence; and I was left to worship from a discreet distance over the gigot or loup de mer grillé.
One day in the early sixties, with a hangover of the most punishing dimensions, I lay flat on my back in the sun beside the swimming pool, too weak to move, too ill to sit up, just wishing to be left alone and for the world to stop swinging about my aching head. A shadow fell across my face. And stayed there. Reluctantly I opened my eyes to the blazing light and saw, immediately above me, a pair of ravishing brown legs and two motionless fists. In the right a large Bloody Mary, in the left a packet of Marlboroughs clutched, an enormous gold bracelet glinting in the sun. I recognised the accessories and attempted to sit, but the voice bade me stay where I was.
“Don’t move,” it commanded. “I may not stay long.”
At seven in the evening, as the staff were setting up the tables on the terrace for dinner, we finished luncheon together; it had to be a long luncheon to bridge the many years which we had spent sitting apart, she at her table under the big fig tree, me at mine a little along the wall under the oranges. We had, and still do have, a great deal to talk about.
The one thing I finally became absolutely positive about, living in Italy, was exactly where I wished to live in France. I stuck the point of a compass into the village of St Paul de Vence and measured a half arc in pencil towards the south in a radius of about twenty kilometres. I had got to know and love this area, and a great deal beyond and above it, intimately, through Michael Powell with whom I had, in the early fifties, made a film based on the extraordinary exploits of Patrick Leigh-Fermor during the war in Crete. Mickey knew every hamlet, track, crag and olive grove. Together we had explored them and I had quickly grown to share his passion for the calm and peace which lay not so far beyond the cruelly ravaged coast. In this gentle, undulating, wooded land as yet almost untouched by the rotting fingers of the prospective property tycoons, I determined to seek and acquire my house. St Paul, once so sweet and calm and lost, except to a fortunate few, when I first came to it at the end of the forties, was now, in 1969, slowly but inexorably turning itself into a kitschy ruin of faux art galleries, Provençal boutiques, Vietnamese restaurants, and tarty little shops selling postcards, hideous porcelain, olive-wood salad bowls and key-rings.
Only the Colombe d’Or managed to stand aloof from this onslaught of quaintness, remaining a small, bright island around which all the flotsam and jetsam of package tours and coach trips ebbed and surged hourly, red-skinned, hot, smelling of suntan oil and pommes frites. Yvonne and Francis Roux who own it, were patient and polite and listened to my plans with no shred of astonishment, merely shaking their heads thoughtfully, if sadly, insisting that what I wanted (a small, tumbled down old mas or shepherd’s house in a few isolated acres for very little money) simply no longer existed in the area of the village. Everything had been bought and converted, the land was almost the highest priced in all Europe per square metre, and I would have to search well down into my compass-inscribed perimeter to avoid tremendous prices, swimming pools, macadamed drives, wrought iron, or Manniken-Pis and storks in every garden; the dreadful attributes of Paris-rustic, well-heeled New Jersey, Frankfurt, or Bexley Heath.
Since M. Roux had been born in the village and knew his way about things extremely well, I saw absolutely no reason to doubt their word. But Simone was ever brave, ever courageous, and at this present time a little bored with picking mint. She said that she would come with me on the journeys I would take, and offered herself as guide and translator, since my French was almost limited to the phrases which Lally had taught us years ago and those, I felt, were hardly enough to deal with plumbing, contracts, rights of way, electricity and septic tanks. This was indeed generous of her, and we all set out confidently on a course of house-hunting.
Simone’s presence, alas, was a mixed blessing. Although she dealt fearlessly, vocally, and expediently with rights of way, septic tanks and land boundaries with the agents, the householders fell back in awe and delight at her presence and brought out the bottles of Marc, or Cognac and endless cups of coffee. The social delights tended to obscure, rather, my desperate search in the limited time I had for my next, and I hoped, final abode in the soft hills of Provence. We visited many possibilities that November, none of them remotely acceptable.
Eventually, with time rapidly running out, I took another look at my map with a weary eye and discovered, almost b
y chance, that the pencil line of my perimeter neatly bisected a small village on its southernmost tip in which lived a much admired actress Yvonne Mitchell. Indeed she had been the recipient of the very first fan letter I had ever written in my life. She had lived there for over six years. How on earth could I have forgotten? Surely she must know the region pretty well and perhaps even know of something for sale, or someone who could advise me? Of one thing I was perfectly certain: Yvonne would know exactly what I was after. And she did. Indeed she did; and knew of a house, quite remote, near a village which had almost entirely been by-passed. It had, she thought, quite a bit of land, would need restoration, but not, she said firmly, at the price which I envisaged. For that, all I could hope for would be a studio flat with a small balcony in one of the new blocks which were spreading like white fungus along the coast from Juan-les-Pins to Antibes. However, she agreed to call the owners, whom she knew slightly, and see if they would consider selling. They were anxious to move into Nice because the land was becoming too much for them and their children were now growing up and should be nearer schools and so on; although the place was not actually on the market she had a feeling that a fair price might tempt them. The next evening she telephoned to say that they would consider selling, and the price they were asking. Which was rather more than half my savings; she assured me that it was reasonable, that the family had owned the house for more than four hundred years, that they were very distinguished and honourable, and that if I really did wish to settle in that part of France it was the ideal place for me.
It was. It stood three sides full to the winds; the north sheltered by a high hill and a wood of ancient oaks; the east had the sea far below as a distant border, shimmering white in the November sun; to the west rose the seven hundred metre hump of the Bois de la Marbrière which would help to deflect the mistral which roared down from the Rhone Valley from time to time; and to the south the terraced land fell steeply to the plain and the wooded hills which rose eventually towards the craggy line of the Estoril range. Twelve acres of long abandoned vine and jasmine fields surrounded it, and four hundred venerable olive trees sheltered it from view, an uncompromising, stone-built, pink-tiled, shepherd’s house, approached by a long rutted track. Above the front door leading directly into the stone-sink and tiled-floored kitchen was a stone with the date deeply incised upon it. 1641. I knew that I had arrived.
The next day I went again, taking Simone (there were no householders to be bewitched; they had very discreetly vanished), and we were shown round the house by a plump girl listlessly sweeping out a shed. There was much to be done. But there were a lot of possibilities. Simone approved of the rough-cast walls, the tiled floors, the great oak beams, and a large photograph of Che Guevara pinned to the wall in the only, rather small, sitting room upstairs. Below were just stables and the kitchen with its immense open fireplace. She pronounced herself satisfied, said the place was “une vraie maison”, and that, knowing my obsession for privacy and solitude, she didn’t think I need look further. I knew that I didn’t, and by the following January the house and its land were mine to do as I pleased. I made arrangements to move in immediately after “Death in Venice” was finished, some time in mid-summer, and for various alterations to be made in that time. I knew that living there would be a great challenge both financially and physically, but beyond that I had no doubts whatsoever. Yvonne Mitchell had secured me my foreseeable future.
* * *
It really would be refreshing to report that preparations for “Death in Venice” went ahead smoothly, calmly and confidently. The reverse, alas, is true; it was all perfectly normal. We had to fight, cajole, push and batter to get Mr Mann’s classical work even near a screen. Money, naturally, was the first problem; this was finally more or less overcome (we thought) by a grant, modest enough, from the Italian State. But we needed a great deal more.
“La Caduta degli Dei” (now re-titled “The Damned” for English-speaking countries) was a tremendous success in America with eulogistic Press reports and highly encouraging attendances in the cinemas. We were the hit of the season and Visconti put it down to the fact that New York was a predominantly Jewish city (as were many of its critics) and the film was splendidly anti-German. Whatever the true facts we were successful, the only thing you need to be in America, and they offered to back his next venture. On certain conditions. First I must be replaced by one or other of two British players who, at that time, brought in a great deal more money to the box office than I did. Or ever would. This Visconti refused outright, insisting, to their bewilderment, that I was exactly like a pheasant hanging by its neck in the game larder, ready and perfect for the pot. They eventually agreed but promptly halved the budget which they had originally offered. Visconti still refused to yield me up, and settled for half-money.
Secondly, they insisted, or tried to insist, that Tadzio, the boy, should be played by a girl. This, they declared, would be far more acceptable to American audiences; if the story was left exactly as Thomas Mann had written it, it could only possibly mean one thing in that shining new country: “a dirty old man chasing a kid’s ass.” Visconti heard them out in a stunned silence. “But if I change Tadzio to a little girl, and we call her Tadzia, you seriously believe that American audiences would be prepared to accept that?”
“We certainly do.”
“You do not think that in America they mind child-molestation?”
There was, he told me, a nervous pause and then the spokesman bravely shook his head and said that they didn’t see it like that.
“Mister Visconti, we do not envisage that kind of problem. We are not as degenerate here as you are in Europe,” he said comfortably. Vietnam was still to come.
“This is a search after purity and beauty,” said Visconti. “Surely people will recognise that? They have been reading the book for many years. Even in America.”
The battle went on for almost a week; and finally, reluctantly, suspiciously, they capitulated on both points; and Visconti flew back from New York victorious, battered. There was not enough money to make the film exactly as he had planned unless everyone concerned with the project would accept severe cuts in their salaries. He himself said that he would accept no fee whatsoever. And did not. Setting an example which was impossible to ignore. I accepted the salary offered by an extremely embarrassed producer (Visconti quite properly always avoided personal confrontations over money) of 40,000 dollars for five months’ work (plus a large percentage of which, to this very day, I have never seen a cent). Silvana Mangano, who played the lady of the pearls, Tadzio’s mother, waived her salary altogether, working only for her hotel expenses, and the rest of the troupe from the great Pasquale de Santis to the set decorators accepted equivalent reductions. It was more important to us all that the film was made; and buoyed by our co-operation Visconti set out, in an immense fur hat and a pair of seal-skin boots, to search for his Tadzio in the northern capitals.
He found him right away, on the first day of his search, in Stockholm. A slim, pale, blond boy of thirteen, Björn Andresen, who had been brought to the auditions by an ambitious grandmother and who was, in spite of a strong predilection for black Bubble Gum and The Beatles, the ideal choice. Anyone else was unthinkable; although Visconti, always a man of honour, carried out the rest of the tour from Copenhagen to Helsinki and only signed Andresen at the very last moment so as not to disappoint the many eager parents and children who flocked to his presence in the hopes of landing the part. Björn was not immediately impressed by the idea himself, but once it was promised that he would receive at least enough money from the modest salary that was offered him to be able to purchase an electric guitar and a motor bike he accepted, and the perfect Tadzio was ours.
We were on our way. Except for one very minor-major matter which seemed to cause Visconti not the least shred of concern. The rights to the subject. He was so sure that he would be able to secure them with no trouble at all, since he knew the Mann family well and was convinced t
hat no one else would even want to attempt such a difficult proposition, that he simply never bothered to find out if they were free or not. Robin Fox telephoned from London four weeks before we were due to start work and very politely suggested that, if Visconti really did want to go ahead, mightn’t it be a good idea to check the rights? He had heard from a fellow agent in New York that they did in fact belong to someone else, who planned not only to play von Aschenbach, but to write the script himself, direct it and produce it. A one man band. He had owned them for some long time and was not about to give an inch.
Consternation filled the quiet, elegant rooms of via Salaria when Forwood and I, after an urgent request for an appointment, arrived one evening with the news and came face to face with an ashen Visconti. The first time, and indeed the last, until his illness some years later, that I was ever to see him shattered into helplessness. At first he absolutely refused to believe that our news was correct or that Robin Fox knew what he was talking about and it was only by forcing him, almost physically, to lift his receiver and call the agent in New York that we succeeded in making him realise that the appalling rumours, as he had insisted on calling them, were in fact true. He hadn’t even known how to dial New York, and when this was done for him, and when he had spoken at some length, the silence which followed his replacing of the receiver was frighteningly eloquent.
For a few moments he stared helplessly before him, one hand toying with a small ball of lapis lazuli, the other nervously flicking a Cartier lighter.