Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “It is true. True what they tell you. This dreadful thing. Orribile! He bought the rights long ago … but he does not set the film up … now he waits patiently like a tiger in the grass. What to do? Quel catastrophe! I am helpless; what can I do … eyee!”

  It was distressing to see him sitting slumped in his great velvet chair among the Picassos, Klimts, Schieles and glittering bric-a-brac, his greatest plans in ruins about him like an exploded house of cards. Despondently we drove back to the villa on the hill near the cemetery with leaden hearts. “Death in Venice” was clearly lost.

  But Visconti rallied swiftly after our departure and three days later we were summoned back to via Salaria and a triumphant, if disgusted, victor explained in confidence that, after a long and bitter altercation on the telephone to America, followed by numerous vitriolic cables, in which he had threatened the unfortunate owner with every possible kind of indignity and a “great mischief in all the newspapers of the world which I will make personally,” he managed to buy him out. For a vast sum. The rights were now ours. But at such a cost; the already slender budget had further been depleted. Visconti’s over-confidence had cost us all dear. There was even less to work with now four weeks before starting, and strict and even savage economies had to be made. I for one lost my entire wardrobe which had been meticulously planned down to the last button and hook eye, and made do with a couple of old second-hand suits, a too small evening jacket, and hats and shoes which Piero Tosi, the designer of the film and probably the most brilliant of them all, had somehow found for me from stock in the enormous wardrobe at Tirelli; but the crowd, so important to the film, and all carefully hand-picked by Visconti himself, had to be halved and on it went, one slashing cut after another to try and balance up the shaking budget. But we were all cheerful in spite of this, and felt confident that once we really started, help, if we needed it, would come from somewhere. Although not one of us dared to consider where that somewhere could possibly be.

  I, after all, was well used to working under duress and actually found that it increased the intensity of concentration. I spent the next three weeks reading and re-reading the book, and going through the unmitigated hell of having a nose built to resemble Mahler’s own. This entailed hours of lying prone while plaster of Paris was poured over my face, two straws shoved up my nostrils so that I could breathe, and then anxious days of fitting the plastic model made to fit over my own nose. Once all that was done we had to start the packing up of Villa Fratelli—taking the cats to the photographer in the village who promised them a home, sorting out the possessions which we had all of us accumulated in the year, and trying to placate Peppino who wept silent tears in his little shed with Gina Lollobrigida, his hat twisted in his fist, his face buried in the crook of his arm, even the sight of two months’ salary failing to get him to raise his head. Signora Fratelli mistrustfully checked her very inadequate inventory, told us to leave the keys under a flower pot in the garden, and accordingly one dark, bitter March morning, exactly one year to the day that I had arrived there, we all drove away in convoy again, much as we had left the house in England, but this time for Venice; and with the addition of an extra passenger, since Labbo, the abandoned dog, had now become so much a part of life that to leave him would have been unthinkable.

  Equally unthinkable to cart him round the hotels of Venice for five or six months, and to this end Visconti, who was deeply attached to the beast whom he called Poverino, sought and found a small house with an acre of garden which he persuaded his friends the Volpi’s to allow me to rent, assuring them that though I was, unfortunately, a cinema actor, he could guarantee that I would not wreck it, turn it into a bawdy house, or receive any members of the Press there. This having been solemnly agreed to, and accepted, we all moved into Ca’ Leone, a ravishing eighteenth-century house which, although cold, damp and often flooded, stood in an acre of flowering gardens on the lagoon immediately joining the gardens of the Redentore. We were all ravished by its calm and tranquillity, by the many arched colonnades, secret little piazzas, vines and trees, white walls, and elegant simple furnishings. The only one who actively disliked the whole project, acreage and trees included, was the dog. Ca’ Leone was to become my evening sanctuary from the exhausting problems which beset “Death in Venice” daily.

  The first, I suppose, was the matter of Mahler’s nose. It fitted perfectly and looked exactly as it should. After three hours of make-up on the very first morning of work, dressed in the old second-hand suit we had found, and from which I had hastily removed a tailor’s label bearing the date of its making, April 1914, lest Visconti reject it out of hand as being four years ahead of the story, my button boots and the uncompromising felt hat, I looked, in the mirror at least, very like Mahler himself. Visconti was in raptures.

  “Ah!” he cried, clasping his beautiful hands. “Ah! My Mahler! My Mahler!”

  The only problem was that I was quite unable to move my head or face. Embalmed as I was in three hours’ work of plastic, wax and glue, the very slightest movement caused the nose to crack immediately round the edges, from which oozed an extremely unbecoming fluid. The perspiration, which had gathered between my own unhappy member and its plastic and rubber addition, trickled implacably from the fissures which appeared every time I moved a muscle even to speak, and slid inexorably down my chin, beading there like crystal warts.

  The groans of anguish which emanated both from Visconti and the unhappy Mauro, my make-up man, were as nothing to my own distress. It was impossible to use the nose; without it, I knew, I would have no character. I would be reduced just to my old familiar face, of which I was exceedingly weary, peering out from a baggy, brown suit. Although Visconti stubbornly insisted that we go ahead in the Mahler mould, I equally insisted that the only way I could go through the film under those conditions was in a wheel chair bolted by the neck to the headrest. It would, I felt, be at least a still performance. Eventually it was decided that Silvana Mangano’s make-up man, a retired gentleman of great experience who had agreed to leave his peaceful retreat in Tuscany to work again for his adored Mangano, should be the one to give the casting vote as to whether the nose could or could not be made workable. He pronounced it, after a good ten minutes close and agonising inspection, as impossible and sadly left the room.

  There was a dreadful silence. So still was the small room in the Hotel des Bains where I was dressing that I could hear the gulls crying across the gardens, and the sea flap-lapping softly against the distant sands. Visconti sighed, lit a new cigarette and stared out of the windows; Mauro turned to the wall and leant against it, his tears quietly falling; Forwood looked stoically over my shoulder into the mirror, and I wrenched the sticky mess from my face and dropped it into the waste-paper basket. Visconti quite suddenly slammed the window and looked at his watch.

  “In one half an hour you must come downstairs to the big Saloon, we will have a glass of champagne there for the good luck. The Press are waiting, many friends are there to wish us success. At 2 o’clock we will make the first shot of the picture; it is necessary for the insurance people. Ciao.”

  He and Mauro left the room and closed the door. I stared at my crumpled reflection. I looked exactly like a depraved choir-boy with bags under his eyes and a badly running nose. Mann and Mahler had never been so far away.

  “What shall I do?” I was relieved at least to hear that my voice had broken.

  “Difficult. You’ll have to start from scratch again.”

  “I have half an hour, I gather.”

  “Well, you’ll have to hurry up, won’t you? Start thinking him.”

  “But I just look like myself. They will all expect Mahler, that’s what they’ve been told.”

  Forwood was fingering through a small box of moustaches which Mauro had left behind in his grief. He handed me one at random. I stuck it on; it was bushy, greyish, Kipling. In another box of buttons, safety pins, hair grips, and some scattered glass beads he disentangled a pair of rather bent pince
-nez with a thin gold chain dangling. I placed the hat back on my head, wrapped a long beige woollen scarf about my neck, took up a walking stick from a bundle of others which lay in a pile, and borrowing a walk from my paternal grandfather, heavily back on the heels, no knee caps, I started to walk slowly round and round the room emptying myself of myself, thinking pain and loneliness, bewilderment and age, fear and the terror of dying in solitude. Willing von Aschenbach himself to come towards me and slip into the vacuum which I was creating for his reception.

  And he came, not all at once, but in little whispers … bringing with him the weight of his years, the irritability of his loneliness, the tiredness of his sick body, and stiffly he went out into the long, long corridor which lead to the great staircase, walking heavily, thumping firmly with the stick for confidence, frighteningly aware of the rising sounds of voices and laughter from below, some idea of tears behind the glittering, pinching pince-nez. At the top of the staircase he stopped suddenly, one shaking hand holding the cool mahogany rail, trying to square the sagging shoulders which emphasised his agonising shyness; below, the hall seemed jammed with people he didn’t know and had never seen before. Arrogance slid in like a vapour; carefully, firmly, no longer shaking now, he started to descend towards them, head held as high as it would go, legs as firm as they would allow, hand lightly touching the rail for moral support. There was a sudden hush in the crowded room. Faces swiftly turned upwards towards him, pink discs frozen. He continued slowly down, allowing himself the barest smile of German superiority. From a long way away he suddenly heard Visconti’s voice break the almost unbearable stillness. “Bravo! Bravo!” it cried. “Look, look, all of you! Look! Here is my Thomas Mann!”

  * * *

  I led a curiously isolated and protected existence for the next five months. I seldom, if ever, joined in with the troupe, or the other players, or met Visconti, or anyone else for that matter, socially; my life was in a state of limbo. Daily I sat alone on the Lido beach in my little cabana aloof and distant, silent and yearning as von Aschenbach himself. Indeed I had absolutely no doubt that I was him, and the exterior shell of my normal body was only the vessel which contained his spirit. My main objective at this time, which was understood and respected by everyone around me, was to remain in total, exhausting, concentration at all times and under all circumstances in order to contain this spirit which was so completely alien to myself. It was a fragile thing; I was constantly terrified that he would at one moment or another slip away from me. But he stayed. Eventually, even in the peace of Ca’ Leone, alone in my garden massed now with nodding spikes of white hollyhocks, or walking through the silent piazzas of the city after I had changed into jeans and a tee-shirt, I still retained his walk and mannerisms which might have surprised anyone who didn’t know that I walked as a man possessed without consciousness of the present world.

  My relationship with Visconti was extraordinary. We were fused together in a world of total silence. We seldom spoke, and never ever about the film. We sat a little apart from each other, admitting each other’s need for privacy, but never much more than a metre away. Incredibly we had no need of speech together. We worked as one person. I knew, instinctively, when he was ready, he knew when I was. We worked very much on sign language; a raising of eyebrows from him signified that all was set when I was. Should I shake my head, then he would sit again, and light another cigarette until such time as I felt myself in condition, and then I would touch his arm and walk towards the lights. We hardly ever shot two takes of anything—occasionally he would murmur, “Encora” and we would do it again—but that was all that was ever said and it happened very few times.

  Our behaviour startled the occasional stranger to the set. An American female photographer, forced upon us by our American bosses, haunted us for a few days, and was dispirited and furious at the same time, at our total lack of co-operation, which must, I suppose, have seemed rude to her. One day, in a bitterly sarcastic whisper I heard her remark that she had just heard us say “good morning” to each other … right beside her.

  “They’ve stopped feuding!” she said triumphantly.

  Feuding! I told Visconti with a wry smile, and he patted my hand comfortably: “Non capisce matrimonio, hey?” And it was a marriage indeed. We had never, at any time, discussed how I should attempt to play von Aschenbach; there were no discussions at all about motivation or interpretation. He chose the three suits I should wear, the two hats, the three ties, all my luggage and the shabby overcoat and scarf—and he had chosen me. Apart from that not a word was spoken. Once, just before our departure from Rome, I requested him to give me just half an hour to discuss the role. He grudgingly agreed and, telling me to help myself to wine on the table beside him, asked me how many times I had read the book. When I told him at least thirty, he advised another thirty and that was that; nothing more was ever said.

  I think that the only direct instruction he ever gave me was one morning when he requested that I should stand upright in my little motor-boat at the exact moment that I felt the mid-day sun strike my face as we slipped under the great arc of the Rialto bridge. I did not know why I had to make this specific movement at such a precise time until I saw the final film with him some months later, and it was only then, too, that I realised he had been choreographing the entire film, shot by shot, blending all my movements to the music of the man he had wanted to embody the soul of Gustav von Aschenbach. Gustav Mahler.

  * * *

  The partial withdrawal from ordinary life was not, when all is said and done, as depressing as it might seem. Although I moved about in a sort of trance for most of the time I did manage to attempt some kind of normality on Sundays, the one day we had free, and Ca’ Leone with Antonia and Eduardo at the helm welcomed carefully chosen, and sympathetic, guests—Kathleen Tynan, Rex Harrison, Alan Lerner, David Bailey, Alain Resnais and his wife Florence, Penelope Tree and Patrick Lichfield with all his cameras, and others who were understanding of what has been called my obsessional privacy and who allowed me to wander off back to the attendant shade of von Aschenbach whenever the need arose, without question.

  Nor was I absolutely unaware of things which went on around my solitary figure sitting in the cabana on the beach. I noticed, casually, one day, that some of the troupe, carpenters, the script girl, an assistant property man for example, were walking about wearing neat little squares of white paint, no bigger than a postage stamp. I didn’t pay very much attention, but after three or four days, and an ever-increasing amount of little white squares appearing on people’s arms or legs or, once, on a forehead, I asked Mauro what was happening. His very evasiveness gave me a worrying clue. They were testing some kind of make-up. The more I took notice the more I saw that the patches were being worn on the most sensitive areas of the skin. It was a worrying clue because of all the things which I had to face in the film the thing which frightened me most was the actual, final, death scene, which I knew I would find difficult, and which I also knew Visconti was keeping to the very end of the work in Venice. Clearly that moment was upon us. They were testing special make-up because the one I would have to use must be a total death mask: it was to crack apart slowly, symbolising decay, age, ruin and the ultimate disintegration of a man’s soul. But I kept silent, as was my habit, and merely watched with mounting terror the daily proliferation of little white patches among the troupe. Whatever they were using (or Mauro was trying to invent) was going to be both unpleasant, and possibly from the amount of care being taken, dangerous. The bolt hit me one morning, heavy and hot with the sirocco; the sea grey and flat, the wind spinning burning grains of sand across the beach, the heat almost insufferable. Visconti’s perfect weather for his grand finale. I was told that today, towards four in the afternoon when the light would be exactly right, I should have to play the final death scene. In the make-up room Visconti was quiet, firm, and very gentle.

  “Today is the perfect light, you see … the real sirocco … it will help you … the heat; you
are sick now, and old; remember what Mann has said, you will have lips as ripe as strawberries … the dye from your hair will run … when you smile to Tadzio, your Summoner, your poor face will crack, and then you will die … I tell you all this because when you have the make-up on your face you will not be able to speak, it will be dead as a mask … we only do one take for that reason … it is hard like a plaster.”

  “But what is it?”

  “The make-up? Very good. We have tested very much. All will be well, you will see.”

  He left me to Mauro who held in his hand a fat silver tube of a white substance which, when he applied it, immediately burned like fire and started to stiffen. It was too late to protest; for two hours I sat immobile while the stuff was plastered and smoothed to my wretched face. Before he had gone too far I was able, just, to implore him not to use it round my eyes, for from the intensity of the burning I was sure that it would blind me; he nodded sagely, and continued his work implacably. When it was finished I looked like a Japanese puppet. I was carried into a car and driven down to the beach lest the least movement should cause the by now iron-hard mask to crack or chip before the cameras turned. Two strong men carried my inert body across the burning, copper sand to the deck-chair placed ready for my demise. I had thought, foolishly, that the beach would be deserted and that tact would have been used to remove any idle bystanders from my eye-line. Not so. Twenty feet away from my electric chair, for that is how it felt to me, ranged a line of eager spectators all seated comfortably under umbrellas, all with Instamatics, Nikons, Leicas and even, I noticed miserably, one pair of binoculars. In the very centre of this array sat Visconti himself, the host to his invited guests from Milan, Rome and Florence, who, led by Alida Toscanini, had been offered the great privilege of witnessing the final shot of his film. They all looked very jolly and relaxed, sipping cool drinks. If comparisons with the Coliseum flashed into my mind they could be forgiven. Someone removed my hat and fixed, with dexterity, a small plastic sac of black dye … this was to break with the heat generated under my hat, when the moment came, and would run down my painted face. I noticed hopelessly that someone had placed three long pieces of bamboo cane in the sand before me. One quite near, one further away, the third five metres out into the leadened sea. Albino, leaning close to my ear, whispered that the first cane marked the position of the fight between Tadzio and Jaschiu; the second would represent Tadzio after he had broken away; and the third his ultimate position in the sea beckoning to me, and pointing out an immensity of rich expectations.