by James Salter
That was with regular skis, of course. In those days expert opinion was that black Heads were the best for powder if you happened to own a pair, but if you were good you could ski on anything. I once heard of a hero in Jackson Hole who skied in a race on a pair of seven-foot two-by-fours straight from the lumberyard with the front ends shaved up and bindings mounted on them.
Times change. There arrives a long box with nothing on the outside to indicate New Era. Within is a strange pair of skis, unnaturally wide, almost five inches, and looking like a softball does when you are used to a baseball. They are Atomics, Powder Plus, and in a yellow slash near the middle is written “Fat Boy.” They’ve been around for several years, I know, and I also know they make a huge difference—you stay right on the surface of the powder, float on it. The idea makes sense.
As I look at these broad, round-tipped skis there rises in me the familiar conflict, complexity versus simplicity. The fully outfitted skier now possesses, besides expensive clothes, two kinds of cross-country skis, downhill and slalom skis, telemarks, randonnees, and now powder skis, and there are at least three types of those, fats, chubbs, and bow ties, never mind the distinction. This is not to mention snowshoes and snowboard. It used to be easier.
I think of a story Mike Burns, a producer I know, told me of going out to play golf with his stepfather. At the first tee a stranger came up wearing old pants and work shoes and carrying a canvas golf bag with three clubs in it. Would they mind if he joined them for a round, he asked?
Mike’s stepfather teed off, sliced one across the road, and then topped his second drive, which bounced down the fairway. Mike stepped up and did about the same. The fellow with the canvas bag took out a worn three wood and hit a ball 200 yards or more, straight as a city block. I liked him in the story and in life as well—it was Ned Vare, a wonderful golfer who used to live in Aspen years ago.
Be with me, beauty, for the fire is dying . . .
I don’t know if I’ll be on the Shoulder of Bell after a storm anymore, but you never lose the taste for powder. I would like to ski it and cut through the crud the way Ned Vare played golf, but I’m probably going to have to use a pair of Fat Boys to do it. I have plenty of company, and not many people have ever heard about the guy on the two-by-fours.
Outside
December 1995
Passionate Falsehoods
I was sitting in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside, going from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Points of rain appeared on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine—the models, maddeningly prim, wore little hats and white gloves—there was an article that caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plump Welsh poet, with a beguiling photograph taken outside the door of his studio in a seaside town, a manuscript stuck in the pocket of his jacket. The poet was Dylan Thomas, and the tribute, written by John Malcolm Brinnin, had somehow ended up in Mademoiselle. Brinnin’s lyrical description of the poet’s seedy, romantic life was an introduction to the poem that followed. It was “Under Milk Wood,” roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. The drops of rain became streaks as in the soft, clicking comfort of the train the voices spoke: housewives, shopkeepers, shrews, Captain Cat—the blind retired sea captain dreaming of a strumpet, Rosie Probert (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”).
I was at the time an officer in the United States Air Force. With me in that Bundesbahn car, which had, I suppose, survived the war—within me—was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem I had read, and the longing to do so rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?
The war I had survived was the Korean War. I had returned from it two years before, rich with memories of flying as a fighter pilot. I had kept a journal. I had written before: stories and poems as a schoolboy, and later, in the Air Force, a novel, which was sent to a publisher and turned down. The fateful letter, however, offered encouragement. If I wrote another book, the publishers would like to see it. And so, on an iron cot in a Georgia barracks one afternoon, seemingly without effort, I wrote the outline of a novel, and on weekends and at night over the next two or three years completed the book. It was called The Hunters and was immediately accepted. That was 1957.
The hour had come. I resigned from the Air Force, probably the single most difficult act I had ever performed, with the idea of becoming a writer. I had been in the military for twelve years. I had a wife and two small children. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down in despair and tried to write. A few years later, a second novel was published. It was more ambitious but also more derivative, and it disappeared without a trace. But I was, despite that, a writer, and could be introduced, at least for a while, as such. The problem was that I had no way to support myself. Then, almost as if on cue, a door opened to another world.
My entry was by way of a cluttered back room, toppling with papers. The room belonged to Howard Rayfiel, a junior member of the staff of two prominent New York theatrical lawyers. Rayfiel—large, soft, animated, the son of a lawyer and brother of a movie writer—was an impresario of a phantom company on his own time. The company had one other member, a theater director who had had some limited success, and the two of them invited me to write a script. Flattered, needing money, bored by the loneliness of writing a new book—the usual circumstances—and also believing that I could put my hand to almost anything, I returned the brief smile the movies had just given me—it was an intoxicating moment—and began what turned out to be a long affair.
My script, called “Goodbye, Bear,” was a sentimental bouquet laid at the feet of a certain type of young, irresistibly cynical New York girl, the flower of every generation. In this case, she was nurtured in such bygone hothouses as El Morocco and the Stork Club and was seen through the eyes of an infatuated but unforceful man. The story had no barb. It was merely a history and would have been better as a poem, but it possessed a kind of lovely dignity. It also produced an unexpected result, reminiscent of the Chinese fable of the mandarin who stood by the river fishing with a straight pin instead of a hook. When word of this curious behavior reached the emperor, he came to see. “What could anyone hope to catch with such a hook?” The answer was serene. “You, my emperor.” The emperor, uncrowned then, was Robert Redford, just becoming known on the New York stage. Somehow, he had gotten hold of the script, and we met for lunch, two naïfs in the sunlit city.
There come back to me many memories of Redford when he was new and his image that of purest youth. One morning in London at the entrance of the Savoy, three or four women came up asking for an autograph. As he signed, he gave me a sort of embarrassed smile. “You hired them,” I said to him afterward. He broke out in a wonderful laugh—no, no, he hadn’t. The car that was driving us to the airport that day broke down in the tunnel just before Heathrow, and we got out and ran for the plane, carrying our bags. That was how easy and unattended his life was then.
Later, in 1968, we went together to the Winter Olympics and Grenoble, slept in corridors, since rooms were unavailable, and rode on buses. By then, I was the author of several scripts, although none had been made into movies, and had been hired to write “Downhill Racer,” a ski film that Redford would star in. We travelled for weeks with the United States team.
At dinner one night, I remarked that I saw Billy Kidd as the model for the main character. Kidd was the dominant skier on the U.S. team and, in the manner of champions, was somewhat arrogant and aloof. He was tough—from a poor part of town, I imagined, honed by years on the icy runs of the East.
Redford shook his head. The racer he was interested in was at another table. Over there. I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself—which of course should have marked him from the first—sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of
his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times.
“Him?” I said. “Sabich?”
Yes, Redford said; when he was that age he had been just like him—vain, savvy.
So easy, all of it, such play. Back in New York, when I went into restaurants with Redford, eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well. There was a dreamlike quality also, perhaps because Redford seemed to be just passing through, not really involved. It was washing over him, like a casual love affair. He wore black silk shirts and drove a Porsche, disliked being called Bobby by eager agents, and more than once said, “I hate being a movie star.” Nevertheless, he became one, with the life of evasion that went with it, of trying not to be recognized, a life of friends only, of sitting at the very front of the plane, the last to board, like a wanted man.
Years later, at forty, he looked better than when we had first known one another. The handsome, somewhat shallow college boy had disappeared and a lean, perceptive man stood in his place. From a kind of unconcerned amusement and a natural caution he had made an astonishing success. His days had a form; he accomplished something during them. As if glancing at a menu, he was able to choose his life.
We drifted apart. I wrote another film for him, but it was never made. “My presence in something,” I remember him saying, perhaps in apology, “is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” He knew his limitations.
I saw him last at a premiere. A mob was waiting. Inside the theater every seat was filled. Then in the bluish gloom a murmur went across the crowd. People began to stand. There was a virtual rain of light as flashbulbs went off everywhere, and, amid a small group moving down the aisle, the blond head of the star could be seen. I was far off—years, in fact—but felt a certain sickening pull. There came to me the part about Falstaff and the coronation. I shall be sent for in private, I thought, consoling myself. I shall be sent for soon at night.
As I think of early days, an inseparable part of them appears: the thrilling city—New York was that—and a kind of Athenian brilliance over everything, which might well have been the light coming through the tall glass archways of Lincoln Center, where, in the fall, the Film Festival was held. It drew what I felt to be the elite, the great European directors—Antonioni, Truffaut, Fellini, and Godard—presenting a new kind of film, more imaginative and penetrating than our own.
The city was leaping with films, schools of them, of every variety, daring films that were breaking into something vast and uncharted, as an icebreaker crushes its way to open sea.
I was living not in New York itself but thirty miles from it, with my wife and children, in a half-converted barn in Rockland County. By chance, I met a writer named Lane Slate—he had a place just down the road—and was drawn to him immediately. He was irreverent and well read, an expert on Joyce, on films, on painting—the very companion I had been longing for. Together we made a short documentary called Team, Team, Team, some twelve minutes long, about football, the sweat and dirt of practice. It was my first film. A few months later, to our astonishment, it won first prize at Venice.
On the strength of this initial success, Lane and I formed a company and made documentaries—ten or twelve of them, scraped together, some of them eloquent. We travelled over the country, flying, driving, checking into motels, the mindless joy of America, beer bottles lying by the roadside, empty cans tumbling like paper. It is his curious charm that I remember, and how quickly he could make himself liked.
Our final film was on American painters: Warhol before his real recognition, Rauschenberg, Stuart Davis, a dozen others. Then Lane’s older son was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and died a few days afterward. We had already begun gradually to separate. Perhaps we had lost the power to amuse each other.
In 1963, about the time that Lane and I stopped working together, a friend introduced me to Peter Glenville, an Englishman who had directed Rashomon on the stage and the film Becket, and had an undeniable gift. I was invited to dinner—there were four of us, all men, in his New York town house—the meal served by a uniformed maid. Toward the end of the meal, Glenville asked if I would be interested in writing a script, a story he wanted to make in Italy. The mere proposal seemed a reward. He was showing his faith in me; he had tapped me, as it were.
I was sent a typewritten outline and felt, upon reading it, disappointment. It was trash: a young man in Rome, a lawyer, meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl who is strangely evasive about her personal life. She is either uncertain and innocent or—the evidence is flimsy, but his suspicions mount—a call girl. He marries her anyway, but incidents recur that are disturbing. I have forgotten the cliché climactic moment: Does she attempt suicide? Is there a final reconciliation amid the white sheets of the ospedale?
It was called “The Appointment.” I told Glenville frankly that it would never possess the least merit. He understood my misgivings, but still the theme of jealousy was interesting and the locale . . .
The film’s producer called from California. He had talked at length to Glenville. They were confident that I was the one to write the film. Forgetting everything, I inhaled.
I arrived in Rome with the name of a Count Crespi, Glenville had supplied it. The Count was cool on the telephone. I had to wait several days for an appointment.
He came out of his office to introduce himself, tan, handsome face, ears close to his head, shattering smile. “I am Crespi,” he said, taking me into a small, plain room, where he sat down across from me.
I told him the story of the film, and he began without hesitation to suggest things. The girl, instead of being a model, which was rather commonplace, might work at Vogue, where his wife’s former secretary, a very clever girl who spoke four or five languages . . . but Vogue is already a little too fancy, perhaps, he decided. A salesgirl in a boutique, he thought, or perhaps, yes, even better, a mannequin in one of the couture houses—Fourquet on Via dei Condotti, for example. “She may earn only eighty thousand lire a month, but it’s interesting work, she meets people, a certain kind of person with money, taste. If she has something to attend, Fourquet will probably lend her one of his expensive dresses.”
With heroic charm he began to describe the man in the film, the somewhat proper lawyer. He has a good car, he goes dancing, to the beach. He loves sport, like all Italians, though not as a participant, of course, and there is also something traditional about him—he still goes home every day at noon to eat with his mother.
Crespi’s enthusiasm and his willingness to provide details increased my confidence. There might be a tone, I began to feel, a manner of presenting the film, that would redeem it. As we talked on, Crespi began to shift his view, to see the lawyer as less sophisticated, not from Fellini’s Rome, where people had seen everything, but from a place in a more provincial town, Piacenza or Verona. Yes, he said, he saw it as a really romantic story.
At a dinner in the country a week or so later, I tried to follow the conversation and the bursts of laughter at the table. It was all wicked and in Italian. We were in a garden, grouped around an animated woman named Laura Betti. She was a singer and an actress. Pasolini and Moravia had written lyrics for her songs, and she performed all the Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht repertory in Italian. She talked constantly, a cigarette between her fingers. Her laugh was irresistible. Smoke poured from her mouth. She was blond, a bit heavy, perhaps thirty years old, the sort of woman who proudly wore a sadness.
We were in the ancient world, it seemed, in the cool air, the darkness beneath the vines. There were six or seven of us. They were eating from one another’s plates and talking about everyone: about the famous actress who liked to make love in two ways at the same time—you could always recognize such women, Laura Betti said, by the way they looked over their shoulder with a knowing smile; or about the madwoman who walked the streets singing about a little boy’s dove that she had touched with he
r tongue. It was all about love, or, more truly, desire. Rome was a village that had no secrets. They knew everything, even the names of the four countesses who had picked up an eleven-year-old Gypsy girl one night and brought her to a noted journalist to watch him have his pleasure with her.
The script I was writing, they asked, what was its nature? Though feeling that it sounded naive, I described it. Perhaps it should not take place in Rome, I suggested—someone had mentioned Piacenza.
“Bologna,” Laura Betti said. “That’s where it could take place. It is famous for three things. Its learning—it has the oldest university in Italy; its food; and, lastly, its . . .” Here she used the most common word describing fellatio.
“It’s a specialty,” she said. “All the various forms are called by the names of pasta. Rigate, for instance, which is a pasta with thin, fluted marks. For that the girls gently use their teeth. When there used to be brothels, there was a Signorina Bolognese—that was her specialty.”
But I remained in Rome. The heat bore down. Dark Sicilians rose at two in the afternoon. The Tiber was green and stagnant. On Sunday mornings, the highway to the sea was jammed with cars, the music from hundreds of radios beating the blue, exhausted air. Rome was a city of women: you saw them everywhere, women in expensive clothes at the Hassler or the Hotel de Ville; women travelling with their husbands and without; young women claiming to be actresses—who knows what became of them; pairs of women in restaurants reading the menu very carefully; women stripped of illusion but unable to say farewell; women who owned shops and went to Circeo in the summer; divorced women who had once had a life in Trastevere; girls who looked unbathed, sitting in skimpy dresses in the restaurants, with young white teeth; principesse born in Vienna, living in the solitude of vast apartments; and aging fashion editors who seldom strayed far from the Hilton.