by James Salter
Against them, the legions of men: the handsome scum; men whose marriages had never been annulled; men who would never marry; men of dubious occupation; men from the streets and bars, of nullo, nothing; men with good names and dark mouths; swarthy men from the South, polished and unalterable, the nail of their little finger an inch long.
One June evening I was introduced to a woman whose apartment might be for rent. She was small, well dressed, and untrusting—French-Canadian as I found out. Gaby was her name—Gabrielle, I suppose. She was seductive and at the same time disdainful; life had taught her hard lessons, among them, I sensed, to think always of money and to hate men. The result was a passionate interest in human frailty.
She rejoiced, somewhat bitterly, in the weaknesses and secret vices of those in the film and literary worlds: Moravia, Italy’s most famous writer; Visconti; John Cheever (who had lived for a season or two in Rome); Pietro Germi, who left his wife for a young actress and was betrayed by her in the most humiliating way; Thyssen, the rich art collector; countless others.
She told me the story of a singer I’d met once. She had begun as an actress, a shy, sweet girl who was given a chance to sing in a revue. She had to sleep with the star of the show and afterward the producer. But they cut her part. She went to bed with the star’s brother and, finally, the stage manager. He took her to a house, a large one, and into a room upstairs. It was dark. “Take off your clothes,” he told her. When she had done this, he said, “Put these on,” and handed her a pair of very high-heeled shoes. Then he had her get on her hands and knees on the bed. Suddenly the lights came on. There were other men in the room, all the previous ones, the star, the producer, the electrician, and they all came toward her laughing.
Gaby told the story of Corinne Luchaire, a prewar French star. “She was Göring’s mistress.”
I vaguely recalled a slender, beautiful blonde. “Göring’s mistress? Not really?”
“Of course!” she hissed. “Don’t you know anything?”
Corinne Luchaire, she said, had been arrested in her apartment in Paris by the French Resistance and kept there all night while forty-one men raped her. She spent three years in jail. At her trial, her lawyer read aloud the entire de Maupassant story of collaboration, “Boule de Suif”—about the whore who didn’t know that the soldier who came to see her was German. “He was naked.” I had never read the story, which was the first de Maupassant ever published, and even now I’m not sure if Gaby’s version is correct, but it is the one I remember.
Gaby had been pursued, of course—that was one of the roots of her obsession. The Sicilian prince who, as they were dancing at a ball, took her hand and said, “Here. What do you think of it?” having placed his naked member in her hand. The lecherous journalists and lawyers. She rained images on me, some of them so intense they remained in my flesh like wounds.
She also introduced me to Fellini. She brought him stories. “Talk to me, talk to me”: he wanted nothing in writing; he was inspired by listening, he said. It was often remarked that there were, at the time, only two real artists in all of Europe, Picasso and Fellini. Picasso, a god, was ancient and remote. Fellini was a man who sat in shirtsleeves: he resembled his photographs, rumpled, with black hair growing out of his ears, like an unsuccessful uncle.
I met him at the studio where he was working. The conversation began in Italian; he did not speak English, he apologized. I had recently been to the Vorkapich lectures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were essentially a tribute to Slavko Vorkapich, the master of a kind of montage used in the nineteen thirties and forties: pages of a calendar falling away to indicate days or months passing; an ocean liner, then a train to show travel over great distances. The entire film world of the East Coast had attended the lectures, I said. It was difficult to obtain a seat, and of all the directors whose work had been chosen to illustrate concepts Fellini was the one most often used, with Eisenstein second. Fellini gave a modest nod. He seemed grateful, the honor. He had only one question. “Who is Vorkapich?” he wanted to know.
On a slip of paper he wrote his telephone numbers—if there was anything that might be of some help, he urged me to call him.
I was sitting one night in a restaurant, and two women sat down at the next table. One was American, older, with thin hands, and the other young, blond, with a striking figure. They had just been to Capri and were talking with animation about it. Soon they were sampling a dish I had ordered and I was tasting their wine. The younger one’s glances were open and friendly. I could read palms, I told them—I found myself eager to touch her. “Tell me your name,” I suggested.
“Ilena,” she replied.
I examined her palm with feigned authority. “You will have three children,” I said, pointing to some creases. “You are witty—it shows that here. I see money and fame.” I felt her fingers pressing mine.
“You are an ass,” she said gaily. “That means nice, no?”
Ilena may have been her name or it may have been simply the name she wore, like a silk dressing gown one longed to peel back. Warmth came off her in waves. She was twenty-three years old and weighed sixty-two kilos, the absence of any part of which would have been a grave loss. She was, I learned, a mistress of John Huston, who was in Rome directing a film. She had also been the companion of Farouk, the exiled king of Egypt. She had met him at the dentist’s office. He was there with his lawyer, she said, a detail I felt no one could invent.
Farouk’s days had started in the evening. Like a true playboy, he rose late. He liked fine cars—he had a Rolls and a Jaguar. He loved to eat. I thought of the large men I had known, many of them good dancers, graceful, even dainty. Was it true of him? “Darling, we never danced,” she said.
It was clear that she had been fond of him. They had travelled to Monte Carlo together, to the chemin de fer tables, where, a prodigious gambler, he was known as the Locomotive. The night he collapsed and died in a restaurant on Via Cassia she was allowed to leave by the back door before the press arrived.
Whether or not she was an actress or ever became one, I do not know. Of course, she wanted to be—she had already played great roles.
We had a drink, the three of us, at the Blue Bar and a gelato on the Piazza Navona. On Via Veneto she stopped to talk with a group of elderly Italian businessmen. It was lovely to watch her. Her legs, the silk of her print dress, the smoothness of her cheeks, all of it shone like constellations, the sort that rule one’s fate.
We dropped the American woman at her hotel, the Excelsior. Sitting in the car, I turned to Ilena and said simply, “I adore you. I have from the first moment.”
In response she kissed me and said, “To the right.” It was late; she had an appointment in the morning at Elizabeth Arden and wanted to go home.
“Are you married?” she asked as we drove.
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
It was to a man in his eighties, she explained. I recognized the story from the newspapers—she had married him to get a passport. He was in an old people’s home, an istituto. She went to visit him there, she said.
We went on to the Parioli, where, in a somewhat dubious building on Via Archimede, Ilena lived. The apartment was small and drearily furnished, but on the wall was a large picture of John Huston that had appeared in Life. Lying on the floor were books that Huston had given her to read. He might just as well have given her a chemistry set or a microscope. “You must never stop learning,” he told her—she could do him perfectly. I could hear the rich, rolling, faintly cynical voice that I knew from his documentary on the battle of San Pietro.
“Never stop learning,” he repeated. “That’s very important. Promise me that.”
“Of course, John,” she answered.
In an album were clippings of the two of them, Huston with a white, patriarchal beard. He was a coccolone—someone who likes to be babied—and very tight
. “To get a thousand dollars from him is so difficult,” she said. He was also lonely. He would call on the phone: “What are you up to, baby?”
“Nothing.”
“Come right over. Right away.”
He had no friends, she said, and hated to go out. He was living in a suite in the Grand Hotel on a diet of vodka and caviar. “John,” she would ask him, “do you want some girls?”
“Bring them around,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”
She brought three, one of them eighteen years old—she liked young, tender girls, she explained. The late afternoon was best. “Darling,” she said to me after describing a scene that might have taken place at Roissy, “you’re a writer, you should know these things.”
Huston had fought at Cassino, she told me, as if in justification.
“No, he didn’t.”
“But he did. He’s told me stories.”
“He was a film director in the war. He never fought.”
“Well, he thinks he did,” she said. “That’s the same thing.”
I liked her generosity and lack of morals—they seemed close to an ideal condition of living—and also the way she looked at her teeth in the mirror as she talked. I liked the way she pronounced “cashmere,” like the state in India, Kashmir. Her cosmetics bag was filled with prescriptions, just as the shelf in her closet was crammed with shoes. Once we passed a big Alfa Romeo that she recognized as belonging to a friend, the chief of detectives in Rome. She had made love with him, of course. “Darling,” she said, “there’s no other way. Otherwise there would have been terrible trouble about my passport. It would have been impossible.” There was, I discovered, besides Huston, an Italian businessman supporting her.
There was a film festival in Taormina. She had looked forward to it for days, and when she finally went I languished in Rome. The week passed slowly. I heard her distant voice—I did not know where Taormina was, exactly—on the telephone. “Oh, darling,” she cried, “it’s so marvelous.” She was going to have the same agent as Monica Vitti, she said excitedly. A director had promised her a part in a James Bond film. She was not staying at the San Domenico Palace; she was at the Excelsior. Tomorrow she would be at the Imperiale—I understood what all that meant—and on Sunday she was going to receive a prize.
“Which prize?”
“I don’t know. Darling, I can’t believe it,” she said.
At last there was a telegram—I had felt that I might not see her again—“Coming Monday Rapido 5. Afternoon,” and signed with her name. It was sent from Ljubljana—Yugoslavia.
I met the train. It was thrilling to see her coming along the platform, a porter behind her with her bags. Some things are only good the first time but seeing her was like the first time. I knew she would say “darling.” I knew I would say, “I adore you.”
The film festival had left a glow. At a reception there, among scores of faces, she had seen a young man in a silk foulard with a brilliant unwavering smile, a wide smile, “like a killer’s.” She was wearing a white beaded dress. Her arms were bare. Fifteen or twenty minutes later she saw him again. The second barrel, as the lawyers say, was fatal. She said only, “Let’s leave.” Without a word he offered her his arm.
I listened with some unhappiness but without anger. Faithfulness was not what I expected.
“You’ll get to the top,” I told her, almost reluctantly, “but you shouldn’t . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“If I don’t become too much of a whore,” she said.
We drove to Paris, coming up through the Rhône Valley. Past Dijon we were on a back road along a canal and came to a wide dam where fishermen’s lines dropped forty or fifty feet into clear green water. The dark shapes of fish—I took them to be pike—were coasting lazily about. We watched the biggest ones approach, ignore the bait, and move off to lie motionless. “Like sultans,” she commented. I felt she knew.
In some mysterious way that I accepted without wonder, the film I had been writing with little conviction went into production in 1968. At Cannes, the following year, its screening was less than a triumph. The audience, at a moment when it should have felt fulfillment, broke into loud laughter. On the terrace of the Carlton afterward, I could not help overhearing the acid remarks. There was some brief pleasure in having my doubts confirmed.
Movies are like passion, brilliant and definitive. They end and there is an emptiness. “The vulgar falsehoods of the cinema,” as someone has put it. They are narcotic; they allow one to forget—to imagine and forget. Looking back, I suppose I have always rejected the idea of actors as heroes, and no intimacy with any of them has changed this. Actors are idols. Heroes are those with something at stake.
During the war, I remembered, we went to movies almost nightly. We laughed at them as the men and women in evening dress at Cannes had laughed at mine.
Nevertheless, filled with ambition, I had wanted to direct a film of my own. I had a story by Irwin Shaw, and a star—Charlotte Rampling—who had agreed to be in it. Then she changed her mind. At the last minute, after we flew all night to Rome, where she was shooting something else, she was persuaded to be in the film again. Visconti, she said—he was just then directing her—was a true genius. I tried not to be disheartened. I was judging her unfairly, by her conversation and personality, while there she was, flesh and blood and willing to perform. She refused dinner—to get back to a boyfriend, I was sure—and after twenty or thirty minutes raced off in a car. Her agreement to be in the film, however, enabled us to get the money to make it.
I was to learn many things about her: that she chewed wads of gum, had dirty hair, and, according to the costume woman, wore clothes that smelled. Also that she was frequently late, never apologized, and was short-tempered and mean. The boyfriend, a blond highwayman, was a vegetarian. He prescribed their food. “Meat,” he murmured in a restaurant, looking at the menu. “That’ll kill you.” In the morning sometimes they danced maniacally in the street, like two people who had just had an enormous piece of luck. During the day, after every scene, she flew into his arms like a child while he kissed and consoled her.
Midway through shooting—we were near Avignon—she refused to continue unless her salary was doubled and her boyfriend took over as director. She got the money, but the producer refused to back the mutiny. When I heard what had happened, I found it hard to suppress my loathing, although in retrospect I wonder if it might not have been a good thing. The boyfriend might have gotten some unimagined quality from her and made of the well-behaved film something crude but poignant—something compelling.
The truth is, the temperament and impossible behavior of stars are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties—these are the stuff of the myths. Modern deities should be no different.
In the end the film we made, Three, was decorous and mildly attractive. It was popular at Cannes and had some flattering reviews in America. A young women’s magazine voted it the selection of the month and critics had it on their ten-best lists, but they were alone in this. Audiences thought otherwise.
There were opportunities to direct again, but I remembered lying on the stone beach at Nice late one day, when we were close to finishing, wearing a pair of Battistoni shoes, and feeling utterly spent. I felt like an alcoholic, like Malcolm Lowry. It seemed the morning after. I looked down and saw the white legs of my father. All of it had demanded more than I was willing to give again.
For its real adherents the life never ended. I liked the stories of producers driving down to Cap d’Antibes in convertibles with two or three carefree girls. I had had notes placed in my hand by the wives of leading men, bored and unattended to, that said in one way or another, “Call me,” and had seen actors emerging from the Danieli in Venice, wrapped against the fall weather in expensive coats,
fur-lined within and cloth without. The fur was the luxury in which they lived, the cloth a symbol of the ordinary world from which they were removed. Off to Torcello for lunch, jolting across the wide lagoon, the wind blowing the dark green water to whiteness, past San Michele with its brick walls, the island on which Stravinsky and Diaghilev lay buried—the real and the false glory, one moving past the other, though there are times when one cannot tell which is which.
The best scripts are not always made. There are so many factors: timing, impulse, frivolity, accident. The films that are made are like menhirs, standing amid the rubble of everything broken or lost, the marvelous lines, scenes, the great effort lavished like milt over roe. The agents and stars kick through it idly. Perhaps it is this waste, this vast debris, which nourishes the glory.
I was a poule for ten years, fifteen. I might easily have gone on longer. There was wreckage all around, but it was like the refuse piled behind restaurants: I did not consider it—in front they were bowing and showing me to a table.
In Toronto, under amiable conditions, the last of the films I wrote was made. It was called Threshold, prophetically for me. Although I wrote other scripts, I had a deserter’s furtive thoughts.
The movie was about a cardiac surgeon and the first artificial heart. The writing, as one sees often in retrospect, was imperfect, but I could not at the time imagine how to improve it. The budget was too small and the actors were not all ones we wanted. Some of the best scenes were dropped or awkwardly played as a result. When I finally saw the movie, feeling as always naked in the audience, I saw mostly the flaws, quite a few of them my own fault.
Years later, I wrote one (I thought) final script—overwrote, I should say. Again, only the seed of a story was provided: a reclusive star of the first magnitude who has not permitted an interview for years grants one to a very private, literary writer, one of whose books she happens to like. She has everything, he has almost nothing other than familiarity with the great dead and the world they define. Somehow it enthralls her, and for an hour or a week they fall in love.