by Jonathan Coe
She fell quite silent. Rachel thought that some words of encouragement might be in order. ‘It’s a good phrase anyway,’ she said. ‘You should use it as the title. But what about the other film, the German one …?’
‘Well …’ said Laura, ‘the next thing that happened was a message. A message online, out of the blue, from someone who had finally seen one of Roger’s requests for information. More than three years after he’d posted it, in fact. (Yes, that’s right – because Harry was already at nursery.) And that was how he found out the whole story of the film. And it was also the beginning of the end, for him.
‘This guy Chris had been browsing one of these film fan sites and just by chance he’d seen Roger’s old post. So he sent him a personal message …’ She paused to take another sip from her glass, but found it empty. ‘Goodness, that went quickly. Is there anything left in the bottle?’
‘Afraid not,’ said Rachel, with a regretful glance at her own glass. ‘We’ve certainly been getting through it tonight.’
‘That’s all right. I think it’s time to open another. And while I’m doing that,’ said Laura, rising effortfully to her feet, ‘you can have a look at the thread. It’s still there, on the website.’
And so, while Laura opened another bottle of Rioja and poured two more glasses, Rachel sat with the laptop on her knees and read through the exchange of messages which Roger had initiated, on the forums of a site called Britmovie.
23 October 2010 18:32
Hi Roger
Sorry for the delayed reply! I have only just discovered this site and seen your queries.
First off – I have never seen The Crystal Garden but your memory doesn’t deceive you. It was indeed shown in the ATV region one afternoon in the mid-sixties. This was certainly its only British TV screening and one of its very few public screenings anywhere in the world! I know this because my grandfather, Tom Ferris, was the man responsible.
It’s a long story and I don’t know how much information you want apart from the fact your memory is accurate. Let me know and I’ll try to fill in any gaps.
Cheers
Chris Ferris
23 October 2010 19:05
Hi Chris
This is incredible. I had given up hope of ever hearing back from anyone about this (to me) mythical film, and now you have confirmed everything I suspected! To find out that I didn’t dream or imagine it is an amazing moment for me. I am literally shaking in front of the computer as I type these words.
Please tell me every single thing you know about this film and its screening on British TV, starting at the very beginning.
Roger
24 October 2010 23:53
Chris
Are you still there?
Roger
25 October 2010 22:17
Hi Roger
Sorry to have left it a couple of days before replying. I can see you’re pretty keen to hear about this. But it’s taken me a day or two to get my thoughts together and put the facts in the right order.
So, where to start? Let’s start with the director of the film, Fred Goodman, or Friedrich Güdemann as he was known before he got out of Germany in the late 1930s. Friedrich (my grandfather could never bring himself to call him Fred) came from Magdeburg, in the East. He was a young and talented DP who had worked for several years at UFA studios. But he also had ambitions to direct, and had apparently been getting quite frustrated that no opportunities had presented themselves. The only thing he’d managed to do was a tiny little film, about 8 or 9 minutes long, which he’d made over one weekend at the country house of some friends, in the middle of winter, using their little son as the main actor. As far as I know it had no real plot to speak of (you would perhaps know more about this), just one sequence of a little boy exploring the grounds of this house, making his way through this tunnel in one of the walls and emerging into a magical landscape, a garden made entirely of crystal. That’s all there was to it, and yet the few people who saw the film said it cast an extraordinary spell on them. Including my grandad. It was a visionary piece of work, he said. At the very least, it was an amazing calling card. But Friedrich was Jewish, of course, and he’d already left it dangerously late to get out of Germany. When he did finally make his escape, he took the film with him – the only print in existence, on a single 16 mm reel. He pitched up in Paris and then a few months later managed to cross the Channel to London. This would be in ’37 or ’38. He soon got introduced to the film-making community here and found some work at Gainsborough, where he was DP on a couple of lowbrow comedies – sub-Will Hay stuff. God knows what he made of the films themselves, but I’m sure he did a good, professional job. Anyway, this was where he met my grandfather, who was designing titles for Gainsborough at the time. Friedrich asked him to do some new titles for The Crystal Garden – unpaid, that is. In his spare time. He thought it would be good to have an English-language version, and it was only the opening titles that needed changing – the film had no dialogue as far as I know. My grandad liked Friedrich and was happy to do him the favour. So the film was screened for him and he was quite bowled over, apparently. He said it was beautifully photographed, of course, because Friedrich was a very gifted guy, but the thing that made the strongest impression on him, funnily enough, was the music. There’d been no money to use an orchestra or anything like that, so once again Friedrich had called in a favour, and got a friend to write some music for it, and persuaded this soprano – it may even have been the same woman who owned the country house – to do the recording. Just her voice, I believe, and a little chamber group. Grandad often used to talk to me about this music and how beautiful it was but I never heard it myself, sadly.
Well, this has already taken longer than I thought so I’ll pack it in for now and continue the story tomorrow if I get the time.
25 October 2010 22:33
Oh God yes, I remember that music. So lovely, and so sad! Like the distillation of every lament for childhood innocence that you ever heard. How did I understand that, how did I tune in to it, when I was just five years old? Or am I projecting, looking back on my five-year-old self, my eyes riveted to that tiny black and white screen, the recording of that music (already thirty years old) drifting out of the puny speaker on our little Ekco TV set through a quagmire, a forest of pops and crackles and distortions? And the gas fire hissing in the hearth, my mum next door in the kitchen, getting dinner ready for when Dad came home. I think …
… I think I’m already high on the stuff you’ve told me, and I’ve had 2 or 3 glasses of wine too many while reading it, and it’s always a mistake to post when pissed, so …
26 October 2010 22:42
Hello again Roger
I hope you didn’t drink too much more wine last night, and your hangover wasn’t too horrific this morning!
Anyway, I can see that this is an important story for you, and I’m sorry to have left you hanging in the air like that. It’s taking me longer than I expected to tell you everything. So let’s pick up where we left off.
My grandad Tom designed a nice set of opening title cards for the film and added them to the print, but I’m pretty sure Friedrich never saw them – not until many years later, anyway. In fact Grandad was still working on the film, and still had the print in his possession, when he got a telegram from Friedrich which gave him quite a shock. It was sent from a transatlantic liner and it said that a friend of Friedrich’s had obtained a work permit for him in America at very short notice and he was off to Holly
wood. (Along with all the other, more famous European refugees from Nazi Germany who went there in those years – I’m sure you don’t need me to list their names.) And that was the last Grandad ever saw of him, as it turned out. Friedrich changed his name to Fred Goodman and after a few years in Hollywood he moved over to television and worked on a number of big shows for CBS and others. Which, coincidentally, is more or less what Grandad did after the war. He worked at Ealing Studios for most of the forties but made the transition to television almost as soon as commercial TV started up. He moved to the Midlands and worked for ATV, designing titles and captions to start with, finally ending up with a desk job in scheduling.
So that brings us to the mid-1960s. Grandad and Friedrich have sporadically – very sporadically – kept in touch during this time. A letter every two or three years. Grandad still has the print of The Crystal Garden and has shown it a few times at film societies and so on – at one point even offering to try and find distribution for it as a supporting feature but I don’t think anything came of that. Friedrich has given him carte blanche to get it shown whenever he can – he’s not interested in remuneration. And this is how Grandad one day gets his idea. The scheduling at ATV can be somewhat erratic, especially during the daytime, and the best care isn’t always taken to ensure that feature films, in particular, fill the spots that have been allowed to them. Quite often ten or fifteen minutes have to be filled in and for this reason a little stockpile of ‘standby’ material is kept on hand: sometimes cartoons and so on, but those can be expensive to use, so more often it’s cheaper material like terrible Public Information films from the 1950s. And so, Grandad decided to lend his print of The Crystal Garden to ATV so that they could drop it into the afternoon schedule like this if they ever needed to. To plug a ten-minute gap. And that is indeed what happened – once and once only – on the day you saw the film and it made such a strong impression on you.
So, I hope I have cleared up that mystery at least. It’s been nice connecting with someone who remembers the film – the story of Grandad and Friedrich and this one unrepeated screening is something of a legend in my household. It’s nice to know that someone saw it and, more importantly, actually remembers it.
27 October 2010 00:27
Chris
I can’t believe you have left the story unfinished like this. You haven’t answered the most important question of all.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRINT???
27 October 2010 21:46
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRINT??
28 October 2010 10:33
Dear Roger
Hm. Well, a quick ‘thanks’ or something after I told you all that stuff would have been nice, but anyway …
Briefly – when the Wall came down in ’89, Friedrich returned home to Magdeburg for the first time in more than sixty years. He wrote to my grandfather and asked him to send the print out to Germany as he wanted to see it again. And that’s what Grandad did. More than that I don’t know.
Hope this satisfies your curiosity.
Cheers
Chris
And that, it seemed, was the end of the thread. Rachel closed the laptop and handed it back to Laura, who had been watching her all this time, sipping her wine mechanically and leaning forward in her eagerness to observe her reaction.
‘Well …?’ said Laura, after a while, when no immediate response was forthcoming.
‘He certainly had it bad,’ said Rachel. ‘I hope that he didn’t … I hope you’re not going to tell me the next thing he did was go to Germany?’
Laura nodded slowly, with a sad, emphatic smile. ‘Of course. What else was he going to do?’
She ran a hand through her hair and took a deep breath. ‘Roger had a friend who lived over there. Well, not a friend, exactly – an academic colleague called James, who’d married a German woman and now taught film studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. When Roger was writing about The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, James had helped him to track down an old German TV documentary about Billy Wilder. He was resourceful and he knew his way around the key German film archives. So James made some routine initial enquiries but nothing came of them. Friedrich Güdemann had died in 2004 at the healthy age of ninety-five, but since then The Crystal Garden hadn’t turned up anywhere. So what had become of that single print? Was it with his family – and for that matter, where were his family? Did he have children and grandchildren back in America? Roger sent a message to Chris asking him if he knew anything about this, but Chris was no longer in the mood to answer any of my rude husband’s questions. So this was where James had to step in again.
‘Well, Güdemann had been gay, apparently – that was one of the first things he discovered. When he’d come back to live in Germany he was already an old man and his long-term lover was dead. Güdemann spent his last years in Leipzig, with his sister and brother-in-law. By the time James found all this out, the brother-in-law was the only one left alive, and he was in a care home and not particularly compos mentis. James found himself dealing with this man’s son-in-law, a guy in his late fifties called Horst. So we’re already several steps removed from Friedrich himself by now. After putting his father-in-law in a home, Horst had sold his house and put all his effects into a couple of big storage units in a warehouse on the outskirts of Leipzig. Did this include any of Friedrich’s stuff, James wanted to know? Horst wasn’t sure. He’d simply taken the entire contents of the house and stored them. His plan was to go through it all whenever he had the time but he hadn’t got round to it yet.
‘Now, I don’t know exactly what James said to him to get him to cooperate. But, somehow or other, he persuaded Horst to let him look through the contents of the units. And as soon as he emailed Roger to let him know about this, Roger was on the first plane to Germany. He literally booked the first flight he could find that evening. I was sitting up in bed reading, last thing at night, when he came in and announced that he was off to Leipzig the next day. He had to get up at 3.30. I remember him giving me a goodbye kiss and saying something to me about the film – how sure he was that he was going to find it, how this was going to be the end of the search, how it would all be over and done with in a couple of days. I kissed him back and told him that I was glad. And that was the last time I ever saw him.’
She tried to drink from her wine glass, but it was empty again. Her eyes seemed tired now, almost sightless.
‘I’ll fetch James’s letter,’ she said. ‘That will tell you the end of the story.’
Rachel noticed that Laura was slightly unsteady on her feet as she got up and left the room. She went into the ground-floor study and was gone for a few minutes. Rachel heard desk drawers being opened and shut repeatedly, papers being shuffled through, multiple tuts of impatience and frustration. But at last the document was found, and Laura returned, bearing it aloft in one hand while she carried a small bottle in the other.
‘Brandy,’ she explained. ‘Always good to finish off the evening with a brandy. And here’s the letter. Have a read of that while I pour you a little shot of brandy.’
There was still a little wine left in Rachel’s glass, but the brandy was added to it anyway, producing a liquid that was sickly orange in colour. She refrained from drinking it, and concentrated instead on the sheaf of handwritten sheets which Laura had given her. The handwriting was clear and firm, with a noticeable italic slant. The notepaper itself was thick, creamy yellow and expensively watermarked.
My dear Laura [the letter began],
What a terrible thing it is to have to
write these words. You said, at the funeral (and how beautifully you spoke to the congregation, on that wretched occasion), that I was not to blame myself for what happened. But how can I not? I was the one who led Roger to the place where he died. True, I could never have predicted what would happen there, but still – the fact remains. If it wasn’t for my intervention, your husband would be alive today.
Thursday was not the time to discuss the details of his last few hours. I promised you that I would write and tell you all that I could. So I shall begin at the time that I met Roger off the plane at Leipzig.
It was a bitterly cold morning. I met him at the airport (snow had delayed his connecting flight from Hannover by half an hour) and we went for a coffee at the airport bar. He did not waste any time in small talk – he came straight to the point and wanted to know everything about our forthcoming meeting with Horst. We had plenty of time but he made me gulp down my coffee and leave. As a consequence we arrived at the storage units about 15 minutes early. It was getting ever more snowy and although by now it was late in the morning, the sky was a thick grey-black and it felt like there would be no real daylight today. The storage place was simply a large warehouse on the outskirts of town: a place totally without character or atmosphere. There was a big car park outside. We parked the car and walked inside through the snow, and bought ourselves more scalding black coffee from the machine next to the reception desk. Then we sat there drinking it and waiting for Horst to arrive. I explained a thing or two to Roger: that it had not been easy, at first, to persuade Horst to let us look through these storage cupboards in search of Friedrich Güdemann’s effects. He was mistrustful of us. Until I had contacted him, he’d had no idea that Friedrich had had a career in film and television and the only reason he had agreed to meet us this morning, I was sure, was the possibility that we might be able to alert him to something among these belongings that was valuable and might be worth selling. I warned Roger that this might include the print of Der Garten aus Kristall, if we found it, but this suggestion did not seem to worry him, but only to excite him further. ‘You mean – you really think it might be here?’ he said, and that was his only reaction. He was so fixated on the idea of finding the film that he didn’t give a thought to what might happen to it afterwards, what kinds of dispute over ownership might arise. So powerful was his need, I now realize, to see it just once again, to relive – as best he could – those minutes of far-off enchantment he had enjoyed once, as a young and carefree schoolboy.