by Anne Edwards
Cathy was the social one with many friends, a developing artist, and amazingly sensitive to others—especially to me. I could easily imagine that her friends confided in her and trusted her comments or advice. She also had an unusual grasp of language for one so young. Without a male figure in the house to share her attention, we were perhaps closer than many mothers and daughters. But it was her understanding heart—and her ability to express what she felt—that bound us (and still does).
The American film colony in London now consisted of both expats and recent arrivals—probably in equal numbers. Many of the newcomers were associated with Columbia Pictures. The two groups commingled, and I found new friends and colleagues. Columbia had gained the upper hand in Anglo-American production for two major reasons. In the 1950s, when the rise of television all but mined many Hollywood studios, Columbia embraced it by establishing a major television subsidiary, Screen Gems. The profits from this enterprise were then channeled into the company’s film productions. While MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century-Fox had turned their backs on television, Columbia, who had trailed behind these movie mammoths for years, was now solidly entrenched at the top. Not only was the company making its own films and television series, it was a distribution company for independents.
Relationships were not always amiable between the men working in the film colony. Often one man’s success was a thorn in another’s ambition. Also, for reasons not revealed (or rather, kept secret), some expats had begun receiving credit under their own name and others had not (a disparity that continued for too many years). Sunday baseball games in Hyde Park continued, but hostility prevailed and bitterness bred among the expats who believed that others of their group had made covert deals with the Committee, held behind closed doors, and had named others. There remained a large segment of the expats who were working as writers for “slavery pay” as Lester termed the low salaries of the expats. Also, selling an original screenplay was extremely difficult. The studios owned a library of literary works—plays, short stories, books, and a backlog of old films that could be remade. The same was true about the music, which studios had bought for earlier movies and reused for current productions.
The expat community was not limited to actors, writers, directors, and producers. Some of Hollywood’s finest cameramen, sound engineers, cutters, and composers had been blacklisted and forced to find work and make deals for themselves. For those who had ambitions to be producers, the added pressure was that of putting a deal together. This involved packaging, distribution, promotion, and selling. Carl Foreman, foremost among those artists who had gone beyond their original career choices, writing in his case, to branch out into independent filmmaking, had started Open Road Productions. His first movie under that banner—The Guns of Navarone, from a novel by Alistair MacLean—had been a huge box-office success. Carl was extremely gifted at self-promotion. Whatever movie he was shooting quickly became identified in the media as “Foreman’s film” or a “Carl Foreman production.”
The recent years had found Carl less interested in writing than supervising a script’s development and being engaged with all the other facets of his productions. He had reached out to the expat colony and surrounded himself with an extremely talented and cohesive team to whom he paid below-scale wages. Open Road Productions at the time was a leading independent overseas production company with grand offices on Green Street off Park Lane in fashionable Mayfair. One fine day in May, nearby Hyde Park abloom in golden daffodils and flaming tulips, I made my way to their offices for a meeting with Carl’s associate producer, Leon Becker. Carl had optioned the best-selling book, Born Free, and was considering me as a candidate to “crack the back” of it as a first step to screen adaptation.
Leon was not a man comfortable in conducting a conversation across a desk. The hour was late for lunch and as he had not had his, he asked if I might like to join him. We went around the corner to a small sandwich shop that had a few tables set out on the street. I had read the book and offered up some ideas. He seemed to like my suggestions. Obviously ill at ease, he then set forth what the company would be willing to pay me for my services. It was low even as a sub-rosa fee.
“You might very well get the job of adapting the book,” he added quickly, I suppose as a sweetener.
“I feel like a former headliner being asked to come in to test for a bit role!” I laughed. “I am not interested in auditioning,” I added. “I am working on my own project [meaning the novel that was still in flux] and really am not sure I would want to take the time out for the length of time an adaptation would take. Sooooo . . . you tell Carl that I will be happy to do a twenty-five-page breakdown of Born Free, if he is willing to pay me twice what you have just offered.”
“I’ll give him that message,” he said, averting my glance.
After lunch, he went his way and I went in a different direction.
The concept of a breakdown of a book purchased for films was to find the main thrust of the story and major characters, to cut the chaff from the wheat without compromising the author’s intention. Characters that do not contribute to the continuity of the story have to be cut. The trick was to find others who might be developed in a manner that would be more filmically dramatic. As example, in Margaret Mitchell’s famed book Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara had borne two children before she married Rhett Butler. To make her “more desirable” and amplify the dramatic power of the death of their daughter, Bonnie Blue, Scarlett’s two older children were not acknowledged in the movie although her two earlier marriages were included.
Often, two characters can be combined into one, scenes reset to allow for available and less expensive locations, or camera shots created that will both lower the budget and intensify the impact. Perhaps one of the most memorable examples was the Atlanta railway depot scene in Gone with the Wind where the depot had been turned into a field hospital for thousands of wounded and dying Southern Confederate soldiers just before the Northern Union troops ravage and occupy the city. This scene had been movingly evoked in the novel but would have cost a fortune in extras to film. Cinematographer William Cameron Menzies (who won the Academy Award for his work on the film) had handled this problem by pulling the camera farther and farther back, widening the shot to show up close the terrifying numbers of moaning, writhing, fallen Confederate soldiers as they lay stretched out on the open, parched field, crying for aid that was not there and would never come. The farther the camera pulled back the smaller and more distant the “men” at the far end of that field could be distinctly seen. Dummies designed in various positions were substituted for the extras, and the camera swept high and over their forms. This dramatically cut cost and sped up the action. Menzies then went in with his camera for a close-up of Scarlett, horrified at the carnage she was witnessing, that one shot giving total motivation for the ensuing scenes of her desperation to escape Atlanta before the Yankees had captured the city.
A good breakdown also gave a producer and director a guide as to the necessary locations and the number of characters needed to be cast. It was a starting point for a production. Many producers, directors, and adapters did their own breakdown. Still, having one in hand early in a film’s development was an aid to the production team and could save considerable money in the long run. I had discovered that a unique part of my creative abilities in these early years was to visualize written scenes and to see the narrator as a camera. It had just come to me naturally.
Wishful thinking had combined with the truth when I once had confided to Norman Mailer that I was planning one day to write a novel about the McCarthy period and the expat community in London. For years, I kept journals, notes, character sketches, before I came to the realization in the early 1960s that many (make that most!) of our lives remained in flux and that no one yet, including myself, knew the result and certainly not how history would record the period. Due to that conclusion, I felt the novel would have to wait a time before I could write it. Meanwhile, I was quite ha
ppy to do the breakdown of Born Free (once Carl settled on a better deal) to support we three, while in whatever spare time I had I went to work on another novel. The crux of everything I ever wrote had been a story element that stressed a guiding principle, what the French call idee-maitresse. Mine was simple. Survival, a common drive of almost every sane person—and insane ones as well. One variation intrigued me—guilt at surviving an experience that inexplicably killed many others and left you alive.
Joined with this was the horror of the Holocaust. And, lately, a phenomenon of unlikely mass murders, which kept appearing on the front pages of the press. I began to research these. Somewhere during this process, my two major characters for a novel (to be called The Survivors) started to take life. This would be a suspense-love story involving two people who are drawn together by the mutual guilt of being alive when so many others had not escaped extermination. The woman would be the lone survivor of her murdered family; the man, a war correspondent, spectator to the power, greed, and intolerance that led to the cold-blooded massacres of World War II. There would be love and suspicion that brings them together and yet pushes them apart, and a cunning mass murderer to be caught. I wanted the story set in locations I knew intimately. Therefore, Klosters, Switzerland, and London, but which part of that great metropolis? I wondered. London is a city divided not only by sections and the river Thames, but by dozens of dialects and class divisions. Where my heroine lived before the murders would be an important element.
On weekends, I put aside my work for Open Road and, with the children, investigated the various areas of London for my book-to-be. There were shopkeepers to talk to, small cafes for lunch or tea, old homes that were open at certain hours to the public, parks to stroll through, churches to attend. One Saturday afternoon it would be Regent’s Park (too conservative), Mayfair (too upper class), Swiss Cottage (possible), St. John’s Wood (also possible), and then—finally we spent a day in Hampstead. That was it.
I remembered how fond my friend, the American travel writer Kate Simon, was of Hampstead. After my third visit, I understood why. Kate had described Hampstead as having streets “extraordinarily fanciful, yielding houses for Ushers [the family in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous tale of horror] to decay in, for rotting loneliness and people administering slow poisons to their loved ones.” How delicious! How creepy! How apt!
Hampstead wears almost as many disguises as it has corkscrew, eighteenth-century alleys (outdoing all other sections of London, I think). Never good at mazes, I easily got lost as there seemed no specific route to follow to reach a high street (main thoroughfare). There were narrow paved and cobbled roads, jagged with cottages from pre-Victorian days. Go around a turning and you were faced with stately brick and gated homes where Queen Victoria’s son, Edward VII, had visited friends and lovers. The area was a delightful hodgepodge of architectural style and, happily, the modernists had not yet torn down the old shops and replaced them with cement-block buildings.
Hampstead Heath delighted me. The rambling, curving paths of this massive public park were covered in autumn leaves, the gently rising and falling slopes of its hilly grounds in magnificent bloom in spring and summer. Children’s shouts and laughter echoed as they ran through the woody, leafy trails playing games of tag or hide-and-seek. On rainy days, there was the heady scent of wet wood and damp moss and, on sunny ones, the sweet fragrance of new blooms. One could quite easily become lost, or could experience pure communication with nature. My young woman was a dreamy sort, somehow isolated from the outside world, only comfortable before the murders when in her home among family and a small domestic staff. She often would have gone to the Heath to paint or write or just to surround herself with what the ancient poet Milton called “beldame Nature.” Her house would not have been one of the great houses but, more likely, a large Victorian cottage, neatly kept yet badly in need of modernization.
I cannot recall when it was that I realized Leon Becker’s interest in me had become personal.
He was always the gentleman and not prone to discuss his private life. I knew he was a widower, his wife, Kathryn, having died of an overdose of sleeping pills the previous year. He intimated the dosage had been accidental. I was shocked to learn (not from Leon) that she had been having an affair with Carl Foreman and that her death had been recorded as a suicide, a note having been found beside her body. It could well have explained why Estelle Foreman had returned to the States and filed for divorce. I was amazed that their affair had been kept so quiet in a community that loved to share the current gossip. More so, that Leon continued to work side by side with Carl under such devastating circumstances. When I considered the masochistic elements involved, I was truly confused, for Leon did not seem to be a man who hated himself. Nor was he self-effacing.
I was thirty-four, Leon fifty, a stretch, yet no more than the age difference between Jule Styne and myself. Leon was not anything at all like Jule or Sy (or my ex-husband, for that matter), either in appearance or personality. He was on guard, conscientious, yet there was a touch of the poet in his deep brown, expressive eyes and often in his speech. Of Russian heritage, he had been born in Canada and raised in the States and yet seemed a foreigner to both those cultures. Tennis was his game of choice, and he played as often as his schedule allowed. His step was brisk, his energy fully charged at most times. He was also highly intelligent and spoke seven languages—five of them fluently, a great help when Open Road was shooting a movie abroad (Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece being the locations that film companies mostly used). As time went on, I came to understand the moodiness that shadowed some of our early meetings. As our relationship progressed, his dark attitude decreased. It was as though he had stepped out of the shade and into the sunlight. His sense of humor (especially in the use of wordplay) was exposed. He was warm, loving. A complicated man, he could display a childhood delight in such simple things as a dish of ice cream or the brilliance of late Turner paintings, his favorites at the Tate.
Of many things, Leon was a man of refined tastes and of consummate knowledge, not only of paintings but of music, especially music. Our transition from casual companion and business associate to dating took place after we had attended several operas and concerts together. No romantic overtures were made on his part, so I assumed we were good friends and nothing more ( I also knew that he was seeing Joseph Losey’s ex-wife, Mary, at the time) and I was quite content with the status quo. We shared a deep interest in music—opera, concert, classic, and modern. Our first dates were to see live performances, which I had hitherto not been able to afford for myself, and since most of my friends preferred films, theater, dinners at good restaurants, and gatherings at people’s homes, I had accepted these entertainments as a fair exchange.
I had, in fact, never heard opera live in an opera house, and it was a wondrous world that Leon made possible. Covent Garden, home of the Royal Opera, is a world of its own—and I loved it. From the sixteenth century, the area in the yawning hours of the morning was an open market, which I did on rare occasions venture to, and there might still be a flower lady extending an almost empty tray of violets and asking “’Ows about it, luv? All ’alf the price?” The market porters would be packing up their crates of unsold vegetables and the ground would be strewn with waste. Came evening, everything had been whisked clean, and taxis and elegant cars deposited gowned and tuxedoed patrons at the curb. Umbrellas would snap open as the operagoers ducked beneath them and carefully navigated the slippery steps to the open doors. By the second or third time that Leon accompanied me to the opera, I wore that green gown that I had bought on Sloane Street and felt very grand, for attendees did dress formal for the opera in those days!
I recall hearing Joan Sutherland sing the “Queen of Spades,” and excellent productions of Aida and La Traviata. The most thrilling experience for me—seated in the fifth row center—was the night Leon had tickets for Tosca, sung by Maria Callas. There was no disputing the diva’s brilliance. Callas had more than a superb
voice. The opera critic Andrew Porter called it “something else which cannot be defined—it has to do with bearing and gesture and timbre, and phrasing, and utterance of the words, and combined—the mysterious qualities which not only make her Callas, but also make every heroine she portrays distinct and indelible.” For me, that was Tosca, never to be forgotten. (Years later, the occasion still vivid to me, I would use the quote from his review in my biography of Maria Callas.)
Leon had an insatiable passion for Russian opera, as well as great piano music and the songs of Handel. One cannot deny Handel’s genius, but he was definitely not one of my favorites. Joan Sutherland always liked to tell the story of being invited to sing at the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s home in St. John’s Wood. Asked what she was to sing, she replied, “Handel’s ‘Let the Bright Seraphim.’” Beecham exploded, “Oh! Not Handel!” I felt much the same way.
Leon knew many of the performing artists, so after a concert we would go backstage where he would be greeted warmly. One night, after a Yehudi Menuhin concert at Royal Festival Hall, the world-famous violinist threw his arms around Leon. “He was my earliest accompanist,” he told me. “My good friend. We were children together. Prodigies together.”