by Anne Edwards
I had recently read an article about Jules that said something to the effect that he was “a man still in search of a country and a cohesive artistic style.” Bea (his ex-wife) had told me once that he was always looking to morph into a new persona, never sure of who he really was or who he wanted to be. His parents had both been Russian immigrants who had settled in Harlem which, at that time, had separate black, Jewish, Irish, and Italian ghettos. Everyone seemed poor, and the groups were constantly fighting each other. The elder Dassins had eight children and they were hardly able to keep their family fed. “We were so poor, it was ridiculous,” Jules once said. “There was always the problem of eating. And it was cold . . . it was always so cold.”
“You know,” he also said to me, very seriously, when we happened to be talking about Vivien Leigh just after her tragic death in 1967. “I am the only man I know who understood Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien’s most famous role), for she was a woman’s creation, after all. But that line—‘I’ll never go hungry again—nor will any one of my family’—I understood that. Sympathized with that. I felt the same way when I was a young man. Still feel that way. It makes you ambitious—but it also makes you insecure, fearful.”
When I first met Jules he was in his forties. He was now in his midsixties. He looked tired and older than his years and somehow had the aura of defeat about him, something of course that Scarlett O’Hara never had, and since he had done reasonably well in Europe, adding rather than subtracting to his preblacklist status, it seemed odd. He was genuinely glad to see me. We were seated at a rather secluded table in the elegant dining room of La Reserve. Our waiter spoke English quite well, but Jules always addressed and answered him in French. We talked about a variety of things—the business (films), my books, his concern for his children (now adult). Suddenly, he asked me, “You were close to Bob Rossen, weren’t you?”
I explained the relationship.
“I always wondered how he could face his kids after he had named names, betrayed his friends. What kind of a role model is that for a son or daughter?”
“Stevie, his son, had the most trouble with it,” I admitted. I recalled how Bob was always telling Stevie to face down those who tried to bully him. Stevie was a sensitive youngster—not a fighter, really, and Bob wanted his son to be more of a macho man. “I believe that Bob thought the fact that he had given in to the Committee, not fought his battle, was a greater betrayal to his son than to those who he had named.”
Jules sat across from me thinking about that for a long time. He took a deep breath, cast his gaze somewhere in the past for a moment, and then turned back and stared hard at me. “That’s one of the saddest stories of the consequences of the Committee’s bullying tactics that I have ever heard,” he said in a soft voice, moist with emotion. “There can’t be anything worse than if a man’s children think he has betrayed them.”
He insisted on driving me home. Our conversation grew lighter, perhaps superficial as we glided around the curves of the seafront highway. He got out of the car to escort me to the door.
Not long after our dinner, his son Joe, who had been a singer, died of a heart attack. Jules suffered one himself a few months later but recovered. I never was able to get that moment out of my head when we were discussing Bob Rossen and a father’s betrayal to a son and how deeply Bob’s family situation had affected Jules. I wondered if he hadn’t felt his leaving Bea for Melina was also a betrayal to his children—or perhaps that his son had thought it had been. I made a mental note for my book to investigate the effect the blacklist had on the children whose lives had been upturned (including my own) and who thereafter carried the engraved stamp on their deepest, darkest, interior feelings of their parents’ decisions during the early days of the blacklist and of HUAC’s brutal gavel.
• 18 •
Going Home
Beyond the sealed shutter doors of the living room, the wind whipped across the patio and rattled the front gate. This was November, the time of Le Mistral, a dry cold, northerly wind that blows in squalls toward the Mediterranean coast of southern France. I had been told that it could reach a speed of 180 kilometers an hour and leave towering, aged palm trees bowed and broken, sands and roads littered with debris, and rooftops shed of tiles. Residents of the Cote d’Azur made a fairly mass exodus to calmer, less depressing places—for the rain and mist that preceded it, and then the untempered wind itself, affected one’s state of mind as well as one’s business, many of which closed for the entire month of November.
I sat, legs up, on the sofa, a blanket over them, Biba quivering on my lap, Chrissy and Sandy (growling under his breath) on the floor beside us. I could hear the click-clicking sound of Jay’s nimble fingers on the typewriter in the morning-room-cum-office. Genevieve (making her presence known with her grumbling) had deposited some groceries on the kitchen table and then slammed the door hard after herself. Dale had tried unsuccessfully to persuade me to bring Jay and the dogs to Gstaad for the month. Truth was, I had welcomed Le Mistral. I was not enamored with the gray skies, the lowering clouds, the sea that had turned to slate, and, especially, the need (in case of breaking glass) to live behind locked shutters and to have my days brightened only with artificial light. But the upside was that I could fully concentrate on my work. Visitors were few, and those who did come left as swiftly as they could once they realized no sun could be promised for the day following their arrival.
The dark soul of my novel was upon me. I had to find answers to all the questions that crowded my thoughts. I had named my protagonist (and antihero) Max Seaman (yes, with its homophonic in mind) and it was through him that I meant to convey to a reader the cataclysmic damage rendered to the men and women who had gone before the Committee, both those who had defied it and those who had caved in. They were all victims, as Dalton Trumbo had said.
I was exhausted this day. Le Mistral had blown fierce, turning more bellicose by the hour. I had been up all night wrapped in a blanket on the chaise lounge in my bedroom, writing. I managed a few hours sleep in the early morning—which could not reveal itself to me with all the shutters tightly sealed. I had edited the six or seven pages of lined yellow paper that contained my scrawled and marked-up handwriting that Jay was now transcribing on the typewriter, although I could not imagine how he could read my scribblings at all, never mind at the speed at which he was copying them.
The clicking stopped. A few moments later he came into the living room and stood by the fireplace, the fire now down to glowing embers. He held the pages to his chest, hands crossed over them. “I don’t think you should read these until tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, somewhat surprised as Jay seldom made such suggestions.
“You need a good night’s sleep to clear your head a bit.”
“What does that mean?”
“You shouldn’t be quick to change anything. This passage says it all. I understand Max now. I feel sorry for him, for his loss. You know, my heart was pounding as I was typing. I felt in a small way a part of something important. What you are writing is important.” He walked over and put the pages down on the cocktail table in front of the sofa. “I’ll make some coffee,” he announced and went into the kitchen as Biba jumped off my lap and followed him in.
We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, caressing our hot-brewed mugs of coffee between our swallows. Genevieve had left a yeast-scented bread loaf and several croissants along with some sliced ham, milk, cheese, and a half dozen eggs, several of which were apparently cracked, as their contents were oozing through the paper sack that held them, most probably the cause of her ill humor earlier. Despite Le Mistral’s wrath, boulangers in town had kept their ovens baking. I was sorry to have missed the sight of Genevieve tightly gripping the handlebars of her moped as the vehicle was accelerated ever faster by the winds on her way into town and the brassy fight she must have fought to make her way back against them.
Jay pulled the last cigarette from a pack and lit i
t. He made a show of not crumpling the empty packaging and stuffing it into a pocket. A ruse, but I did not miss the fact that he smoked well over a pack a day. Early on in our relationship I had tried hard, without nagging, to get him to cut down, with no success. I watched him now as he inhaled deeply and then struggled to stifle a cough.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine. I could use a few good days in the sun,” he replied in a gravelly voice once he had stopped coughing.
He did not look fine. He had lost weight in recent weeks, and his cheeks were sunken. I had been concerned about his cough, which had begun to sound deeply imbedded in his chest, and had suggested he see a doctor in Cannes whom Sidney had recommended. His refusal was brusque. I reluctantly let it alone. I knew he was finding Beaulieu a bit lonely without the stimulation of the group at Chalet Coward, who were now wintering in the islands.
“It’s none of my business,” I ventured, “but have you heard from Cole Lesley lately?”
“I had a card,” he answered tersely, “forwarded from Gstaad. He obviously lost our new address.”
I was about to suggest he might like to take a week’s vacation to Jamaica. Certainly he was due more than that as he hardly ever took time off. But he continued. “He wrote something like—‘sky is blue, sun is great, Noël in painting mode.’ On the other side was a copy of a painting Noël had done of the island. No invitation. And I don’t go where I’m not invited.” Coughing overcame him again and he turned away.
By nightfall, Le Mistral’s energy had slackened. I suggested we call and see if the African Queen was open for dinner. He was instantly enthusiastic. The restaurant was on a stretch of the coast just down the hill from us known as “Petite Afrique.” There were several other restaurants all with good food and one that was quite exceptional. Wagons of seawet fresh seafood were stationed on their patios for inspection and choice, many varieties totally unfamiliar to me. However, no one was seated outside, for Le Mistral had not been stilled. There remained a brisk wind that caused all the storefront canopies to flutter with a thudding sound. The sea remained unsettled; the many-splendored lights of the row reflecting on the agitated waves. Boats, docked at the far end of the marina, swayed in their berths.
The African Queen was our favorite restaurant. The ambiance was more California than the South of France. Movie posters of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, in their iconic roles as the alcoholic river captain and the maddening spinster traveling down river in Africa during World War I in the film for which the restaurant was named, decorated the walls along with fishnets and marine objects. The clientele was young, full of spirit. There was a singer who accompanied himself on the guitar, his repertoire current and fairly new American hits translated quite freely into French. The piece most requested seemed to be “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” the popular song from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, played and sung in such a unique fashion that, although lively and charming, might not have been recognized by the song’s composers, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The place was warm and cozy. Voices were spirited. A guest at the African Queen could linger as long as they wished. The bill was never presented until the diner requested it. And, indeed, we lingered, for Jay was never at a loss for a story to tell. This evening he was looking back at his life before coming to Europe, on how difficult it had been to be gay when he was young, how much he resented having been the sibling elected to live with, and take care of, his mother as she aged, because he had to keep his personal life so locked up that it took on a sleazy feeling. He had hated that. He still could not let the memory die.
Within two days, the sun rose golden, the roads were cleared, and at Villa Roquefille Gerard had swept the patio and terraces of fallen leaves and branches. Best of all, I was able to open all the shutters and could see daylight once again. The last week of November was approaching and with it, the American Thanksgiving. I made plans and invited guests to celebrate with Catherine (who was taking the long weekend off from her studies), me, and Jay (whom my friends considered a family member and always included in their gatherings). I tried to persuade Michael to fly over, but he was in the very last days of a political campaign he was managing. My expat friends came from all directions of the Cote d’Azur and Catherine was bringing a French fellow classmate; we would be thirteen in all.
Procuring a turkey was not an easy task, and finding cranberries and pumpkin for the usual holiday favorites—cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie—no less daunting. The first American-style supermarket (so advertised with much to-do) had opened on the coast highway just the other side of Nice, so Jay and I drove there to see what we could find. The place was gigantic with a distinctive circus feel to the decor. Dozens of flags lined the road leading to it. Rock music blared forth as you entered. People had come to see it as they would have gone to—well—a circus! The French were accustomed to shopping for their food supplies at stores that specialized in different categories—the boulangerie, charcuterie, and so forth. The supermarket introduced a new way of obtaining their household and cooking needs under one gigantic roof. There were crowds at every display, aisles were blocked with wagons. The largest group of gapers and tasters was gathered suspiciously around a massive display of wine—not bottled, but in cardboard containers, a first at that time in a country where wine is revered as no place else on earth.
In the international food section I found canned pumpkin and small tins of cranberry sauce, the latter produced in Great Britain and bound to be closer to jam and very sweet. The market appeared to have every fowl known to man, case after case of the packaged winged wonders. But no turkeys (“dinde”), which are not indigenous to France. Still, I had been told that they were being newly bred in some part of the country, obviously not the South of France. I finally located a butcher in Nice who was doing a brisk business in supplying turkeys to the American colony in the area. The birds were on the small side, the largest he had weighed between twelve to thirteen pounds. I bought two of them (“plucked and beheaded, please”). I liked the idea anyway, as then there would be four legs for those of my guests who were hooked on drumsticks.
I doctored the cranberry sauce, toning down the sugar content as best I could with lemon juice and chunks of oranges—a bit of brandy poured in for a little nip. I made two pumpkin pies topped with crème fraîche and two rich, delicious Boston cream pies (my mother’s recipe—and definitely an American invention). Believe me, no one went hungry. I have always held that Thanksgiving (and Christmas, as well) should be a shared, all-in-one family kind of meal, so I had Gerard bring in the patio table to extend the dining table. With a board and some padding he managed to make the two tables connect and level. The sideboard had to be moved into Jay’s office to make room. We then placed it, front facing into the dining room, against the opened double doors so that it could be used to serve from.
Dinner, ready at six, was a huge success. Catherine’s guest, however, had found fowl served with a fruit sauce “most exotic” and had no idea what a pumpkin was—or even its French translation, “citrouille.” When told that it was a kind of squash, he commented, “How unusual American cookery is! Fruit with the main course and a vegetable for dessert!” As he took two helpings of everything, I assumed he approved.
All in all, it was a memorable Thanksgiving and somewhat of a wake-up call. For the hours of that day, I forgot that I was an American in a foreign country. I had felt comfortable, whole.
Catherine would be returning for Christmas, and I wanted to spend as much time as I could with her. So, on the Monday following Thanksgiving I set a rigid work schedule for myself and accepted no interim social engagements. Eleanor Wolquitt had gone to the Congressional Library in Washington on my behalf and had sent me transcripts of Bertolt Brecht and other writers’ appearances before the Committee, of which good ole Harry S. Truman had said, shortly after turning over the presidency to Dwight D. Eisenhower: “The House Un-American Activities Committee is the most un-American t
hing in America!” Reading these gut-grinding transcripts demonstrated how right that gentleman from Missouri had been.
That morning, the sun just rising in a peaceful blue sky, I started work on a key scene toward the end of the novel where Max, whose life is closing in on him, flies to Washington from London to search out answers to the many questions he had about his testimony there a decade earlier, the one in which he had brought himself to believe that to survive he must betray his friends. He goes to the Congressional Library and takes out the transcript of his appearance. Once I had settled in on my chaise, yellow pad and several pens on the ready, the words seemed to flow directly from my brain to the paper. I wrote that Max sat down with his transcript
in that scholarly place . . . his hand on top of the nineteen pages (only nineteen pages!) that represented his entire testimony. Just sat there with his hand resting that way. What was that—a caress? Who the hell did he think he was comforting? And why had he just sat that way never reading the transcript he had come all the way to Washington to read? Irrational—totally irrational. The ground was slipping from under him. . . .
And yet he had not felt bad when he left Washington. That was the odd thing. He had in a way even felt comforted. There had been a demonstration of young people in Washington at the same time he had been there. And he had left envying them. They cared. They felt akin to this country. Dissent passionate enough to march itself right up to where the heart was. “Beat for us a while. Listen to our voices,” was the message their attitude revealed. They cared. They belonged. This was their country and they were still young enough to fight for it their way. They were still hopeful that it could be what they dared to dream it could be.
A lot of what I personally felt was scrawled on the pages of that yellow lined pad. In my youth, I had written protest letters—hundreds of them—to senators, congressmen, newspapers, guilds, and unions. I joined organizations that seemed to be for what I was for—the Anti-Nazi League, charities for the victims of beleaguered nations—I signed petitions for the integration of blacks into the schools in the South—and for the right for all people of all races who were citizens of the United States to vote in our elections. Incredibly, these actions (which seemed the least I could do) were mostly accountable for the Committee’s interest in me . . . that, and my close relationship to Robert Rossen. Guilty by association had become the Committee’s mantra.