Enrico was back at the Ritz. I was sitting on the terrace of the Rhumerie Martiniquaise on the boulevard St. Germain, a place I patronized but rarely—one has one’s little habits, what can I say?—when who should come walking past but my friend Ellsworth Kelly. “Join me for a drink?” I called out to him. Why not? He climbed the two steps to the terrace and pulled up a chair. “I’m on my way to an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art,” he said. “Want to come along?” “Sure. This morning I just sent off my article on Danièle Delorme’s new movie, so I’m free as a bird.” A few nights before, I had filled him in on the movie assignment and the teaching job that had emanated therefrom.
“You’re teaching Danièle Delorme English!” he salivated. “And other things?”
“Ellsworth, you have an evil mind.”
“You’re not going to drag that along,” he said, pointing to the Royal Standard at my feet.
“No,” I said, “this is Patsy’s. She asked me to drop it off after I’d finished my piece.”
Ellsworth looked at me oddly. He knew we were living together. “Drop it off where?”
“Right up the street, at the little hotel on the rue de l’Échaudé … I know, I know,” I said in response to Ellsworth’s slightly malicious grin. “She’s there for just a few days.” He waited for more. He was not above a good tidbit of juicy gossip. “It’s a long story,” I said, gesturing to the waiter. “I’ll be right back,” I said, picking up the typewriter.
“No, I’ll go with you,” he said.
Magnanimously, I folded an extra hundred francs into the bill, and we headed up the narrow street—more an alley, really. Inside, the hotel lobby was in semidarkness, as opposed to the darker darkness once the sun, if it happened to be out, had set, offset only by a lone twenty-five-watt bulb dangling on a meter-long cord above the reception. One thing I could say about all these Left Bank hotels: they wasted not an extra franc on illumination. I hoisted the typewriter onto the counter, where the day clerk was a mousy fellow I had seen a few times and whose salient feature was an ill-fitting toupee that he changed three or four times a month: the short version, worn just after the ritual non-haircut; the middle version, donned for week two; and the third, and sometimes fourth, when lengthening curls and unruly sideburns made it evident it was time for the non-haircut. “Bland” was too exciting a word for him, but today, as I entered with Ellsworth trailing close behind, he looked almost apoplectic. I debated asking him if he was all right, for his eyes were bulging and his brow bathed in sweat, but thought better of it and said simply, “Would you kindly make sure Mademoiselle Hartley gets this typewriter.” Barely had Patsy’s surname escaped my lips when out of the shadows behind the reception stepped two rather large men who said without ado, “You’re under arrest,” and snapped a pair of handcuffs not only on me, who was clearly the object of something judicial, if not criminal—though in rapidly scanning my recent past, as I am told a drowning man does, I could find nothing to warrant this—but on poor Ellsworth as well.
“What—what’s this—what’s this all about?” Ellsworth stammered. “Tell them I’m a teacher,” he insisted, “at the American School. They can call and verify right now. Go ahead, tell them this is a big mistake.” Meanwhile, in his panic, the desk clerk had removed his middle-of-the-month toupee and was furiously mopping his brows. The clever cover was blown. Would the poor man ever be able to face us again?
“Sir,” I said to burly and, to put it kindly, rather jowly Plainclothesman Number 1, assuming for the nonce a rather pronounced American accent, “this gentleman was with me purely by chance. He is a respected art teacher at the American School in Paris. I vouch for him totally.”
“Get a move on” was his growled response, prodding us out the door onto the street, then across the southern segment of the carrefour de Buci, thankfully shuttered and virtually empty at that hour, now that the normally bustling food markets were over. The few people who loitered there looked at us inquisitively but not inquisitorially. The police were not much beloved in Paris these days, the memory of their often too close collaboration with the Germans still fresh in most minds. Still, our grim-faced guardians were marching us briskly, as if to the gallows. Ellsworth, with each step, was increasingly upset, protesting his innocence, which he kept pressing me to convey. When I told him I already had, his brow furrowed even more deeply. “Try again,” he suggested.
When we reached the English Bookshop on the rue de Seine, with the proprietor, Gaït Frogé, standing in the doorway, her eyes widening as she saw us thus manacled, I drew the line, even though I figured it might cost me. I stopped in my tracks. “Whatever’s going on,” I said in my most impeccable French, casting aside all efforts to shroud myself falsely in my American identity, “I can tell you, you have the wrong men. We are both American citizens and demand our rights. I have lived in this quartier quite some time. I’m well-known here, and yet you are parading us through the streets as though we’re common criminals. I repeat: this gentleman with me is an esteemed painter and a teacher at the American School, and has nothing to do with whatever the problem is.” At least my mini-peroration had resulted in our guardian angels’ pausing in the street, apparently wondering whether, indeed, an error might have been made. “I also demand to know where you are taking us,” I added, feeling slightly more sure of myself, despite the inescapable suspicion that all this was somehow linked to Patsy. Clearly they had staked out her hotel. So this fucking Enrico …
“To the prefecture,” they said as one.
“Then either remove these handcuffs or take us in a car.”
“Anything I can do?” Gaït whispered, for we were stationed directly in front of her store.
I shook my head. “Big mistake,” I said. “But thanks.”
The two plainclothesmen conferred, keeping a careful eye on their quarry, muttered a few words, then hailed a cab, which fortunately happened by. I was only glad that Madame Germaine, who sometimes did her shopping at Buci, had not witnessed my arrest. Immediate expulsion from her domain, I suspected, without appeal. I could hear her telling the other boarders in hushed tones, “Je ne savais pas que j’hébergeais un criminel!” I didn’t know I was housing a criminal!
At the prefecture, the drabbest of buildings, whose corridors were endless and whose soulless paint was both flaking and peeling, we were hustled up to the second floor, where we were unhandcuffed and our shoelaces removed.
“Why are they taking our shoelaces?” Ellsworth wanted to know.
“Suicide,” I muttered. I’d read my share of police procedurals. “So you don’t use them to commit suicide.”
“Suicide with those!” Ellsworth said, with utter disdain. “There must be some other reason.”
Just then a well-dressed man—white shirt, coat, and tie—arrived, legendary mégot hanging from his lips. How the French could smoke and talk at the same time, without using their fingers, I had never fathomed. Probably a Gallic gene.
“Monsieur,” Ellsworth cried out, deciding that it was time to bring out the major artillery, namely, his full command of French, only half a dozen words of which I had ever heard. “Monsieur, je suis une peinture,” he declaimed. And as if to make his case even more convincing, he added: “Une peinture au quatrième!” The new arrival’s head turned smartly, as if he were trying to adjust his hearing to a new language, for literally what Ellsworth had reported was: “Sir, I’m a painting on the fourth floor!” Perhaps, the man must have thought, this is a case for St. Anne, the local asylum, not the prefecture. I knew what Ellsworth was trying to say: he was a painter, which indeed he very much was, and he was living on the fourth floor of a building on the Île St. Louis. But those basic facts had been slightly mangled in the telling. I urged the chief of detectives—for that is who he turned out to be—to verify my friend’s story by calling the director of the American School, which he promised to do. I explained that Ellsworth, an old friend, had happened by that afternoon on his way to an exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art and invited me along. I even named the artist whose show we had planned to attend there. Within the hour word came back that Mr. Kelly’s bona fides had been verified, and he was released forthwith.
“I’m sorry to have ruined your afternoon,” I said.
“Hey, it was kind of exciting.” He smiled, feeling much better now that his shoelaces had been restored. “When you get out, if you get out”—Ellsworth’s sly sense of humor was usually accompanied by a slightly malevolent leer—“I assume you’ll tell me what this is all about.”
Just as he was leaving, two other plainclothesmen who could have been cloned from our own escorts entered the room, bearing between them a lovely young lady, smiling broadly: Patsy! Ellsworth looked even more astonished. If till now he had figured that this afternoon’s shenanigans were imputable to some misdemeanor or indiscretion on my part, seeing Patsy thickened the plot. He shuffled out, shaking his head.
“Hi, Dick!” Patsy said, pecking me on both cheeks, perfidious child. “I see they got you first.”
“What an unexpected pleasure!” I said.
“A big mistake,” she said as they hustled her toward the far door. “It’s all a big mistake, I assure you,” she managed over her shoulder. “A couple of phone calls and we’ll be out of here. I promise!”
“Enrico?” I called after her. “Enrico?”
But she was hustled out the door before she could reply.
* * *
They installed me in a small, poorly lit room, its only window overlooking the prefecture courtyard, and left me there for two hours. The only torture was that I had nothing to read. I suddenly imagined hell as a place consciously devoid of reading matter. Finally, as I was beginning to obsess on the shoelaces, two men arrived and began to question me about my relationship with Enrico. I barely knew the man, I said, had spent one evening with him a couple weeks ago. Did I know he was a big-time diamond thief? No. That he dealt in diamonds? Vaguely. He made some claim about being able to change yellow diamonds into white. And you believed him? It seemed possible. He could be very convincing. Have you ever traveled with him? Traveled? Exactly: to Switzerland, for example, or Israel? Absolutely not: I told you I barely know the man.
No? Were you involved with him financially? Suddenly I wondered what Patsy might have said to them about our mad plan of using him for high literary purposes. It would only add to the confusion. No, never. They left the room, presumably to confer, then returned a couple minutes later.
“You can go,” the lead interrogator said.
“What about Mademoiselle?” I said, tying my shoes.
“We’re keeping her a bit longer,” one of them said.
* * *
I went down and bought the two biggest tabloids, figuring the story would be in one or the other, if anywhere. And there it was, on page 3: “Gendarmes Nab Major Diamond Thief,” with a two-inch-wide picture of Enrico looking somber and depressed. As well he should. A diamond thief, no less. And to think I half swallowed his exotic story. The French and Swiss police had been tracking him for months. His thefts amounted to millions. He was currently incarcerated in the Santé, Paris’s most notorious prison.
* * *
Five months passed. One day, Patsy got word from her friend at the old hotel on the rue de l’Échaudé that she’d received a pneumatique—Paris’s antiquated but highly efficient method of rapid communication in those days—from Enrico. He would be freed next week and wanted to see her before he left France (read: expelled). We suggested he meet us at the Brasserie Lipp, and promptly at one in came (for me) the ghost of Enrico, his once elegant clothes hanging on him limply. He could have applied for the role of scarecrow in any peasant field. He had lost, he announced, some forty kilos, ninety pounds.
A choucroute garnie and glass or two of wine cheered him up, but I could tell that he really wanted to see Patsy, not me, so before coffee I excused myself on the pretext I had a three o’clock appointment and hurried off. Later, Patsy told me he had roundly rejected the charge of jewel thief, claimed again that his story was absolutely true, that his mistake had been not in changing the yellow diamonds to white but in transporting them across the border. He would head back to Israel that night, resume his production, and make sure in the future to handle his finished goods more carefully and discreetly. How, after rotting in the Santé for all those months, had he finally been sprung? He remained vague but implied that someone “important” in the Israeli government had contacted someone in the French government who had intervened. He was considering instituting a suit against the police for false arrest. He promised Patsy she would hear from him again “soon.”
Three months later, on the eve of our departure for the States, we still had no news of Enrico. Or if Patsy had heard from him, she didn’t share the message.
14
Name-Dropping; or, An Evening with Orson
ONCE PATSY WAS GONE—and after I finally came to the realization that she wasn’t coming back—I consoled or distracted myself by dating a few ladies. I ended up going out with an American girl who turned out to be Orson Welles’s secretary, Catherine, a buxom young lady from Middle America who, when the Great Man had decided to pull up stakes and leave America, whether for good or temporarily only time would tell, had accepted the job of Paris secretary. One of his secretaries, she hastened to add. How many does he have? I wondered aloud. Wasn’t one enough? She laughed and shook her head. “Have you ever heard of the human dynamo? The concept of perpetual motion? Orson incarnate. He never has only one project going. Generally half a dozen. Writing scripts, directing, casting actors for projects not off the ground, accepting roles major and minor, usually to raise money…” “After Kane,” I said, “I assumed he was never short of money.” She shook her head. “He’s always short of money. When he has it, he spends it like crazy, mainly because he has this theory that if you don’t live high on the hog, people will think your career is slipping.” Sounds like a monster, I said. No, no, she reassured me. Arrogant, yes; certain of his own genius, yes. But also plagued by doubts, which I guarantee are sincere and, for me, make him human. Why did he leave Hollywood? I wondered. I would have thought he could take his pick of projects. He’s had his share of commercial flops, she said. Besides, he’s convinced that Hollywood has it in for him, resents him, and that if he had stayed there and played by the rules—their rules—he’d never make another original movie. In Hollywood he felt straitjacketed, whereas in Europe he feels free, able to move in any of a dozen directions, both geographically and creatively. Plus, of course, he’s espoused a lot of liberal causes, and this current American witch-hunt mentality drives him insane. People less liberal than he have been targeted, blacklisted, called before congressional committees, all of which he views as outrageous, ridiculous, time-consuming, and way beneath his dignity. Here he feels free from all that. He’s the most peripatetic man on the planet. He flits from country to country on a whim, so I see him only sporadically. He’ll announce one morning he’s off to Rome for a “couple of days,” and he’ll be gone for a month. Dublin, London, Morocco. Much of his nerve-racking travel has to do with Shakespeare, with whom he’s enamored. That was not news to me, but Catherine let it slip one day that he not only revered the Bard but felt he and he alone was capable of translating him—or at least certain of his works—to the screen. Pretty strong words when actors such as Gielgud and Olivier were still in their Shakespearean prime. Still … The project he was obsessed with these days, she reported, was Othello. He had a dozen other projects in various stages of development, including a play in French he was directing—she’d seen it and thought it “awful,” but she’d never dare tell him that. “So you’re scared of him,” I ventured. “No,” she said, “simply there are times, and situations, when discretion is advised.” “So you are scared of him,” I concluded, as if I had just taken one of her pawns.
I admired the man no end, but even after Catherine’s intriguing nuggets I had no desire to meet him.
Legends and their flesh and blood are best kept separate, I felt. Nonetheless, when one evening in late winter Catherine asked me if I would care to meet her boss, I of course said yes, especially after she mentioned in passing that he had read in the Trib not only the article I had written on Gigi—apparently, he was a fan of Colette’s—but one I had written a few weeks later on Jean Gabin, the French actor he also greatly admired. At least I had a tiny credit or two to level the playing field, I told myself, then quickly put things back into perspective: this was God I was going to see, and I was sure I’d be suitably tongue-tied, making a fool of myself, with morning-after self-loathing.
Welles, Catherine told me, usually stayed at a posh Right Bank hotel, the Lancaster or the Ritz, but because of a French play he was directing, he had rented an apartment off the Champs-Élysées. At precisely seven o’clock Catherine opened the door to me. Would there be a dozen other guests? A hundred? But no, it was only the three of us, at least for the moment. The apartment was as expected: sumptuous and gilded, with massive doors, its generous windows framed by heavy drapes of some brocaded material in immaculate taste. But what did surprise and take me aback was the imposing size of Mr. Welles. I remembered him as the dashing demented incarnation of William Randolph Hearst, not as slim as Joseph Cotten but, let’s say, normal. And here was Citizen Kane offering me a drink. Whiskey? he suggested. I hadn’t had a Scotch in all my years in Paris. “That would be fine,” I said, and he poured me a major, under-the-table tumblerful. “Ice?” he asked. “No, neat,” I said, remembering the term from some Cary Grant, or maybe Gary Cooper, movie, uttered through tight lips so the words barely squeezed out. I think he was impressed. “Catherine tells me you’re a writer,” he said. Jesus, in trouble already. I had never told her that. “I write,” I said. “Not quite the same thing.” He told me he had been intrigued by my piece on Gigi—not the Danièle Delorme, but a later interview with Colette. She must be a hundred by now, he said. How did you ever get to her? I thought she didn’t give interviews anymore. It’s a long story, I said, if you really want to hear it. He did. So I had to thumbnail back into my wrestling, my fortuitous encounter with Maurice Goudeket, Colette’s husband, our bonding through the classic sport of wrestling, my assignment to write about Gigi, and Goudeket’s immediate and generous response that I could interview the author anytime. As I ended, I feared the two-, maybe three-minute roundup must have bored the man to death, but apparently not. Well, said Welles, you really caught her flavor—when I read your piece, I felt I’d met her. Is she actually bedridden, surrounded by all those cats? On the bed, in the bed, around the bed, I said: there were easily a dozen. One thing I especially liked, Welles said, was when she asked you where you lived and you said rue Jacob, she thought a second and said—his accent thick, his delivery impeccable, sounding like Colette’s specific intonation from Burgundy—“Je n’ai rien contre la rue Jacob.” I don’t have anything against the rue Jacob. Yes, that’s it. A rather strange way of putting it, no? I’d never heard that expression before, but I think I know what Colette meant. She probably has positive feelings about some places, negative about others. About the rue Jacob I assume she’s neutral. It was not only the words that came tumbling across the room; it was the sonority, that voice one would have recognized anywhere.
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 18