The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  A week before the earthquake, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had left for Cuba at the invitation of Carlos Franqui, editor of the weekly Revolución, Cuba’s largest-circulation magazine. They stayed there until 20 March. The previous year, Castro and the barbudos had seized power, forcing the dictator Fulgencio Batista to flee the country. It was impossible not to love Cuba then – all those who made the trip, everyone from Kouchner to Ania Francos, were equally enthusiastic – and Sartre was no exception. I remember his return, his seriousness, his feeling of kinship with all the Cubans he had met, from twenty-five-year-old ministers to illiterate peasants cutting sugar cane, and Castro himself, of whom he spoke as he would of himself four years later at the end of Les Mots, the book that won him the Nobel Prize that he declined: ‘A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.’ But what I remember most was Sartre’s clear-sightedness: his friendship and admiration, his approval for what was happening in Cuba, did not blind him. He told me that he had said to Castro, despite his energetic denials, on several occasions, ‘The terror lies ahead of you.’ Let us not forget: in that important year of 1960 (the Manifesto of the 121, the Jeanson trial, Sartre’s meeting with Fanon, his trip to Brazil in August followed by a second, brief, trip to Cuba in October), he published Critique de la raison dialectique, with its trenchant analyses of the fleeting, liberating moment in every revolution – what he calls ‘la groupe en fusion’ [‘the group-in-fusion’] – followed ineluctably by ‘fraternité-terreur’ [‘fraternity-terror’] – which in turn disintegrates to become institutionalized suspicion, bureaucracy and dictatorship. And yet Sartre wanted to help the Cuban revolution and make it known to as wide a public as possible. He decided he wanted to write about it not for his own publication, Les Temps Modernes, nor for a weekly, but for a popular daily newspaper with a large circulation. He settled on France-Soir, and I was asked to negotiate with Pierre Lazareff. France-Soir had never previously contemplated publishing Sartre, but it did so superbly, making no attempt to censor his piece, contenting itself with stating, in an introductory note, that the newspaper did not necessarily share all of the opinions of the author, all the while boasting that it had been chosen by the ‘illustrious writer’ to publish ‘Hurricane over Sugar’ (the title was Sartre’s). Pierre Lazareff, who knew his job, told me he had rarely read a piece of such power, and this too won him over. With his permission, and that of Sartre, I edited the piece into sixteen instalments that appeared daily as full-page (sometimes double-page) articles from 28 June to 15 July 1960. I chose the headings and the subheadings, always with the approval of Sartre and the editor of France-Soir. I don’t know whether such courtesy, such collaboration and such freedom would be possible nowadays. For the reasons I gave in issue 649–50 of Les Temps modernes (April–May–June 2008), Sartre’s reportage never became a book and remained buried for forty-eight years, until a researcher undertook to transcribe the newspaper’s microfiche copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Reading it again I was struck, as I had been the first time, by its literary elegance, its depth, its intelligence, its honesty. I decided to republish it.

  Listing all the actors and actresses about whom I wrote articles for Elle during those years would be tedious unless I went into detail. The simplest thing would be to reread the articles – perhaps I will publish them in an anthology one day. With Sophia Loren, born Sofia Scicolone, at six in the morning in the kitchen of her apartment in Rome, the only hour when it was possible to avoid the prying, jealous presence of her mentor, Pygmalion, lover and soon-to-be-husband, Carlo Ponti; with Lollobrigida and her dazzling smile in her beautiful home on the via Appia Antica; or a forbidding pilgrimage across the paddy fields of the Po, with Silvana Mangano, who had agreed to return and face the attacks of the most ferocious mosquitoes on the peninsula, I celebrated Italian women. But I celebrated Americans too, and all the French actresses.

  Every Sunday, on their vast estate in Louveciennes, the Lazareffs gave an elaborate lunch, inviting the jet-set, politicians, and a number of contributors to the various magazines and newspapers in the group. Hélène, like Pierre, was truly in touch with what was happening in the world, and more than once lunch was interrupted when it was decided I should leave immediately on some bizarre assignment. Pierre’s nickname was ‘Pierrot les bretelles’ – ‘Pierrot in braces’ – since at the table he rarely wore a jacket. I can still see him, thumbs hooked into his braces, fingers drumming on his puny chest, glasses pushed up onto his balding pate, suddenly leaping from his chair like a demon, dashing from the table because someone had whispered some piece of news that had just come in, then coming back with a smile on his face – his greatest pleasure was to be first with an important scoop, to be able to announce it. One day he came back to the table, his face like that of a serious child, and at the top of his voice proclaimed, ‘There’s a Russian orbiting the earth!’ The man sitting on my right said curtly, ‘That’s just propaganda.’ This was Georges Pompidou, future Prime Minister, future President of the Republic, but at the time senior executive of the Rothschild Bank; nowadays he would be called its CEO.

  At the end of one of these lunches, Hélène came up to me and said, ‘Claude, you’re the only person who can do something, you need to leave at once for Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Simone Signoret is all alone there at the hotel La Colombe d’Or and desperately needs help, we need to launch a counter-attack, to convince everyone in Hollywood that there’s nothing going on between Montand and Marilyn Monroe, that they’re friends with a great professional regard for each other, nothing more.’ A tough brief, Mission: Impossible, barely compensated for by my delight at returning to La Colombe d’Or, a paradise I had discovered shortly before on another assignment for Hélène when, overnight, all the paintings in the prestigious auberge, the Picassos, the Mirós, the Légers, the Braques, had been stolen by professional thieves intimately familiar with the comings and goings there. Paul Roux, who had founded the establishment, had been a friend to painters and a painter himself, creating this unique collection through donations, purchases, exchanges – he had provided hospitality for unknown, undernourished geniuses, who thanked him with paintings. Paul Roux passed away before my first visit, so I never got to meet him, but I was welcomed by his very elderly wife, Titine, who always dressed in black like a Sicilian widow and sat by the stove at the entrance, keeping an eye on everything. But I particularly remember her son, Francis, a jumble of qualities: intelligent, handsome, open and cunning, with a formidable sense of dynastic responsibility; he not only proved to be an unrivalled negotiator with the thieves, succeeding in recovering the stolen paintings, but he also oversaw the expansion, development and modernization of the auberge without sacrificing any of its original charm. The dynasty still exists and it is now his son, François, who brings to the task all his father’s virtues together with his own; he has the same kindness, the same sense of organization, which, though it appears casual, runs like a well-oiled machine, his is an iron fist in a velvet glove, smiling and stoic when the family was struck by tragedy. Even now, after so many years, it is always a great pleasure to go back there, for a reason as simple as it is rare: there is no distinction between the guests and the numerous staff, all express an easy kindness, which is like a sense of family. I spent two days with Signoret, her face haggard, listening as she effortlessly lied to me; I spent the whole night writing, claiming that I knew from an employee at the telephone exchange in Saint-Paul that there had been a constant stream of phone calls from Bungalow 20 at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles to Room 3 at La Colombe d’Or, day and night, because of the time difference. All in all, I did what I could for Simone, and I too lied through my teeth so that she would not lose face. After that, she thought of me as a friend, I became her favourite writer; in fact, when I got back to Paris I had to fob off Hélène, who was determined to send me to Hollywood to be near Marilyn and Montand. Over the decade, I must have written a dozen articles about Simone Signoret, and I wil
l never forget the week that I spent with her at the Savoy Hotel and the Royal Court Theatre in London. Alec Guinness had persuaded her to play Lady Macbeth in English before the most snooty traditionalist audience in the world. It was clear to me from the first rehearsal that she was heading for disaster: aside from her French accent, which her efforts to overcome simply magnified, she just did not have what it took to play Shakespeare. I made no attempt to hide my sense of foreboding, I begged her to cry off, but she was brave and stood firm. Indeed, the disaster unfolded – never were reviews so vicious; it took her some time to recover.

  I met them all, wrote about them, and I can say without vanity that I helped some of them to make a qualitative leap in their careers. Bardot confided in me her eternal, undying love for each new boyfriend; Jeanne Moreau lounged by an emerald swimming pool in Cuernavaca in Mexico that some hopelessly besotted American lesbian strewed with fresh rose petals every morning; Ava Gardner in Madrid, still sublime but already an alcoholic, on the set of 55 Days at Peking; Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in Sardinia for a Joseph Losey film, who retired each evening to a yacht, their shouts and death threats booming around the decks until dawn as they chased each other – they were truly Shakespearean – each vowing that the other would not live to see another day; Gary Cooper in his Bel Air villa, tall, handsome, poignant, marked and almost mute, already eaten up by cancer. How could I forget Martine Carol, Michèle Morgan, Juliette Gréco, Madeleine Renaud, Edwige Feullière, Delphine Seyrig? And the men: Michel Piccoli – whose best man I was at his wedding to Juliette Gréco – Sami Frey, François Périer, Curd Jürgens, Lelouch, Aznavour, Gabin, Belmondo, Antoine, Gainsbourg – and that’s not the half of them. I wrote about almost every subject: the Pope’s first visit to the Holy Land; the discovery by a Dutch–American archaeological team of Çartan, a forgotten, Biblical city in the Jordan Valley complete with a queen’s diadem and jewels (the piece began: ‘The queen had been waiting for three thousand years, so with no time to lose I jumped on the first flight’). I wrote about the riddle of Tutankhamun’s treasures; tragic events in Alpine ascents; mime and Marcel Marceau – who was effusive once you got him to open his mouth; and the great Raymond Devos, with his huge barrel chest and his way of throwing his arms up wide then bringing them forwards slowly, a movement he learned when using cheesewire to cut slabs of butter in his first job, in a dairy.

  One day Pierre Lazareff called me into his vast office on the rue Réaumur and asked if I would be the famous Captain Cousteau’s ghostwriter, and assist him in writing a book about his experiment in underwater living off the coast of Marseille. Needless to say, only Cousteau’s name would appear. My role was strictly confidential and I would receive no royalties. When the job was done, I would be paid a bonus in addition to my salary. It was a paltry sum, as I recall, but I agreed to everything. I boarded the Calypso in Marseille – the first Calypso – where I was greeted by Madame Cousteau – the first Madame Cousteau – and introduced to the divers, who were devoted to their master body and soul. He himself eventually arrived, trailing a pack of photographers and TV reporters in his wake. After they had left, I introduced myself; he was friendly but cold. The experiment, he explained, was to begin the following day: a test house had already been built thirty metres underwater. Falco, the main diver, and his team had already made several dives transporting everything that was needed for a stay of a week, perhaps two, including oxygen tanks that ensured a constant supply of air. Eventually, Cousteau asked me if I had ever been scuba diving before and when I said, ‘No, only free diving’, but that I was eager to try, he entrusted me to Falco, a friendly, stocky man from southern France who had already made several deep dives to test gases other than oxygen, including sophisticated mixtures. The following day we made a twenty-metre dive; before we did so, he explained to me that it was vital I stop on my way back to the surface, respecting the necessary decompression stages. I found diving easy and a little intoxicating, captivated, perhaps, from my first attempt by the call of the deep. But I disregarded Falco’s advice and shot back to the surface without stopping, like an arrow, which resulted in bleeding from my nose and ears. Luckily, Cousteau was not aboard at the time and I set myself to studying the decompression tables. I spent a whole day and two nights in the undersea house, while Cousteau, a great communicator, made two brief visits, but for the most part spent his time on the deck of the Calypso surrounded by cameras and microphones, being filmed from every angle, discussing science with Falco in terms easily comprehensible to the layman, asking him how comfortable we were, since the purpose of the experiment was to prove that it was possible to live for long periods in a pressurized environment, moving easily about the house, entering through a series of airlocks, so there was no need for oxygen tanks. I must admit that I did not sleep a wink on either of the two nights I spent in the underwater paradise and, when I came back to the surface, I was exhausted and suffering from violent headaches. The experiment over – and utterly conclusive according to Cousteau, who immediately sent out press releases to that effect – I had to begin writing. Cousteau set me up in a house he owned in Sanary. I was alone there. He assigned me a small study where I worked like a maniac, day and night, surrounded by scholarly tomes. I had become an expert on decompression tables, stops, gas mixtures, and since I have a naturally epic writing style, I tried to make the story, which was really nothing more than a publicity stun, into a heroic adventure, inspiring and full of promise. Cousteau, who was living nearby in another of his houses, kept a close eye on me, came over every evening to see how I was getting on, and had me read aloud what I had written. ‘It’s much too good,’ he said over and over, ‘it’s not my style.’ I had to convince him that the style of the article would only enhance his reputation. One evening, unable to bear being cooped up any longer, I slipped out through a ground-floor window and went to spend the night with Castor, who was waiting for me in Saint-Tropez. I planned to get back by the following morning.

  Excerpts from the book were published in France-Soir and I quickly forgot that episode of my life. I ran into Cousteau several times after that; he never said hello, his long thin face was accustomed to surveying the horizon, and he simply did not notice me. When I accepted Pierre Lazareff’s proposal, I had not realized that Captain Jacques Cousteau was the brother of Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, a Nazi collaborator who had been tried after the Liberation and only narrowly escaped facing a firing squad – there was undoubtedly a family resemblance. This was something I discovered only later at a session of the Académie française to which I had been invited by Erik Orsenna, who, having been chosen to take the seat held by the late Captain Cousteau, paid tribute to his predecessor before, in turn, tributes were paid to him. Accolades were the order of the day, not a word of misgiving was spoken, no one put his foot in it. As I left the Académie, the evening papers were just out and I bought a copy of France-Soir, which carried a despicable letter from Cousteau to his wife, written in the spring of 1942, in which he told her, in the crudest and most vulgar terms, ‘Don’t worry about the apartment, the Jews have all been swept up in the raids, we’ll be spoilt for choice now.’

  But I also wrote about other writers: Sartre, for a start, the Sartre who wrote Les Mots; about Claire Etcherelli and Élise ou la vraie vie [Élise, or the Real Life]; about Françoise Sagan on several occasions; about Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur [Her Lover] and later, Les Valeureux [The Valiant]. Albert and I became such firm friends that once a month I used to fly to Geneva, where he lived with Bella, his last wife, at 7 avenue Krieg. The apartment was divided into two halves, his and Bella’s, connected by a large central living-room-cum-dining-room that they shared. I usually arrived at about ten o’clock to be greeted by Albert in his dressing gown, clutching an amber rosary that he fingered constantly. He showed me into his study, an extraordinarily bare room with stainless steel furniture and mirrors, and drawers that silently slid home on runners, locking automatically. He was seventy-four at the time and his greetin
g was always the same: ‘Give me a cigarette.’ He never had any; he suffered from bronchitis, and when I arrived, Bella, who had strictly forbidden him to smoke, always reminded me that cigarettes would kill him. So I would always start by firmly refusing, but I smoked; he would promise not to inhale, and to limit himself to one cigarette. So then we smoked together as he reeled off a list of celebrities who had called to tell him how much they admired him: ‘François Mitterrand wants to set up a committee in support of my nomination for the Nobel Prize,’ or ‘Brigitte Bardot asked me to promise she could play Ariane, but Catherine Deneuve called to ask me the same thing…’ At one point, on my first visit, he suddenly began to tremble and it was clear I had made some unforgivable mistake and, in retrospect, I can only agree with him: there were two ashtrays set out in front of us, one ordinary, the other a revolving, free-standing model. The first was for the ash, the most noble of substances, all the more so for us Jews, he said, given what was done to our people. But the cigarette butts, the quintessence of all that is foul, were not to be casually stubbed out in an ashtray, they had to disappear, to vanish into this revolving receptacle conceived for the purpose. I never committed such sacrilege again, yet every time I visited him I gave in to his pleading, and handed him a lethal cigarette. You must understand that Cohen was very isolated, he took no part in Parisian literary life, published a book once every ten years and desperately needed to be reassured of his genius: on my visits he read to me or had me read letters from admirers, articles paying tribute to him; I considered this normal, fair and touching precisely because I believed him to be a man of genius. Afterwards, we moved into the living-dining-room where Bella was waiting with a light, delicious lunch of smoked salmon. At this point, Albert would ask me what I had been doing, worry about my material needs, wonder whether I would have enough money to live on in my old age.