by James Salter
——
They are marching off without you, forming up. The faint, familiar sound of commands rises, far off.
I felt that, the confusion and panic, as I sat in a beautiful room watching the television. It was July but the room was cool and the streets of New York seemed silent. I was watching three white-clad men who were preparing my annihilation; they were leaving for the moon, the first flight meant to land there.
Aldrin is one of them, the one I know. He waves. Memories of being in the squadron together come back to me. His wife was interested in the theater. She was thought of as artistic, a damning thing. His hand grasps a rail as he climbs aboard the truck. I want to turn away but cannot. The simplest of his acts is dreadful to me.
They pass through a shadow and beneath the complexity of the enormous crane. They enter an elevator. A solemn commentator is explaining it all. The door of the elevator closes. They rise.
They arrive at the top, like the top of a scaffold. I cry out but there is no sound, I haven’t the courage to cry, my life has already left me. I think of the long description of an execution, a guillotining, written by Turgenev, the unbearable ceremony.
A wreath of white smoke is leaking from the rocket. I am able to say nothing, not a word. I sit in the St. Regis with anything one might want there at hand. I feel hollow, as if I had lost everything.
They announce twelve minutes. I feel like the unknown crewman who is guiding them to the cabin, no, he is filled with excitement and pride, he feels himself to be an important figure. It is all a dream and yet intensely real. I can smell the smooth enameled steel. I can hear the radio voices, confident and brief. The camera is now under the engine bells, their openings vast as gun maws. The elevators in the hotel with their freight of well-dressed businessmen are moving up and down, the maids in the carpeted hallway are pushing their carts.
Five minutes. We are waiting, we hundreds of millions, staring intently at the faintly blackened site from which they will go. My heart is no longer beating, it seems to have stopped, to have prepared itself for the end. Fifteen tons of fuel a second, the announcer is saying. Fifteen tons, and its own weight besides is unimaginable. The morning is hot and airless at the Cape. Birds fly past the rocket, unaware of its potency. Three minutes.
The days of flying that have borne them to this, the countless, repetitive days. The astonishing thing is that we are empowered to bequeath history, to create the unalterable: paintings, elections, crimes. In fact they are impossible to prevent. One of the most memorable acts of all time is about to occur. Two minutes.
I had an Italian mistress, O very fine, who would fly places to meet me. She was slender, with a body brown from Rome’s beaches and a narrow pale band, as if bleached, encircling her hips, the white reserve. She wore a brown leather jacket and had black hair, cut short. I had a luxurious corduroy suit, soft as velvet, from Palazzi on Via Borgognona. She had bought it for me as a gift. She was the antidote to, among many things, the sickening hours surrounding the launch and intolerable days after. I had taught her a catechism, or rather together we had composed one, which she could recite in perfect English, the flagrant words sinless in her mouth, the innocent questions and profane responses, and the low, inviting voice in which they were uttered. One minute.
We were silent that night with the television still on, light shifting on the walls in the darkened room. I was watching, transfixed by it, as well as by the cool, unhurried act we were engaged in. As a boy I had imagined grown men achieving scenes such as this. Tremendous deliberation. Reverent movement, oblivious, assured. She is writhing, like a dying snake, like a woman in bedlam. Everything and nothing, and meanwhile the invincible rocket, devouring miles, flying lead-heavy through actual minutes and men’s dreams.
I have never forgotten that night or its anguish. Pleasure and inconsequence on one hand, immeasurable deeds on the other. I lay awake for a long time thinking of what I had become.
——
I was a poule for ten years, fifteen. I might easily have gone on longer. There was wreckage all around, but like the refuse piled behind restaurants I did not consider it—in front they were bowing and showing me to the table.
Robert Bolt, who had been a schoolteacher and then a play-wright, was as talented as any writer of his generation. David Lean, for whom he did celebrated films—Lawrence of Arabia, Zhivago—had been known to bring him thousands of miles to discuss changing a single line, and honors were heaped at his feet. The best script I had ever read, he had written, an astonishing version of the Bounty mutiny and its aftermath, filled with original images and scenes. It was a work of high ambition. In the course of things it was never made.
Aging and far from his house in Surrey with the river drifting past, separated from his wife, he found himself in the derelict tropics, the occasional friend of a childlike actress, Mia Farrow, who was acting in a movie on a nearby island at the time. As an offering to her he rewrote pages of dialogue, and she was able to present them to the original writer as her own suggestions. In the end, tiring of this, she handed a sheaf of pages over, confessing all. The writer was a close friend of mine, Lorenzo Semple, and far from being annoyed, asked if he could meet Bolt, whom he greatly admired.
A dinner took place. It was in a shabby Chinese restaurant with unmatched dishes and a dirt floor. Bolt came wearing a palmetto hat. He was drunk. The talk was of writing, of course, though becoming less and less coherent as the evening went on. Bolt was somehow able, nevertheless, to bring out an important point. In writing films, he cautioned, in writing films, yes, there was one thing that should never be lost sight of.
“What is that?” Lorenzo asked.
“The money, my boy,” Bolt said, “the money.”
There were writers who made good use of it. In Los Angeles, on Summit Drive, I sat at lunch with an elegant man in his forties; I’ll call him Edoardo. He came from the Veneto, the most civilized area in Italy, as he said, where even the farmers, though drunkards, were cultured after fifteen centuries of elevated life. Venice, the region’s great city, had for ages been the light of the world.
A tall Swedish girl with a Russian name, Natasha, was serving us—veal gratinée, fresh garden peas, cucumbers in a sour-cream sauce. When she had slipped out, I asked casually, “Is she the cook?”
“Yes. Cook, everything,” he said offhandedly, returning to the subject. “When London had two hundred and fifty thousand people, Venice had three hundred and fifty thousand. Shakespeare laid four of his plays there, The Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet.”
He was throwing in Arden and Athens as locations, but I was only hesitant about one. “Romeo and Juliet?”
“Well, in Verona, but that’s nearby.”
I was captivated by him, the grand house, the Rolls-Royce in the covered driveway, the gardens. He seemed like Uncle Vanya to me, a shrewder Vanya, hardworking, knowledgeable.
I happened to mention d’Annunzio. He knew everything about him, his uncle had been in d’Annunzio’s squadron in the First World War and even looked like the poet, small, ugly, and bald. D’Annunzio had used him as a decoy. When he wanted to go to a hotel with some woman he would have the uncle sit in the villa, reading by the window.
We drank white Burgundy. The Swedish girl, graceful and silent, served a bowl of fresh raspberries and strawberries in cream. D’Annunzio, who died in the 1930s, had been the most celebrated writer of his time—the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth—with a life of colossal breadth, the most notorious since Byron’s. He was the lover of Duse and countless others. He had written Mussolini’s famous speeches. Becoming old, he withdrew into a pantheon of his own design, the Vittoriale, above Lake Garda, where a kind of opera continued. He dressed in a monk’s outfit and had his servants, all attractive women, dress as nuns. The next day he would be in a commodore’s uniform and they were sailors.
“There are at least twenty d’Annunzio scripts in Italy,” Edoardo s
aid. “They’ve been trying for years to make a film about him. I remember the day he died. I was at school and a boy came up and said, ‘No school today!’
“ ‘No school?’
“ ‘The poet is dead.’
“ ‘Hooray,’ I said.”
It was like Rome in Edoardo’s house, Monte Mario, the terraces and pools. Sometimes in the evening, he said, they sat outside, he and the Swedish girl, looking out over the city. He was king of this Eden, gentle, wise, with a kind of classic ease and moderation, a single young novitiate beneath his wing—a man past the panicky appetites of youth, serene, able to savor, unhurried even if beset, like all men, by infinite desires.
“Edoardo?” said someone who knew him well when I mentioned his name. “He’s the most unhappy, dissatisfied man I know.”
“Impossible.”
“He’s an artist manqué. He thinks he’s wasted his talent on movies, which he detests. Actually, he’s never written any good movies—they’re all trash except for one he did for Germi. Oh, he’s a fabulous raconteur, especially in Italian, but he hates his life and is filled with self-disgust. He considers himself the only intelligent person in Italian cinema, and since he’s the only one who reads, he’s been able to make a career of taking de Maupassant stories and passing them off as his own. He’s never married. He’s the saddest man I know.”
——
This was the Coast, the fabled Coast. Girls with hair blowing and sunburned limbs. Driving there in the summer of 1976, coming out of the desert, the crushing heat and emptiness on the road to Barstow. Then tired and heat-stained, along the freeways, into Santa Monica and up along the sea.
The house had a garden looking towards the hills, hibiscus and jade trees and a single huge palm, the fronds of which one could touch from a balcony on the second floor. Visible from the same spot was the bare, alluring corner of a tennis court. Silence. Birds fluttering in the branches.
Of the mysteries, the first I recall was a lily stalk bending over in strange, jerky movements to disappear into the ground, A small animal was gathering supper.
Cool morning mist and the sound of waves, cries of children in the street, the fronds plunging down from the heights of the tree. Malibu. Dank sand beneath one’s feet in the narrow passageway that led to the beach, the vines overhead glittering with sun. A steamer basket arrived from my new agent, Evarts Ziegler; fruit and wine in a frock of apricot-colored cellophane. Welcome to California, the card read. It was signed simply, Ziggy.
Lorenzo, who was a favorite of his, had praised me and persuaded him to take me as a client. When I went to meet him he immediately told me how much he admired my work on a film I’d had nothing to do with. I nodded modestly, taking it as a good omen. He was, even then, an anachronism. His hair was gray; he wore three-piece suits and had gone to France for the first time in 1929 with his mother. Later he went back and forth across the country on the Super Chief, a train so luxurious it had a barbershop and waiters who would ask at dinner if you would like a nice fresh trout, caught in a mountain stream and picked up at the last stop.
In the bathroom adjoining his office were signed photographs of Sinclair Lewis and Hemingway, left to him by his father, and in the private sauna one of a naked girl ravenously drinking, water pouring down her chin.
He had a ravaged, sharp face which he was constantly working with his fingers, pushing it together, fixing it. He looked like a naval lieutenant who had been burned in a turret explosion. Over the decades he had acquired certain nervous gestures—I remember him habitually touching his right lower eyelid as he talked or thought. He was married to his second wife at the time, a blonde woman who seemed to hint society, but along the line he got divorced and after an interval married again. One had the feeling he was resigned to the idea of matrimony, that he regarded it as a necessity like good clothes. He was in his sixties though seeming to lack any mortal anxiety. “My health is innate,” he confided to me one day.
“Innate?”
I had misunderstood him. “But my marriage is a two,” he added.
He had a house in Pasadena, another in the desert, and a beach house near Santa Barbara. Business was conducted in his offices in Beverly Hills and occasionally over lunch, where he would discreetly point out various studio heads of enormous wealth. For me he performed the usual functions—negotiating, preparing contracts—but in many ways he was more of a companion than an agent. I could rely on him for unenthusiastic opinions delivered with the realism of a criminal-court judge.
I wrote during the day. At night as the sea disappeared, we drove, shooting past the canyons, along the coast. In the darkness the clouds were low over distant Santa Monica—beneath was a band of imprisoned light. Everywhere cars were speeding, not in urgency but in aimlessness, leisure. We drove in the redolent darkness, the undefined city drawing near.
California life, the film extra’s life, cool night air and sea winds from the 1930s or whatever decade one’s images of it dated back to. Despite my indifference, even dislike, there was something—the blue legend, the inexhaustible sea. On the cover of the telephone directory was a bit of description which explained that as late as the 1940s—the heart of my lifetime—such and such a part of the city had been almost all small ranches and now was entirely shops and homes. A melancholy came over me as I read it, almost sweet, a pang like thoughts of someone I had loved and would never see again. I envied those who had grown up here or had given it countless wasted days.
At the studios, like the gates of royal enclaves, one was waved through. There were huge blow-ups of famous movie scenes framed in the hallways at United Artists though no one bothered to look at them. The majesty of the present required scorn of the past, and movement was always towards newer and greater things. The hopeful came from everywhere, like suitors in a fairy tale, to try their luck. The appeal was irresistible. Even polished figures from the East, more like university presidents than hustlers, arrived with their dreams. I saw Peter Gimbel there. He had come with his wife, a blonde actress, Elga Anderson, and Billy, their dog. They had a script, of course, that they hoped to make. Now to business, he seemed to say, and from the breast pocket of a bush jacket drew a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to read over a list of possible agents.
Gimbel, his wife called him, with the trace of a German accent. I had met her in Rome years before when she was a gleaming colt, proud and indifferent to stares. She was still beautiful, European, with an occasional haughty expression of disdain crossing her mouth—an actress, with something of the word’s meaning in the time of Molière or Goethe clinging to her, a natural mistress to the aristocracy with the requisite behavior.
She and Gimbel had no luck, then or afterwards. In a way she’d had hers, and he was like a gentleman drawn to the Regency gaming tables. He could afford to lose and would have been pleased to win, though there was not much chance of it.
It is beyond conquering. You may taste it, even reign for an hour, but that is all. You may not own the beach or the girls on it, the haze of summer afternoons, or the crashing, green sea, and the next wave of aspirants is outside the door, their murmuring, their hunger. The next tide of beautiful, uninformed faces, of perfect limbs and an overwhelming desire to be known.
——
They all, in a way, were like schoolmates, some popular, others to be avoided, some lazy though not without appeal. Like schoolmates, they scattered and found various fates.
Jean-Pierre Rassam I met first in Paris at La Coupole. He was there every night. It was a belief of his that in any city one should have a single restaurant, that way people always knew where to find you. For him in Paris, it was La Coupole. Later, in New York, it was Elaine’s.
We had been talking about him, though I had not met him, Helen Scott and I. He had been at a film conference, she said, and standing at the podium had introduced himself, “My name is Jean-Pierre Rassam. I live with my mother.” I admired the bravura and self-effacement. He was the brother-in-law, difficult and romanti
c, she said, of a director, Claude Berri. He was a mythomaniac, happy only in dreams, appealing and self-destructive.
As if summoned by the lure of her description, he came to the table. I should say someone came to the table and I recognized him immediately: the suicidal face, fine black hair, curved nose, thin lips, a face as perfect as an animal’s, as sleek. He was urbane and unmanageable. His history was one of glorious tatters, yet he had the power to make one believe in him, in the infinity of possibilities he represented. For his university degree, the oral examination, he’d announced the work of a writer he had never even read, Charles Péguy, an obscure poet. He dazzled the questioners. They sat nodding in approval. At the end, one of them asked, as a matter of interest, which book of Péguy’s he preferred. He didn’t know, Rassam said, he’d never read any of them. They failed him for honesty, but the story would have been much less interesting if he’d lied.
Rassam had many friends at La Coupole. With some, passing among the tables, he sat a long time, with others he exchanged a greeting and a word or two. He was almost always alone. It was because of the dream that one night he would meet the woman of his life there, and he didn’t want to be with anyone else at the time. It was a misconceived idea; you are always with someone else.
Helen Scott had been a mother to him—whether the one he had referred to or not, I cannot say—during a long year when he suffered from serious depression. He emerged from it at last. “In his own milieu,” Helen confided, “he is unbeatable, and he always finds his milieu.”
She drank that night and talked about the past, her father who had been an actor. When military music used to play, he would salute and march around the room. He didn’t speak to her mother except through the children (“Tell your mother she’s a murderous bitch”), and it was only at his funeral that Helen began to understand him, she said. His funeral marked his reentry into her life. We continued to drink. There was something of the coquette in her, unlikely as it seemed, beneath the heavy body and crude features. She knew Truffaut very well, and once in a hotel had come to his room in a negligee, hoping to seduce him. He had to lock himself in the bathroom. Before Paris, she had worked for the United Nations in New York, for the Polish delegation. Scottka, they called her. She had worked with Kropotski.