Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Listen, cobber, my aunt and uncle are here. On a Jet-Away tour. Just come up from Italy. Very impressed with the Pope.’

  ‘Had an audience, did they?’

  ‘Saw him at a distant bloody window. What d’you think they are? President of the ACTU? My uncle’s the postmaster from Warwick. Just retired. Don’t let on, though, that’s all I ask. You know, that there’s anything wrong between Maureen and me.’

  ‘I didn’t know that there was anything wrong,’ said Carey.

  ‘Oh,’ said Andy, waving his hand in dismissal. ‘A girl on Anderson’s staff. Jesus, a man’s only bloody human.’ He mimicked a girl’s voice. ‘I really want to be done over by one of the great directors, Mr McNiell.’

  Carey laughed.

  Andy said: ‘I don’t want Maureen’s great hulking brothers arriving.’ Her brothers were husky fellows who’d both played for Richmond and ran an advertising agency in Melbourne.

  Carey and McNiell, author and director in apparent harmony, walked through into the day’s first party. Waiters uncorked and poured Veuve Clicquot. Beyond the panoramic windows, the Niarchos yacht flashed sunlight from its super-structure. Andy and Maureen were subject to an immediate ambush, and Carey would identify the aunt and uncle in the ruck – a large sunburned man with two sun-cancers on his balding head, and the aunt, a solid little brick-red woman. Once the party settled down, these two sought Carey out.

  ‘We saw the Pope in St Peter’s the other day,’ said the aunt.

  ‘A wonderful bloody place,’ said her husband.

  ‘You can’t help being impressed. It’s something more important than whether you’re a Catholic or not. Sometimes I envy you Catholics.’

  Carey had not been to Mass since he was seventeen, but he let it pass. The uncle took one gulp of the champagne and made a face. ‘Don’t you like it, love?’ his wife asked.

  He did not answer, but grabbed a passing waiter. The boy was neat and dark. Half his ancestors, you could bet, were from Algeria. ‘Listen, François,’ said the uncle, ‘this stuff doesn’t agree with my tummy. D’you think you could get me a beer, eh? Mind you, cold, froid. Froid.’

  He pronounced the French word so that it sounded like the renowned Viennese psychiatrist.

  ‘Une bouteille de bier pour le monsieur, s’il vous plaît!’ said the little red aunt in dazzling French.

  She said to Carey, ‘You know they banned your book from schools in Queensland. Because of the bad words! You’d think none of them had ever been in a pub or shearing shed.’

  The waiter sashayed back in, a Löewenbräu and a glass on a silver salver held wide of his body. He poured the beer into the tall-stemmed glass and then pushed the salver towards monsieur. The uncle didn’t give a damn for all that mannered contempt. It was results that told. He drank half the glass in one long swallow.

  The aunt said: ‘I learned French by the Linguaphone method.’ And Carey imagined a tranquil post office, the only noise the breeze and the fall of pepper-tree pods on the iron roof. And the Linguaphone records running.

  She said: ‘What a shame Andy’s parents couldn’t see this. We wanted to tell you we’re so proud to be here …’

  Uncle Frank took up the speech at the point where honest tears had suddenly disabled his wife. ‘So bloody incredible. Me and the wife. I mean I wouldn’t in a million years expect to end up in a place like this, I mean … it’ll be bloody hard to settle down in the bush again. We wish you all the best, son. You jokers are more important than Test cricketers or anything like that. I mean, this is a country’s bloody culture …’

  ‘Garçon. Une autre bier pour ma mari, s’il vous plaît.’

  When the beer was delivered, the couple moved on. Carey chatted with Maureen and drank the expensive distillations of the sunlight which waiters kept putting in his hand. Carey found himself kissing her, half-fraternally. Together they watched Carey’s blonde companion darting around, talking in a fast voice to the worldly men and women who might decide to deliver her from being just an Australian actress, listening ecstatically in return to Europe’s fast talkers putting forward proposals for co-productions. The feelings of distaste that Carey had felt on the bus, but two hours and an era ago, were sedated now, and he began to tell Maureen how he should have gone to any expense to bring his wife.

  ‘Too bloody right, you should’ve.’

  Carey explained how he’d asked her to come, but the kids had to get to school each day; that had to be attended to.

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Maureen.

  As if at a signal, she led Carey out of the gorgeous room into the corridor where Andy and the blonde actress were waiting for them.

  ‘It’s time,’ said Andy.

  ‘What for?’ Carey asked.

  ‘There’s a limousine waiting here now,’ said Maureen.

  ‘To drive us to the Palais des Festivals,’ said the actress.

  They did not go to the front door of the hotel but to a side entrance, where the car waited for them. Andy and the two women sat on the back seat; Carey pulled down the dicky seat and sat like a mafia bodyguard facing them. The car speeded out into sunlight. An immediate rush of faces appeared beyond the glass at the car windows. The eyes peering in showed a sort of calculating fever; the features wore an assumption of ownership of whatever was inside the vehicle. This crowd surveyed the faces of the two men and two women, noted that none of them was Jane Fonda, and then drifted back to the pavement again.

  ‘God!’ exclaimed Carey, genuinely shaken, appalled at the frenzy and ruthlessness of those faces.

  Maureen said: ‘There’s nothing that stands between a star and his fans. No reserve. No protection.’

  Carey began to laugh. ‘Thank God we’re nobodies.’

  The blonde smiled and said nothing. Both she and Andy were thinking: tonight we’re somebody, and tomorrow the world will know us.

  Traffic on la Croisette was slow. By the time they reached the Palais, the foyer was crowded with people who seemed to be, at least in part, the guests they’d just left behind at the Carlton. Everyone was dressed to the limit. ‘Ladies’ night at the Masonic Lodge,’ said Maureen.

  They climbed the great red staircase. People speculated on who they were. Those in the know about Andy’s existence and talents passed the word to those who were speculating. Treading the red carpet, Carey’s companion wore a beatific smile.

  The seating arrangement in the front row of the dress circle was: Maureen and Andy, the aunt and the uncle, the blonde actress and Carey. For some reason the order was then altered, for beside Carey sat Terry Parker, and next to Terry a sublime girl. Terry introduced her. Her name was Rosemarie Melsner. She was his Alsatian. She spoke English as if born to it, and had then gone to some finishing school to pick up an overlay of Gallic accent. ‘Oh,’ Carey whispered to Terry when they’d sat. ‘Oh!’

  ‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Terry said to him gravely.

  ‘Sounds like a human being, too,’ Carey said, nodding secretly towards his blonde companion, so that Parker would know he meant the darker side of the comment to apply to her.

  ‘Mate,’ Terry said. ‘I know what you mean. I’ve seen her in operation.’

  The lights dimmed. A basso voice announced that the International Jury of the Cannes Film Festival took pride in presenting an Australian film by Andrew McNiell. The theatre went dark. Carey found that his eyes were near closed. The trouble was he’d written this book in a past that seemed as remote to him as another historical era. He had never re-read it since the day of its publication. He was half embarrassed by the memory of it, as a person would be by an old love letter. Through his lowered eyelids, he saw that there were, all at once on the screen, primeval mountains. A strange music, of Aboriginal gods calling from the crevices of the rock, sounded out. Carey muttered in sheer panic: ‘The Yanks won’t understand this.’

  Terry Parker came into view on the screen, a young squatter politician electioneering in the wilderness. At the sight of him, a small gus
h of breath escaped Rosemarie Melsner. Albie Toombs could then be seen, challenging the Terry Parker character. Light, bouncing from Albie Toombs’s head and shoulders, hurt the Terry character’s eyes. Then aggression broke out in the crowd. Half the people turned on the black man, and tall outback police moved in. Albie Toombs was dragged away, the opening credits rolling over his bowed head, over the primeval hills, basking lizards and wheeling galahs.

  ‘The music is brilliant,’ Carey told his companion. ‘Shhhhh!’ she told him. Ten minutes of the film flickered before him. Carey didn’t like the tone of it. His eyes remained half closed. It was probably the fault of the book. In being faithful to the novel, Andy might have committed a filmic sin. Yet there was also a raucous voice in Carey, as well as the reasoning one, and that voice said: ‘The bugger four seats up has violated your novel.’

  Meanwhile, Carey became aware of some problems of design on the screen. Graffiti on a great boulder looked as if they had been painted there half an hour before filming, without being aged or weathered. Some of the interiors lacked conviction. But the apex of his torment was the two scenes in which he played a government clerk arguing with Albie Toombs. Carey’s participation had been the result of his own vanity in thinking himself, for a brief season, an actor, and also of Andy McNiell’s in thinking that he could handle amateurs.

  ‘How do you think it’s going?’ Carey asked the blonde actress after close on an hour of the movie.

  ‘Shhhhh!’ she said yet again, taking in the movie with an abominable fixity.

  The film grew episodic in the second hour. I should never have sold the bloody thing, Carey counselled himself, and hunched further into his seat. Not to anyone. It was, for one thing, written before the essential date, before 1972, the watershed year when Carey’s wife and he had ceased to torment each other and learned to live in union.

  All pre-1972 Carey novels were dark and savage documents, the work of a tormented young man. All novels since then had been increasingly light and compassionate. Critics disliked the change, but Carey was delighted with it. The Cut-Rate Kingdom dated from before that watershed. And here it was, rising in images in this foreign movie house. And bringing with it the torment of pre-1972.

  Like a life, it raced towards the end. There was a blackness as the Albie Toombs character died. Then closing credits, music and the primeval hills again. After the film ended, the crowd kept their silence for two seconds. Then they commenced to applaud and stand, first in the stalls, next in the circle. Everyone stood, even Maureen and then Carey, adding his ambiguous contribution to the rising noise of the clapping. Carey’s companion glanced not once at him, but smiled steadily up at the rows of filmgoers who were applauding behind them.

  Andy began to move up the steps; he looked back, wanting to include Carey. But Carey pretended to be caught up with Terry Parker and his sweet girl from Alsace. So the crowd swept Andy up the steps and then on to the landing, where there was more applause from people standing below in the Palais foyer.

  Uncle Frank wept at Carey’s side. The blonde actress had disappeared, probably to kiss Andy in congratulation while there was still a pressman about to capture it all. Uncle Frank put his arm around Carey. ‘A bloody great night for Australia, Phil. I mean, I saw Dawn Fraser at the ’56 Olympics. But you expect Australians to win gold medals at that sort of stuff. This … this sort of thing … is something absolutely bloody new.’

  On the steps, the beautiful Alsatian asked Carey if he was happy with the film of his novel. Carey shook his head, pretending the experience had swamped him. ‘I can’t sort out my ideas yet, love …’ He stumbled in a half-real, half-feigned way as they descended to the foyer.

  Maureen and Terry, Andy and the actress were posing for photographs as Rosemarie Melsner and Carey slid out of the door and on to the pavement. ‘Well?’ she said, and looked at Carey with the same smile, spotting the author’s dismay.

  ‘No,’ said Carey. ‘It isn’t that I didn’t like it.’

  ‘No?’ she said, laughing. ‘Never mind. You can clear out from all this in a day or so. Get back to innocent old Australia again.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Carey said. ‘I’m going to leave tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t sound so anxious to leave us,’ she said.

  They walked down among the palm trees of la Croisette in a sublime purple evening. A genial traffic jam let them cross the motor lanes when they chose. Two expensive-looking Americans and their wives, ahead of Rosemarie and Carey, began talking about the movie.

  ‘Think it could have a future in the art cinemas,’ one of them said. ‘Go down well on the college circuits,’ said another. ‘The violence is a problem.’

  The Alsatian overheard all this too and smiled at Carey again, as if the Americans were figures of fun.

  Carey said: ‘What Andy wants is perfectly reasonable. He wants to be an Australian culture-hero. He wants to be the object of an inter national cult as well. And to have his movie on in every sizeable town in the US, Great Britain and Western Europe.’

  ‘A perfectly reasonable ambition,’ said Rosemarie Melsner. ‘For a boy from Melbourne.’

  The Café Ondine was a restaurant on the beach, the sort of place which on a windy day would get sand across the carpet. There indeed stood Susannah York, shining in a doorway. And Alan Bates. And the Polish director who had just run them in tandem in a movie. Somehow, the sight of the two of them standing there made Carey feel like running away.

  At the far corner table he had found, journalists came up to him and asked him for his reaction. He said he couldn’t expect to give a clear answer. The experience had been overpowering. Going to the bar for some Kronenberg beer, he met Andy and Maureen, embraced them, told them the half truths he’d told the journalists. He was over come, he said. He would have to speak to them in the morning. He knew he was sounding enthusiastic to the extent of misleading them.

  He could sense that the guests entering the Ondine were divided in their feelings for the movie. All night long they came up to him, muttering under their voices. Those who’d liked the movie drank and sang and touched each other’s flesh. But Carey’s share of the party were the snipers, the grudge-holders and the disapprovers.

  ‘You should’ve written the script.’

  ‘Andy offered it … I refused.’

  ‘Did he give you right of approval of the script?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you approved that script?’

  ‘No. Well, not in that form. Andy changes the script as he shoots. He rewrites it during tea breaks, or at lunchtime, before every take. I wish he didn’t do it that way. But there’s no bloody malice to it. It’s just the way that he works.’

  ‘You’re very forgiving.’

  The accusation of virtue angered Carey. ‘No. He bought the film rights, fair and square. I wrote a book, that’s all, and he bought it.’

  ‘Oh … oh, mate. And a great book it was …’

  ‘No book written before 1972 was any bloody good,’ said Carey as an axiom. He took giant swallows of beer. ‘All literature begins in 1972,’ he announced drunkenly.

  ‘What about Homer?’

  A dozen times that night, in his corner, he said: ‘I don’t think it’s one of those books you can easily film. In a novel you can deal with motivation inside the bloke’s head. In a movie you can only show it through the use of external symbols.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ They would pat Carey’s arm. ‘He buggered it up on you and you know it. But never mind. There must be a few more good novels left in you.’ The weariness of thinking of that future heap of as-yet unwritten Carey novels rose before him like an intimidating tower. He lowered his brow to the table. The Alsatian girl, so generous in her ways, smoothed the hair at the back of his neck.

  Many times that night he returned to Andy and Maureen to say loud and indefinite things. On his last clearheaded approach, he was alarmed to see Andy staring at him through wine-bleared eyes with a sobriety that arose from the man’s c
ore. Andy could see, beyond Carey’s own wine-bleared eyes, his friend’s dissent from what the movie had done with the novel. In that second, Carey would later believe, the friendship was cruelled forever. He and Andy McNiell became all of a sudden acquaintances with half-bitter anecdotes to tell about each other.

  At last, some of the party staggered on to the beach. A middle-aged Belgian had joined Carey and Terry Parker and the girl, and beside the Belgian sat a whore whose blouse exposed her breasts in the manner of the garments of the French revolution. She was a striking and beautiful woman, about as old as the Belgian himself. Both of them seemed happy enough to end the night listening to Carey and Terry Parker rant about the burdens of being Australian. Carey lay with his head in Rosemarie Melsner’s lap, looking up at her perfect face. ‘When I studied Alsace-Lorraine at the Christian Brothers,’ he told her, ‘and how the Huns and the Frogs squabbled over it, I didn’t think of it as the habitat of a sweet girl like you, Rosemarie. Rosemarie, Rosemarie …’

  Somehow they all got home. And in the morning there was no time to confide in Andy. The alarm clock was late in going off. Maureen and the actress raged around the apartment making Andy his breakfast, for he was due to appear on French television at 9.30. He might be back to see Carey before Carey caught the red bus going back to Nice.

  Carey spent the morning on the Carlton terrace, listening to argumentation about the film.

  ‘Where is Rosemarie?’ he asked Terry Parker.

  Terry looked out across the ocean. ‘Had to go to work.’

  A drinking group of producers and actors gathered. One of them said: ‘You can’t make an art movie of that size and expect not to have to use an international lead.’

  The remark initiated a debate. ‘Why pander to the buggers?’ Carey asked with a gesture of the hand that indicated the wide world. ‘We take what they dish up. Let them take a bit of us!’

  ‘That’s all bloody well,’ explained a producer, ‘unless your market is a country of 14 million. In a country of 14 million you shouldn’t make movies that have crowd scenes and in which there isn’t an inter national lead.’