The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  “Brilliant. Fantastic. But where’s the film? That’s six months’ work?” He looked sad rather than angry.

  “There’s more,” I said. “I haven’t shown you the rest.”

  We got down to business. We argued, we haggled. I was in a strong position: Joan of Arc had been a great success—not quite a Julie, but highly satisfying all the same. Julie was still playing in the U.S.A. Eddie wanted Part I complete by July ’28. I demanded the end of September. I won. Eddie stipulated that I must forfeit my twenty-five-thousand-dollar completion bonus if I was one day into October. We saved some money by actually closing down the film for two months—March and April. I add this note because I have read the wildest and most irresponsible accounts of the filming of The Confessions. It has even been written that I spent five years making a two-hour film. For the record, then, the first phase of The Confessions: Part I lasted from July 1927 to February 1928. Phase two was to commence at Chambéry in May 1928.

  Doon and I tried to meet as often as we could. She insisted, however, that if we made love we had to be together for a whole night. This not unreasonable demand made life extra-difficult for me, as you might imagine. My lies to Sonia became less and less circumspect. I found the whole business of covering up increasingly effortful. And I was encouraged in my laxity by Sonia’s astonishing naïveté. Or indifference.

  I spent a whole weekend with Doon in February. Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night. I returned home on Sunday evening.

  “Where were you?” Sonia said.

  “I told you. At the studios, editing.”

  “But they said you weren’t there. That you’d left on Friday night.”

  “That’s nonsense. Of course I was.”

  “I telephoned all day Saturday.”

  “Well, I was in and out.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “What?”

  “Someone told me they saw you in town on Saturday evening. In a restaurant. Kurfürstendamm.”

  Mild panic symptoms. “Yes.… Well, I had to meet Doon Bogan. Script—you know—decisions.”

  “How is Doon?”

  “What?… Oh, fine, fine. Fine.… Why were you phoning me?”

  “Hereford was ill.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Seems to be now. Just a bad cold.”

  “There’s no need to phone me just because a child’s got a cold, Sonia.”

  I found this conversation most disturbing. I looked at Sonia’s expression closely (she was playing patience), but she seemed entirely credulous. Yet she had virtually trapped me in a lie. More intelligent questioning, had she been truly suspicious, would surely have caught me out. Had she been truly suspicious … Why was she not suspicious? Over the next few days this question nagged at me. There were only two answers that I could come up with. One: that she was a trusting fool. Two: that my prolonged absences from the home suited her in some way.

  I eventually asked Doon.

  “Do you think Sonia could ever have an affair?”

  “Why not? You are. Do you think you need a special talent?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “She’s attractive.”

  “Sonia?”

  “Yeah. In a sort of comforting earth-mothery way.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I just know Alex used to say she was sort of sexy. He liked English women.”

  This did me no good at all. To me, Sonia seemed unchanged. I had not felt a spasm of sexual attraction towards her since I had met Doon that Christmas night in 1926. But once the seed had been sown, suspicion began to flower. She was alone a lot; she was rich; she had servants, a car, and a driver if need be; the children were looked after.… What did she do all day?

  It was during the lay-off months of March and April that these suspicions became intolerable. Doon asked me to come with her to a conference of international socialism in Paris, but I excused myself on the grounds that phase two of Part I required me in Berlin. I felt I had dedicated enough time and effort to the cause, with my generous donations, my signing of innumerable petitions and protesting letters to the newspapers. I had managed to cut down on the meetings, but along with Doon I had actually marched twice through the streets of Berlin on KPD rallies. It was enough, I felt. Much as I loved her I did not want to submit that love to the trials of a two-week conference.

  Thus, undistracted, I fell to brooding about Sonia and decided, reluctantly, to have her followed. I asked Eddie if he knew of a private investigator.

  “Yes,” he said, “what for?”

  I lied. I said a friend of Sonia had asked to borrow money from her. I merely wanted the proposed “scheme” investigated, discreetly.

  Eddie looked shrewdly at me. “We used to use a man called Eugen for chasing debts. I never met him but his success rate was high.”

  “Sounds ideal,” I said. “What’s his address?”

  I was relieved that E. P. Eugen lived in an unfashionable northern quarter of the city—Wedding—in a small street next to the infectious-diseases hospital, and with a drab view of the Berlin ship canal at its southern end. I found it—and I am sure all Eugen’s clients felt the same—strangely reassuring to visit such an anonymous address. I traveled there by the Ringbahn—it seemed more fitting—and got off at Putlitzstrasse Station. I had never visited this district before: it was oddly spread out—warehouses, a new park that seemed not to have taken to its surroundings, the vast modern functional-looking hospital. I made my way quickly to Fehmarnstrasse.

  On the door it said EUGEN P. EUGEN, LOAN REPOSSESSION AND CHARACTER REFERENCES. I knocked and was admitted by a young bespectacled girl. A small man, almost dainty, rested one haunch on what I took to be her desk. He turned and examined the dangling, gleaming toe of his boot.

  “I have an appointment with Herr Eugen,” I said. “I am Herr Braun.”

  “Ah, Herr Braun.” The little man stood up. “I am Eugen. Come in.”

  I followed Eugen into his office. He really was very small, not much over five feet, and immaculately dressed. He had neatly parted blond hair with almost-white eyelashes, which gave him a look of childish openness. We sat down. Eugen took a long cigar out of a drawer in his desk and lit it. I imagined this was a reflex gesture. It seemed to say: “I may be a small man but I have a big cock.” I immediately disliked him.

  He told me of his terms and I told him my business. I told him that I wanted a woman followed with the utmost discretion. I gave no name, just my address and Sonia’s description. I wanted to know where she went, who was there and what they did. It was simple, straightforward and our discussion lasted less than five minutes. I paid in advance and he agreed to provide a full report in one month. I got up to leave but Eugen was round his desk like a cat and stopped me at the door.

  “Would you oblige me with your autograph, Herr Todd? For my secretary. She’s seen Julie five or ten times. Fifteen, perhaps.”

  I signed, grudgingly, but without comment,

  “Too, I am a great admirer,” he said in English, in a soft confidential voice. Then as I left he added pointedly, “Good day to you, Herr Braun.”

  It was only two weeks before I heard from him. I was busy with the approaching restart of the film. Leo was away in Switzerland supervising construction of a huge set near the small town of Grex, which was doubling as eighteenth-century Geneva. I was working on a revolutionary technical device and was plotting its integration with the film when Eugen’s phone call was transferred to me in the photographic laboratories at Spandau.

  “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you,” I said.

  “There is good and bad news,” he said. “I must discuss them with you.”

  We arranged to meet in a small café around the corner from his office in the late afternoon. It turned out to be a cellar café, a few uncomfortable doors away from the main entrance to the Institut für Infektionskrankenhaus. Eugen sat at the back of the café at a thin table, eating stuffed cucumbers. He had a bad fre
sh graze on his forehead and chin; apart from that he was as dapper as ever. He stopped eating as soon as he saw me and lit one of his stupid cigars.

  “Can I offer you some beer? Some wine? There is excellent food here. Excellent—and at modest prices.”

  “No, thanks. What happened?”

  “Your wife. She discovered me.”

  Eugen told me that it was his practice to use a small motorbike to follow cars. In this manner he had followed Sonia undiscovered for ten days. The day before yesterday she had not used the driver but had taken the car herself. She took an unfamiliar route and Eugen thought he was finally on to something. She motored out to the country. Somewhere near Dallgow, in a quiet lane, Eugen turned a corner and almost ran into the back of Sonia’s car (our Packard), which was deliberately parked to bring about this result. Eugen braked, skidded and fell off his bike. He tore his clothes, grazed his face and was momentarily stunned. Sonia confronted him, brandished a revolver (it must have been a child’s toy—I had to admire her nerve and aplomb) and demanded to know why he was following her.

  He looked down at his cucumber.

  “I had to confess a powerful infatuation,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s the best excuse. It always works.” Sonia had gone through his wallet and had found his business cards (here I was thankful for Eugen’s euphemistic job description).

  “But I must tell you,” he went on. “Good news. She’s an honest woman. There’s nothing illicit in her life, nothing. She meets her friends, she takes her children to the park. She shops. She plays cards twice a week with other women. That’s all.”

  We haggled aimlessly for a while over his fee. He said the damage to his motorbike, clothes, face and self-esteem were barely covered by the unearned portion of his advance. I gave in and returned home somewhat relieved. Sonia never mentioned the incident to me. Why? Did she suspect me? Or was she flattered by Eugen’s subterfuge? Although I was reassured I still harbored illogical worries, even though there was nothing in Sonia’s demeanor or increasingly, round, placid face (Berlin was plumping her up) that could reasonably give me cause for alarm.

  Is this the time for a brief tribute to Eddie Simmonette? I owe him so much (mind you, he owes me a fair bit too) and I will never forget his generosity and tolerance, his help and understanding, when I went to him in April 1928 and told him my plans to revise completely certain aspects of The Confessions and reshoot some of the previous year’s scenes.

  I was bold—I pushed my luck—only because of that deathbed promise old Duric had extracted from him. But, sentimental reasons aside, there were sound commercial reasons for backing a John Todd film in those days. Anyway, I made my bid because I was fretting about certain sequences of the film and was seeking some means of resolving them.

  The plain fact is that by 1928 there was nothing much more to be done with the camera. Every so-called trick and gimmick you see on today’s cinema screens had been discovered before three decades of the century were up. Rapid cutting, multiple exposure, moving cameras, angled shots, back lighting, matte screens, selective soft focus, vignette masks, crane shots, lens diffusion, etc., etc., were all at the director’s disposal. It was as if, to take an analogy, the history of painting had moved from mud daubings on a cave wall to modern abstract expressionism in twenty-five years. We were even experimenting with a kind of 3-D picture in those days and this was one of the new techniques I wanted to employ. A firm in France was producing a type of embossed film that when projected on a screen gave the actors, if not a true three-dimensional effect, at least that of a bas-relief. It was particularly effective in close-up. The film stock was expensive but we had budgeted for it. I planned to use it in the famous cherry-picking incident, which we would film in Chambéry that summer.

  All film technique, I am convinced (and as is the case with many of my theories, I am probably alone in adhering to it), originates in dreaming. We could dream slow motion before the moving camera was invented. In our dreams we could cut between parallel action, we assembled montage shots, long before some self-important Russian claimed to show us how. This is where the film derives its particular power. It re-creates on screen what has been going on in our unconscious. I met a famous director once (he shall be nameless) who purported to have been the first man to launch a remote-control camera down a stretched wire and give us for the first time the sensation of flying like a bird. But dreamers, I told him, have been flying this way since the birth of consciousness. Many of my own inventions (the hand-held camera, my soft-focus lens) originated in my dreams. This, then, was the position I found myself in. Let us take another image—a still, burning candle. It is beautiful, it illumines. Now, breathe gently on the flame and observe the flickering, dancing transformation. As I saw it, the director’s role in the film was to be the breath upon the candle flame. I had everything at my disposal in The Confessions to make that flame dance and sparkle—my vision, the actors, technical apparatus and the skills of my collaborators—but I still felt myself balked and restricted by the confinement of the lens and what we could do with it, that fixed immutable rectangle that we had to fill. And then, that spring of ’28, I dreamed about Rousseau and his walk from Geneva to Savoy. I saw him striding through the chilly landscape with the vast backdrop of the mountains behind him. It was as if I stood and watched him walk a mile in front of my eyes.… When I woke I knew that my task in The Confessions was somehow to escape the limitations of the frame.

  The solution to this problem came so swiftly that I was baffled that it had not struck anyone before. If I could not extend the dimensions of the camera lens and thereby extend the dimensions of the screen, I would simply multiply the options available to me: I would use three cameras, five cameras, synchronize their images and project them on a corresponding number of adjacent screens. I had a sudden vision of my cinema of the future. We would sit the audience in a round amphitheater, hemmed in by a circular screen. Jean Jacques’s walk could span 360 degrees.…

  But this was far away. I sat down with my cameraman, Horst Immelman, to work out the practicalities (there is not much to say about Horst—in his forties, genial, efficient, an artisan deluxe). We quickly realized that the best we could achieve was the linking up of three cameras, otherwise synchronization, image adjustment and continuity would prove nightmarishly complicated. Horst thought a prototype could be rigged up in a month. I went to Eddie to convince him we should use it. He at once saw the immense advantages the device would bring, but pointed out that we would have to adapt the world’s cinemas too, if it was to be worthwhile. It was a fair point. In the end it was decided that I would shoot some scenes with the Tri-Kamera (as it was now known) and—this was Eddie’s idea—Realismus would adapt key cinemas for premiere, trade and publicity screenings. He enthused about my invention but for the wrong reason. He saw it as a spectacular publicity stunt and was indifferent to the aesthetic potential. We—Horst and I—went away with a revised budget and shooting schedule. I would refilm two scenes—Rousseau’s walk to Savoy and his first meeting Mme. de Warens—and use the Tri-Kamera on two new ones: the cherry-picking incident and Rousseau’s forlorn departure from Les Charmettes and arrival in Paris. If the device worked, and public response was favorable, we would look at expanding the Tri-Kamera sequences in Parts II and III.

  And so we were set to go again. The rest of the year lay before me, planned and funded. Spring and summer in Geneva, Annecy and Chambéry. The autumn taken up with shooting the Tri-Kamera scenes. Winter, back in Spandau for interiors. My new delivery date was July 1, 1929. Part II would commence in the autumn of that year.

  Before we left for France I asked Doon to marry me but, typically, with my usual impulsive stupidity, chose entirely the wrong moment. I was at her apartment; we had just made love. I got dressed to go out and buy some cigarettes. As I took my coat and hat from the stand in the hall I saw an unfamiliar paisley-patterned fine-wool scarf hanging there. I picked it up and smelled it. Hair oil and cigars … I replaced it and
went out. Somehow I purchased cigarettes.

  Mavrocordato.

  Mavrocordato had been to the apartment. I could see the scarf round his thick neck. I issued a series of instructions to myself as I walked back from the tobacconist’s kiosk, all to do with calmness, logic, dispassion, self-respect, but I promptly forgot them all as I stepped back inside.

  Doon called, “Hurry up with those cigarettes!”

  I took Mavrocordato’s scarf off the hook and put it in my pocket. I went into the bedroom and tossed a packet of cigarettes onto the bed. Doon sat up to reach them, exposing her breasts as she leaned forward. I dangled the scarf in front of her. She looked up.

  “Mavrocordato’s been here, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes.” She was candid, unshaken.

  I felt my eyes heavy with tears. “He forgot his scarf. You should be more careful.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What?”

  “Not his scarf. The plumber who came on Monday—no, Tuesday—left it.”

  “The plumber …”

  “Well done.”

  “But you did say Mavrocordato had been here.”

  “Yes.”

  I felt all my anger turn in midair like a boomerang and head back towards me.

  “What the hell for?” I asked. “I mean, what bloody right does he have … ? What about my feelings, for God’s sake?”

  “We had a chat. Christ, I was married to him, you know.”

  I sat down on the bed and took her hand.

  “Doon, I want you to marry me. I beg you. Let’s get married.”

  “No. I don’t want to get married again. Once was enough. Not to anyone. Not even you.”

  She freed her hand from mine, lit her cigarette and lay back in the bed.

  “Why should we get married? Aren’t you happy?”

  “Of course I am. That’s why.”

  “Well, let’s leave it at that.”

  “I forbid you to see that … that big hairy shit again.”

  “No, you don’t. I like him. I’ll see him if I want to. You don’t need to be there. For God’s sake, don’t be stupid, Jamie. Anyway, you’re married already.”