by William Boyd
“Bloody rain,” I said.
“Jamie, I was thinking, wouldn’t the scene be better in rain? I mean, it’s a low moment.”
“Absolutely not.” I reiterated my reasons. She was bored, idle. She knew she would never get me to compromise.
“Well, could I go down to the hotel? I’ve got some stuff to sort out.”
I looked up at the massed, packed gray clouds. If the sun appeared we would only have time to do Jean Jacques’s walk to the front door. I said yes. She went off with understandable relief.
What took me back down the valley early? What made me leave in advance of the cast and crew? I cannot remember. I think Leo brought a cable from Eddie querying some expense and I think I wanted to check my production notes before I dictated a reply. Anyway, whatever it was, I had myself driven down to the Hôtel de France on the Quai Nezia (I can recommend it, if ever you find yourself in Chambéry). It was an agreeable drive, even in the rain. I remember that because my mood was so placid and settled. I had one scene left to film; The Confessions: Part I was everything I had dreamed it to be. I felt the benign confidence of a great artist—a da Vinci, a Rembrandt, a Monet—staring at his completed canvas, wondering only where to inscribe his signature.
Did I stop at my room before I went to Doon’s suite? (The hotel had only one, rather poky, on the top floor under the eaves, converted from servants’ quarters.) I think so. I think I confirmed or refuted Eddie’s inquiry. Then I sauntered along the corridor and up the steep stairs, and walked into Doon’s sitting room.
Alexander Mavrocordato sat there, smoking, reading a script, my script. A briefcase rested against his chair leg. He was dressed casually—à l’anglaise—sports coat, twills, a cream shirt and a cravat. He looked up as I came in. There was no surprise, no guilt, no welcome.
“Ah, Todd,” he said. “I hear the weather is causing you problems.”
I thought for an instant I was going to have a heart attack, so intense was the pain that seemed to zigzag transversely across my chest from my left armpit. But it passed with gratifying suddenness. (Did I tell you Mavrocordato was Russian? Or so he claimed to be. He spoke English with a clotted central European accent. I am sure his name was assumed. Someone once told me his real name was Otto Blâc—the c pronounced ch.)
“Yes,” I managed to say, forcing my head to stay still and not swivel round to Doon’s bedroom door. “Minor problems. Minor. Very minor.… Yes, entirely minor.”
He threw the script on the table. “That’s some film you’re making.”
“Thank you.” I stood like a major domo, unnaturally rigid in the middle of the room, canted forward ever so slightly, as if waiting to receive an order. I felt that if Doon did not come in soon I would shatter, so tensely was I holding myself.
She came through the door brushing her hair. I saw the bed for a second—flat, unrumpled. I relaxed, marginally.
“Hi, darling,” she said to me. “Look who’s here,” she said, indicating Mavrocordato.
“Yes,” I said, turning to him. “What exactly do you want?”
“He’s making a film,” Doon said. “He wants me to be in it.”
“No,” I said.
“No what?” Mavrocordato asked.
“No, she will not be in your film.”
“Jamie? Are you all right?”
Mavrocordato smiled wearily. “I don’t think that’s your decision, Todd, with great respect.”
“Forget it,” I said. “With great respect.”
Doon fixed me with a wide-eyed angry look. She turned to Mavrocordato. “We’ll talk later.”
He got up, picked up his briefcase, opened it and placed a script on the table. I picked it up and handed it to him. I smelled the sour reek of his cheroot.
“I leave you script, Doon,” he said, setting it down again. I picked it up and handed it to him. We did this three times.
“Take it, Blâc,” I said.
He swore expansively at me in his tiny improvised language, mangled munching sounds.
“Fuck off, cunt,” I said. Proud Anglo-Saxon brevity.
“Stop it, Jamie!” Doon was furious but I did not care. I felt cool, as if all my arteries and veins were ventilated suddenly with clear Alpine air. He stood there with his hands on his hips as if I were some irritating mendicant who would not take no for an answer.
“Is he always such a child?” he asked Doon.
It was the look he gave her that did it. Familiar, possessive, knowing.
Spontaneously I said to Doon, “Have you ever slept with him? Since we—”
I left it unfinished. Her face was taut, stretched.
A hooting laugh from Mavrocordato. “Ah, yes! Now we are there. So English!”
“Well?”
“Yes,” she said. “Once or twice.”
“For old time sake,” Mavrocordato said.
I hit him with all my strength, a curved high right hook, catching him in front of his left ear. I heard, before I felt the pain, my knuckles break. He went crashing down and got up staggering almost at once. I swung two more wild hits at his face, a left and a right. The left squashed his nose, the right slammed into his shoulder. I bellowed in agony as my broken knuckles ground bone on bone.
Mavrocordato was swaying, snorting blood and mucus—nose-jam—onto the carpet like a dying bull in a bullfight. Doon was cursing and yelling at us to stop. My right hand felt as if it had been plunged in a bucket of sharp knives. The hot pain had a jangling metallic quality to it.
His first punch caught me a glancing blow high on the head. Then he tried to knee me in the groin but, doubled over as I was, his knee drove into my ribs, blasting the air out of my lungs. I felt myself going down slowly and his second punch landed more like a club on the back of my head. He grabbed my collar, opened the door and dragged me through. I could see nothing but light meteors swarming like a shoal of darting fish in front of my eyes. I reached to grab something—I thought there was a wall in front of me—and I clutched air. Then I was launched into space with the vicious force of his boot in my arse. I took a header down the stairs.
I finished filming the final scene of The Confessions ten days later with two broken knuckles, a severe compound fracture of my right arm, three broken ribs and massive body-wide contusions. My torso was heavily strapped, my right arm and hand set in plaster and my brain fuddled with analgesics.
Doon could not stop laughing and we were obliged to shoot many takes. But it worked and was finally done exactly as I wanted.
I forgave Doon, with guilty magnanimity, when she apologized for not telling me about Mavrocordato. She was not ashamed, she said, using arguments identical to those I myself employed to ease my conscience about Monika. And she was going to appear in his film. Somehow that did not bother me so much now. But she was sweet to me while I convalesced for a week. She looked after me with merry, genuine care.
Eddie Simmonette came for the last days’ filming. He seemed strangely subdued. He did not join in the great cheer that went up from the entire crew when I said for the last time, “Cut! Print it!” My own elation was brief. I was exhausted from almost two years of creative struggle, yet was fully aware that the entire project was only one-third complete.
We were jolly enough in the Hôtel de France that night. Garrulous mutually admiring speeches were made, tokens were exchanged, much champagne was drunk. When the singing started, Eddie came over and asked if he could have a word with me outside.
We went out and strolled along the banks of the river Leysse towards the jardin public. It was a calm, balmy night with a clear sky. We talked inconsequentially about this or that. Eddie asked how my broken arm and ribs were. Eventually, I said, “What’s wrong, Eddie? Money problems?”
He chuckled. “There are always money problems.”
“What is it then?”
He paused under a streetlamp. Across the river I could see the gravel paths of the public gardens and the knobbled leprous boughs of the pollarded limes, grote
sque in the darkness.
“Whatever happens, John,” he began slowly, “I want you to know that I will never be as proud of anything as I am of The Confessions. It’s a masterpiece. A wonderful film.”
“Thank you, Eddie.” I felt my heart clog with affection for this neat dark man. “But what do you mean, ‘whatever happens’?”
He looked at me. I could not swear to it—his voice gave nothing away—but I think his eyes were luminous with tears. He took a folded newspaper from his pocket. It was a trade paper, Kino-Magazin. Large-type headlines dominated the front page:
END OF PATENTS WAR!!!
TOBIS-KLANGFILM SYNDICATE TRIUMPHS!!!
I had drunk too much. I was weary.
“What’s it all about?” I asked.
“I think we’re too late,” he said softly, desperately. “The Confessions, it’s too late.”
“Late? Too late for what?”
“For sound.”
VILLA LUXE, June 24, 1972
Sound. Sound.… I had never worried about sound. I knew about it but it seemed to me then to be a fad. Moreover, it was a device that would take film back to its theatrical and literary origins, which it had managed to shake off. I regarded it rather as a painter might take note of new developments in drypoint engraving. It seemed to have nothing to do with the purity of moving pictures. I, who despised captions so much, who had even invented the superimposed caption so that the screen never had to resemble a blackboard, what did I want—what did any film artist want—with dialogue, with the “talkies”? How could words play any part in a purely visual medium?
Well, history proved me wrong. But we have lost as much as we gained. With sound it is too easy to explain, too easy to be precise. That dangerous edge of ambiguity has gone forever. The potent, multifarious suggestions of the visual image were subjugated to prattle. Articulate reasoning took over from the freedom the image had to operate below the level of conscious thought.… I can go on. Technology stifled an art in 1927—or whenever it was that ghastly quacking blacked-up singer first articulated on film—and today, decades later, we are still fighting to regain that marvelous subversive quality of the mature silent film.
Anyway, I rehearse all these old arguments with Ulrike one evening at her parents’ villa. She is a good audience—she agrees with every word I say.
Herr Günther is tall and ruddy. He has red cheeks, as if he’s spent the day striding through a chill gusty countryside. He looks like an English farmer. His entire family is gathered on the pool terrace and there are numerous other guests—strangers to me—from the new villas being erected around our bay. Most of the adults have forsaken the pool but the children still scream and shout in and around it. Ulrike has asked me if I want to swim, but I declined, saying I am not feeling too well. In fact I’m reluctant to display my old man’s body among all this tanned youth and concupiscence. My flesh is slack and folded now. My flat chest has transformed itself into two soft dropping breasts. The virile furze that covered my body has grown long and mysteriously silky. My legs are thin, my buttocks half-deflated. All the usual signs. I might have swum with two or three present but not this loud, vital assembly.
Ulrike tells me her boyfriend is arriving tomorrow and that he’s greatly looking forward to meeting me. She says he has requests from one or two film magazines to do interviews. Do I have any objections?
“No photographs,” I say quickly, thinking of the man on the bus. “And he mustn’t publish my address.”
“Of course not.”
We talk on. She is a keen student of film and I find I enjoy airing my views.
“But what about color, Mr. Todd? You can’t object to that.”
“Oh yes, I do, but not as strongly as sound.”
I tell her that color makes the cinema film banal. It becomes exactly the same as seeing. We view the world in color; black and white makes film quite different, an essential veil of artifice, like the two dimensions of an artist’s canvas pretending to be three. With moving pictures—the great art form of the twentieth century—the addition of sound and the arrival of color robbed them of their uniqueness.
“And besides,” I go on, warming up—Anneliese has arrived—“color is modern, so black and white becomes the past, the color of history. Think of the Great War. You only know it in black and white. There are no color photographs of the Great War, yet I can assure you it was a very colorful event. Imagine it in color—you’d have an entirely different impression of it. When I see newsreels I hardly recognize it—all that monochrome!”
Herr Günther approaches and starts asking me about my First War experiences. I tell him something of them. People gather round, fascinated by an old man’s memories. The sun dips below the crocodile headland and the first bats begin to dart between the pines.
13
The End of the Affair
It was some time between Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the Reichstag fire that Doon told me she was moving to Paris. Her arguments were cogent. Eight of her colleagues in the Artists’ Association had been killed in the last year. The association itself was outlawed. She doubted if she would ever be able to work in a German film again. The country, she said, was ruined, she had no desire to live in it, and so on.
I encouraged her to go and said I would join her as soon as I finished work on the new sound version of The Confessions. Indeed by then, early 1933, half the German film industry seemed to be living abroad. I went with her to Lehrter Station to see her off. She had hardly any luggage. We kissed, we declared our love for each other and she left.
I walked gloomily out of the station. The unpleasantly bright flags—red, white and black—flew everywhere. Men in uniform hawked newspapers in loud confident voices. I hailed a taxi and thought about going to the Metropol for a symbolic drink but decided against it. I knew it would only make me more depressed and I had enough trouble on my hands as it was.
It was not only the arrival of the talkies that had done for The Confessions. The Wall Street crash had contributed too. As the repercussions of financial collapse in America struck the tottering edifice of German industry in 1930, Realismus Films came alarmingly close to bankruptcy. The Spandau studios were closed and we moved back to our offices near the gasworks in Grunewald. The editing suites were cramped and uncomfortable and our machines were badly serviced. While I worked in these straightened circumstances on the miles of film we had shot, crowds stampeded to the cinemas to see and hear the babble of inane voices in Die Nacht Gehört Uns and Melodie des Herzens. Perhaps if we had had more finance and better facilities The Confessions might still have made its mark, as talkies were rare and their quality lamentable. However, by the time it was finally ready—February 1931—the cinemas were full of insufferable operettas, dire homespun musicals cast with petit bourgeois lads and lasses or blatant publicity vehicles for superannuated tenors like Kiepura and Neumark.
The Confessions: Part I in its final version ran five hours and forty-eight minutes. It had not been difficult to persuade Eddie that its only chance of success lay in emphasizing its scale and extraordinary properties. We hired the enormous Gloria-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm and installed three vast screens. A sixty-man orchestra was assembled (at the last minute Furtwängler denied us the Berlin Philharmonic—I never spoke to him again after that day). On February 27 there was a gala performance. The great auditorium was half-empty; only a few hundred people saw The Confessions as it was intended to be. There was, consolingly, a rapturous reception from the press, but its tone was sad and valedictory. The Illustrierter Film-Kunst was representative:
It is as if Todd had launched, in this the era of the motorcar, the airplane and the transatlantic liner, a splendid three-masted clipper ship with billowing white sails, sumptuous saloons and the most elegant lines. Magnificent, but of another age than ours.
The film ran for a week in the Gloria-Palast to average houses before we had to close. The sole benefit was that the publicity revived Realismus�
��s fortunes briefly. Leo Druce quickly made a musical comedy about three out-of-work window cleaners that enjoyed a modicum of success. Offers multiplied for me. I could have made any number of films in half a dozen countries had I so wished, but I turned them all down. I will not dwell on my feelings, but my despair at what had happened was so intense I half-seriously contemplated suicide, especially when—against my wishes—Doon went to Italy to make the film with Mavrocordato. Karl-Heinz was busy at UFA with a new contract. It is a measure of how low I was that I did not interfere when Eddie cut and dubbed a ninety-minute version of The Confessions with a partial soundtrack of execrable quality, called Jean Jacques! This was to appease Pathé and the French investors and I believe played only in France and Belgium. I have never seen it; I insisted my name be removed from the credits; I abjure it utterly.
I bought a modern apartment in the west end, but Doon never moved in with me. I was so distracted that I soon gave up trying to persuade her. We continued to see each other as before, shuttling between the two addresses, as her work and political activities permitted, up to her departure for Paris. I suppose we led a social life, but I remember little about those difficult months after the collapse of The Confessions. Among my papers I have a small engagement diary for 1932. I quote its entries in full.
January 10: Eddie, KS, B von A at R.
January 25: Dinner, Leo.
February 2: Doon’s b’day—Café Berlin.
February 27: Heavy snow. Dentist.
The rest is blank.
It was Eddie who encouraged me to think of adapting The Confessions for sound. His motives were not entirely altruistic. The film had cost the best part of two million dollars and virtually none of that had been recouped. Obviously we could do nothing with Part I, but he reminded me we still had Part II and Part III to go. Could we not commence filming these in sound and use some of the material of Part I as flashback? Slowly, my enthusiasm began to regenerate itself. Over several weeks I ran the film again and again. Yes, there were sequences that could be saved by voice-over narration. New schemes and possibilities presented themselves to me and by the end of 1932 I started the over-dubbing.