by William Boyd
I had to do this piecemeal as both Doon and Karl-Heinz were busy on other films, and moreover it took many attempts to get the synchronization perfect. But I was working again, and in between these dubbing sessions I wrote a narrative monologue for Karl-Heinz’s voice-over and we started recording music for key scenes.
Does it sound absurdly naïve, today, to relate that I was hardly concerned about the rise of the Nazi party? To be perfectly honest, I thought they were a crowd of farcical jokers. I remember going—reluctantly and under duress—to an association meeting with Doon in the spring of ’32 where a scuffle broke out at the door and there was a distant sound of breaking glass. Afterwards I asked what all the fuss had been about.
“Fucking Nazis,” Doon said.
“What are they after?”
She looked at me in hostile astonishment.
“Jesus, Jamie, where are you living?”
“In Chambéry,” I said.
Doon understood. But it was as close as the Nazis ever came to me. I am sure she told me in great detail what was happening in the country, but I let it wash over me. It is quite easy to give an impression of intent listening even when your mind is somewhere else entirely. I remember in mid-’32, before the general elections, how Doon used vociferously to support the Communists’ decision not to vote with the Social Democrats. And when the Nazis won all those seats she still maintained it had been the right course of action.… Social Democrats, Communists, Nationalists, Nazis, Hindenburg, Papen, Schleicher, ban the SS and the SA, rescind the ban on the SS and the SA—round how many Berlin dinner parties did these names and topics hum? True, I did notice the uniforms on the streets, and there always seemed to be a march, a demonstration or a rally going on. But remember, it was not my country and as far as I was concerned there were more pressing affairs to be dealt with.
Georg Pfau, though, told me something that I do still recall. Poor Georg was attacked by party thugs with depressing regularity. Number 129B was near a hall frequently used by the KPD for their meetings, and Georg, who often walked home from work late, was set upon twice by Nazi gangs and was once even victim of a Communist ambush.
He turned up at the studios one day for a sound-recording session (he had a basket of cicadas for me) with both eyes blackened and a large blue bruise on his forehead. I commiserated with him.
“At the root,” he said to me slowly, “it’s a Bavarian problem. You see, the Bavarians hate us Prussians. That’s the danger. And they won’t be happy until they have us under their control. That’s what all this verdammt trouble’s about. It’s a German civil war. That’s what we’re living through.”
He was very gloomy about it. I used to repeat his remarks at dinner parties whenever the conversation turned to politics and it always promoted serious debate—in which I took no part, content simply to have initiated it. But Georg’s dark pessimism was somewhat unusual. Among our friends and acquaintances the mood was excited, but one of patience too. “Yes,” people would say, “things are bad now but it’s only a phase. It’ll pass, you’ll see.”
Even Doon thought this, although the phase she anticipated following this one sounded hopelessly unrealistic. I pointed out to her that the association was a splinter group of a faction (the Artists’ League) that had broken away from the KPD. It was hardly a firm base upon which to build a new society. She admitted that.
“But our principles are universal,” she would say.
“What do you mean?”
“Which side is your heart on?”
“The left.”
It was a neat debating trick, but I often used to recall it later when I became a victim of political ideologies myself.
But Adolf Hitler as chancellor was too much for her to take. She began to plan to leave almost at once. And, it had to be said, her own career was not holding up that well. Doon spoke German, but not to a standard necessary for German talkies. The film she had made with Mavrocordato (The Blond Nightmare, need I say more?) had, not surprisingly, flopped. Offers of work were now forthcoming only from British or American co-productions (hence the trip to Paris) and the parts were only cameos—the token American vamp or minx, tourist or heiress. Mavrocordato was already in Paris working with Pommer and Pabst. He had been trying to persuade Doon to move there for months. In the end Adolf Hitler provided the final push.
Why did I let her go? I was no longer worried about Mavrocordato, oddly enough. I guessed that if she felt like it Doon might sleep with him again, but no prohibition on my part would make any difference. In fact, I thought we could both do with a break from each other. Since Sonia had gone, my life with Doon had not been the unalloyed bliss I had expected. We were like those gimmicky weather forecasters, where a man or a woman pops out of a little house to prophesy rain or shine. As luck would have it, our fortunes and spirits rarely coincided during the early thirties. While I was flattened by the Confessions disaster, Doon was busy. When I picked up as I began to work on the sound version, Doon could get no decent roles and the political situation made her miserable. I let her go, then, sadly but fairly confidently. I planned to be filming at Neuchâtel in the near future: we would not be far apart, Doon could join me at weekends. After The Confessions I would happily move with her anywhere. In any event, I did not see my tenure in Germany lasting much longer. Eddie had recently been summoned to the Propaganda Ministry by Goebbels himself and was asked to explain why he was making a film about the notorious French socialist J. J. Rousseau. Eddie ducked the issue by saying the Rousseau he planned to film was in fact Swiss. But the dead hand of the official censor seemed poised. Paris might even be an admirable base from which to complete the film. Gently, I tried to persuade Eddie to transfer Realismus to another country. He said he would think about it.
The Confessions now existed in three versions. There was the worthless and appalling Jean Jacques!, there was my six-hour definitive Part I and now we had about fifty minutes of dubbed sound episodes—fragments waiting to be linked by new sequences that we planned to film at the end of the year and into 1934.
Karl-Heinz would be free of his UFA contract in November, and then we would film the Neuchâtel episodes. We would link this new narrative to the flashbacks and then move on to film the years of triumph and fame in Paris. This Part II would encapsulate Part I and it would all be more or less in sound. At least, this was how Eddie and I worked it out. But Eddie was not all that sanguine. Realismus, while no longer in severe financial difficulties (so he assured me), was no longer the power it had been. A. E. Groth had returned to Sweden, where he had had a stroke. Gast and Hitzig, the company’s two most successful directors after me, had joined the ever increasing stream of exiles: Gast to Paris, Hitzig to London. Leo Druce was required as my producer and in any event his two films had not been particularly successful. Even the most charitable friend (i.e., me) would have to describe Leo’s directing as “workmanlike.” Also, he was preoccupied with personal affairs. Lola had divorced him, gone to Hollywood and returned, and was now suing him for some reason or other. Eddie could not afford to hire more-established directors. The choice facing him as head of a small studio down on its luck was either make risky trash or else stick with his star. Eddie knew I could get work at UFA, Terra or Tobis at any time I wished. But I was loyal. He somehow managed to scrape up enough money and the filming of The Confessions: Part II was announced in small advertisements in the trade press.
From my diary:
February 17, 1934. Hôtel du Lac et Bellevue, Neuchâtel. Successful day. Anny reacted marvelously when the stones came through the window. Real terror. Unfortunately she was slightly cut on one arm, so I decided to save the English scenes till later. A scream is a scream in any language. No word yet from Doon. All my cables to Paris are unanswered. Good atmosphere among the crew. There is no doubt that sound has a limited role to play in the cinema. The noise of glass breaking and Anny’s screams are genuinely frightening.
We had been late starting Part II, true to form. We
came down to Neuchâtel in early January. The departure from Stettin Station was in strong contrast to that of 1928. Now our little troupe occupied only one carriage and a baggage wagon. Still, it was stimulating to be at work again. Despite the interruption I felt a strong sense of continuity as we settled into the hotel. Here we were again in another medium-class, medium-sized hotel on the banks of a lake surrounded by mountains. Annecy, Geneva and now Neuchâtel. The pilgrimage of The Confessions continued the tracing of Jean Jacques’s steps. And here we all were: myself, Leo, Karl-Heinz, Horst Immelman, each one dedicated to the task in hand. Only Doon was missing, but she was not far away.
The first disaster struck before a foot of film had turned. Helene Rednitz, who was playing Thérèse le Vasseur, came down with bronchitis and after a week in bed went back to Berlin. Leo, Karl-Heinz and I went to Geneva and spent two days patrolling bars, theaters and variety shows looking for a replacement. We found our Thérèse in the Théâtre de la Comédie, a young girl playing a chambermaid in some tired farce. Her name was Anne-Louise Corsalettes. I decided to call her Anny La Lance (after a small village on the Lake of Neuchâtel) and, I would like to say, a star was born. I certainly enjoyed the opportunity it afforded me of saying, “I want you to be in my movie,” but Anny was no actress, she just looked perfect. Rousseau described Thérèse as “a girl of feeling, lacking in coquetry, with lustrous gentle eyes.” Anny had large dark eyes and a blunt, quite pretty face. She was a big girl with strong shoulders and hips and it had been her clumping exits and entrances in the farce that had attracted our attention and had taken us backstage. Naturally, she was overwhelmed at our offer.
Anyway, that was Anny La Lance and she performed well under my direction. She did everything I told her and bore me no ill will when I set her up in order to get the right response (as in the diary passage quoted above, when Jean Jacques’s house at Môtiers was stoned by hostile suspicious villagers). Filming was going well and I was shooting German and English versions concurrently—such are the problems of sound. Karl-Heinz’s English accent was strongly Germanic and Anny spoke only French, but I could overdub later.
My one vague worry was the long silence from Doon. We had spent a rather awkward Christmas in Paris, neither of us accustomed to reunions. We were not at our best. Neither of us was a good letter writer, either, and a month elapsed before I sent a cable to her Paris address, but there was no reply. I was surprised, but assumed she had gone off somewhere to make a film.
The day after I wrote that diary entry, Eddie Simmonette turned up. It was in the evening and we had just finished dinner when he arrived. I knew there was something wrong because his clothes were dirty. He was unshaven and the cleft in his chin was dense with bristles. He had driven all the way from Berlin, via Austria, an arduous journey that had taken him five days. He brought the worst news. First, the luckless Georg Pfau had been arrested and incarcerated for some reason. His connection with Realismus Films had led to the studio’s being investigated. Shortly after that, Eddie had apparently been declared a “non-Aryan.” The scandal attaching to this had prompted the banks to foreclose on him and the creditors to rush in. The studios were shut down, the staff paid off, all Eddie’s property impounded.
“Everything?” I asked. I felt a horrible cold nausea squirming in my body, like something trapped in a burrow.
“The lot.”
“What about The Confessions?” I could hardly get the words out. “The negative?”
“Oh, I’ve got that in the back of my car. And that old trunk you kept there. No, I’m talking about my house, the studios—”
There and then I made him take me out to his car—a big Audi—and open it. I saw the flat gleaming aluminum boxes. I counted them—fourteen. I let my forehead touch the car’s cold roof for a few seconds.
“Have you heard from Doon?” he asked.
“No.”
“She made a long-distance call, looking for you. I couldn’t speak to her—the police were there.”
“When was that?”
“Ten days ago.”
It made no sense—I thought she knew where I was—but I had no time to ponder on it. We summoned the crew to a meeting in the hotel dining room and told them what had happened. Eddie said he would pay them off the next day. He speculated vaguely about setting himself up in Paris and reassembling everything at the end of that year once he had a secure base.
Later that evening Eddie and I talked alone. He told me that after paying off the crew and settling the film’s debts he would have approximately two thousand dollars left in the world.
“It’s over,” he said. “I’m sorry, John.”
“For the time being,” I said bravely. “It survived talkies and the Wall Street crash. We’ll just have to postpone it.” Half of me actually believed this, I suppose; the other half wanted to lie down and die.
“You have some money here, don’t you?” he asked.
I had, in Geneva. My profits from Julie, which Thompson had told me to transfer from Germany, minus certain payments to Sonia.
“Yes. Why?”
“I want to sell you the negative to The Confessions,” he said, “for fifty thousand dollars.”
To this day I sometimes wonder if Eddie fooled me. Sometimes I am convinced he did; at others, absolutely not. He knew I had money in Switzerland because I had passed on to him Thompson’s advice to me—which he had chosen to ignore.
At one dark stage in my life I was convinced he had set up The Confessions: Part II only to get me to Switzerland for the express purpose of selling me Part I. He must have known I would buy it. In the end, though, I have to absolve him; the plot was far too complicated even for Eddie’s Byzantine mind. For example, he could not have known he would be investigated and declared a non-Aryan by the Nazis. But out of disaster the cards fell conveniently for him. I had something over seventy thousand dollars in a bank in Geneva. Eddie had pitched his price just right.
It took a couple of days to sort out our affairs in Neuchâtel. We bade each other morose farewells. Karl-Heinz said he would go back to Berlin to see what he could do for Georg. I told him I would go straight to Paris and urged him to join Doon and me there. He said he would wait and see.
Anny La Lance contemplated the sudden demise of her short-lived film career and the resumption of her old identity with surprising calm. She said it had always seemed too good to be true and asked only for a lift back to Geneva, where both Eddie and I were going.
We spent a day with a lawyer. Fortuitously, Eddie had brought all the necessary documents with him. Now we had cause to bless the existence of Jean Jacques! The Confessions: Part I belonged entirely to Realismus Films Verlag A. G. The film negative and everything that had been shot of Part II were now purchased by John James Todd, Esq., for fifty thousand dollars less the legal fees the advocate demanded. I went to my bank and withdrew the money, in cash—all of which, to my surprise, Eddie managed to fit into his briefcase.
It was a mild wintry day, the sun shone on the lake, as we sat in a café enjoying a farewell drink. Anny was still with us, holding on to her lost future until the final minute. Parked nearby on the curb was Eddie’s big Audi, which was now mine—he had generously included it in the deal.
“So,” I said, “that’s it. When are you off to Paris?”
“I’m not going,” he said. “I’m going to America.” He patted his briefcase. “See what I can do there.” He smiled. “Why don’t you join me? Eh, Johnny? That’s where the future lies.”
“My future’s sitting in that car,” I said. “No, I’m going to Paris. Find Doon.”
I rang the doorbell on Doon’s apartment door. She lived in a rather shabby building on the Rue de Grenelle. There was no answer. I went to look for the concierge. This turned out to be a beefy man in vest and braces who was watering the weeds in the damp courtyard with weedkiller. He told me Mlle. Bogan had gone.
“When will she be back?” I asked.
No. I had not understood.
She had gone away. She was not returning.
I felt sadness infect me like a germ.
“Where has she gone? Did she say?”
“No,” he said. “She just left. Monsieur Mavrocordato came and they went away together.”
14
Dog Days
I was back in London within a week. I sold the Audi in Paris and bought a large tin cabin trunk to take the contents of the old one and the reels of The Confessions. This I then deposited in the vault of a bank in Piccadilly. I rented a modest dusty flat in Islington not far from the site of the old Superb-Imperial studios and contemplated my future.
It was strange to be back in London after a gap of ten years. It was busier and dustier than Berlin; apart from that, to my indifferent eyes, it seemed more or less unchanged. Sonia and the children now lived in a large house near Parson’s Green. I deliberately chose a place to live as far away from Shorrold territory as possible.
I was depressed and often quite miserable during those initial weeks back in London. I had taken the demise of Realismus Films and the end of my dreams about The Confessions extraordinarily well, or so I thought. I suppose it was because I had never truly felt that the sound version was really feasible. Making it was a despairing effort rather than an enthusiastic one—an act of bravado, not conviction. I needed more time to generate that last emotion.
In fact, ambition had become almost extinct in me since 1929, hard though it may be to believe. I set up Part II and did what filming I could manage powered by an energy that was derived more from dwindling momentum than from any self-generating creative source. Ambition had died, and now I needed a strong deep sentiment to fill the spaces it had vacated. That was why I drove to Paris with such joyous anticipation, and that was why Doon’s betrayal was the most savage shock I had to take.