by William Boyd
And on and on. I could see that there had been a massive loss of face on his part and I was genuinely sorry. But what else could I have done? I wrote back briefly, apologized again and said I would send a hundred dollars a month, and more if circumstances permitted, until my debt had been cleared. While I worked at Fox, I was as good as my word.
Very surprisingly, and somewhat worryingly, there was no news or sign of Doon. Few people seemed even to remember her. “Didn’t she go to Europe in the twenties?” was the best I could come up with. I came to the reluctant conclusion that she was still in France. Willi Gast, Egon’s brother, arrived in Los Angeles and told me there was a sizable community of émigrés in Sanary, in the South of France, among whom he had noticed Mavrocordato. I assumed that was where I could find Doon—if I wanted to.
Eddie Simmonette, I discovered, was in New York, where he was making films in Yiddish. I wrote to him and he—typically—offered me a job, but I declined. I had settled in by then and the effort of moving east seemed too much. The Californian lethargy was already in my blood, coagulating it, slowing me down. Besides, I couldn’t speak Yiddish … but neither could Eddie, as far as I knew. I stayed put.
I earned some extra money on top of my Fox wage from a man named Smee, Monroe Smee, whom I met at the Anti-Nazi League meetings. Smee was an unfortunate-looking fellow with receding hair and chin and yellow equine teeth with large gaps between them. He said he ran a small production company and I acted as a freelance script reader for him at twenty-five dollars a script. I read seven before I asked to be relieved of the job. The scripts were absurdly bad, quite appalling. I had been expecting earnest, liberal-minded tracts, but what he sent me was the worst sort of trash—turgid thrillers with creaking conspiracy theories and cloying romances with a strain of positively nauseating sentimentality, as far as I recall. Smee had great hopes for these scripts and I was reluctant to dash them as wholeheartedly as I felt they deserved, but I did. He was paying me for my honest professional opinion, I reminded him.
For a few weeks we saw a fair amount of each other. I didn’t dislike Smee, but he just wasn’t my type. He had only one joke, which he employed endlessly. If, as you left a coffeeshop, say, you asked, “Are you coming?” he would respond, “As the Actress said to the Bishop.” If you said, “Shall I stay inside?” he would pipe up with “As the Bishop said to the Actress.” I became almost maddened by this jocular tic. It was astonishing how the most innocuous question could be turned in Smee’s mind into a Bishop/Actress gag.
I handed the last—the seventh—script back to him one night after a league meeting and told him I was quitting. I apologized.
“I just can’t do it anymore,” I said.
“As the Bishop said to the Actress.”
“No, seriously, Monroe, wherever you’re getting these screenwriters from, I’d dump them. They’re useless, worse than useless. You must be able to find some better ones. Ask the first person you meet outside.… I mean this is crap. Really. And that Falling Snow, I think that’s probably the worst script I’ve ever read. The guy should be locked up. What was his name?”
“Falling Snow? That was, ah, Edgar Douglas.”
“Well he ought to have his brain examined. There was something actually rather disgusting about that story.”
Smee grinned. “Well, anyway, I’m grateful to you, John. At least you’re honest.” His face was damp, Smee sweated easily. “But I should level with you now that you’re quitting. I’m Edgar Douglas. I wrote Falling Snow. I wrote them all.”
“Jesus Christ! Monroe! God, why didn’t you—”
“No, no. Don’t worry. I’m grateful.” His grin was now distinctly cheesy. “I’d never have known. I can’t judge my own stuff. I needed an honest opinion.”
“Jesus.… I’ve got to give you your money back.”
“Nonsense, you earned it.”
“But I feel such a prick.”
“As the Actress said to the Bishop.… No, really, John, I needed to hear it. I respect your honesty. So I’m not cut out to be a screenwriter. Now I know. Once a loation manager, always a location manager.”
“Monroe, I—”
“No hard feelings.”
We shook hands. “I owe you one,” he said. “I mean it.”
I felt bad about it and continued to apologize when we met at league meetings. He kept telling me to forget it and eventually I did. I held on to the money he had paid me, though. He was right: I had earned it.
And so I drifted through 1938 and into ’39. On the day of my fortieth birthday (I looked ten years younger) I was invited to a tennis lunch-party at the Bel Air home of an English director called Cyril Norman. Norman was a North Country homosexual who took his sport seriously, and the day was mapped out with a series of round-robin competitions of singles and doubles. I was scheduled to start proceedings off with a doubles match: me and Clive Brook against Ronald Colman and Richard Barthelmess. I had left my racket in the office and drove there to pick it up before going to the party.
I parked in a vacant reserved space and ran upstairs. I came out two minutes later to find a large Chrysler coupe partially blocking me in. Its driver, a small red-faced man in a light-gray suit with a yellow silk display handkerchief stood beside it. I was in white flannels, white shirt, navy cotton jersey. I was carrying my tennis racket. It was Wednesday, 11 A.M.
“Sorry,” I said. “Won’t be a second.”
“You work here?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
He looked me up and down. “Could have fooled me. What do you do?”
“I’m a writer,” I said. I didn’t like his tone.
“Oh yeah? Chances are you can read, then.”
I looked at him, then at my watch. “Look, I’d love to stay and chat but I’m pressed for time.”
He pointed. “What the fuck you think that sign says? ‘Please park here’?”
There was a sign: PRIVATE, RESERVED, and a name I couldn’t read from that distance.
“If you move your car,” I said patiently, “you can have your space back. I was in a hurry.”
“I don’t give the steam off my shit if you’re in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be there in the first place, dork.”
I got into my car.
“Hey! Jerk-off. You English?”
“Scottish.”
“What’s your name?”
“Todd.” I started the engine.
“Todd? Todd?…” He thought. Then his eyes widened. “J. J. Todt! You’re the fuckin’ German writer. What do you mean you’re Scottish? We don’t hire Scottish writers here! There are no fuckin’ Scottish refugees!”
“You’d better move your car, you little prick, or I’ll hit it.”
“You’re fired, asshole! I’m going to sue you for fraud.”
“So sue me!” I contemplated getting out and laying into him with my tennis racquet. But instead I backed out fast and took the front fender neatly off his new car. For good measure I ran over it as I drove off.
I was fired. The very next day. I don’t know who the man was, some self-important junior executive, I suspect, but somehow word got around that it was Darryl Zanuck himself. I’m sure it wasn’t, but the rumor circulated anyway, and even made some gossip columns. “Hapless German writer J. J. Todt clipped D. F. Zanuck’s fender on the Fox lot last week and promptly got himself fired.” “Writer J. J. Todt left his car at the curb in the Fox lot and dropped by the office to pick up his tennis racket. But the rookie writer had parked in the Vee Pee’s place and got himself blasted out of court with a Zanuck ace! Nein, nein, J.J.!”
In the way these things happen, I even started dining out on it myself. It may have made a good story at a cocktail party, but it also meant it proved almost impossible to get another job.
“God. So you’re the guy Zanuck fired.”
“No,” I would say, “it wasn’t him. I’ve never met him.”
“But I read about it. Didn’t I read about it? Jeez, what d
id you say to him, for God’s sake?”
My remonstrations had no effect. None of the major studios would hire me. I was not only burdened with the Zanuck misapprehension, but I was now irrevocably associated with the émigrés. People would often congratulate me on my excellent English, and there were too many Europeans looking for too few jobs. I realized then the extraordinary tenacity of first impressions. From then on I ceased putting such trust in my own.
I was out of work for two or three months. Of the two hundred or so émigrés in Los Angeles, I suppose thirty or forty were regularly employed. Among the others there was fierce competition for the available jobs. I had to take my chances with everyone else.
I supplemented my rent by coaching Elroy Cooper with his maths—or math, as I was now instructed to call it. Elroy was a bright kid, but lazy. I kept him hard at it and found I rather enjoyed myself. I enjoyed the mathematics too; it took me back to the early days with Hamish at Minto Academy.
But I soon ran low on funds and I ended up accepting the first job I was offered. The Associated Motion Picture Releasing Corporation sounded quite grand. In reality it was one of the “Poverty Row” film companies producing B-movie horror films and—this was its speciality—Westerns. The man who offered me the job was called Brodie McMaster. He came from Illinois but was deeply proud of his heritage. The ethnic connection worked to my advantage, for once.
The only difficulty was that AMPR paid its writers fifty dollars a week. As a result they tended to be very old, very poor or heavily dependent on narcotics. In my time at AMPR I worked with two morphine addicts, a cocaine junkie and half a dozen soaks. I received shared writing credits on several AMPR films, but I have no recollection now of which ones.
So my life restarted but on more reduced terms than before. I had virtually no savings by now and had stopped repaying my loan from Thompson’s bank. Apart from my salary, I earned only a trickle of royalties from my films (Jean Jacques! was currently playing in Francophone Africa) and from my patents. The graph line of my fortunes was still heading downwards.
But I was happy enough. Those two years in Hollywood before the Second World War now seem to me to be among the most placid and carefree of my life. The experience was similar, I imagine, to that of going to university: a finite period of independence with few responsibilities and limited funds. The sun shone; I had work, a little money, friends, a social life, a place to live. What more did I want?
Sex. Sex was something of a problem until Monika Alt arrived in town. It may sound strange, but I had been practically celibate since Doon had left me. I had had one unsatisfactory visit to a prostitute during my sorrow-drowning binge after The Confessions: Part II had ended, and a heartless fortnight’s affair with the head of makeup during filming of The Divorce (it ended the day we wrapped—her decision). Otherwise, I swear, nothing. After Doon left I felt sexually dessicated. From time to time the old urges returned, with Senga for example, and for a hot week at Drumlarish, a sort of rutting season, I suppose. I asked Mungo what there was available locally and he told me about an old woman who lived in a filthy bothy on the road to Glenfinnan with whom you could have your way for a tumbler of whiskey, but I was not tempted. Doon’s betrayal had left me emotionally mawkish. I returned to the solace and 100 percent reliability of adolescent methods.
However, America had stimulated me once again, and shortly after I moved into 361½ Encanto Drive I courted and won the manageress of a coffeeshop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Her name was Lorelei, Lorelei Madrazon. I think she was half-Turkish and Lorelei an approximation to her Turkish name. She was in her forties, a divorcée with three young children—Hall, Chauncy and Nora Lee. Lori’s, her coffeeshop, was a pleasant ten-minute saunter from Encanto Drive. Her ex-husband was a Filipino who ran a garden maintenance service. He had set her up in the coffeeshop and they remained good friends. I met him several times. Anyway, Lori was solid, fleshy, with wiry blond hair—she was a victim of the permanent wave—and a pretty face, always bright with makeup. I think it was a combination of the olive skin and primary colors set against the improbable Nordic blondness of her hair that attracted me. We enjoyed efficient, uncomplicated, fairly regular sex, twice a week on average, usually in the early evenings after she’d closed, and after which we would go out for a meal or take in a movie.
I was glad to see Monika again. She had left Berlin in 1934 and had come straight to Hollywood, where she enjoyed brief and modest success in two or three sub-Marlene Dietrich thrillers. This trip had the bonus of securing her an American husband and citizenship. For a year she had been content to be Mrs. Geraldo Berasconi, but then came divorce and another attempt to return to the screen. Monika, however, was now in her fifties, astonishing though that fact seemed when I stopped to consider it, and the flood of émigrés had provided a glut of sensual foreign vamps. She still looked good, I must say—hair shorter, as thin as ever but more groomed. Unfortunately, her new consort was Harold Faithfull.
Faithfull was still a successful second-rater—they never truly succeed, these types, but they never seem truly to fail, either. He was in Hollywood under contract to Warners and, like most of the European directors in the place, was engaged in serving up a trashy version of “Old Europe” for American consumption.
I met Monika and Faithfull at a cricket match in Bel Air (once again organized by the indefatigable Cyril Norman, a ghastly annual occasion for all the has-beens, bit-parters and lounge lizards to parade their stage Englishness). Faithfull ignored me except to comment, “Hard times, Todd? Hard luck,” and wander away. He was very fat but still annoyingly handsome in his sleek prosperous way, with his thick gray hair brushed straight back from his forehead. Every time I saw him I felt a bizarre cannibalistic urge to carve a steak of his plump haunches. I have a feeling Faithfull would have tasted good—porkish, with crackling, served up with roast potatoes, sprouts and applesauce. He had a superb tailor. His immaculately cut dark suits made him look tapered rather than bulky.
Monika wouldn’t leave him for me (she said he’d had his teeth fixed) and they made a stylish couple. However, she would motor down from Mulholland Drive to see me occasionally in my little apartment. I always liked Monika and we got on well. The sex was not the sole reason for the continued association. She was no snob. Faithfull wouldn’t be seen with me because I was a fifty-dollar-a-week writer on Poverty Row. Monika had a European egalitarianism that the British don’t possess. Hard times?… Hard luck. No one from Berlin would have said that in 1939.
* * *
I drove to Tijuana to the American consulate to renew my resident’s visa. I waited for an hour to see the consul, a Mr. Lexter, a quiet elderly man and a lay Baptist minister, so he told me later. He had a big shock of unruly gray hair that kept falling into an unlikely boyish fringe. He looked over my form, and me, and said he would get it processed right away. Then, dropping his functionary’s guard for a moment, he said, “I think your country is doing a fine and noble thing, Mr. Todd. I pray for an end to this evil.” It was only then (he obligingly fetched an American newspaper) that I learned war had been declared.
I left the consulate and went round the corner to the Hotel Cuatro Naciónes. I sat in the bar and read the news. I drank several beers and wondered what to do next. How did I feel?… First, oddly divided. Then emotionally and tearfully patriotic. Then irritated and frustrated. I thought of my years in Berlin and of all my German friends. Then I thought of those mad bastards with their uniforms and their flags. I wasn’t at all surprised by the news. Our Santa Monica chapter of the Anti-Nazi League had been predicting war in Europe for years. Now it had come and abstract arguments were suddenly concrete facts. I thought, for some reason, about my father, Hamish and Mungo before I considered my three children. These misplaced loyalties upset me. I felt a rush of self-hatred for so easily abandoning Vincent, Emmeline and Annabelle to Devize. I ate a solitary lunch of chorizos, goat’s cheese and a bottle of sweet wine, growing steadily more depressed as the particu
lar fears—destruction of country, death of loved ones—elided into the generally maudlin.
My mind went back to 1917. I thought of the Salient, the bombers, that day with Teague. It was just my luck to fit two European wars into my four decades. How could all this be happening again? And so soon?… Then, Christ! Karl-Heinz! What about Karl-Heinz? Then I felt bitterly sorry for myself, alone in this noisy, noisome border town. What the hell was I doing here? I grew angry. I strode back round to the consulate, but it was shut. I had a vicious argument with an impassive concierge. I left a note urging Lexter to process my application with the greatest speed as I wished to return to Britain at once.
It was a curious day. I drove back to Rincón and packed my suitcases. Then I unpacked them. That evening I went down to the Cervecería Americana. The place was full of glum Germans. As I sat on the terrace and talked with them I suddenly realized that notionally we were enemies. To cope with this absurdity I drank too much tequila añeja and took a hundred-dollar bet with an affable man called Ramón Dusenberry that the U.S.A. would declare war on Germany before the end of November. When I left the cervecería at 2 A.M. it was still loud with the noise of morose disputation.
I confess the events of the next week or so are hard for me to untangle. My journal entries are undated.
Wednesday. To Tijuana. Lexter says he will do everything he can to expedite matters. Back to Rincón. Cervecería at night. F. says Hitler will sue for peace once he has Poland.…
Friday. To Tijuana. Lexter—no news. Cable Father for money. Telephone Lori to pass on message to the Coopers and Monika—no reply from AMPR.…
Tuesday. Herr and Frau K. return L.A.
Saturday. Americana—Dusenberry.