The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  One effect of this was to salve my patriotic conscience. If the British Diplomatic Service could connive at my being dubbed an undesirable alien, then I certainly wasn’t about to hurry back to serve my country. In any case, Hollywood was full of British actors, directors and producers—Korda was here, Wilcox, Olivier, Spenser, Bellamy, Norman and many others. I did not stand out.

  I didn’t mix with the British community; I stayed with the émigrés, my Berlin friends. By now it was clear who was going to flourish in Hollywood and who was going to just make do. Eddie, I must say, was loyal to the Realismus boys. Hitzig, Gast and I were kept busy on the Lone Star B-features. Our fortunes had leveled out—at least they weren’t declining—while others’ ascended. Lang, Glucksman, Wilder, Strauss, Brecht—these were the feted and the high flyers. We wished them well. Honestly.

  I had another reason for avoiding the British. In 1942 Leo Druce arrived with Courtney Young to film A Close-Run Thing, a torpid epic about the duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo, thinly disguised British propaganda to be directed at American audiences. I was walking along the beach one Sunday at Malibu and passed in front of the jutting deck of a beach house. A loud lunch party was going on and with a cold, spine-jolting shock of recognition I saw Druce’s face in the crowd. Someone leaned over the rail and shouted down to me to come and join them. I saw Druce’s head swivel round at the mention of my name. I made sure our eyes did not meet. For an instant I was tempted by the thought of reconciliation—we had been friends for close on twenty years, after all—but my charity was snuffed out by memories of that day he had so earnestly and altruistically advised me to turn down Great Alfred (a half success, like all his other films). I knew I could never forgive him. His own greed and ambition had lost me The Confessions and effectively driven me from my own country. There was no possibility of ever recovering our old warm friendship. I waved, shouted an excuse and walked on.

  Around this time there was another arrival in Los Angeles whom I was, paradoxically, happier to see. Alex Mavrocordato turned up in the émigré community, impoverished and jobless. He didn’t look well: his weight and bulk seemed a burden to him now, a slack load. He was still a big man but he had lost his big-man aura, if you know what I mean. Before, he had seemed to fill a room, as if his personality emitted some kind of force field. That was all but gone. A difficult journey through Vichy France and Spain, followed by a long wait in Lisbon for a boat west, seemed to have dispirited him, to have decanted his bullishness. He was staying with the Coopers and I went round to see him shortly after he arrived. We walked down to Lori’s and I bought him a fourteen-ounce steak with two fried eggs, french fries and a green salad on the side.

  We sat down in the bright diner. Young people laughed and chattered in the booths. Lori and her smiling waitresses patrolled the aisles. The merry lights of Malibu Pier stretched out languidly into the darkness. Mavrocordato chewed vigorously on his steak. I ordered him another beer.

  “My God,” he said with some bitterness. “War is hell.” He looked round him incredulously. “You should see Europe.”

  I felt an itch of guilt. “You’ll get used to it,” I said a little ruefully. “It’s quite easy.”

  “Always in the right place at the right time,” he said. “You find your feet, eh, Todd?”

  “That’s not how it looks from my angle,” I said, and added pleasantly, “You can’t possibly know what you’re talking about.”

  “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen?…” He had a sense of humor, had Mavrocordato.

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I have to thank you for the meal. What do you want?”

  “Where’s Doon? What happened to Doon?”

  “I haven’t seen Doon for …” He thought. “My God, eight, nearly nine years. Nineteen thirty-four, Paris.”

  I felt the strangest sensation in my body, an odd mixture of alarm and elation.

  “But she was in Sanary with you.”

  “For one week. Then she left. She went to Neuchâtel to look for you.”

  “But we’d left.…”

  Bafflement clogged my brain. I felt thick, dull, like a man with a heavy cold.

  Mavrocordato told me that he had seen Doon for a week in Paris in January ’34, after our unhappy Christmas together. She seemed very depressed, he said. She was drunk most of the time. They left Paris for Sanary together; he thought the Riviera would do her good. But all they did was fight. She talked all the time about going to America. She left for Neuchâtel to tell me her decision, he said. That was the last he had seen of her.

  We walked slowly back up the road towards the Cooper house. My mind was squirming with the revelations I had heard.

  “So she must have gone … come here?”

  “Yes. I always thought so.”

  “I thought …” I was suddenly close to adolescent tears. “I thought she had gone off with you.”

  “I asked her,” Mavrocordato said, with some of his old vehemence. “You know, I even asked her to marry me again.” He shrugged. “You know Doon. I always think she’s a little bit mad.” He tapped his head.

  I was still thinking. “But if she came here, where is she?”

  “If she’s drinking like Paris, she’s got to be dead. Or very sick.”

  We stopped at the three flights of steps that led up to the Cooper house. Mavrocordato was sharing 361½ with two other destitute émigés.

  “I’d better try and find her,” I said vaguely.

  “Say hello from me.”

  We shook hands.

  “Listen Todd, if you are needing assistant on your film … bygones can be easily bygones.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll bear it in mind.” I felt only an immense gratitude towards Mavocordato. I derived no pleasure from this triumph,

  I went home and drank half a bottle of Vat 69 as I thought about Doon and this news. She hadn’t betrayed me. She had simply run away. I felt peculiar: I should have been elated, my heart big with joy. But I wasn’t. If she had been in America since 1934, why was there no sign of her? No trace at all? All her old friends from Berlin were in Hollywood; why had she not once made contact?

  Eddie said I should get in touch with the Bureau of Missing Persons.

  “Where was she from?” he asked. “You know, her hometown?”

  “I’ve no idea. My God.”

  “Very useful.”

  Eddie was married now, to a small dark woman called Artemisia Parke. It struck me that in all the years I had known him, this was the first time I had ever associated him with a woman. Somehow a lovelife, even a sex life, had seemed inappropriate for him, superflous to his needs. He was like one of those worms or amoebas, hermaphroditic, that can service themselves (and I don’t mean that unkindly). Like most facets of his life these days, Eddie’s marriage seemed a means to some mysterious end. He appeared unconcerned and incurious about the Doon mystery.

  “She was a strange girl, Johnny, I told you so years ago. She could have suicided.” He snapped his fingers. “They break, these types, like that.”

  “Not Doon.”

  “You should know.”

  He sighed. He was on his way to play golf, wearing an outfit patterned with lozenges of lemon yellow, burnt sienna and maroon. I had a slight headache resulting from my attack on the Vat 69—and the colors seemed to press against my eyeballs painfully. I took a pair of green sunglasses out of my jacket pocket and put them on. We were sitting in his vast Beverly Hills home.

  “Anyway,” he said, “don’t go running off. I’ve got a new project for you. The biggest yet.”

  “Oh yes? What?”

  “A film about Billy the Kid. But listen, in color.”

  I drove down to San Diego to see Ramón Dusenberry. Since he had been best man at my wedding we had become quite close friends. We would meet up from time to time when he was in Los Angeles on business. He was a great admirer of my Westerns. “Anytime you’re tired of movies, you can have yo
ur old job back,” he would joke. I liked Ramón and not just for his gratifying enthusiasm. He was older than I and I had unilaterally appointed him as surrogate older brother, now that Thompson had abandoned the role. I asked him what to do about finding Doon. He said he had a friend in the San Diego police force who might be able to help.

  We sat in Ramón’s yacht club overlooking the marina. It was a clear day, the sky empty of clouds. A flying boat—a Catalina—flew past at a low level on the way to the naval base. Over in Europe the Red Army captured Kharkov on their advance to the Dnieper. The RAF bombed Cologne. The USAF bombed St.-Nazaire.

  “So what’s the next movie?” Ramón asked.

  “What? Oh, Billy the Kid,” I said.

  “My God! Well, you’ve got to meet Garfield Barry.”

  “I have?”

  “Yes, old Garfield knew him, for God’s sake.”

  After lunch Ramón drove me up the coast to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, to a retirement home called Bella Vista across the coast highway from the public beach. It was a series of attenuated bungalows in the English style linked by covered walkways. Here and there were palms and ancient pepper trees with wooden benches set beneath them. We found Garfield Barry sitting outside in a wheelchair rather too close to a lawn sprinkler. The back of his head and shoulders were quite damp from the spray. We wheeled him out of range.

  Barry was a lively old geezer but physically incapacitated by a recent stroke. He had a big nose and bright watery eyes; an uneven skull beneath a thin floss of white hair. One of Ramón’s newspapers had run a long interview with him on his eighty-fourth birthday a couple of months previously, called “The Last Man Who Knew Billy the Kid.” (This was quite true, I believe. There were a couple of old ladies still living who remembered the Kid, but Barry was definitely the last male.)

  Barry had been born in 1858. His father kept a saloon in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Barry himself had been postmaster there for forty years. In 1881, the year the Kid died there, Barry had been twenty-two, a year older than the desperado. It was strange talking to the old man. I realized that Billy the Kid himself could have lived as long, had circumstances been different. I felt an odd melancholy. Here I was, forty-four, born eighteen years after Pat Garrett killed the Kid, talking to their contemporary. Meanwhile the sun shone on San Diego and the Red Army pressed on towards the Dnieper. I felt a swooning disorientation of space and time, the present and the past. The objective and subjective worlds I occupied seemed to swirl and dance round me. I forced myself to concentrate on the old man.

  “What was he like?” I asked. “Billy the Kid?”

  “Well, for a start his name wasn’t Billy the Kid, wasn’t even William Bonney. It was Henry McCarty, and I would say …” The old man paused for breath. A breeze stirred his fine hair and the branches of the pepper tree above him. I thought suddenly of old Duric Lodokian in his Berlin deathbed.

  “… I would say he was one of the meanest, shortassed, buck-teethed, foxy little fuckers I’ve ever met.”

  With the help of Barry’s reminiscences I rewrote Eddie’s rotten script. Out went the American Robin Hood and in came something more sinister. The way I told it, my Henry McCarty was an evil runt who shot charming William Bonney and stole his name. Sheriff Pat Garrett, immensely tall (six feet four inches, according to Barry), became a moralistic, lugubrious avenging angel. I took plenty of liberties with the story, but the facts were accurate. It was the eighteenth Billy the Kid film, but the first one to portray him as he really had been.

  “He wasn’t even left-handed,” Garfield Barry told me. We were examining the only known photograph of the Kid, where he stands with a rifle by his side. “Some fool reversed the picture first time it was used and now everybody thinks he was a left-handed gun,” Barry said, chuckled and coughed.

  I looked closely at the photo. “My God. He’s got three-inch heels on his boots,” I said.

  “Told you he was a stunted little bastard.”

  I think that was one of my most brilliant ideas in the film. Sonny Pyle, an astonishing young actor (whose tragic death in 1944 was a huge loss to the cinema), played the Kid throughout the film in four-inch Cuban heels. It had the most bizarre effect on every posture and movement. Pyle was thin-faced with staring eyes and we gave him a plate of false teeth so we could get the famous jackrabbit smile. Many people have subsequently analyzed his performance without being able to say precisely why it is so mesmerizing. Quite simply, it is the high heels. My Billy the Kid teeters; he has to go upstairs carefully, he jumps down from his horse with uncharacteristic caution. He walks with a curious bent-kneed gait. For the first time since The Divorce I worked with some enthusiasm on a motion picture.

  I think this is what Eddie responded to, I had little trouble in convincing him that we had to shoot the film in New Mexico. The budget doubled, then trebled.

  “Yes, Johnny,” he said patiently. “I know. Location authenticity. I’ve heard it all before, remember?”

  Towards the end of the year I flew down to Albuquerque to do a location scout. We based ourselves in Roswell and motored out across the Pecos flats searching for small villages that could stand in for nineteenth-century Lincoln and Fort Sumner. For the first time too I became excited about the possibilities of color. Around me were the red and purple mountains, the pink and blue adobe houses, the hay meadows and the rolling alfalfa pastures, the canyon walls stippled with piñon and oak bush. This would be the backdrop for my morality play in which Sheriff Pat Garrett was the hero and the Kid the villain.

  I was going to call the film Alias Billy the Kid, but I decided in the end that I would use the name the cowboys gave to their six-guns, The Equalizer.

  I am proud of The Equalizer. It doesn’t rank with The Confessions: Part I but it was made—fast—with a kind of angry fervor that allowed me to invest a tired genre with a rare intensity. We filmed in the spring of ’44. Padika was Lincoln; Little Black was Fort Sumner. There was still snow on the Capitan Mountains and I kept them in the background of every exterior shot possible. Cold and remote, they are a continual presence in the film. We filmed also in a fruit ranch near the Ruidoso River. Acres of peach, plum, apple and pear orchards were in bloom. Their blossoms hung like a low-lying pink and white smoke across the landscape. (You will remember that scene when Pat Garrett—Nash McLure—stalks the Kid through the candied pink of the peach orchard.) I used color like a painter: I literally daubed it on. It was my first color film and I had every tone I could heightened. I repainted the adobe houses in Padika. The Kid smoked cigarettes wrapped in bright yellow paper. I ran blue dye down canyon streams. And everything in the landscape had a vernal freshness—the chaparral thickets, the cottonwoods, the bunchgrass and greasewood. The whole film glowed.

  Where did this urgency and angry fervor I referred to come from? Why, I hear you ask, was it not present in Gun Justice, Four Guns for Texas and Stampede!? The answer lies in the fact that I ran across Leo Druce a week before I started filming—the encounter acted as a powerful goad.

  We met in the Los Angeles Airport departure lounge. I was flying a Transcontinental and Western Sky Chief to El Paso and then flying on up to Albuquerque. Druce was traveling to New York. Both our planes were delayed. Druce was with an elegant woman (his wife?) and two other men. I was alone. It was the first time we had met face to face in six years. He was gray-haired now and stouter. He looked well off. I decided to ignore him and carried on reading my newspaper, but he came over. He was smoking a cigar and I suspect he’d been drinking. He stopped about six feet away from me. I looked up.

  “Hello, Todd. Still here?” he said.

  I ignored the implied insult. “So are you, I see.”

  “Ah, but I’m on my way home. To England.”

  “Bon voyage.” I returned to my newspaper. It was full of speculation about a second front.

  “Any message for the folks back home?”

  “Just go away, Druce,” I said. I am sure it was my indifference that galled him mos
t.

  “Been a long time in your funk-hole now.”

  I stood up and advanced on him. He stepped back quickly, then recovered himself.

  “Listen, Druce,” I said quietly but full of venom, “I don’t need to prove myself to you or anybody. I was three months in that fucking Salient and six months in a prison camp while you were convalescing and totting up figures in the quartermaster’s store. So just go away and leave me alone.”

  “The next time you go up in a balloon make sure the wind’s blowing in the right direction.”

  “The next time you shoot yourself in the leg, cut the powder burns out of your trousers.”

  I swear, until that moment I had never regarded the bullet that had passed through Druce’s leg as anything other than German. The shock in his eyes confirmed the accuracy of my gibe.

  He slapped my face.

  “You bloody coward!”

  I am told that my yell as I leaped on him was quite inhuman. I was hauled off him quickly enough by some TWA officials, but not before my flailing clubbing fists had connected with that self-satisfied, dishonest, craven face. I had shut one of his eyes and split his top lip. I felt a silent howl of atavistic triumph echo through me as I saw his party lead him away to the washrooms groaning, doubled over.

  “Madman!” he shouted weakly at me. “You’ll pay for this!”

  “Can’t you think of anything more original to say!” I yelled back. I’m delighted to report that the entire departure lounge burst into laughter.

  I was in Albuquerque and then Roswell when the story broke in the newspapers and so saw nothing of it. I believe it was all reported with clumsy irony: the “Britishers” fighting each other in L.A. while the real enemy lay overseas. At any rate that, plus the Zanuck incident, was enough to get me branded as a “hellraiser.” For a good while afterwards, people greeting me would recoil with gestures of mock terror and hostesses would whimsically entreat me at parties not to rough up the guests. Never believe anything you read in newspapers.