by William Boyd
We were within a week of completing the film when I received the message. The crew were in Padika shooting a scene under the shade trees in the square when the runner from the production office in Roswell arrived with a telegam:
DOON HOGAN LIVING IN MONTEZUMA ARIZONA STOP NEAR WINSLOW STOP GOOD LUCK RAMON
When the film ended I hired a car and drove up to Albuquerque and on through the mountains into Arizona. It took me two full days but I have no recollection of the splendid scenery through which I traveled. I have no recollection of my mood: I was moodless, I think. It had been so long; I didn’t want either pessimism or optimism to prejudice me. I would find what I would find.
I turned off the highway before Winslow and found Montezuma, a small town on the edge of the Navajo reservation. Distant mountains ringed the wide mesa. It was hot and dry.
I drove down the main street. There was a gas station, a used car lot, a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket and a cut-rate clothes emporium. I parked outside a funeral parlor and strolled down the cracked sidewalk to a small street market. At the market the stalls—fruit and vegetable—were manned mainly by Navajo Indians. If you wanted to hide away, Montezuma seemed like a fair choice. I asked one fellow selling cheap trinkets and bright woven rugs if he knew where Doon Bogan lived.
“Miss Bogan? Sure. Go back to the gas station and take a right. There’s an old ranch house two miles down the road—The Colony. Can’t miss it.”
I followed his instructions. The road ran through a dusty scrub of sagebrush and manzanita bushes. The Colony announced itself with a freshly painted sign. It was a low wooden ranch house with rusted screens on the windows and a tumbledown corral. Three cars were pulled up outside. Two had California plates. My mouth was quite dry. My movements were slow and studied, as if I were recovering from a grave illness.
I knocked on the door and got no answer. I went round the side of the house. In a kitchen a thin, bald, shirtless man in chino shorts washed up dishes in a tin basin.
“I’m looking for Miss Bogan,” I said.
“Hi. You must be Wally Garalga. Pleased to meet you, Wally. I’m Morris Drexel.”
He wiped his hands on a towel and offered me his right one to shake. I shook it.
“We kinda figured you wouldn’t get here till late,” Drexel said. He had a thin chest with gray hairs grouped round the nipples.
“My name’s Todd. I’m not expected. I’m an old friend of Doon.”
“Oh.… I’m sorry. We were expecting a Mr. Garalga.” He led me to the door and pointed. “See that arroyo? Just follow it down a way. Doon’s there.”
I set off. My God, had Doon set up home with Morris Drexel?… I couldn’t imagine it. I walked down the sandy bed of the arroyo, contemplating this notion further. I began to perspire. The heat seemed trapped in the gully. I took off my tie. I had left my jacket in the car.
Then I saw Doon and stopped. She stood with her back towards me, in front of an easel. She was wearing a denim shirt over white duck slacks. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head. I felt faint. My mouth was still as dry as the arroyo bed.
“Doon,” I said and advanced a few steps.
“Morris?”
“No, for Christ’s sake, it’s me!”
She took off her sunglasses and put on spectacles.
“My sweet Lord,” she said. “If it isn’t John James Todd.”
I sat in the main sitting room of The Colony, trying to bring under control the competing emotions of profound shock and mounting irritation. The comfortable plain room was lined with abstract paintings that might just have passed for landscapes. Doon’s work. To my eyes they seemed entirely without merit. Doon was in the kitchen making a pitcher of iced tea. She came back in.
“Sorry,” she said, “Rita hasn’t been into town for the ice. Will fairly cold tea do?”
“Fine. Perfect. Don’t you have an icebox?”
“We don’t have electricity.”
I forced a smile, trying to come to terms with the transformation in her. Doon was thinner and deeply tanned. Her hair was long, dry, dark brown streaked with gray. I had lived with her bobbed blond fringe for so long it was as if the person I was now conversing with were, an older sister, or an aunt. She put on her spectacles, searched for her cigarettes, found them and lit one. Her voice was deeper—raggedy—from smoking.
“You want one?”
“No, thanks. I’m trying to stop.”
“Don’t snap, Jamie.… So what happened after Mexico?”
I finished the brief sketch of the intervening years, leaving out my marriage to Monika. Doon had already told me her story. She had left Sanary, gone to Neuchâtel to tell me her decision to return to America. She had found no trace of us, only news that the film had collapsed. She went back to America and Hollywood. She stayed there for a month and found she was lonely, miserable and forgotten. She hated it and so, as she put it, she “resigned.” She bought this ranch house and took up painting. When her funds began running low, she established it as an artists’ retreat. She made ends meet with no great difficulty, she said.
“But why,” I had asked carefully on hearing this, “why in God’s name didn’t you contact me?”
“I tried. I tried to call you in Berlin; I got some policeman on the line. I went to Neuchâtel; you were all gone. It was over, Jamie, you know that. I couldn’t go chasing around Europe looking for you.”
I let that one go.
“I’m happy now,” she said. “Really, I wasn’t happy in Paris.”
So I told her what had happened to me. I felt glum, suddenly immensely tired. I could have slept for a week.
“So you’re making Westerns? For Eddie Simmonette? Isn’t that a bit degrading?”
“I make ends meet with no great difficulty.”
“See. We’re arguing already.… Sorry,” she said. “Have some more tea.”
She stood up to fetch the pitcher. I went over to her.
“Doon, I saw Alex Mavrocordato—”
“Alex? How is he?”
“Stop it! Stop being so fucking hardboiled!”
Morris Drexel glanced into the room. I calmed down.
“Don’t you see? I thought you had gone off with him. I thought you had chosen him instead of me.… That’s why I never tried to get in touch. I was trying to get over it, do you see? Trying to forget you.”
“Well, of course. You had to do that.”
“But then he told me what really happened.” I looked out of the window and saw two ladies walk by with canvases under their arms. Two “artists,” Like Morris, paying guests.
I shut my eyes. My head seemed to hum with a high, keening melancholic whine. I had been driving too long. The huge needless frustrations of the years without Doon were almost insupportable. Only my irritation with her own calm was preventing me from weeping. I was exhausted too from my weeks’ work on the film. What had I expected to find here? The Doon I had known in Berlin in the twenties? In her green dress and her short blond fringe? Dully, I started calling myself names: fool, idiot, hopeless romantic … I opened my eyes; Doon had sat down and was looking at me. She had hooked a leg over the arm of the soft chair she was sitting in. She still had that lean dancer’s grace I always associated with her. Perhaps, in time, we could reestablish old intimacies.… But too much history bulked between us. My Doon was a blond, smooth-skinned, provocative beauty full of crazy enthusiasms. This thin, tanned, deep-voiced cynic was someone else entirely.
“You’ve hardly changed at all, Jamie,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “You’re not so slim, maybe. A few gray hairs. You look a bit tired.” She smiled. “Why did you come?”
“I’ve missed you,” I said hopelessly. “Nothing’s been the same. I wanted to see you. I can’t tell you—”
“I hope you weren’t too shocked.” She got up and moved to the door. Clearly, she didn’t want to talk. “Staying for lunch?”
“Yes,” I said. I coudn’t simply leave. “Please.”
&
nbsp; So I stayed, and chatted effortfully with dull Morris and Rita and Elaine, the two spry lesbians, and tried not to think about Doon and the past.
When I left that afternoon, she removed her spectacles to let me kiss her cheek. I looked into her myopic eyes and tried to conjure up that day in the Metropol Hotel in Berlin twenty years before.
“Don’t fret about it,” she said softly. “I remember you told me once, ‘Make your own rut.’ I’m happy, I told you. Now, you be happy. Come back and see us, soon.”
I drove off in blackest despair. I was convinced we would never meet again. I was wrong.
I could not shake off my depression. I could measure it in millibars. You know these moods? I’m sure you do. I saw my life as a catalogue of wasted opportunities, of intemperate decisions, of blind, crazy impulsiveness and, of course, heedless circumstance and filthy luck. It seemed to me to be the most desperate tragedy that Doon and I, of all people, had ended up almost strangers. I looked back over the last decade and saw it as a fruitless wasteland shadowed by clouds of disappointment, betrayal, flight and persecution. Perhaps, I thought, my individual life was merely acting as a conduit for the Zeitgeist of that low dishonest decade … but we now were four years into the forties—I was four years into my forties. I was as old as the century and yet entirely out of step with it. The world was at war and what was I doing? Undermining the Billy the Kid myth and making a forlorn and futile visit to my old love. I was stuck in my thirties mood—failure and disillusionment. It was time for a change.
There were two baffling letters waiting for me on my return from Montezuma, both a fortnight old. One was from Hamish. It announced merely that he had recently arrived in the States and was working for a U.S. government organization called the National Research Institute, in Zion, New Jersey, not far from Princeton. He said he hoped that we might meet up soon, then he added, “I can’t tell you how sorry I was to see you vilified in that despicable way. I wrote several letters in your defense but none were printed. I suspect you have become the scapegoat for more eminent appeasers.”
What vilification? What appeasement was he talking about? The second letter was from my father and even more perplexing.
My dear John,
I am prompted to write because I know the distress you must be suffering at these scandalous allegations. The fine letter in your defense from a Mr. Julian Teague published in Wednesday’s Times came a little too late. I fear, to undo the damage or halt the momentum. I merely wanted you to know that your family (and that includes Thompson) is standing by you during this difficult and unpleasant time.
I am surprisingly fit for an old man. Please convey my respects to your new wife, Monika, and I hope we will all meet soon in more happy circumstances.
Yours aye,
Dad
It was the “Dad” that shook me. He had never signed himself so affectionately before. But what was going on? Clearly some vile slander on me had been perpetrated in the British press. I wrote to my father and Hamish immediately asking for more information.
I didn’t have long to wait. I was in an editing suite at Lone Star working on The Equalizer when I received a call from a reporter on the L.A. Times. He would like to talk to me, he said. I assumed it was about the new film.
I met him in a bar round the corner. It was a sunny fresh morning and the place was quiet. Rumba music played gently on the radio. I ordered a Four Roses with ice and ginger ale in a tall glass. I munched some pretzels from the bartop bowl. The journalist arrived and introduced himself as Karl Shumway. He fanned out a series of newspaper clippings on the bar.
“What do you say to this?” he asked.
Let me summarize briefly the history of this particularly sordid campaign of character assassination. It had begun in a small-circulation British film magazine called Cinema Monthly, in an article entitled “Fun in the Sun: Our Absent Industry.” This purported to criticize the large number of British actors, producers, writers and directors who were living the high life in Hollywood while war was being waged at home. In fact, over three quarters of its length was given over to a sustained attack on me. Among the lies were these: I had been pro-Nazi before the war when I had made my name in Berlin during the twenties; I had stayed on long after Hitler came to power. I had been unable to further my career in Britain and had left for the U.S.A. when war clouds (predictably) “loomed” over Europe. In Hollywood I had consorted with Germans, married a German actress—one Mathilde Halte—and when the war began had fled to Mexico for several months before sneaking back to Hollywood when I thought the coast was clear. Now I whiled away my time making worthless films and living in a loud and ostentatious style.
This might have traveled no further except for the fact that some cineast in the editorial department of the London Times read it, and on a quiet day wrote a third leader “deploring the example set by English artists and intellectuals who sat out the war in the Lotusland of the U.S.A., far from the hardship and suffering being endured by Europe.” Furthermore, “the example of John James Todd, an English director, is particularly unedifying,” the leader said and went on to adumbrate Cinema Monthly’s allegations, concluding with an exhortation that the government seize and impound all the said artists’ assets in this country until “they deigned to return to our beleaguered shores and defend themselves.”
This was the signal for the rest of the press to join in. Stories were run about me; photographs were printed of starlets and swimming pools, supermarkets and sunny beaches. Here and there an old photograph of myself, dark and grinning, looked out as if to say, “Too bad, suckers!” One caption read:
John James Todd, a notorious hellraiser at Hollywood parties, drives a luxury car and lives in an eight-bedroomed house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Another English film director, who visited Hollywood recently on a war-bond fund-raising drive, said Todd seems very much at home. Quite frankly, he’s not the sort we want back here. We’re better off without him.
I felt first warm with shame, then this was replaced with a more general state of nausea. This must be Druce’s revenge. I went back to the original Cinema Monthly piece. The byline was “From our special Hollywood correspondent.” Old familiar feelings of helpless impotence returned. Dutifully I rebutted all the points to Shumway. I had left Berlin in ’34. I was and had always been anti-Nazi. I had been in an anti-Nazi organization in Berlin in the twenties and I was a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. I explained about Mexico and detailed the modest size of my house and the temperance of my life.
“What about this fight you had at L.A. Airport?”
“That was a personal matter.”
“Didn’t Zanuck throw you off the Fox lot?”
I refuted that one too. Druce’s features came to mind. I very nearly told Shumway about the self-inflicted wound, but wisely decided against it. Shumway wrote everything down in a notebook. Two days later on page 4 of the L.A. Times a small two-column piece appeared, headed “Director Todd Slams British Smears.”
Nobody read it, or at least nobody commented on it. But the lies had their effect on me. Coupled with the failure of my reunion with Doon, they sent me into something of a nervous decline. I imagined people I knew reading these stories and believing them. I wrote to my family—even Sonia—asking them to spread the truth. I saw the way the world’s perception of a person could change so easily. Who would now recall the triumphs of Julie and The Confessions: Part I? What was Julian Teague’s letter against this huge tide of calumny and innuendo? I felt my life had been wasted, both as an artist and as a human being. All my films were forgotten. The emotional center of my life—Doon—had disappeared and abandoned me. The world and the future seemed dull, hostile, uninviting. I began to drink more than was good for me, not venturing out of my house for days at a time. I knew I had to do something soon or I would go under. Eddie, who was delighted with The Equalizer, was offering me a script about Jesse James. But the unfair stories about my craven absence from the war unsettled me
. I began to feel guilty. Guilt infected me. Me, of all people … But that sort of accusation is insidious—it touches the very core of our self-esteem. I forgot about the Salient, the horrors I had endured in the Great War. Fool that I was, only one course of action seemed open to me: I began to plan my return to Europe.
But in what capacity? I was too old to enlist. And besides, I had no desire to kill anyone—except Leo Druce. Ramón Dusenberry solved my problem when I confided in him. I became an accredited war correspondent for the Dusenberry press syndicate. I would report the latest news from the European battle fronts for the Chula Vista Herald-Post, the El Cajon Sentinel, the Imperial County Gazette, and the Calexico Argus. I had my old job back. I packed my Leica, bought a portable typewriter and headed east to New York to embark for London.
VILLA LUXE, June 26, 1972
For some reason Emilia didn’t come today. At lunchtime I went into the village to buy some oranges, but no one knew if she was ill or not. I cleaned up the kitchen, and washed the dirty dishes, partly to please her, partly to make her feel guilty. I’m alarmed at the rapid growth in the complexity of my feelings for her. She’s been working here for at least three years and until recently I never gave her more than a passing thought.
This evening I take my drink out to the seat on the cliff edge and watch the sun set. I notice that although the hill on the crocodile promontory casts a shadow onto the villa, my small beach on the bay below still gets the sun for another half hour or so. Perhaps I will go down tomorrow. I feel like a bathe.
And so I took myself off to a war once more again for just as idiotic motives as led me off to the first. However, before I left for Europe I paid a visit to Hamish in Zion.