by William Boyd
I went up to the front door and rang the bell. A Hispanic maid answered. Right behind her was a thin, rather sharp-faced woman with hard blond hair.
“It’s all right, Caridad,” she said. Then to me: “Yes?”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Smee. It’s a committee matter.”
“Oh.…” She frowned. “Come in.”
I stepped into the hall, and as I did so my fear returned. Mrs. Smee went into a room and I heard her say, “Monroe? It’s a man from the committee.”
Smee came out. He wore black suspenders over a white nylon shirt.
“Hello, Monroe,” I said. “I think we need to talk.”
He looked deeply and profoundly shocked. Then his nose wrinkled in a curious way.
“Get out,” he said. “Get out of my house you filth! You Commie filth.”
“For God’s sake, Smee—”
“You evil Red bastard! How dare you contaminate my house! How dare you!”
“Very impressive,” I said. “Academy Award stuff. Now, we’ve—”
“Get out! Get out!”
I grabbed his shirtfront with both hands and slammed him up against the wall.
“Call the police!” he bellowed at his wife.
“Why? Why me? Just leave me alone!” I felt a homicidal anger distort my voice unpleasantly. Years of frustration boiling over.
Mrs. Smee screamed behind me. I felt her fists pound my back. I let him go.
“You can’t do anything more to me,” I said. “Just leave me alone.”
He rummaged in the drawer of a hall table and took out a small revolver.
“I could kill you, Todd!” he screamed. “I could kill you here and now and they’d give me a medal for killing Red scum—”
“You’re fucking mad!”
“—but I don’t want the stink in my house!”
“I’ll kill you!” I yelled back unthinkingly. “Leave me alone or I’ll kill you, so help me!”
“Get out, you Commie shit! Get out of my house!” He leveled the gun at me.
“You’re a lunatic. Madman … I warn you!” I backed off all the same. Mrs. Smee had sunk to her knees and was sobbing loudly.
“You’ve had it, Todd! I’ll get you!”
“And I’ll break your fucking neck!”
We shouted insults at each other as I opened the door. My last image was of Mrs. Smee hauling herself up his body, clutching imploringly for the gun.
As I strode across the front lawn the sprinklers came on—automatically, I assume—and soaked my trousers from the knee down. I danced over the grass to O’Hara’s car.
“Did he do that?” O’Hara asked as I got in beside him. “Want me to knock him around some? Little roughhouse stuff?”
“No. Let’s go.”
O’Hara drove off.
“He pulled a gun on me,” I said, delayed shock setting in. “Jesus, he pointed a fucking gun at me.”
“Bastard,” O’Hara said. “Want me to break his legs? His arms?”
“Some other time, Sean.”
He lowered his voice. “I can do that sort of thing for you, Mr. Todd. Anything. Not too expensive, for certain clients. Get my drift?”
I wasn’t listening.
“He’s mad,” I said, my arms and body beginning to tremble. I rubbed my face. “As simple as that. Stark, staring, Grade A nut case.”
VILLA LUXE, June 29, 1972
Why did Smee hate me with such vehement passion? I don’t know. It couldn’t have been simply that incident with the scripts. But it must have started then, as a basic irrational dislike that over the years his anti-Communist mania had turned into something righteous and patriotically American. He was indisputably mad, Smee, beneath the perfect sanity of his life. Perhaps one shouldn’t look any further. He was a manic force operating in Los Angeles and I just happened to come into range.
And yet … admit it, we have all met people whom we have instinctively disliked. It doesn’t take much irritation to turn that emotion into something altogether more venomous. I presume Smee must have felt something like this where I was concerned, especially after I had so guilelessly rubbished his work. When I did that I turned the knife in his vanity—and there are few people vainer than the deluded, talentless ones among us. But also he was an FBI informer when he met me and possibly he saw me as even more of a traitor.… Anyway, one can’t speculate much beyond this. The motivating factors in a psyche like Smee’s are too dark and baffling to be elucidated. He hated me, he was convinced I was a Communist. It was his bounden duty to bring me down. Smee was a given—call him another brute contingency that my life had thrown up. And I had never guessed, not for a moment. And that made the experience even more alarming. Monroe Smee, G-man, HUAC investigator, Red scourge, anti-Communist entrepreneur. My appointed nemesis.
Emilia has done something appalling to her hair. She has dyed it black—a gunmetal blue-black—and has had it set in hard waves around her head. She wears a pungent scent that today at lunchtime I thought I could even taste in my food. On two occasions this morning she found opportunities to brush against me. And I sense her looking at me, covertly, as if weighing me up all the time. The atmosphere in the house is charged, tremulous, on the brink of something drastic.
Her new hairstyle is not flattering, but as the day wears on I find my thoughts returning to her more frequently than I would have imagined. There has been no one in my life for years, you see. Perhaps, like Jean Jacques, I could do worse than take up with someone like Emilia, faithful and efficient. Just as he had his Thérèse, so I would have my Emilia.… I project myself into this putative future and, do you know, it has its own real attraction. There’s a lot of life left in Emilia. She is attractive in a crude, faintly primitive way.
I go looking for her. I find her in the living room, which is shuttered against the afternoon sun. She was dusting the books on the bookshelves, something I had never seen her do before. Suddenly, I knew I could find a sort of happiness with her, and that’s not something to be spurned.
“Oh, Mr. Todd,” she says. “That man was looking for you again. I forgot to tell you. In the village. The American.”
Jesus Christ. “Did you see him?”
“No, Ernesto told me, at the bar.” She sees the look of worry in my face. “Is there a problem, Mr. Todd? Is something wrong? You can tell me. If you like.”
She comes over, heralded by her perfume. I go to meet her. She stops.
“I don’t know, Emilia.… Something happened a long time ago,” Unthinkingly, I put my hands on her shoulders. For the first time my fingers on her flesh. Her new hair gleams with dull-blue highlights. She twists the duster in her hands.
“Mr. Todd, are you in trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
She pushes me away with astonishing strength. I stumble, catch the back of my leg painfully on a coffee table. Emilia seems to be shivering slightly. She has one hand up to her mouth.
“No,” she says. “No. We must wait. We must wait.”
She turns round and runs out of the room. Wait for what? A minute later I hear her motorbike start up. I sit down. What was that all about? I wonder. Shock, shame, second thoughts? Head-in-hands time.…
Then I remember what she told me and I feel the fear creep back. It’s like a smell; my nostrils flare; my mouth feels pasty, dry. I decide to ask Ernesto for more information.
I walk up the track towards the village. Günther’s driveway is clogged with cars and jeeps. Children’s shouts and conversation rise up from the swimming pool. It’s hot. I should have brought my hat. I slow down. On either side of the track the pinewoods seem to bake in their dusty silence.
I arrive at Ernesto’s, parched and overheated. The terrace is deserted apart from a couple in their swimming costumes. I look again: Ulrike and a young man. I wave limply at them.
“Mr. Todd. A moment.”
They come over. I step into shade and lean against a pillar. Ulrike wears a bikini. Despite my exhaust
ion I note the muscled plane of her stomach, the swell and cleavage of her breasts, the flick and contraction of her thighs as she comes over. Certain women, walking towards me … My stomach dips. I think of Doon. I would weep if I weren’t so tired. But what’s happened to me today? I seem to be in the grasp of some geriatric satyriasis.
They sense my vague distress. Soon I am seated, a cool beer is in front of me, offers of food have been declined. I am an old man, over seventy. I keep forgetting. Sometimes I feel a coltish eighteen, hard though it may be to credit.
“Is Ernesto here?” I ask.
“No. Just Concepción.”
“Never mind.”
“Mr. Todd, I’d like you to meet Tobias, my boyfriend.”
I look at the young man. Dark hair, receding temples. He is thin, with broad shoulders. He takes my hand.
“Mr. Todd,” he says. He speaks good English. “This is a real honor for me. I couldn’t believe it when Ulrike told me about you.” More plaudits follow. I begin to relax and order another beer. Tobias tells me of the new plans he and his colleagues have made since Ulrike’s discovery of me. From the way he talks, you’d think I was a new continent. I barely listen. I hear him mention old names from past: Julie, Doon Bogan, Karl-Heinz, Duric and Aram Lodokian, UFA, Realismus, The Confessions …
I interrupt. “Have either of you, by any chance, heard of a man in the village looking for me? An American?”
“An American? No.”
“I heard this man was asking for me. Asking Ernesto.”
More negatives. Tobias leans forward.
“The great mystery, Mr. Todd, this is what we all want to know … The Confessions: Part I—what happened to that film? We can find no print at all in Germany. No negative. It hasn’t been seen for forty years. Do you know where there is a copy?”
“Alas, no.” I spread my hands. “Sorry.”
“Think hard,” Tobias implores. “Imagine, if we could discover it.” For a moment he allows his own ambitions to overrun his altruism. “Think what a discovery it would be. A lost masterpiece restored. The greatest film of the silent era. Astonishing news.”
“I wish I could help you,” I say. “But everything must have been destroyed in the war.”
* To add to my list of firsts: I was the first person to take the Fifth in Hollywood. There was little publicity. Ramón Dusenberry tried to run a campaign in his papers, but no one else took it up. Only in Southern California was I referred to as “The Hollywood One.”
20
The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau
I believe that The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau has something of a cult following on the university film-club circuit. I saw a poll in a magazine once where it came third, equal with Juliet of the Spirits, after Un Chien Andalou and Last Year in Marienbad, in the category “Offbeat and Avant-garde.” It was the last film I made and far and away the strangest.
It was shot in three weeks, cost $128,000 and lasts one hour and ten minutes. Eddie financed it (“No more than one hundred grand for an art movie”) on the conditions that I use a pseudonym and that I direct a low-budget epic called Hercules and the Sirens afterwards. I agreed at once. I knew that Last Walk would be my last film.
The final years of Jean Jacques’s life were spent in Paris, in a tranquil enough state, apart from his occasional bouts of acute paranoia. He was famous and sought after but made no attempt to capitalize on his renown. He received many visitors, encouraging young people in particular to come and see him, and took up his old career as a music copyist. His great hobby was botanizing, or herborizing as he called it, and he knew no greater pleasure than to take long solitary walks through the countryside round Paris, frequently in the company of a friend. In the last two years of his life—1777 and ’78—he wrote his final piece of autobiography, the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire. It is unfinished, but in the course of these ten promenades he surveys his life from the serene vantage point of old age. The Confessions is passionate and vital. The Rêveries is elegiac and sagacious. In the summer of 1778, feeling unwell, he and Thérèse went to live in a pavilion on the estate of the marquis de Girardin at Ermenonville, northwest of Paris near Senlis. There, he worked on the Rêveries, herborized and seemed to be regaining his strength.
On July 1, 1778, it was a warm day. Rousseau went for a long walk with the marquis’s son in the meadows of the park at Ermenonville. That night he dined extremely well in the company of the marquis and his family. He seemed amiable and vivacious. The next day, however, he felt ill. Thérèse assumed he had eaten too much. At ten o’clock, staring out of the windows at the gardens, he had a severe apoplectic fit. He fell to the ground, breathless and in agony, striking his head against the floor, causing a bad wound. He died almost immediately.
The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau opens with a shot of the dining room in the pavilion. Jean Jacques (Karl-Heinz) sits at the table eating his breakfast. The young Girardin comes to collect him and they set off on their walk. The pavilion, we then observe, is set in a meadow on the Monterey Peninsula near Big Sur. The sense of reality that the opening scene seemed to present so faithfully begins to fall away, never to be recovered.
When Jean Jacques had collected and examined a plant he used to tie a red or gold ribbon round one of the same type so he would know it was documented. On leaving the pavilion, he and Girardin find themselves in a prairie alive with red and gold ribbons. They enter a copse of trees and descend into a little wooded canyon through which runs a fast shallow river (the Little Sur River, in fact). Two girls are sitting beside it, one combing the other’s hair. In the background their horses graze. Jean Jacques watches them mount up and ford the river. We cut to the prelude to the cherry-orchard sequence idyll in The Confessions: Part 1. Color gives way to black and white. We see a young Jean Jacques help the girls across a similar river. Then we intercut the orchard sequence with the curious faces of old Jean Jacques and the baffled Girardin. Later, they botanize, Jean Jacques diligently tying red and gold ribbons on plants as they go. They come upon a hermitage. The monks offer them lunch. A lesson is read during the meal about how futile it is for man to complain about his lot. “God has brought man nothing, He oweth him nothing.”
After lunch they go into the garden of the hermitage. A group of contemporary Californians sit before a screen watching scenes from The Confessions: Part I. Old Jean Jacques observes his young self arriving in Annecy on his way to the house of Mme. de Warens.
Jean Jacques and Girardin leave for home. On their way back they cross the Pacific Coast Highway (completely unperturbed by the automobiles). They stop at a roadside diner, which is full of garish tourists. The owner recognizes Jean Jacques, sets up a table for him outside underneath a redwood and provides him with bread, wine and cheese.
GIRARDIN: He seems to know you well.
JEAN JACQUES: In fine weather my wife and I used to come here and eat a cutlet of an evening.
As they approach the pavilion they notice a huge Great Dane loping and bounding about the meadows. The dog sees Jean Jacques and races towards him. It leaps up and knocks him heavily to the ground. Unconscious, Jean Jacques has a vision of Mme. de Warens, her back towards him, about to enter the door of the church at Annecy. Then he sees a view of the lake at Annecy, which merges with the Pacific Ocean off Big Sur. He hears the monk’s voice saying: “All flesh is grass.… The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.…” We see the meadow with its fluttering ribbons through which they passed that morning dissolve into a smoking ashfield (a National Guardsman with a flamethrower was responsible for the transformation, supervised by the Carmel Fire Department).
Jean Jacques recovers himself and they make their way back home. We cut to the dinner scene, with the marquis, the marquise and their family present. Candles flicker; their gleam is reflected in the silverware. Jean Jacques talks with almost manic animation. Later, when everyone has gone, and Thérèse is upstairs in bed, he stands alone in the dark room looking out through the
windows at the moonlit garden. For an instant we see the Great Dane lope across the lawns. Then the windows become white screens and upon them is projected the vision he saw earlier: Mme. de Warens about to enter the church.
“Julie,” he whispers.
She turns. And there is Doon.
Suddenly the image is shattered by a stone. Then dozens of stones are hurled through the panes. Glass breaks. Shards fly. We are back in Môtiers; the mob is stoning his house. A rock catches Jean Jacques on his forehead; blood flows. He clutches his chest in monstrous agony and falls to the floor.
Thérèse comes in. The room is exactly as it was. Exquisite moonlight floods the tranquil garden. Jean Jacques lies on the floor, dead. End. Credits.
My sources for the film were the Rêveries, a description of a walk taken with Rousseau, written by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, my own memories (which no doubt you will have spotted) and inspired pilfering of my subconscious. I assembled my sources and the narrative seemed to flow from my pen with an ease I had never before encountered. The one critic of any repute who noticed the film wrote, “The Last Walk exerts a beguiling grip on the viewer but remains in the end a maze of inpenetrable symbols.” Ah, but remember there is always a way out of a maze.
We shot the film in the late summer of 1958. For the three years previously, Academy Awards for the best screenplay had gone to blacklisted screenwriters using pseudonyms. Eddie was sure that 1959 would see the MPAA rescind its bylaws against those who had refused to cooperate with HUAC. The time was right, he said, but he still wanted my director’s credit to be pseudonymous. I chose the name John Witzenreid.
I enjoyed making that small film as much as I relished the scale of The Confessions: Part I. Our cast was composed of amateurs and bit-part players. We had a small crew, based ourselves in San Francisco and traveled out to whatever location took our fancy.