by Cecil Beaton
Perhaps now the greatest impression, as a newcomer, was of the distances to be covered during the course of an average day’s work. Women’s Character Wardrobe and Men’s Wardrobe were long distances apart, though Wigs and Makeup were conveniently situated in the same building. The sound stages were often half a mile from the Art Department or the ‘Still’ Camera Depot and Publicity, while the outdoor locations on Lot 2 were impossible to reach on foot. Even the warehouses, where furniture of all periods, china, glass and every sort of ‘property’ are stored, were like vast hangars, and a man who wore a pedometer on his ankle discovered he had walked ten miles in a morning. Few people realise the value of the contents of these warehouses. I discovered a Golgotha hoard of riches dating back to the great days of extravagance. Here was Sèvres porcelain and real Louis XV furniture that had been brought back from Europe by special envoys scouting for Norma Shearer’s Marie Antoinette.
There were specialists in charge of jewellery and of buying materials and there were those who knew precisely how dirty to make a certain costume. The ‘property men’, too, responsible for everything the players may use in the course of a day’s acting, have developed their craft so that they have come to be relied upon as magicians.
Once I mistook a turning and found myself on the Pacific Ocean front at Santa Monica, twenty miles off course. Nevertheless at the end of the day’s work I enjoyed driving, with the radio at full blast on the dashboard, towards Beverly Hills, purple in the fading light.
The weeks rushed by in a surge of overwork. Necessarily one got to know the star performers extremely well.
Leslie Caron never allowed herself to be hurried or cajoled into making a decision she had not long thought out for herself. Typical of the new Hollywood leading lady, she despised flamboyant behaviour or ‘glamorous’ off-screen appearances and reserved her temperament for her performance.
Isabel Jeans was always good-tempered, however arduous or disappointing her days might be. Often ready ‘made up’ after a dawn call, she would wait upon bad weather or a delayed schedule until dusk without appearing before the cameras. But then when the time came she gave as spontaneous and distinguished a performance as if it had been rehearsed for months before.
Maurice Chevalier, the complete professional, was never out-of-sorts or inconsiderate, and had a broad smile for all.
I never enjoyed for long the quietness of my sumptuous office. ‘We’ve a problem here. Can you come down?’ Even my lunches in the commissary were interrupted with the intercom messages — ‘Seesil Bayton wanted on telafon’ and the messages would often come as a surprise — ‘Please will you be outside stage 15 at 1.20 to inspect a tennis court?’ ‘Will you okay a sugar bracelet to be eaten by a Lippit-zane horse?’ I discovered I could cut a stuffed peacock in half, and still make it stand up on a demi-mondaine’s head and I found that I could trim thirty hats in one and a half hours.
By now we had shot the Trouville scenes on the Pacific shore and they had appeared successfully like paintings of Boudin.
We remained often two or three days shooting on each set. The effect was as if we had been staying in the houses of the various characters. From the bourgeois parlour of crimson and plush of Gigi’s grandmother we moved to the Fragonard elegance of Aunt Alicia’s apartment for lessons in jewellery, deportment, and the choosing of wine and clothes; then to Uncle Honoré’s where the decoration was ‘art moderne 1900’ with mustard and Chartreuse colour schemes.
The leading actors had had time to become the characters they were impersonating. It is the final lap of filming that creates the most danger points. Energy begins to sag, impatience sets in, even if imperceptibly, and actors and actresses, even without their knowing it, are apt to cheat on their performances, to play for sympathy, to sweeten their characterisation and beautify their appearances.
Vincente Minnelli’s vitality brooked all setbacks, even re-takes. With the aid of countless Dixie-cups of black coffee, his enthusiasm and meticulous attention to detail was unabated. ‘Do you consider the relationship of those characters in that sequence is real?’ he would ask in a hushed whisper. He was alive to every nuance of acting behaviour, to every infinitesimal visual aspect and every technicality.
‘We’re going to shoot the Pre Catalan and the Bal Masque on Friday,’ Bill Ryan told me. ‘It’ll be a busy day for you — but after that there’ll only be the intimate scenes to do.’
When Friday arrived I realised that Bill Ryan had been speaking in euphemisms. Two hundred extras had to be dressed and on the lot in time for Vincente to shoot the elaborate sequence of the masked ball. This comic motley crowd of 1900-looking Pierettes, Cromwellian Cavaliers, Nell Gwynns and Marie Antoinettes throwing confetti and streamers, had to surge up and down a giant staircase with a precision that must always look spontaneous. The shot must be completed before the midday break, after which all had to be changed again for a completely different but equally difficult one that afternoon.
One is only vaguely conscious that the producer has set a certain time in which the picture should be made, but few connected with its execution ever really believe in the schedule. ‘It will take months longer,’ says everyone from the sound-track expert to the continuity girl. Just as the schoolboy at his first boarding-school can never believe in the end of term, or the prisoner that the day of his release will ever arrive, so, too, those involved cannot envisage the possible completion of a picture.
The film had yet to be edited and polished, songs and incidental music had to be synchronised. It is a movieland truism that the talent of those responsible for ‘shaping’ a film creates much of its success.
The experiences of the last six months had been interesting and happy. New vistas had been opened and perhaps now that my work was abruptly over, ordinary everyday existence would seem, by comparison, just a bit humdrum.
Part V: Old Friends: New Places, 1958-60
PAROS WITH TRUMAN CAPOTE
Paros, Greece: August 26th, 1958
We have not seen a newspaper since we arrived on this island a week ago. We have lived in a timeless haze of repetition. Life is nothing but sleep, swim, eat and read. The meals take little time to eat for they are not interesting, and we are in a hurry, after lunch, to get to our bedrooms. We meet again five or six hours later; time passes very quickly with slumber and books. One day merges soothingly into another without incident. Each day is a pattern.
This morning I was on my roof terrace painting the white marshmallow village below. Only a few people were awake. As on every other day, the first to appear was an old man with huge stomach and straw hat; he sits like a statue, blinking at the horizon; an elderly Greek couple come out from between their blue shutters to spend the whole day on their balcony; and the local photographer and his wife busy themselves watering from tins their carefully tended zinnias.
Today Truman talked about writing. ‘The mood is something that must be created by technique. To bring Christmas Story alive, I wrote it in the present tense. I felt so strongly about it, because the loss of this woman, when I heard of it at school, was one of the most dreadful things that have ever happened to me in my life. When I was writing the last page of that story, with the kites flying up to heaven, I was so upset that I vomited and cried for three days. It is only now that I have read and re-read so many hundreds of times what I have written that I can see the technique and prevent myself from weeping. I am convinced there is no one in America who knows so much about the style and the technique of writing as I do, or who writes as well.’
Truman considers that E.M. Forster is about the best writer today; his ear is sharp, each sentence is perfectly formed, his characters are real and the situations valid. But he thinks no one since Shakespeare had a better ear than Virginia Woolf — every line she wrote was immaculate, even if the content was not extraordinary. Maugham, without a true ear, had taught himself how to write well. Though his ear was good and he knew how to write polished prose, David Cecil’s writing is life
less — a pastiche — nothing to do with the idiom of today.
Truman had written Breakfast at Tiffany’s as an exercise, and only the dialogue was in the style of today. J.D. Salinger was the great exponent of the modern vernacular. The greatest genius of all, who really knew how to write, and who had complete insight into the characters of all his creations, was Proust, the undoubted master.
We talked about the inner rhythm in Shakespeare. Truman said that it was this inner rhythm that was an essential part of good writing. ‘My ear is so strong that it is apt to run away with me, to make me depend too much on what it tells me rather than on “style”. A statement has to give information in the most lucid terms. But it can do so in so many rhythms. The choice of word combinations is limitless; that is why it is hard to choose and make a final decision. That is why I write so slowly. With all these words flying around that is what writing is about. That is why I give so much time to it and take it so seriously; it is the one thing I can’t have a sense of humour about. That article on Brooklyn I showed you took me a month; but then I never rewrite; no time is spent crossing out and rewriting or polishing.’
Truman has a good idea of what an artist he is; he could make a great deal of money if he needed to; but money doesn’t mean much to him at the moment; he turns down lucrative offers and only does what interests him. He is not hard up and lives extravagantly for much of the year.
The people of Paros have come out to enjoy the cool and magic of dusk. They sit along the esplanade drinking ouzo. They pay little attention to us. They are inquisitive only to a point, then are completely unfriendly. Truman and Jack usually make friends easily with the inhabitants of every place they visit, but here they know no one outside the personnel of this hotel. The locals are too removed from the world to care. They are physically unattractive.
The little town has immense charm and even mystery; it is a labyrinth of white-washed dwellings; white walls, white doors and even white paving-stones. The only contrast is provided by the dark greens of cypresses, honeysuckle, or morning glory over a balcony. The church, built at the time of Santa Sophia, has a touch of modernity and the pie-crusted arches of the cloisters might have been designed by Emilio Terry. Inside there are tall pews with inexplicable high rests for the arms — can it mean one sits with hands at eye level?
We drove down a mountainside through olive groves and suddenly found ourselves in a green oasis where trees grew to gigantic heights — ilex, cypress, olives. There were pomegranates, quince, figs, and there was water rushing through great fertility of green shade. We noticed what looked like strange pear-shaped black and white leaves on a wall; these ‘leaves’ gradually opened and we saw that they were bright coral pink, orange and scarlet butterflies. The driver shook the foliage and suddenly the air was a-flutter with scarlet wings. The butterflies, which had become the shape of the leaf on which they slept, flew out in their hundreds and thousands. It was a strangely beautiful sight, and perhaps unique to this one place. It was so cool and green and romantic here that we hated to leave. It was a rare experience.
ROSE MACAULAY
October
Rose Macaulay, string and bones for years, had become almost like a galvanised corpse. Someone said of her, as she came into a crowded party at Ann Fleming’s, ‘Heavens, there’s the ghost of E.F. Benson as Hamlet!’
Rose Macaulay’s interest and enthusiasm for life alone made up the driving power that kept her going, for she never seemed to touch food or drink. She was never warmly enough clad in winter, and always cold in the height of a Greek summer. At last the impetus had come to an abrupt stop. But Dame Rose dines and lunches out all week as usual, driving her battered car everywhere. She would wait in it if she had arrived early, and in a leisurely way bring out a lipstick and ‘freshen-up’ her face.
On Tuesday, Simon Fleet and Juliet Duff gave a cruise reunion party. All their friends who had been to Greece and Russia together were gathered in the Gothic Box. The party was not a disappointment — in fact a surprising success. But on Thursday morning, Dame Rose was dead. Her photograph, shot onto the television screen, gave me a shock.
GRETA BY HERSELF
New York: Winter, 1958-9
Greta has gone from one doctor to another. Suddenly she started to feel better when she was given insulin injections by a quack. ‘I can’t come to you every day to take my turn in the queue,’ she said. ‘I have [with a laugh] too much to do!’ (She has nothing whatsoever to do!) The doctor said: ‘You come in by the side door here, and I’ll always fit you in. Don’t miss a day though, not even Sundays.’
So on Sunday Greta went and found the doctor in his dressing gown. ‘Excuse me being undressed and unshaved like this. It’s wonderful not to have to shave, and to be dirty for one day in the week.’ Greta sympathised, got her shot, and left.
Next day, on arrival, she told the liftman she wanted to see the doctor. ‘The doctor ain’t no more. He died last night.’ Greta felt faint. She was stunned for several days afterwards, and felt absolutely lost.
She did not know which way to turn. She suddenly resumed her relationship with her friend Mercedes. For a year or more she had cut her. If she met Mercedes while walking with Eric Goldsmith, she would nod only in the most cursory manner. Then, suddenly, Greta telephones, comes round to Mercedes, bursts into floods of tears.
‘I have no one to look after me.’
‘You don’t want anyone to look after you.’
‘I’m frightened! I’m so lost!’
Mercedes is her very best friend, and for thirty years has stood by her, willing to devote her life to her.
Once again Greta rallied. Mercedes prevailed upon a little doctor to break his rule of not having private clients and to come to New York from Rochester each day to look after Greta.
‘How do I know what you’re doing to me? How do I know you’re not killing me?’
The little man, very Italian and gallant, kissed her on the cheek and said: ‘I think you’re the sweetest person I ever knew.’ But when he asked for her telephone number, she refused to give it. ‘Very well then, I shall not continue to look after you. I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. If your doctor can’t telephone to know how you are responding to his treatment, there’s no point in his continuing.’
‘Very well, but you’re not to give that number to Mercedes.’
‘Do you mean to say you haven’t given your number to the person who begged me to look after you?’
‘I’ll give it to her later.’
The doctor rang Mercedes. ‘Would you mind if I ask you a very personal question? Have you, or not, Miss Garbo’s telephone number?’
‘No!’
‘I’m shocked! That is the most selfish thing I’ve heard in my life. It’s absolutely inhuman!’
In spite of everything, Mercedes continues to do all she can for Greta. Greta arrived unexpectedly at her flat, very upset. She had been to the Health Food store and the woman there had said: ‘Oh, Miss Garbo, you don’t look at all well!’ Greta was in tears. ‘Do I look so changed? Do I look so old?’ Mercedes secretly ran to the Health Food store and, shaking a finger, instructed the woman. ‘Don’t you ever tell Miss Garbo she doesn’t look well again! However badly you think she looks, tell her she looks fine.’ The woman was dreadfully apologetic and upset.
Mercedes suffers dreadfully at Greta’s cruelty, and after all these years has not adopted an invulnerable attitude. Yet she can be funny about Greta’s extraordinary behaviour and instead of getting angry (as I am apt to do), she giggles. ‘Well, we really must admit she’s a character, if not a real eccentric.’
The saddest aspect of this escape from people is in the fact that by now very few people are left who care about her whereabouts. A few old cronies still discuss her at length, but a whole generation has now grown up who have never seen her. When she walks down the street today, very few people recognise her.
Her health precludes her from leading a ‘normal’ life, her habit of
being by herself has become so much more exaggerated and she has eaten an artichoke for dinner at 7.15 almost every night alone in her own apartment. She has not been to a theatre for a year, and done very little shopping.
November
On arrival in New York I telephoned. Greta seemed delighted that her silence had been broken in upon. She came around that afternoon and stood at my doorway looking like a terrified creature: her eyes wide open and mouth agape as if ready for any torture. We laughed; we drank a little vodka, although she should abstain, and she would have stayed for dinner if I had not already made another engagement.
I felt a great tenderness for her most of the time and very little exasperation. My heart was touched by her. I enjoyed telephoning to her many times a day to find out how she fared, to keep in touch, to ‘clock in’, even if I knew there was nothing much to say.
For a month I telephoned most days. Sometimes she would suggest a meeting — a dinner with some Swedish friends.
I knew that at the present moment it was unwise to try and discuss our situation. I was in danger of taking on what would probably be an appallingly difficult life task. But no decision would be possible now. She was too ill and disorganised, too abject, too much embedded in her frigid rut to lose her head enough to make any affirmative gesture.
It is not the time for anything but treading water, and for enjoying minor pleasures.
Later Greta went off to the South of France to join ‘her friend’. They joined Aristotle Onassis on his yacht and had a gayer time than for many a year.