Lost at Sea (12 page)

KUBRICK
: That’s right.

You catch glimpses of Vivian in the rushes. She looks beautiful, effervescent.

“She is a fabulous person,” says Christiane. “Beautiful, very witty, enormously talented in all sorts of directions, very musical, a great mimic, she could play instruments easily, she could sing, she could dance, she could act, there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. We had fights. But she was hugely loved. And now I’ve lost her.” She pauses. “You know that? I used to keep all this a secret, as I was hoping it would go away. But now I’ve lost hope. So. She’s gone.”

It all began, she says, while Stanley was editing
Eyes Wide Shut
, which starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Stanley asked Vivian to compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn’t. Instead, she disappeared into San Francisco and Los Angeles. “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy. He wrote her a forty-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”

On the day of Stanley’s funeral, Christiane says, Vivian arrived with a woman nobody recognized. “She just sat in Vivian’s room. Never said hello to us. Just sat. We were all spooked. Who was this person? Turns out she was a Scientology something-or-other, don’t know what.”

“Did Vivian give a reason why she joined the Scientologists?” I ask.

“It’s her new religion.” Christiane shrugs. “It had absolutely nothing to do with Tom Cruise, by the way. Absolutely not.”

“Maybe it was her way of dealing with her father’s death?”

“I think she must have been very upset,” Christiane says, “but, again, I wouldn’t know. I know nothing. That is the truth. I can’t reach her at all. I’ve had two conversations with her since Stanley died. The last one was eight years ago. She became a Scientologist and didn’t want to talk to us anymore and didn’t see her dying sister, didn’t come to her funeral. [Her sister Anya died of cancer, aged fifty.] And these were children that had been joined at the hip.”

I tell her that she seems to have handled all her tragedies with remarkable resilience. “I daresay I have, yes,” she says. “But I’ve also been very sad. I was helped by my children. Anya, in particular.”

She says that when Stanley was alive, he kept her and their daughters cosseted from stress, from life’s legal and financial arrangements, allowing them to float through Childwick without worries. But he died long before anyone expected he would, and Christiane has been left with burdens she never anticipated. So she’s forever finding herself second-guessing him. Would he have handled the Vivian situation differently? Would he have approved of letting me look though the boxes? She has bigger plans for the archive. She wants to donate them to a university. Would he have approved of that?

“I am very self-conscious and surrounded by his ghost,” she says. “I’m always having these conversations with him, as I am not terribly secure. And I try to live like I think he would want me to go on, because of the grandchildren and everything.”

At the end of our dinner I tell her, with some embarrassment, that I find her quite inspiring. She thinks about this for a moment. “I’m very pleased that Stanley liked me,” she replies.

•   •   •

FOR MONTHS,
as I look through the boxes, I don’t bother opening the two that read
Shadow on the Sun
. But, one evening just before last Christmas, I decide to take a look.

It is amazing. The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a slightly cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog:

“Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?” says the dog’s owner. “He’s not very well. I’m a bit worried about him, John.”

This is typed.

Kubrick has handwritten below it: “THE DOG IS NOT WELL.”

A virus has been carried to earth on a meteorite. This is why the dog is listless, and also why humans across the planet are no longer able to control their sexual appetites. It ends with a speech:

There’s been so much killing—friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, but we all know nobody on this earth is to blame, Mrs. Brighton. We’ve all had the compulsions. We’ll just have to forgive each other our trespasses. I’ll do my part. I’ll grant a general amnesty—wipe the slate clean. Then perhaps we can begin to live again, as ordinary decent human beings, and forget the horror of the past few months.

This, too, is typed. But all over the script I find notes handwritten by Kubrick. (“Establish Brighton’s interest in extra-terrestrial matters.” “Dog finds meteorite.” “John has got to have very powerful connections of the highest level.” “A Bill Murray line!”)

“I know what this is,” says Tony.

Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early sixties, he happened to hear this drama serial—
Shadow on the Sun
. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished
Full Metal Jacket
, he was looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track the scripts down. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about
Shadow on the Sun
, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually—after working on and rejecting
AI—
made
Eyes Wide Shut
instead.

“But the original script seems quite cheesy,” I say.

“Ah,” replies Tony, “but this is before Stanley worked his alchemy.”

And I realize this is true. “Dog finds meteorite.” It sounds so banal, but imagine how Kubrick might have directed it. Do the words “Ape finds monolith” or “Little boy turns the corner and sees twin girls” sound any less banal on the page?

All this time I have been looking in the boxes for some embodiment of the fantasies of the outsiders like Mr. Sam Laks and me—but I never do find anything like that. I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the towns from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.

It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If
2001
, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped. Tony says that if I’m looking for the solution to the mystery of Kubrick, I don’t really need to look inside the boxes. I just need to watch the films.

“It’s all there,” he says. “Those films are Stanley.”

•   •   •

ALTHOUGH THE KUBRICKS
always guarded their privacy inside Childwick, I come to the end of my time at the house just as Christiane and her daughter Katharina decide to open the grounds and the stable block to the public. They’re going to hold an art fair, displaying their work and the work of a number of local artists. Christiane has decided to let the boxes go. She’s donating them to the University of the Arts London—to a special climate-controlled Kubrick wing, where film students and other students can look through them. She’s letting them go because, she tells me, “I get very upset at seeing some of his old things. The paper is so dusty and old and yellow. They look so sad. The person is so very dead once the paper is yellow.”

I’m there to watch a fleet of removal vans arrive to take them away. During the months and years that follow, Christiane oversees the publication of two books about the things inside the boxes—
The Stanley Kubrick Archives
(Taschen) and
Stanley Kubrick’s
Napoleon:
The Greatest Movie Never Made
(Taschen). She turns up for special screenings of his films—I watch her introduce
Paths of Glory
in the open-air cinema at Somerset House, Central London, and we have dinner afterward. I mention this to a friend, a Kubrick buff. “Oddly, I was just thinking about her today,” he replies. “A
Twilight
fan said to me, ‘Is there anything more romantic than Edward and Bella?’” I immediately thought, “Christiane Kubrick’s protection of her husband’s legacy.”

One of the very last boxes I opened before the removal vans came contained a videotape. Kubrick was on the tape, addressing the camera, looking nervous. It was an acceptance speech. He’d been awarded the D. W. Griffith Award. It was just a few months before he died.

“Good evening,” he says. “I’m sorry not to be able to be with you tonight . . . but I’m in London making
Eyes Wide Shut
with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and at just about this time I’m probably in the car on the way to the studio. . . .”

All this time I’ve been looking for some kind of Rosebud and I think I find it in a few lines in this speech.

“Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film,” he says, “also knows that although it can be like trying to write
War and Peace
in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.”

I think Kubrick knew he had the ability to make films of genius, and to do that—when most films are so bad—there has to be a method, and the method for him was precision and detail. I think his boxes contain the rhythm of genius.

PART THREE

EVERYDAY DIFFICULTY

“I’ve thought about doing myself in loads of times.”

—“Bill” to Christopher Foster

Santa’s Little Conspirators

I
t is a Monday in late October and I’m standing inside a smoke-filled Lotto shop in the tiny Alaskan town of North Pole, population 1,600. This shop sells only two things: cigarettes and Lotto scratch cards. Chain-smoking inveterate gamblers sit at the counter and frantically demolish mountains of the scratch cards. They have names like Royal Jackpot, Blame It on Rio, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Outside, people are going about their business on Frosty Avenue. Friends are chatting on Kris Kringle Drive. A gang of hoodies are slouched against the candy-cane-striped streetlights on Santa Claus Lane, having just emerged from the Christmas-themed McDonald’s.

Everything in North Pole is Christmas-themed. It is Christmas Day here 365 days a year. The decorations are always up. It never stops being Christmas here. Never. Wherever you are in the world, if you write a letter to Santa, and address it simply “Santa, North Pole,” your letter will most likely end up in this tiny Alaskan town.

Actually, specifically, your Santa letter will end up right here, in this smoke-filled scratch-card and cigarette shop. It’s late October, and boxes of them are already piled up on the counter near the fruit machine. They’re automatically forwarded here from the post office. I pick an envelope up at random. It has only one word scrawled on it, in a child’s handwriting: “Santa.” It’s postmarked Doncaster, UK.

I get talking to Debbie, who works here, selling scratch cards to the gamblers. Debbie is herself a chain-smoker, a blowsy strawberry-blonde with a tough, good-looking face. She says she can frequently be found alone in here in floods of tears, having just opened yet another heartbreaker.

“Just before you got here,” she says, “I opened one that said, ‘Dear Santa. All I want for Christmas is for my mother and father to stop shouting at each other.’ I just fell apart.”

“We get a lot of ‘Could you bring my father back from Iraq?’” says Gaby, the shop’s owner. Debbie answers as many Santa letters as she can, whenever she gets a break. She writes back using her elf name: Twinkle.

And she has help. Each week in November and December, a box of Santa letters is sent over to the nearby middle school, where the town’s eleven- and twelve-year-olds—the sixth graders—write back in the guise of elves. It is part of the curriculum.

Six of last year’s middle school elves, now aged thirteen, were arrested back in April for being in the final stages of plotting a mass murder, a Columbine-style school shooting. The information is sketchy, but apparently they had elaborate diagrams and code names and lists of the kids they were going to kill. I’ve come to North Pole to investigate the plot. What turned those elves bad? Were they serious? Was the town just too Christmassy?

I need to tread carefully. So far I’ve tried to ask only one person about it—James, the waiter in Pizza Hut—and it went down badly.

“North Pole is the greatest place I’ve ever been,” James told me as he poured my coffee. “The people here are always ready to do! We stay on track and we move on forward! We don’t let anything get us down. That’s the spirit of North Pole and the spirit of Christmas. People here are willing to put their best foot forward and be the best kind of people they can be.”

“I heard about the thing with the kids over at the middle school plotting a Columbine-style massacre,” I said.

At this, James let out a noise the likes of which I’ve never really heard before. It was an “Aaaaaah.” He sounded like a balloon being burst by me, with all the joy escaping from him like air.

“That was a, uh, shock. . . .” said James.

“You have to wonder why. . . .” I said.

“This is a very happy, cheerful, cheery place,” said James. “Anything more you need?”

“No,” I said. And James walked back to the counter, shooting me a sad look, as if to say, “What kind of a Grinch are you to bring that up?”

•   •   •

MONDAY NIGHT.
People keep telling me that everybody in North Pole loves Christmas. But I’ve found someone who doesn’t. Her name is Jessie Desmond. I found her on Myspace.

“Christmas is a super big deal around here,” she e-mailed me before I set off for Alaska, “but for me it is a general hate. Please don’t go off me about that.”

We meet in a non-Christmassy bar of her choice on the edge of town. She’s in her early twenties. She was educated at the middle school and is now trying to make her way as a comic-book artist. She has the Batman logo tattooed on her hand.

“Christmas really grates on me, all the time, in the back of my head,” she tells me. “Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. It drives me nuts.”

“But there must be something you do like about North Pole,” I say.

Jessie thinks about this. “Well, if you get into an accident or something, everyone’s willing to help you,” she eventually says, shrugging.

I decide it’s safe to ask Jessie—being anti-Christmas—about the mass-murder plot.

“Do you know the boys?” I ask her.

She shakes her head.

“Apparently they drew up a list,” I say.

“Well, I have a hate list on my wall too,” Jessie replies.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t have access to weapons.”

“I have a revolver in my bedroom,” Jessie says.

“Do you stand in front of the mirror with it and shout ‘Freeze!’ and imagine what it’s like to kill your enemies?” I ask.

There’s a silence.

“I might,” says Jessie, finally.

I ask Jessie if she’ll take me to her house and show me her gun. On the way she tells me she suspects the boys were just like her—all talk—and the town only took them seriously because everyone is terrified of everything these days.

Although this is late October, Jessie’s house is extremely Christmassy. Her parents, Mike and Edith (a former Miss Alaska), are great fans of Christmas.

“Did you see my Christmas balls up front?” Edith asks me. “The nicest thing about living in North Pole is that you can leave your Christmas decorations up all year.”

“Are there people in North Pole who don’t like Christmas?” I ask.

“I don’t know any,” says Mike.

I glance at Jessie. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor at their feet, displaying no emotion.

Mike shows me the mounted head of a sheep he once shot. It’s wearing tinsel.

“You never think that having decorations up all year round is too much Christmas?” I ask.

Edith shakes her head.

“No,” she says firmly. “No. I love Christmas. It’s my favorite time.”

“Jessie,” I say. “Will you show me your gun?”

“Sure,” she says.

I tell Mr. and Mrs. Desmond that it was lovely to meet them, and I walk with Jessie down the corridor. We pass a row of paintings depicting Santa in various festive settings, in front of log fires, etc. Across the corridor is Jessie’s bedroom. It is free of anything Christmassy.

“Does your mother know . . . ?” I begin.

“That I don’t like Christmas?” says Jessie.

I nod.

“I’ve told her,” she says. “But I don’t think she believes me.” She rummages around her wardrobe and pulls out her revolver.

“You’re the first person to see it,” she says.

She straightens her arm like in a police movie. She says she sometimes pretends to kill the kids who bullied her in middle school. “I walk up to them when no one is around and I bop them over the head and shoot them!” she says. “Ha-ha!”

Jessie says the person I should really ask about the plot is Jeff Jacobson. He teaches sixth grade at the middle school. He must have known the boys. Plus Jeff
was mayor of North Pole until last week. If anyone who knows is willing to tell, it’s Jeff,
Jessie says.

I leave Jessie’s and call Jeff
Jacobson. He says I’m welcome to visit him tomorrow at the school during the lunch period.

Dusk is settling. One of the town’s two giant Santa sculptures—the one outside the RV park—lights up. It’s lit from below, which gives Santa’s eyes a hollow, creepy look, like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
.

•   •   •

TUESDAY MORNING.
Apparently the kids who were plotting the shootings were Goths. Earl Dalman, the owner of the permanently Christmas-decorated Dalman’s Family Restaurant, the most popular restaurant in town, tells me this. Just about everyone who lives in North Pole eats breakfast at Dalman’s. It has a lovely, festive, community feel, even if the decorations are looking frayed.

There’s Debbie—Twinkle—who looks like she’s been up all night opening letters to Santa. There’s Mary Christmas, who runs the Santa Claus House gift shop. That’s her real name. It’s on her birth certificate. And there’s Earl Dalman, the owner of the diner. We get to talking.

“Do you know anything about that shooting plot over at the middle school?” I ask him.

“The kids were Goths,” he says.

“Really?” I say.

Earl gives me a look to say, “Well, of course they were Goths. What else would they be?”

“Where I come from,” I explain, “Goths aren’t dangerous.”

“Really?” says Earl, surprised.

“Goths don’t do anything bad in the UK,” I say. “They’re a gentle and essentially middle-class subculture.”

“Huh!” says Earl.

“I suppose the difference is that the Goths in Britain aren’t armed,” I muse. “They’re so death-obsessed, it’s probably good to keep them away from guns.”

Earl gives me a look as if to say, “There’s nothing wrong with gun ownership.”

Then he tells me that—as a result of the shooting plot—his daughter has pulled her kids out of the middle school. The Dalman kids are being homeschooled instead now.

“It shook everyone up,” says Earl.

I have a few hours to kill before I get to go inside the middle school and meet Jeff Jacobson, and so I visit a sweet, twinkly-eyed lady called Jan Thacker, local columnist and author of the book
365 Days of Christmas: The Story of North Pole, Alaska, the Little Town That Carved Itself Out of the Alaska Wilderness and Became Known, Worldwide, as the Home of Santa Claus
.

Her book begins, “So does he? Does Santa really live in North Pole? . . . The police chief believes it, and who is more honest than the chief of police?”

Jan and I chat for a while, and then she takes me into her back room, which is full of guns—a glinting rack of them—and a number of stuffed wolves she’s killed.

The stuffed wolves have ferocious facial expressions. They’re snarling, their teeth bared, their eyes aflame with hatred, ready to pounce.

I tell Jan she must have been very brave to shoot those terrifying wolves.

“Were they pouncing like that when you shot them?” I ask.

“No,” Jan says.

Then she explains: The local taxidermist, Charlie Livingston, tends to give the wolves ferocious expressions however they were behaving at the moment of their death—even if they were just wandering around all doe-eyed, looking for a pat and a play.

It’s surprising to see such a twinkly-eyed old lady so heavily armed, but this is normal for North Pole. It solves the mystery of where the plotters would have got the guns. There are guns everywhere.

This is mainly because of all the bears. There are bears everywhere, and moose. I suspect this is why the town is so Republican. There are virtually no liberals. When you’ve got that many bears, you’re not going to be liberal. You know what liberals are like with bears. We just scream. We let out a high-pitched scream and run away, our arms in the air.

It is all the more surprising, then, that Jeff Jacobson is a gentle-hearted liberal, a card-carrying Democrat. I’ve been told that sometimes, at night, Jeff can be seen driving around North Pole, quietly putting up decorations in underprivileged parts of town. Now it is lunchtime, and Jeff is putting up decorations in his math classroom. He’s wearing a Santa hat and a tie covered in snowmen. We talk a little about how much he misses being mayor.

I don’t think Jeff gets on with the new mayor, Doug Isaacson, who’s apparently a steely-eyed, shaven-headed staunch Bush Republican. Doug Isaacson’s big idea is apparently to get all the shopkeepers in town to wear elf costumes as a means of generating increased tourist revenue. Jeff feels this is just window dressing, and what’s on the inside is what counts, Christmas-wise.

Jeff tells me this is a good week for me to be in North Pole. Tomorrow his sixth graders will get their first-ever batch of Santa letters to answer. They’ll give themselves elf names and write back on Santa’s behalf.

“We live in a world of text messaging and video games,” Jeff says. “Being a Santa’s elf connects us with real people all around the world.”

“Can I come along and watch them do it?” I ask.

“Of course,” Jeff says.

“Jeff,” I say. “I hear some of last year’s elves were caught plotting a mass murder.”

For a second Jeff freezes, Christmas decorations in hand. Then he recovers and carries on pinning them up.

“It was going to be on a Monday,” he says.

“How was it thwarted?” I ask.

“One of the kids—the one who was going to be bringing the weapons in—didn’t show up that day,” Jeff says, “and so they postponed the plan. And while they were discussing the postponement, the plan was overheard, and the police intervened.”

“And what was the plan?” I ask.

“They were going to bring some knives and guns in,” he says, “and they were going to kill students and teachers. They were going to disrupt the telephone system. They knew where the telephone controls were. And they were also going to disable the electricity. Turn off the lights. And carry out their plans. And these were well-thought-out plans. They had diagrams. They had a list. . . .”

“How many people were on the list?” I ask.

“Dozens,” says Jeff. “And each kid was assigned who was going to do who. With what.”

“Oh my God,” I say.

Jeff shrugs. Then he smiles. “These boys had just turned thirteen years old,” he says. “They were going to disable the telephone system. That sounds terrifying, right? Well . . .”

Jeff rummages around in his pocket and pulls out his mobile phone. He gives me a look as if to say, “Well, duh!”

“So maybe they once saw someone in a James Bond movie disable a building’s communications system,” he says.