Burning the Days (36 page)

We had a drink, the three of us, at the Blue Bar and a
gelato
on the Piazza Navona. On Via Veneto she stopped to talk with a group of elderly Italian businessmen. It was lovely to watch her. Her legs, the silk of her print dress, the smoothness of her cheeks, all of it shone like constellations, the sort that rule one’s fate.

We dropped the American woman at her hotel, the Excelsior. Sitting in the car, in the driveway, I turned to Ilena and said simply, “I adore you. I have from the first moment.” In response she kissed me and said, “To the right.” It was late and she had an early appointment at Elizabeth Arden’s; she wanted to go home.

“Are you married?” she asked as we drove.

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

It was to a man in his eighties, she explained. I recognized the story from the newspapers—she had married him to get a passport.
He was in an old people’s home, an
istituto.
She went to visit him there, she said. Then, agreeably, “Would you like to come?”

We stopped that night on a street near a dark piazza, across from a little place where she had often gone with Farouk at four or five in the morning for apple strudel. It looked closed, and I waited while she ran across to say hello to the woman who was the proprietor. After a while she came back. “She was
so
happy to see me,” she said animatedly and added, “She’s very nice.”

We went on to Parioli, where, in a somewhat dubious building on Via Archimede, Ilena lived. The apartment was small and drearily furnished, but on the wall was a large picture of John Huston that had appeared in
Life.
Lying on the floor were books that Huston had given her to read. He might just as well have given her a chemistry set or a microscope. “You must
never stop
learning,” he told her—she could do him perfectly. I could hear his rich, rolling, faintly cynical voice pronouncing “Mount Lungo” in his documentary on the battle of San Pietro, a village in ruins after the war, given over to weeds and sheep droppings. There is a cemetery atop Mount Lungo from the heights of which one can see twenty miles, all the bare stony slopes up which men fought.

“Never stop learning,” he repeated. “That’s very important. Promise me that.”

“Of course, John,” she answered.

In an album were many clippings of the two of them, Huston with a white, patriarchal beard. He was a
coccolone
—someone who likes to be babied. He was also crazy, she admitted, and very tight. “To get a thousand dollars from him is
so
difficult,” she said.

The portrait she painted over a period of time was of an indomitable man who nonetheless was lonely. He would call on the phone, “What are you up to, baby?”

“Nothing.”

“Come
right
over. Right away.”

He was in the autumn of a life of activity, a life that had not always
been lived in accordance with reason. He had no friends, she said, and hated to go out. He was living in a suite in the Grand Hotel on a diet of vodka and caviar. She would call him. “John, do you want some girls?”

“Bring them around,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”

She brought three, one of them eighteen years old—she liked young, tender girls, she explained, in the late afternoon was best. “Darling,” she said to me after describing a scene that might have taken place at Roissy, “you’re a writer, you should know these things.”

Huston had fought at Cassino, she told me, as if in justification.

“No, he didn’t.”

“But he
did.
He’s told me stories.”

“He was a film director. He never fought.”

“Well, he
thinks
he did,” she said. “That’s the same thing.”

I liked her generosity and lack of morals—they seemed close to an ideal condition of living—and also the way she looked at her teeth in the mirror as she talked. I liked the way she pronounced “cashmere,” like the state in India, Kashmir. Her cosmetics bag was filled with prescriptions, just as the shelf in her closet was crammed with shoes. Once we passed a big Alfa Romeo that she recognized as belonging to a friend, the chief of detectives in Rome. She had made love with him, of course. “Darling,” she said, “there’s no other way. Otherwise there would have been terrible trouble about my passport. It would have been impossible.” I only learned in time that there was, besides Huston, also an Italian businessman supporting her.

She didn’t like Negroes, Arabs, or certain cities, often that she had never been to. Above all, she hated bohemians. “Darling, they’re so filthy.” I admired her poise. On the telephone, to someone she did not know who had been given her number, she merely said, “I’m sorry. I have to go.” I heard that on several occasions.

The things she said seemed to come straight from what she
knew or felt, as easily as one might pick up a fork. There was no hesitation or propriety. She said things I wished I might have, things more direct.

She was also, I hardly need add, difficult, especially about eating. “I have to have something to eat,” she would say, becoming more and more nervous. “If I don’t get something to eat, I’m going to cry.” And reading the menu in a kind of desperation, “What shall I order?” When it came, she was likely to send it back. “I can’t eat this.” The restaurant never made a fuss. The crucial question was whether or not the dish contained butter or had been cooked in it. She absolutely could not eat butter. She had to be extremely careful, she said.

Once we sat down in a restaurant and while she went to the ladies’ room I read the menu. As I did, I realized there was nothing on it she would like, and besides, the place seemed dull and nearly empty. I rose as she returned, and said, “Come. This is not good.” She obeyed without a word.

There was a film festival in Taormina she went to. She had looked forward to it for days. I languished in Rome. The week passed slowly. I heard her distant voice—I did not know where Taormina was, exactly—on the telephone. “Oh, darling,” she cried, “it’s so marvelous.” She was going to have the same agent as Monica Vitti, she said excitedly. A director had promised her a part in a James Bond film. She was not staying at the San Domenico Palace, she was at the Excelsior. Tomorrow she would be at the Imperiale—I understood quite well what all that meant—and on Sunday she was going to receive a prize.

“Which prize?”

“I don’t know. Darling, I can’t believe it,” she said.

At last there was a telegram—I had felt I might not see her again—
Coming Monday Rapido 5. Afternoon,
and signed with her name. It was sent from Ljubljana—Yugoslavia.

I met the train. It was thrilling, almost miraculous, to see her
coming along the platform, a porter behind her with her bags. Some things are only good the first time but seeing her was like the first time. I knew she would say “darling.” I knew she would say, “I
adore
you.”

The exciting days in Sicily, the festival, had left a glow. At a big reception, among scores of faces, she had seen, directed at her, the brilliant unwavering smile of a young man in a silk foulard, a wide smile, “like a killer’s.” She was wearing a white, beaded dress. Her arms were bare. Fifteen or twenty minutes later she saw him again.

The second barrel, as the lawyers say, was fatal. She said only, “Let’s leave.” Without a word he offered her his arm.

He had a beautiful car. The steering wheel was made of gleaming wood. They went somewhere but found it closed. That was enough. “Let’s go to bed,” she said. He said simply, “Yes.”

At the hotel the
portiere
would not let him go up to her room,
“Non, non, signorina,”
he said. She began to make a scene. She was going to another hotel, she threatened loudly. Finally the
portiere
asked, “Where is he?” and allowed them to go up. Thirty minutes later he was ringing the room, to no avail.

I listened with some unhappiness but without anger. They say you should not tell these things to the other person, but in this case it meant little, faithfulness was not what I expected.

“You’ll get to the top,” I told her almost reluctantly, “but you shouldn’t …”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“If I don’t become too much of a whore,” she said.

We drove up to Paris. I remember the hotel and the first evening. We were at the window; I was behind her, standing close. Across the river the lights of the city glittered, as far as one could see.

We had come up through the Rhône valley and many small towns. Past Dijon we were on a back road along a canal and came
to a wide dam from which the lines of fishermen dropped forty or fifty feet into clear green water. The dark shapes of fish—I took them to be pike—were coasting lazily about. We watched the biggest ones approach, ignore the bait, and move off to lie motionless. “Like sultans,” she commented. I felt she knew.

——

What I remember is a kind of glamour and sleekness. Travel, the great hotels. James Kennaway, the Scottish writer, coming into a suite at Claridge’s one January in a belted, supple black-leather coat—he had time for just one drink before catching the night train to Edinburgh, not alone, my impression was. He was sharp-nosed, laughing. I knew him only slightly, though I had once gone for a weekend to his house in Gloucestershire. One of the other guests was a lively old woman who had been his father-in-law’s governess and, at the appropriate period of youth, mistress. She remained close to the family. “Traditional,” they assured me.

I remember, in Santa Monica, beneath the palm-lined bluff on the beach, the brief row of houses, one of which—a large, imitation Normandy farmhouse—had been rented by Roman Polanski and his young wife, Sharon Tate.

I had met Polanski through Redford. A call had come from London, in a warm, faintly accented voice—the producer, Gene Gutowski. Could I come there to talk about writing a film, the film about a ski racer? Somewhere in the whirl of London nights—restaurants so in fashion that their telephone numbers were unlisted, headlong drives through parks and narrow streets—Polanski gave me in a single sentence his idea of the movie: It was to be something like
High Noon;
the sheriff has been killed—in this case the lead racer on the team has broken a leg—and they have to send for a replacement. I was impressed by the succinctness.

Polanski was already famous, in his early thirties, although he
appeared younger. He had a small, speedy car with a telephone—innovative then—a large apartment, and an air of freedom from the dullness of being always and only oneself. With pride, but hastily, he showed me photographs of Sharon, to whom he was not yet married. There was something that both drew one to him and cautioned one—his eye seemed to skim over so many things. Beyond the shrewdness and candor, he gave the strange impression of not playing for anything real, as if chips were certain at some point to be redeemed. His banter was filled with confidence. One night in a restaurant we sat with Nureyev, who was eating a dish of magnificent strawberries with his fingers. “See? I told you he ate like a peasant,” Polanski said. Nureyev didn’t bother to smile.

He had passed, as a child, through the terror of massacre and war. He had seen a column of men being taken from the Krakow ghetto, doomed, his father among them, and had run alongside like a calf, wanting to go. His father ignored him and finally muttered threateningly, “Get lost.” The small boy of ten stopped, stung, and watched them leave him behind, to life, as it turned out, although, astonishingly, his father survived also. For such a miraculous escape and the rich life that followed, was there a price to be exacted?

That summer in Santa Monica—it was 1967—at the Mori Fencing Academy, Polanski was a prize pupil. He was also rehearsing an important film he was about to direct. In the enormous cavern of a sound stage, the floor of the apartment which would be in
Rosemary’s Baby
had been laid out with white tape. Polanski’s instructions to the actors had the same verve and precision he showed with the foil.

At the oversized beach house Sharon wore white pants and a long-sleeved black polo shirt, the buttons open. Her hands stole around me affectionately from behind. Polanski was weary from the long day with actors. We ate in the kitchen, steaks Sharon had thriftily bought at the post exchange in San Francisco—her father
was an army officer—and just as Roman had shown pictures of her to me, she showed one of herself in some film magazine to him. An army brat, I was thinking, although I had never seen one like her. The ease and devotion of their life seemed plain.

For reasons not worth going into, Polanski was dropped from the movie I finally wrote, and thus I never lost the admiration I had for his energy and charm, a charm that was not learned but came from some deeper source, as well as his power to command. I could not imagine him being unable to reply to a question or think quickly. He had an instinct for the visceral; in his hands even familiar material could become interesting.

As for Sharon, she remains for me a kind of Hera, the emblem of marriage. If she was not a very good housekeeper, she was pure of heart and her flesh was a poem. One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman, looking at her, talking, touching, as well as other ways.

August morning. In a white nightgown, barefoot, with lovely arms and long hair she comes to the table in their suite in the Essex House. Polanski, barefoot too, has been watching television. We sit down to breakfast together. May I have the syrup? Mmm. The butter? A hand passes it. Would you like any toast? A crisscrossing of plates and offerings, together with his and her concealed smiles. It was a duet from Noël Coward. The suite was on the south side, high up. All of downtown New York spread before us. The previous night had been frenzy and excess, the morning freshness and reason. On top of the building were large red letters that spelled its name in neon, at night visible for miles. They were a landmark, like a lighthouse, at the edge of the park, and also a schoolboy legend when for a time, inexplicably, the first “E” and “S” were burned out. In the ambience of pleasure and art we talked about the ski-racing script. He was at the time shooting the movie he had rehearsed in California. Ours would be the next.