Burning the Days (40 page)

It did not.

There was still Ingrid Bergman, who was appearing in a play at the time, but for other reasons, including, I think, the health of her husband, she too said no.

——

The best scripts are not always made, just as the hardest fought campaigns may not end in victory. I say this merely as an observation, beyond any experience of mine. There are so many factors: timing, impulse, frivolity, accident. The films that are made are like menhirs, standing amid the rubble of everything broken or lost, the pure lines, scenes, the great effort lavished like milt over roe. The agents and stars kick through it idly. Perhaps it is this waste, this vast debris, which nourishes the glory.

As a producer, Ginna may have had limitations. He was scrupulously honest. He was a classicist—his interests were cultural, his knowledge large—and unequivocal in his statements and beliefs. His past was filled with figures who, rising on the wings of his telling, assumed legendary status: Behan, of course; the ballerina Pat McBride; Neville Cardus, the old writer of cricket; Carol Reed; Jack Nugent, solitaire-playing owner of the Dolphin; Kennaway; John Ford; and the two Swedish girls, sisters, who were
waitresses at Durgin Park, fabulous girls, unattainable, as he said—they were picked up after work in large cars. There was a quality of Fitzgerald in his stories, of the romantic and unpossessed.

We never parted. I am going into the city on the morning train with him, the sun still flickering in our faces, people boarding sleepily at the stops, the beautiful coastal country, Southampton, Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Bay Shore. I guard his heroes, among them Jacques Callot, one of the greatest of printmakers—Rembrandt collected him also—Goya.

In the late 1970s, returning to journalism, he became a magazine editor. The circle was closing. Midnight. We return to the office. There is some final checking to do. He sits correcting the piece of a writer he likes whose telephone has been disconnected for nonpayment. The restaurants are being swept, beneath us the traffic along Sixth Avenue is thinning out. The life of reporters, writers. The night is their noon. On the couch, curled amid books and papers, a woman in a white suit, whom we have had dinner with, is sleeping.

Ginna gave me my first work in journalism, a field which eventually supported me. I was sent to Europe to interview writers: Graham Greene, Nabokov, Antonia Fraser. When I reached Paris there was a telegram from Greene, who was famously reclusive, saying he could not meet me. Then word came that Nabokov had canceled as well. Disaster loomed. I was more concerned with disappointing Ginna, who had faith in me, than with being rejected. Late at night I walked up a sepulchral Boulevard Malesherbes and slipped a note, humble though not abject, under Greene’s door, and later I found the courage to call Montreux and plead with Mme. Nabokov. “Montreux Palace Hotel,” a voice said in English. “Mr. Nabokov, please.” “One moment.”

I don’t recall if I heard the operator ringing or not, but the next word was “Hello.” It was Véra Nabokov. When, after consulting
her husband, she finally invited me to meet him the following Sunday, she repeated his preference that interview questions be written by reminding me, “My husband does not ad lib.” All my efforts were finally successful and Graham Greene, I think taking pity on me as a journalist, arranged to have a novel of mine,
Light Years,
published in England. His opinion of it was higher than the English critics’.

Ginna afterwards became editor in chief at Little, Brown. The offices of the firm faced the Boston Common and no city or location could have suited him better. Among the many books he published was one of mine, written at his urging and with his encouragement,
Solo Faces.
Although I knew enough about the subject, mountaineering, in the end I liked the title more than the text, perhaps because there was nothing ecstatic about the writing, as there had been in the two previous novels.

The place in the world he was made for he perhaps never fully occupied, but the places, Locke-Ober’s, London, the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, the trout streams upstate, all the museums, the Scottish salmon rivers, he managed to make fabled. He read and saw, tasted and drank, and with him one knew the joy of doing the same.

Perhaps I have given the impression he was less drawn to work than to conviviality, but in fact the two in him were stunningly combined. Not all men are so handsomely made.

——

They are marching off without you, forming up. The faint, familiar sound of commands rises, far off.

I felt that, the confusion and panic, as I sat in a beautiful room watching the television. It was July but the room was cool and the streets of New York seemed silent. I was watching three white-clad men who were preparing my annihilation; they were leaving for the moon, the first flight meant to land there.

Aldrin is one of them, the one I know. He waves. Memories of being in the squadron together come back to me. His wife was interested in the theater. She was thought of as artistic, a damning thing. His hand grasps a rail as he climbs aboard the truck. I want to turn away but cannot. The simplest of his acts is dreadful to me.

They pass through a shadow and beneath the complexity of the enormous crane. They enter an elevator. A solemn commentator is explaining it all. The door of the elevator closes. They rise.

They arrive at the top, like the top of a scaffold. I cry out but there is no sound, I haven’t the courage to cry, my life has already left me. I think of the long description of an execution, a guillotining, written by Turgenev, the unbearable ceremony.

A wreath of white smoke is leaking from the rocket. I am able to say nothing, not a word. I sit in the St. Regis with anything one might want there at hand. I feel hollow, as if I had lost everything.

They announce twelve minutes. I feel like the unknown crewman who is guiding them to the cabin, no, he is filled with excitement and pride, he feels himself to be an important figure. It is all a dream and yet intensely real. I can smell the smooth enameled steel. I can hear the radio voices, confident and brief. The camera is now under the engine bells, their openings vast as gun maws. The elevators in the hotel with their freight of well-dressed businessmen are moving up and down, the maids in the carpeted hallway are pushing their carts.

Five minutes. We are waiting, we hundreds of millions, staring intently at the faintly blackened site from which they will go. My heart is no longer beating, it seems to have stopped, to have prepared itself for the end.
Fifteen tons of fuel a second,
the announcer is saying. Fifteen tons, and its own weight besides is unimaginable. The morning is hot and airless at the Cape. Birds fly past the rocket, unaware of its potency. Three minutes.

The days of flying that have borne them to this, the countless, repetitive days. The astonishing thing is that we are empowered to
bequeath history, to create the unalterable: paintings, elections, crimes. In fact they are impossible to prevent. One of the most memorable acts of all time is about to occur. Two minutes.

I had an Italian mistress, O very fine, who would fly places to meet me. She was slender, with a body brown from Rome’s beaches and a narrow pale band, as if bleached, encircling her hips, the white reserve. She wore a brown leather jacket and had black hair, cut short. I had a luxurious corduroy suit, soft as velvet, from Palazzi on Via Borgognona. She had bought it for me as a gift. She was the antidote to, among many things, the sickening hours surrounding the launch and intolerable days after. I had taught her a catechism, or rather together we had composed one, which she could recite in perfect English, the flagrant words sinless in her mouth, the innocent questions and profane responses, and the low, inviting voice in which they were uttered. One minute.

We were silent that night with the television still on, light shifting on the walls in the darkened room. I was watching, transfixed by it, as well as by the cool, unhurried act we were engaged in. As a boy I had imagined grown men achieving scenes such as this. Tremendous deliberation. Reverent movement, oblivious, assured. She is writhing, like a dying snake, like a woman in bedlam. Everything and nothing, and meanwhile the invincible rocket, devouring miles, flying lead-heavy through actual minutes and men’s dreams.

I have never forgotten that night or its anguish. Pleasure and inconsequence on one hand, immeasurable deeds on the other. I lay awake for a long time thinking of what I had become.

——

I was a
poule
for ten years, fifteen. I might easily have gone on longer. There was wreckage all around, but like the refuse piled behind restaurants I did not consider it—in front they were bowing and showing me to the table.

Robert Bolt, who had been a schoolteacher and then a play-wright,
was as talented as any writer of his generation. David Lean, for whom he did celebrated films—
Lawrence of Arabia, Zhivago
—had been known to bring him thousands of miles to discuss changing a single line, and honors were heaped at his feet. The best script I had ever read, he had written, an astonishing version of the
Bounty
mutiny and its aftermath, filled with original images and scenes. It was a work of high ambition. In the course of things it was never made.

Aging and far from his house in Surrey with the river drifting past, separated from his wife, he found himself in the derelict tropics, the occasional friend of a childlike actress, Mia Farrow, who was acting in a movie on a nearby island at the time. As an offering to her he rewrote pages of dialogue, and she was able to present them to the original writer as her own suggestions. In the end, tiring of this, she handed a sheaf of pages over, confessing all. The writer was a close friend of mine, Lorenzo Semple, and far from being annoyed, asked if he could meet Bolt, whom he greatly admired.

A dinner took place. It was in a shabby Chinese restaurant with unmatched dishes and a dirt floor. Bolt came wearing a palmetto hat. He was drunk. The talk was of writing, of course, though becoming less and less coherent as the evening went on. Bolt was somehow able, nevertheless, to bring out an important point. In writing films, he cautioned, in writing films, yes, there was one thing that should never be lost sight of.

“What is that?” Lorenzo asked.

“The money, my boy,” Bolt said, “the money.”

There were writers who made good use of it. In Los Angeles, on Summit Drive, I sat at lunch with an elegant man in his forties; I’ll call him Edoardo. He came from the Veneto, the most civilized area in Italy, as he said, where even the farmers, though drunkards, were cultured after fifteen centuries of elevated life. Venice, the region’s great city, had for ages been the light of the world.

A tall Swedish girl with a Russian name, Natasha, was serving us—veal
gratinée,
fresh garden peas, cucumbers in a sour-cream sauce. When she had slipped out, I asked casually, “Is she the cook?”

“Yes. Cook, everything,” he said offhandedly, returning to the subject. “When London had two hundred and fifty thousand people, Venice had three hundred and fifty thousand. Shakespeare laid four of his plays there,
The Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It,
and
Romeo and Juliet.”

He was throwing in Arden and Athens as locations, but I was only hesitant about one.
“Romeo and Juliet?”

“Well, in Verona, but that’s nearby.”

I was captivated by him, the grand house, the Rolls-Royce in the covered driveway, the gardens. He seemed like Uncle Vanya to me, a shrewder Vanya, hardworking, knowledgeable.

I happened to mention d’Annunzio. He knew everything about him, his uncle had been in d’Annunzio’s squadron in the First World War and even looked like the poet, small, ugly, and bald. D’Annunzio had used him as a decoy. When he wanted to go to a hotel with some woman he would have the uncle sit in the villa, reading by the window.

We drank white Burgundy. The Swedish girl, graceful and silent, served a bowl of fresh raspberries and strawberries in cream. D’Annunzio, who died in the 1930s, had been the most celebrated writer of his time—the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth—with a life of colossal breadth, the most notorious since Byron’s. He was the lover of Duse and countless others. He had written Mussolini’s famous speeches. Becoming old, he withdrew into a pantheon of his own design, the Vittoriale, above Lake Garda, where a kind of opera continued. He dressed in a monk’s outfit and had his servants, all attractive women, dress as nuns. The next day he would be in a commodore’s uniform and they were sailors.

“There are at least twenty d’Annunzio scripts in Italy,” Edoardo said. “They’ve been trying for years to make a film about him. I remember the day he died. I was at school and a boy came up and said, ‘No school today!’

“ ‘No school?’

“ ‘The poet is dead.’

“ ‘Hooray,’ I said.”

It was like Rome in Edoardo’s house, Monte Mario, the terraces and pools. Sometimes in the evening, he said, they sat outside, he and the Swedish girl, looking out over the city. He was king of this Eden, gentle, wise, with a kind of classic ease and moderation, a single young novitiate beneath his wing—a man past the panicky appetites of youth, serene, able to savor, unhurried even if beset, like all men, by infinite desires.

“Edoardo?” said someone who knew him well when I mentioned his name. “He’s the most unhappy, dissatisfied man I know.”

“Impossible.”

“He’s an artist
manqué.
He thinks he’s wasted his talent on movies, which he detests. Actually, he’s never written any good movies—they’re all trash except for one he did for Germi. Oh, he’s a fabulous raconteur, especially in Italian, but he hates his life and is filled with self-disgust. He considers himself the only intelligent person in Italian cinema, and since he’s the only one who reads, he’s been able to make a career of taking de Maupassant stories and passing them off as his own. He’s never married. He’s the saddest man I know.”

——