Promise of Joy (63 page)

5

Late that night, after the world’s response had poured in, turning gradually from initial dismay and condemnation of his deliberate vagueness to a more optimistic note as the outlines of the invasion plan became clear and its progress began to pick up speed and meet some small indications of success, he walked alone down the second-floor corridor to the elevator and went up to the solarium overlooking the Washington Monument, the Potomac, Tom Jefferson and Abe Lincoln in their softly lighted temples. He stood for a long time at the window.

No pedestrians were on the streets, very few cars passed. Winter lay cold on the city.

A tiny, cautious hope was beginning to come back into the world, but it still was a long way to spring.

A long way to spring, and a long way to the point where he, his country and the world could really begin to plan for peace—
if
they could plan for peace. The enterprise appeared to be moving well in its opening stages, the first signs were good. But an infinite amount remained to be accomplished and there was enormous room for error still.

At the moment, it was still entirely unclear whether his plan would really succeed or whether the whole world would be blown up in the wake of what could still turn out to be history’s most disastrous gamble.

Yet he felt confident, perhaps because he really had no choice. Having set into motion the monstrous terrifying machine of a modern military enterprise, he must remain calm and ride Juggernaut to the end, hoping it would follow the paths to which he had directed it. There was nothing else to do now.

Reviewing the final thinking that had gone into his decision, the thinking ratified after somber conference by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by Robert A. Leffingwell and Blair Hannah, by Bill Abbott and Tommy Davis and Bob Munson and Cullee and Ceil and Hal and the rest, he felt that he was justified in confidence. He had indeed done the best he could, and so had all he trusted and relied upon; and so they could commend the event to the hands of God and await its outcome with a fair serenity.

He had been amused by the immediate reaction to his speech. Frantic indignation had shouted from every page, spouted from every broadcast. How could he do such a thing? How could he keep them guessing? How could he take refuge in such a cop-out?

He had been tempted to tell them scathingly, “Shut your yapping mouths and wait a couple of hours, and it will all come clear.” But he had restrained himself, and within a couple of hours it had come about as he could have told them. And so the chorus softened and began to change tentatively but increasingly in his favor.

He was glad that he had given them that time in which to think, and he was glad he had put it to them squarely in his speech:

Suppose
you
were the President of the United States of America, faced with war between Russia and China.

Suppose
you
had to make the decision to stay out or go in, and if your decision was to go in, who to help, and how to do it.

Suppose
you
carried the burden on
your
shoulders, not in a relaxed time of easy decisions, but
right now.

Suppose you had
my
share of our joint responsibility to the world.

What would
you
do, my friends, you who applaud and you who condemn? How would
you
handle it?

Think about it.

Think about it!

He wanted them to know that it wasn’t all that easy, and perhaps now they did, though he would not wager on their retaining the memory for very long.

So it was going forward as he had planned it, intervention on his terms, where and in such manner as he thought would be successful. The event was indeed in the hands of God. And supposing it would succeed, as he believed likely, what then for his frightened country and the shaken world?

He knew the answer.

Infinite pains, infinite patience, infinite struggle and strain. Infinite labor that would have to go on for years, decades, possibly generations before it could be said that a truly stable peace had finally been achieved.

And that, perhaps, was the key to it: the unceasing struggle, the fugitive joy, the recurrent pain, the endless, mostly heartbreaking endeavor.

“‘Let us,’” Lafe Smith had said, quoting on a dark and dismal night, “‘wear upon our sleeves the crêpe of mourning for a civilization that held the promise of joy.’”

The promise of joy.

Not the easy certainty.

Not the painless assurance.

Not the comfortable guarantee.

Just—the promise.

That, perhaps, was all that the American experiment, all that any experiment in human governance that sprang from essentially decent motives, could hold out—the promise of joy. A promise always elusive, always fleeting, never quite captured, never quite achieved, here today, gone tomorrow, back again next day—if you kept working and hoping and struggling and, above all, if you never gave up. If you hung on and kept trying, all of you, unto the last generation.

If his successors—for successors he still believed there would be—were strong, were determined, never lost sight of the essential goodness of the American experiment and the essential goodness of all other sincere and well-meaning peoples wherever they might reside on troubled Earth—then just possibly, somewhere far off beyond his lifetime and maybe far off beyond many other subsequent lifetimes, the promise of joy might sometime—somehow—someday—be kept for his country and for all mankind.

But more likely that was all it was, or could ever be: a promise.

A promise forever worth the seeking—but only a promise.

All ye of faint heart and wavering will who seek the
certainty
of joy, he told them quietly in his mind, forget it.

It does not exist.

So the missiles and bombs and planes and submarines raced on through the winter night to keep their fateful appointments in the warring lands, over the oceans, over the continents, over the good, bad, decent, crafty, devious, straightforward, honest, dishonest, mean, generous, cruel, kindly, gentle, brutish races and nations of the globe, about to find out whether history still had a place for creatures so strangely composed of great ideals and unhappy compromise as they.

October 1973—June 1974.

***

Appendix

Based on the Novel

Allen Drury

The lights go down, the curtain parts, the Saul Bass titles, complete with a disjointed Capitol dome and waving American flags, drift across the screen to muted martial music. This is the movie of
Advise and Consent
, and somewhere down toward the end of all the credits you are informed that it is “based on the novel” of the same name.

If you happen to be the author, you can reflect with some satisfaction that the movie, in this film case, is based on your novel far more accurately and faithfully than most such transitions from the printed page to Hollywood. And you can also reflect, as a thousand memories of two fantastic and fascinating months come crowding back, on just what occurred when the words you wrote became transformed into lights and sets and camera-angles, and the highly individual interpretations of a forceful director and a cast of brilliant stars.

On one level of memory, of course, there are the statistics. They are quite impressive:

Budget, $3,000,000-plus.

Total days of shooting, 47.

Total hours of shooting, approximately 350.

Total number of regular personnel of all categories, actors and technicians, approximately 500.

Total number of extras, including some 2,500 of Washington’s most famous social figures, approximately 3,000.

Total running time of the final product of all these dollars, all these days, all these hours, all these hard-working and dedicated people—two hours and 17 minutes.

So goes the basic, facts-and-figures tale: but nobody, in all probability, ever regarded a movie—at least a good movie—as just facts and figures. Certainly no one could who has been involved in the making of it day-to-day and night-by-night for two months. The facts and figures are there. But the people keep getting in the way:

Walter Pidgeon, regaling cast and company between takes with endless amusing tales of screen and stage. Charles Laughton and Lew Ayres, discussing painting in long, philosophic talks as the grips and electricians move about setting up lights for a coming scene. Gene Tierney, charming and gracious, obvious darling of all the many members of the company who have worked with her before. Former Senators Henry Fountain Ashurst of Arizona and Guy M. Gillette of Iowa, tickled to death with the chance to get back, even if only filmically, to the Senators they loved, running Miss Tierney a close second in the popularity race with everyone on the set. Don Murray, earnest and ambitious, busily making plans for his own productions as he works with an easy and effective skill in someone else’s. Lovely Inga Swenson, discussing her little boy … Henry Fonda, confiding with a grin concerning his own acting offspring, Jane, “It isn’t that I’m a weak father—it’s just that she’s a strong daughter!” … Franchot Tone, dry and witty, participating in a triumphal, police-escorted procession is through Washington to a dinner-date with the Bob Kennedys, remarking, “I guess I’m a simple soul—somehow I’m never quite at ease playing the police-siren type” … The director—always the director, around whom the world of a movie revolves by laws of motion as rigid as those that bind whirling satellites to their paths around the earth shouting in a ball-room scene, “Shadows, start shadowing!” or, in a Senate gallery scene, “
You!
You with the red hat:
Were you wearing that red hat when we shot the scene yesterday?
”

And, of course, the delightful occasion when the director, hurrying to correct a famous actor and momentarily misspeaking his name, addressed him as “Mr. Laughton.”

“Mr.
Lawford
,” the famous actor corrected him elaborately.

“You should be honored!” the director snapped, bringing down the house.

Looked at from this human perspective, the making of a movie becomes something far more than a few statistics; it becomes a study in human nature almost as detailed as a novel itself. (The similarity, indeed, prompts the same suggestion, at different times, from the director and the head cameraman. “You ought to write a novel about us,” the director says. “Hey,” says the head cameraman, “why don’t you put us in a novel?” You agree with them that only a novel, probably, could do it justice—even as you realize, now that you’ve had a little taste of it, that
the
Hollywood novel hasn’t been written. Probably, you decide, because it couldn’t be.)

In its early stages, you find that the process of making a movie rather resembles a piece of music, with the statement of its opening theme your book—and then the gradually accelerating pace by which it eventually becomes 500 regulars and 3,000 extras and a budget spiraling beyond the $3,000,000 mark.

The process begins, many months ahead of the start of shooting, with contract negotiations in New York. These go on for many months, as you are solemnly assured by lawyers and agents that it really takes an infinite amount of time (and, presumably, infinite number of expense-account luncheons) to work out the details. Eventually there comes along from the Big City, presented to you at least on a frantic, hurry-up-and-sign basis (lawyers and agents don’t allow you quite the time they allow themselves, in these matters), the Contract. Acting on the advice of those you think you can trust, you accept it. The machine of a movie starts into motion.

Your own first immediate contact with it comes in the form of a telephone call that afternoon from New York. The blunt, positive, heavily man accented voice you will presently come to know as well as you have ever known a voice, reaches cordially over the wire. He, Otto Preminger, has bought the movie rights to
Advise and Consent
, and he is looking forward eagerly to working with you. You say
you
are looking forward eagerly to working with
him
. There are promises to see each other soon, a warm glow of friendliness on both sides. Can this kindly soul be the Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang you have heard so much about? Perish the thought! It’s only Gentle Otto. Before long, Gentle Otto will begin to move rapidly toward the head of the list of most unforgettable characters you have ever met.

The day will come when you will sue him in New York State Supreme Court over the release-date of the film—and win. The day will come when he will cry angrily, “I am
not so sure
you don’t want to see me in jail!” and bang down the receiver on you. But that, in turn, will be succeeded by a renewal of friendship, so that eventually, after it is all over, you will still regard him as a delightful if somewhat unpredictable friend, who may not be Gentle Otto but is still quite a guy, in his own unique way.

For the moment, however, all is sweetness and light as the adventure begins. Presently he comes down to Washington to look over the Senate, somewhat in the manner of Napoleon giving Moscow a preliminary glance, or Nero trying out his fiddle in front of the fireplace in the study. The first thing he tells you is that he is determined to secure permission from the Senate to shoot scenes in the Senate chamber. You tell him this permission has never been granted to anyone. He says he will ask the White House. You say the Senate couldn’t care less what the White House thinks when it comes to matters concerning the Senate. He dismisses this skeptically. You begin to see shaping up the outlines of a titanic battle: Otto Preminger vs. the U.S. Senate. After 18 years around the place, you know who is going to win—the Senate. But you can’t tell Otto. It makes for fun.

A year goes by, during which he keeps worrying all the Senators he can reach about the chamber; without success, though he does get the same cordial permission to shoot corridors, committee rooms, exteriors and everything but the chamber, that is granted to any legitimate applicant. During this period his script-writer, the brilliant Wendell Mayes of
Anatomy of A Murder
, begins to write the shooting script.

Generously, because the contract does not bind him to it, Otto allows you to read it in each succeeding version and offer your suggestions. You offer fifty or sixty and he accepts five or six, which you have already come to understand is par for the course. In the same fashion, later on, he asks your suggestions on casting. By that time you have learned to be rather vague, because you know he will go right ahead and do it his way, anyway. He does. Fortunately his ideas agree with yours all along the line, so little harm is done to the basic story, the basic philosophy, or the basic characters of the novel.

(His attitude, in fact, gives rise to one of the many private amusements you have as the movie goes along, for you will often hear him describe to visiting reporters how he “made sure that each of the characters, whether you agree with him or not, is shown as being dedicated to his own concept of what is best for the country.” You will also hear him announce proudly on many occasions that he “made sure that the story did not lean either to left or right.”

Since both of these things are exactly what the novel achieves, you are a little amused by this stirring self-portrait of the director rushing gallantly forward to claim credit for doing what your book already does. But you reflect, with a tolerant smile, that when a man is producing a $3,000,000 film, he perhaps has a right to cast himself in an heroic role if he so desires.)

Script completed, Senate still adamant on the chamber but cooperating on their Capitol Hill locations, the day comes when the director and his top lieutenants descend on Washington to begin detailed planning of each individual scene. There is a long-day expedition around the city. Scenes are scanned through the view-finder. Lighting and camera-angles are discussed by a group of businesslike strangers who will soon become as familiar to you as the Washington press corps. Hotel accommodations and the complicated logistics of housing and feeding a movie company are carefully checked. It is roughly two weeks from starting-time, and it appears that the problems with the Senate are not concluded yet.

Now there is a problem that is
really
typical of the Senate: it won’t stop talking, adjourn for the year, and go home so that the movie can have the premises to itself.

Nonetheless, there is a shooting schedule to be adhered to, the moneybags of Columbia Pictures, which will finance and distribute the film, are impatient for action, stars and technicians have made their plans, hotel reservations are waiting—the machine has reached a momentum that even the Senate can’t stop now. The decision is made to “shoot around” the Senate—to do all the other Washington scenes and locations first, in the hope that the Senate will presently conclude its business, and vamoose.

Even this, however, is not conceded by the director without a struggle. Since many of the Senate exterior and corridor scenes are not near the chamber, he argues that he should be permitted to go ahead and shoot them, even though the Senate is still in session. Once again he runs into the Senate’s stubbornness, finds it greater than his own, and loses. No, Senators say, they simply cannot have cameras and other equipment clogging up their corridors in the last hectic days of a session when tempers are short and work-load heavy. The Senate Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, begins to lose a usually steady demeanor as one emissary after another tries to persuade him to change his mind. He won’t do it, and that’s that. At last the director accepts this. Shooting begins far from Capitol Hill, some 10 miles across town in a quiet residential street where
Advise and Consent’s
fictional Senator Brigham Anderson lives with his wife and little daughter.

At this point the Washington summer, which heretofore has been reasonably mild, not too hot and not too soggy, decides to go out in a burst of glory. It is the last week of August, and whambo! The temperature shoots toward the upper 90’s, the humidity keeps it company, and those who have worked with the director before begin to talk darkly about their experiences on his version of
Exodus
, shot in the Israeli desert.

Because he is a stickler for realism, he has chosen private homes in which no rooms can be rebuilt, no walls can be knocked out to permit the camera freer movement, no sets can be expanded to accommodate the 50 or 60 people who crowd in and hover around every scene. The majority are there because they are directly involved in the shooting—the director, the stars, the cameramen, the electricians, the grips, the prop and wardrobe people, the script-girl, the director’s lovely wife, his secretaries and assistants who stand ready to run errands and get questions answered. Others, such as Mrs. Peter Lawford, are there as welcome visitors, friends of the director, the stars, the technicians, the author. The director is extraordinarily generous about this, and only once, in Hollywood, does anyone abuse it. That is Randolph Churchill, and the clash between the two of them is classic.

In the home of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hight, therefore, with actors, director, cameramen, technicians, visitors and all jammed into the living-room, or the sun-porch, or the halls and bedrooms, the stars must emote as the 95-degree temperature makes the great spotlights and arc-lights even hotter than they ordinarily are. You very rapidly begin to acquire a great respect for Hollywood people, most of whom are earnest, dedicated and hard-working.

You realize that this favorable impression is partly attributable to the fact that in
Advise and Consent
the cast is made up mostly of mature, established, responsible actors and actresses. It is not a story conducive to the Monroe-Brando-Taylor type of temperament, and that type of temperament is not included in the cast. By the same token the director, while he frequently blows up verbally as a calculated means of maintaining the proper pitch of attention on the set, is not given to wasteful displays of temperament. Most of his pyrotechnicians have a definite purpose. After it is over, you can reflect that in two months of shooting you have seen him genuinely angry on only four or five occasions. For the most part, he has shown a long-suffering and admirable patience with the crew while its members have fussed and fumed and taken the last possible moment of time in order to get a scene or a lighting set-up perfect. He is a perfectionist himself, and usually his displays of temper have been designed to bring out exactly what he deems best in a given scene.