The Merry Month of May (26 page)

“So I’ve got to get down there,” Harry said over the phone.

I didn’t understand. “But why? If it’s all over and finished, what’s the point? Why do you have to go?”

“I’m going down to strike my own film,” Harry said. “It’s the only film still shooting in France, for Christ’s sake.” I could hear the clarion call of the old warrior in his voice.

“You’re what?” I roared. “You’re out of your mind. It’s an American film, not a French one.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Harry said. “They’re using French crews. I’m going to strike it.” It was a French-murder-Western-love-story which was being shot in the semi-desert Camargue country by Harry’s old friend Allen Steinerwein. Harry had not only written it, but had worked on it all along with Steinerwein.

“You really must be out of your mind,” I said into the phone.

“No,” Harry said. “We had a meeting of the Directors and Actors Union, yesterday night, after the news came in, late, and voted to strike that film, too. I was selected to go down because I know personally just about every grip and cameraman-technician working on it.”

“But what about poor Allen Steinerwein?”

“Tough luck. But he’ll have to take his chances like everybody else. So we’re having a strategy meeting this afternoon, to decide on the best approach. That’s why I’m afraid I might not be able to make it to the Odéon with you tonight.”

“Well, I suppose it will wait till you get back,” I said. “But these kids are getting nervous and if anybody ever needed help, I think they do. How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t really know. It depends on how much trouble I have when I get there. Five days. Maybe a week.”

“Well then I think you really ought to try to make it to Odéon tonight. Before you leave.”

“Actually I probably won’t leave until Wednesday,” Harry said. “Look. I’ll call you tonight. After dinner. Sometime around ten-thirty. I’ll know more about what the situation is like by then. Okay?”

“All right. But I think you really are off your rocker.” There was a pause, as if he not only did not care about my comment, but actually had not heard it, something else totally occupying his mind. Then he said, “What is Hill going to think, or say, about all this?” he asked suddenly. “He’s on that Committee, aint he?”

“I’m sure he’ll be against it,” I said. “He was already against Weintraub bringing even me over there. But he’s already been outvoted by a massive majority.”

Harry didn’t answer for a moment. “Well, if he was outvoted that much, I think it’s my duty to go anyway. Don’t you?”

“I suppose I did,” I said. “It was my idea in the first place. —But I do think you’ve gone off your nut to go to Cannes. Let somebody else go.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he said.

“Good-bye,” I answered. “Don’t forget to call tonight.” But the phone had already gone dead somewhere in the middle. I dined alone that night. I went across the bridge, past the two little camions of cops who were there now 24 hours a day, to Chez René on the corner of Cardinal Lemoine and Boulevard St.-Germain, a favorite place of mine for years where I was well known by all the waiters and the boss himself, who had been a wheel in the
Resistance.
I had had a bellyful of students, film Documentaries and Commentaries, and film people in general. Who in hell gave a real damn about the Cannes Film Festival anyway? Whether they struck them God damned selves or not? It was some kind of macabre joke. And I was sick of Harry, driving all that way down to Cannes, to strike his own film. He must really be out of his head.

I was back home by ten-thirty, passing the ominous, yet gentle and preoccupied little blue camions. Several of the cops inside, who knew my face by now, waved and grinned at me. The phone rang soon after I was back in the apartment.

“I’m ready to go,” Harry said. “Can you get Weintraub?”

“We’re to pick him up at the Monaco Bar,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the footbridge, okay?” I do not think I ever saw anyone take over a roomful of people the way Harry took over that sweaty, steamy, overladen little room under the eaves of the Odéon and its gang of democratic-discussion-oriented students. Not one of them talked back, or offered to argue, or mentioned discussion. This included Hill. And anyway, Harry went right to the prime point.

“You say you want to make a film about the Revolution. But what kind of film is it you want to make? Something to be shown at Rotary Clubs and Ladies’ Clubs luncheons across America? Just what have you got shot? Have you listed it down, for each can, like you should have done? No. Of course not. Nobody thought of that. So what you’ve got here is this. And nobody really knows what it is, really.” He looked at the refrigerator box. “Is this all the shot film you’ve acquired during the past month?”

“No,” said Chairman Daniel, who was looking less and less like a steel-rimmed Commissar. “We have at least that much more stored in the private quarters of Mister Weintraub here.”

“Ha!” said Harry. “All right. That’s not so bad. Except for one thing—repetition. I’ll bet you got about two miles of film, most of it over- or under-exposed, showing groups of students marching toward a stationary camera; and about two miles of film, over- or underexposed, of masked cops charging a stationary camera, which is probably hand-held and wavery anyway. And what kind of a film are you going to make out of that? They probably won’t even want to show it in the high schools in the States, let alone the colleges.

“So. Questions:

“Have you even got remotely in mind any sort of a continuity, a story? If you have, you’ve got to have characters. Have you got characters, to whom things happen, and whom the audience can follow the development of through-out?

“No. Of course, you haven’t. You never thought of that, did you?” Harry looked sardonically, and very professionally around the room. “Take him,” he said, indicating Terri of the beautiful hair. “He’d make the perfect boy for your film.” He looked again. “And take her.” He indicated Anne-Marie. “You give me those two, plus three camera crews, with or without hand-held cameras, and I can make you a film that will be begged for in every theater in America. And I can do it all in ten days. I think the Revolution is going to last that long. And I’m sure there’s some footage in what you’ve already shot that we can use for fill-in, timewise.

“Now. Do you want to do that? Or something like that? If so, I’m your man. And gladly. And all for free. I don’t want a dime of the take. But I’ll get your story seen, and loved, in every moviehouse in Europe and America.” He paused, and grinned. “Except perhaps in France.”

“Well, we asked you over here for that kind of professional advice, Mister Gallagher,” Chairman Daniel said, in an exceedingly unbrassy voice, for him. “I think we ought to discuss it, though, first. Since that is the method we hold to in a democratic Revolution of this sort.”

“Well, you discuss it, gentlemen,” Harry said. “I’m prepared to sit and wait half an hour. But I will not discuss. And if I take it on for you, there will be no more discussion once you designate me as the ‘Man’. From that time on I’ll have to be the absolute boss. Please understand that.”

“I’m not sure we can decide in half an hour,” Daniel said placatingly.

“Well, that’s okay,” Harry grinned. “I’ve got to go to Cannes to do a little job tomorrow or next day. You can have until I return, which may be anywhere from five days to a week. There’ll still be plenty of Revolution left to shoot from, I expect. Especially with all this footage that you’ve got shot already, to splice in when we need it. I’ll need to get to know your cutters, of course. Need to get to know them intimately. Because once the shooting is all done we’ll be working together very closely.”

“We haven’t even decided on cutters yet,” Daniel said.

“Well, like I said, you’ve got roughly five days or a week.” And he stood up from the chair where he had been sitting uncomfortably in front of the “
office”
table-desk.

Young Hill had been standing far at the back, in a darkened corner, all of this time while Harry was making his big-time lecture. I guess I had sidled slowly over toward him unconsciously. He and Harry had said a brief “Hello” and passed a perfunctory handshake when we first came in. But after that, Hill had offered not a word.

Somewhere in the middle of Harry’s statement, a statement which I must say I thought took too tough a line with these unprofessional kids and was also a bit egocentrically long-winded, Samantha Everton had slipped in through the outside door and quietly slipped over to us.

“I don’t think you understand one thing, Mister Gallagher,” Daniel the Chairman said now, looking up at the standing Harry. “We don’t want to make a love-story movie, or something on that order. We want only to show the truth to the world of what has happened, is happening and will happen in this Revolution of ours.”

“I am totally in accord with that,” Harry said sharply. “But I must add one point. Do not forget that the audiences of the world don’t give a damn about the truth, unless it is presented to them in a way in which they can personally associate. They do not, for example, give one good goddamn about seeing seas of anonymous student faces, or even thousands of fighting, attacking cops’ faces—especially if they’re covered with gasmasks. They want to participate in the agony of a few students, whom they can pick out, recognize, and as I said, associate with over and over through the film. That seems to me to be, gentlemen, your basic problem here.

“Anyway, you gentlemen discuss it. I’ve got to go. And as soon as I’m back from setting up this strike in Cannes, I’ll be in touch.
Ça va?
Okay?” They had been speaking in French all the way, but he added the word “okay” in English, at the end.

“Okay,” Daniel grinned back.

Harry had made quite an impression, I must say that. And I noted that he had held back his purpose of striking the film in Cannes until the very last, like a good professional. Now he turned away and, grinning, came over to where Hill and I stood in our darkened corner. He was a tall man, and he had his arms out, to put one of them around each of us. “Let’s us go and have a drink, what do you say?” he said. He pretended not to see Samantha.

I have always been sure, by the look that passed swiftly across his face and was as swiftly swallowed, hidden, put away, that he at that moment knew what had happened and was in process of happening with Hill and Sam.

“You can come with us, too, if you want,” he said to her.

“I thought you were magnificent,” Sam said in a near whisper. “Although I only heard the last half of it.”

Harry continued with his gesture, and put one friendly arm around me and the other around Hill. He somehow carefully excluded Sam from this embrace. “You can come too, if you want, Dave,” he called across several heads to where Weintraub sat on a wood bench with Florence.

“No thanks,” Weintraub said with a fine grin. “I guess I’ll stay here and listen in on the discussion. I’ll be your spy.” Everybody laughed, and a fine feeling was in the room as the four of us went out the door.

I don’t remember what bar it was we went to. It was not the old Monaco. We took to the rue Racine again, as Harry and I had done once before, which was not blocked off by any cordon of CRS. We came out onto the Boulevard St.-Michel which was still jammed with people craning to watch the fighting still going on down at the Carrefour with St.-Germain. We walked south, uphill, away from the river, and it was one of those bars along there that Harry stopped at, and went in, and sat down inside.

Almost at once I felt like, as my old grandfather might have said, the proverbial one-armed paper-hanger with an itch. Whatever it was was happening, or was going to happen, they none of them wanted me around.

So I left them there, and walked home up the rue Soufflot and past the darkened Panthéon, with its CRS-loaded camions all in a line, and then down Cardinal Lemoine. It was almost the same way we had come.

14

I
MUST SAY I
really did not think anything had happened. I mean what, after all, could have happened? And Harry called the next day to tell me he was leaving for Cannes that evening, the Tuesday, instead of on the Wednesday. Then late on the Wednesday afternoon Hill called me.

I had spent most of the Wednesday at his parents’ place watching TV. They were showing the second (and last) day of the debate in the Assemblée Nationale on the motion of censure against Premier Pompidou’s Government and M. Pompidou was speaking himself. It was the first time the Government had allowed such a broadcast since the troubles started. But after Pompidou’s own speech, a tough and fairly reasonable effort I thought, I got bored with the rest of it and went home hoping to work. Anyway, Pompidou’s Government survived the attempt to topple it, though only by 11 votes.

It wasn’t long after I got home that Hill called. I do not know where he called from. In any case, what he wanted to tell me was that Samantha had suddenly disappeared. Hill was in great personal distress. Naturally, I asked him to come right over to my pad, as we “Older Generations” all call our apartments nowadays.

“Don’t say anything to Mother or Dad,” he asked.

“Your dad’s already gone.”

“Oh. I forgot. Well, don’t say anything to Mother.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Maybe,” Hill said. “Anyway I just got to talk to somebody.”

I was flattered by that. I also of course realized immediately that he was in love. Madly in love, probably. For the first time in his miserable young life. And, with all of the possible choices in that good young life, in love with Samantha-Marie Everton.

And, suddenly, not only that, I was reasonably sure I could give him the telephone number where she could be reached in Cannes. I knew the hotel where Harry always stayed in Cannes. It was the Carlton.

Hill certainly looked haggard when he arrived. He was gaunt almost to the point of emaciation, There were deep-blue circles under his eyes, and the eyes themselves I could hardly look at because of the depth of anguish in them.

What in the
name
of
God
could Harry have been thinking of? I thought secretly. Christ. Christ almighty. Christ, Christ.