The Merry Month of May (3 page)

The jacket of Weintraub requires description. I had never seen it on him before the May Revolution came along. It was made of near-white cotton chino, instead of olive-drab wool like the jacket Eisenhower copied from the British, and since the Revolution started I had not seen Weintraub wear anything else. I am convinced he bought it solely to be his Revolutionary uniform, to wear along with the white Levi’s he now affected, in contrast to the dark suits and narrow New York ties he used to wear before. Because the May Revolution, the Students’ Revolution, had become a personal symbol, a deeply personal cause to Weintraub.

He always claimed it was because his
hôtel pension
in the rue de Condé was so close to the Odéon, and the center of it all, that he could not avoid becoming involved. The students had, he said, during one of the scares that the police would attack the Odéon, removed all of the files of the Cinema Committee and hidden them in Weintraub’s room to protect them; and that from that time on he was forcibly committed. I always doubted this. Not that the Committee had hidden their files and shot film in his room; but that they would do so without first knowing him well, and knowing that he
was
committed. I suspect what really happened was that he took to hanging around the Odéon after the students captured and took it over, found the Cinema Committee’s room up in the gloomy recesses upstairs in that old theater, attached himself to them, and later offered his room as a sanctuary for their files and film. Weintraub always denied this though; I don’t know why—out of embarrassment perhaps.

Why this American male of 45-plus years (Weintraub would never admit to more than 45) would attach himself to a group of 19- and 20-year-old French students involved in a visibly hopeless revolt, was something else. To understand that you had to know Weintraub.

Weintraub by profession was a harpist. And a fairly accomplished one. But he didn’t like it much. He played harp in the Paris Opera orchestra regularly, and also played in any theater orchestras and concerts around town that required or wanted a harp. This was how he survived and made enough money to eat and live. But what he wanted to be was an actor. A movie actor. There was not anything about the movies he did not love. Indiscriminately, he loved movie stars, movie producers, movie directors and movie writers; and the more famous and successful they were the more he was inclined to love them. When not playing the harp for bread, he hung around in the expensive joints where all these people hung out, together, places like Castel’s, New Jimmy’s, the Calavados. The only way he could get himself accepted by them, since he could hardly afford to pay his own way in these expensive places, was to play the role of the buffoon, the group clown, which he had figured out for himself. He deliberately made himself into a punching bag and straight man for celebrities. It was in this way that he had attached himself to the Gallaghers, and through them to me, though he had little real interest in my literary pursuits. He was not entirely unknown, having played a number of bit roles in films, several of which Harry Gallagher helped him get. He also wrote bad poetry and painted bad pictures.

His buffoonery and role as the fool, of course, could not keep him going long with any one particular group. They soon got bored with him, and he further alienated himself by his increasingly exotic demands such as ordering on the star’s tab caviar or Scottish salmon when the rest were ordering steaks or hamburgers, by borrowing without repaying, by asking movie stars to get him roles in their productions or invest in his bad paintings, so that he was reduced to moving from group to group to group till he became known to all of regular Paris. Finally he had to attach himself to visiting stars or directors who were in town for a single production. He had about reached this point of no return with the Gallaghers, than whom there were no softer touches in the world, when the May Revolution came along.

I am convinced the reason he involved himself so completely with the young members of the Odéon Cinema Committee, outside of the fact that they had to do with cinema, was partly because he was such a lonely man. The other part I think was the fact that this was the first time in a long time in his life that he was being taken seriously by anyone, at his own face value of himself. These kids believed him when he namedropped the stars he said he knew, and almost certainly saw him as perhaps their major, if not their only contact with that outside cinema world they hoped to get to help them. Later on in the Revolution I went with him many times up into those dark grimy cubbyholes and upper balconies at the Odéon to see—and work with—“his” Committee, and I do not think those children ever did see through him as he really was. And I believe Weintraub needed that, as other men need liquor or dope.

And this was the man who now stood before me in my apartment, his precious Revolutionary’s jacket flung down on my Second Empire couch, while he struggled with his black turtleneck, peeling it up over his bare back to his neck and to the knotted bandanna around it which he had affected since the Revolution started, even during the daytime when there were few or no tear-gas bombs being thrown. This was the man who had brought into our more or less stable, more or less secure midst the woman (woman? woman, hell! Baby girl!) whom I call, called, the Catalyst: all unwittingly on his part, it is true, and, in the end, quite painfully for himself.

“You don’t need to show me, Dave,” I said, with a faint edge of irony in my voice. “I’ll take your word.”

But he had already shucked the shirt up, arms crossed above his bowed neck and bent back, and I saw eight or ten blue-black stripes about the width of a thumb and a foot long, crisscrossing his shoulders and lower back. “I got to admit I’m kinda proud of that,” he said in the resonant basso. He pulled the shirt back down. “Of course, it doesn’t mean anything really, I just happened to get caught between two lines of them. I didn’t see the second line coming down the side street.”

“But you’re glad just the same.” I smiled faintly.

“In a way,” he said, and walked to the nearest of my open windows. He stepped up onto its parapet and leaned his arms on the
fer forgé
protective railing and looked out at the river. “We’re not going to give up, Hartley. We’re not going to quit. The Revolution will continue.”

“What’s happened to the Cinema Committee now that the Sorbonne has fallen?”

“They’ve moved to the Censier.” The Censier was an annex to the overcrowded university in the rue Censier almost a kilometer from the Sorbonne, and still in student hands. “They’ll stay there for now.”

“Not unless the Government wants to let them, they won’t,” I said.

“We’ll never give up,” Weintraub said, still looking out over my river. “We’ve done too much, and come too far, to ever give up now.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t any choice. And never was,” I said.

“You’ve never really been with us, have you, Hartley?” Weintraub said, deepening his voice again, but grinning as he did so, thus making of it a parody of an accusation instead of a real one. It was a trick of his.

“I’ve been with you. And you know it. But I’m also a realist. And I’ve known all along—as you’ve known all along—that it could never be much more than what’s been, never achieve much more than what it’s already achieved.”

“No,” he said solemnly. “It isn’t over. We’ll go on. Somehow. We’ll do something.”

“What? Go underground? And form a new
Résistance?”

“Maybe,” Weintraub said though my remark was patently ridiculous. It was plain he could hardly stand to lose his precious Revolution. But I on the other hand did not want another over-precious lecture
on
his precious Revolution. And I did want to know more about the woman—girl—(God, I hardly know what to call her, really)—whom I have called our Catalyst. “Have you had any news from Sam?” I asked.

“Samantha?” He turned back from the window’s railing.

“Samantha-Marie,” I countered.

He smiled. But under the grease of the protective coating of the smile there was a look of bone-deep sadness, an exhausted anguish, in his eyes. “I had a letter from her from Tel Aviv three days ago. She’s back with her Sabra girlfriend. They’re making it great together. And she wants me to join them as soon as I can get down there.”

“And you’re going?”

“Where would I get the money?”

“Umm,” I said. I changed the subject. “She taught you a lotta things, you told me once.”

“Yeah, she did,” Weintraub said, still smiling an only-skin-deep smile. “She gave me a taste for some pretty exotic stuff. . . . Aw, fuck it. She don’t want me. We both know it. Have you heard anything more from Harry?” He paused. “Or any of them? I walked past the house down there tonight. Their apartment’s closed up tighter than a drum. Not a light anywhere.”

“Hill has left Paris,” I said. “Ten days ago. You knew that. I’ve not heard from him. Louisa, you know about. The baby, McKenna, is staying with Edith de Chambrolet—you know, Louisa’s Countess friend.”

“Have I met her?”

“I think you have, at their place.”

“I don’t remember. And Harry?”

“You saw the telegram I had from him yesterday. He’s arrived in Tel Aviv.”

“You think he’ll ever catch up with her?” Weintraub asked. “With Samantha? Make it back?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” I said. “You would know the answer to that better than I would.”

“No,” he said, and hollows showed under his eyes. “No, I wouldn’t really. Really.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t have an inkling,” I said. “Dave, would you like another drink? I’m pouring. But would you mind making it a quick one? I’ve got some things I’ve really got to do tonight.”

“Sure. I would like one. And I will make it quick. What are you doing? Writing something about our past six weeks, our
Révolution?”

“No,” I said. “But I suppose I will have to have something done about it for the Review.”

He actually leered. “But you’re doing something on it yourself?”

“No. I think I’d much prefer to have a French political expert—Left, of course—do it for me. I might translate it myself, though.”

He pulled himself up to his full five-foot-four, and grinned—again; this time a genuine one. “Don’t forget to have him tell what part Weintraub played in the transpiration of this Revolution! Including the one at Harry Gallagher’s!”

After he left, I wondered if his very last remark was not still a further allusion to these papers, to his awareness of their existence, and that he was giving me permission—no, was
asking
me, please to include him in anything I wrote about the Gallaghers. History he wanted. Well, I would certainly have to include him. He certainly did play a role. A key role. But somehow it depressed me. It depressed me even more than I had known that seeing him would do, and I went myself to my window. I leaned on the protective wrought-iron railing looking out at the sadness of the flowing river. As Weintraub had done. It was always there, that sadness of the river, of the flowing of the river. But I’ve never been able to isolate why. But it was always sad. That was one thing I could count on. Night had fallen since he had arrived. And the Paris streetlights had come on along the quai. Across the river, lights were coming on in the Left Bank apartments. And in the
Quartier
itself there were no more thuds of gas grenades igniting, no more fires flickering from barricades to light up the rising clouds of smoke and tear gas, no more flashes and the cracking reports of the percussion grenades. Something indeed had truly ended.

By leaning out I could look up the quai to the Pont de la Tournelle and see that the two squad cars of police were changing shifts. Twenty-four hours a day they guarded that bridge’s access to the home of M. Pompidou on the Île’s Quai de Bethune.

I made myself another, very stiff drink, and downed it. Then I made another, and downed that. Damn it, I thought, I’m going to bed. And if I can’t sleep, I’ll take a Mogadon.

I didn’t take the Mogadon.

I feel I have not given an adequate picture of Harry Gallagher. To understand him you have to understand something of his background. Harry at 49 comes of an old Boston Irish family, who left him an income of some 20-odd thousand a year. In spite of that he has made a considerable name for himself as a screenwriter, and makes an excellent living on his own. He is famous enough and competent enough—what they call a “star” writer in the industry—to be in demand by big-money American producers. He has published two novels in the past six years. He has written screenplays for France’s most successful young avant-garde movie makers. In short, Harry was a winner, a man who, entering the bottom edge of middle age as he was, could relax a little and look back without anger.

When he was 19, Harry left Harvard in his junior year as a social protest, to become an actor in New York with the idea of writing plays of social protest somewhat in the manner of Odets. When his first accepted play was in production, but long before it actually reached the boards to flop, he was on his way to Hollywood—at what then seemed a fabulous salary—to do his first screenplay, and on a big production. An old Communist-buddy director pal of his from the New York stage, who had gone out there before him, had asked for him and got him.

I will not go into any moral issues here about their going to Hollywood. Suffice it to say that they two (as well as a whole generation of them, I guess, who went out there then) felt that they could reach more people with their message through films than through the theater. That was in 1939. By the time the war came at the end of 1941, at the age of 23, Harry had written two hit screenplays and was a boy-genius in the industry, with a big name.

After Pearl Harbor, Harry threw all this up. Unlike his dedicated Communist confreres, who mostly received commissions as Lieutenant Commanders and went right on, making propaganda films for the Government now, Harry enlisted in the Marines where he fought the war in the Pacific as a Sergeant.

After the war, of course, he had to start all over. A lot of new blood—that voracious, clamorous, greedy-ambitious new blood—had come in and taken over every place that was not occupied, and a lot that were. But he re-established himself in Hollywood as a top writer; and though his friends who had fought the war on the Silver Screen had trouble looking him in the eye, he became again a wheel and involved himself in the intellectual and humanistic Communism-Marxism side of the film-industry community which he had always been drawn to. There is no use here of my going into the relative goods and evils of Communist-Marxism as they were seen in the 1930s and ’40s. A lot of things that have happened in the world since then have changed an awful lot of things. But back then everybody was a pearly idealist. And Harry Gallagher was one of them. And, in 1947, on a visit home to Boston to his conservative Irish family, he met and married young Louisa Dunn Hill, another dedicated Marxist-Liberal idealist from an old Boston Brahmin family whose line and whose Liberalism dated even from before the days of Thoreau and Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Together they carried on their political activities in Hollywood, although neither ever actually became a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party. She immediately bore him their first child, Hill, in 1948.