The Merry Month of May (4 page)

In 1950, when the House Un-American Activities Committee anti-Communist hunt got going full blast in all its glory, and the Hollywood Ten had finally been jailed, Harry (often jokingly called Number Eleven of the Hollywood Ten—although a number of others claimed that title, too, I gather) was investigated. Somebody had given in his name, obviously. Rather than talk to the Committee and give the names of friends as most of his friends did, Harry chose to skip out to Canada and make his way to France, later sending for Louisa and Hill when he got settled, I do not choose to comment on what will be history’s verdict on these ignorant, primitive, self-seeking American politicians who could tolerate and even defend a Rankin and a Joe McCarthy, though they will probably be slightly less badly thought of than the Catholic Inquisition.

Even had he stayed and not gone to jail, he could not have gotten a job anywhere in the American film industry without talking for the Committee because of the secret blacklist—the blacklist which the industry denied existed but which in fact did exist. We tend to prefer not to remember all this today whenever we righteously criticize the Russians for putting their outspoken writers to jail.

Harry’s first two years in France were very hard indeed, because of the language problem. But without help from his family (his parents disapproved of him and had not quite died yet to leave him his inheritance), Harry started over. He played bit parts as Americans in French films, became adept at the new industry of dubbing American films into French for the French market, and finally was writing screenplays in French—now for the young French
Nouvelle Vague
film makers. And as the years passed and the McCarthy Era blew finally away back home, more and more American producers were coming to him for screenplays of productions to be done in Europe, and finally for screenplays to be done at home. It had been discovered Harry had a natural talent for American love stories, and for America’s morality play, the Western. Success followed success.

So it is true that on that night of April 27th, when young Hill threw his first young monkey wrench into the machinery, Harry Gallagher was an unqualified, even a disgusting success.

But Harry had paid pretty dearly for never compromising his principles. It was, Harry felt, something to be proud of. And it was that that stunned him so about Hill’s accusation. It was as if everything he had done and stood for had gone by the board, been thrown out, negated, denied existence by his son in a wild youthful jettison, as if in his housecleaning young Hill, was throwing out the furniture and rugs and even the wall fixtures, along with the dirt.

And yet they were not all that far apart. Hill with his anti-Capitalist, anti-Communist
Nouvel Anarchisme
and the black flag of Dany Cohn-Bendit was not all that far from Harry’s viewpoint. Because Harry had given up on Communism. After watching the developments in Russia, China and elsewhere during the ’40s and ’50s and the ’60s, Harry had become convinced that while these societies might be—probably were—helping the lowest common denominator of humanity, their demand, their drive to compel rigid inflexibility of belief from every citizen (as the Church had also done in its day of power) was diminishing, impeding the movement upward of the highest common denominator of the race: its growth, which was where the true creativity, the talent for innovation, and genius for change and spiritual growth were situated. And for him, however reluctantly, that meant a return to enlightened Capitalism as the lesser evil of the two. But he didn’t like that Capitalism, either. Or what it stood for. Spiritually, that made him an Anarchist too.

But try and tell that to Hill. Certainly I couldn’t. And Harry was not about to.

I suppose really the only difference between them was that Hill was activist. He, like the rest of Dany Cohn-Bendit’s group with their black flag, wanted to
act
on his Anarchism. Believed you
must
act on your Anarchism. He believed in organization of the Anarchists, already an anomaly, of course. Hill believed Harry had become cynical, I suppose you could say—an old man’s right. Wisdom is the right of the aged not to declare themselves. But where, in our day and age, were the old men going to be left to rest peacefully and with dignity upon their laurels? As far as Hill was concerned, all that belonged to the disenfranchised past. To Hill it was the most profane sacrilege.

Perhaps, after all, it was only a problem of the generations. Hill—very jealously—was not about to let his old man get into the act and usurp his youthful rebellion.

Now, I really must sleep.

3

M
Y OWN MARRIAGE HAD ENDED
in the spring of 1958, And it was while my wife was doing her Reno residence time that I departed for a European trip, never dreaming I would end up staying there, in Paris on the Île St.-Louis. Our marriage was always a New York marriage, and a literary one. We lived the whole nine years of it in Manhattan, in a rather grand apartment on Central Park West, and entertained lavishly everybody during that time who had made it on the New York literary or theatrical scene. We were both would-be writers, I in poetry, she in the novel and as an essayist, and Eleanor was wealthy: rich: the heiress of an ancient publishing and writing family that had made millions back when a million counted. Fortunately, we were without issue.

It is difficult to go back to teaching Lit. at some school, even a ritzy one, when you have lived nine years married to an heiress. And we had practically lived together the two years before that, before we married and I gave up my teaching job. My book on
The Rhythms of Early English Prose
came out to very good reviews, and sank. As expected. My two slim poetry volumes got very bad reviews. Eleanor’s first long, long novel, very Joycean in style and very Virginia Woolf in outlook, appeared, died, and joined my three books. And that was probably what did it. We continued to entertain, even stepped up our entertaining. Eleanor drank more and more at night, and so did I. Our parties got oftener and oftener, and longer and longer, often lasting deep into the morning. We got so we each hated to see people leave and go home, begged them to stay for one more drink when they tried to leave. In desperation I tried a tough realistic novel which I never did believe would work. It didn’t. And that was just about it.

I never did believe, as Eleanor accused, that it was all my fault, that I caused the withering and downfall of her talent by my own lack of one, by my budding “alcoholism”. She has never published anything since then, and has married twice and divorced twice. I am sure she had a string of literary and theatrical lovers during our last years, and maybe she had them sooner. But she did love the arts and artists. And I feel that I did fail her there. It left me with a strong guilt. Fortunately for me I still had my own small income which my family of successful New York lawyers had left me:—my family of New York lawyers who had always disapproved of me as Harry Gallagher’s family of Boston bankers and doctors had always disapproved of him.

In late September of 1959 Louisa Gallagher came to my apartment alone for the first time. She called ahead of time and asked to see me and made an appointment. At that time I had known her pretty well for almost two years, and she and Harry had been to my place often. But this was the first time she had ever come there alone. In fact, it was the first time Louisa and I had ever been really alone together anywhere. She certainly had never been to my apartment alone.

If I seem to dwell on this point unduly, it is because Louisa herself made me so aware of it. Not that she ever mentioned it openly in words. She didn’t. But there was about Louisa a kind of quasi-Puritanical quality which seemed to make her always aware of herself as a sexual object, in a sort of guilty and uncomfortable way. Dear Louisa. For instance, she was always very meticulous, even prissy, about her person—always carefully adjusting her skirt when she pulled her lovely long legs up under her; always feeling almost guiltily at her skirt to make sure it was properly adjusted whenever some man looked admiringly at her legs; always sitting primly with her knees pressed tight together when she was in a chair. Even with me, whom I believe she liked more than any other friend they had, there was often this look of guilty start on her face, as if it had again occurred to her that I might find her attractive, and that this was her fault.

I always supposed this was part of her New England heritage. Her New England heritage was evident also in her lanky, almost rawboned build, and in her long, sharply sculptured horse-face. When she grinned, two deep lines would appear beneath her high cheekbones. And yet she was extremely beautiful as a woman, with her lovely long legs and vague, eager eyes. An extremely reserved person about herself, she was by fits and starts almost hysterically talkative about just about everything else, especially politics. Even back then Louisa was already violently and volubly anti-de Gaulle, saying he had only saved France from the militant Rightists of the OAS to impose upon it a gentler Rightism of his own, which would make it that much harder to fight for any truly modern economic reforms. But it was not about de Gaulle that she was coming to my apartment alone to see me that September.

Naturally, I was curious and puzzled. To call me for a rendezvous alone in my apartment was certainly not the usual Louisa. When she came in, I offered her a seat and suggested a drink.

Well, for a moment that startled, wild-deer look came into her eye and I seriously thought she was going to bolt out the door.

“Oh, no! No, no! No drink!” she stammered—as if to accept a drink was the first step along a path that must end in her seduction there in my own apartment. For a few moments I thought she was actually going to refuse to sit down on my Second Empire couch.

There was always about Louisa the feeling of tension as of a tightly drawn wire, but now the drawing was so tautened you actually felt you might hear the wire snap singing in the air.

It was about Harry that she had come to see me. “I’m leaving him, Jack,” she said without preamble. “I’m taking Hill and I’m going back home to America to my family.”

“You’re
what!”
I exclaimed.

“That’s it. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“You must be out of your mind!” I said. “Harry loves you! He adores you!” The thought of their marriage foundering, too, made me actually physically sick at my stomach.

“If he does, he does not show it in any way which I can any longer tolerate,” she said firmly.

I had heard some pretty explicit gossip about Harry Gallagher’s sexual flings with young actresses and such. When people find out you know someone, they hasten to tell you everything scandalous they have heard about them. After his first successes in France in the mid-’50s, Harry apparently had gone through quite a list of young actresses and would-be actresses, of just about every nationality—a number of whom both European and American are today world-worshipped sex symbols.

At first I was shocked by this talk. I still thought of Harry and Louisa as my perfect happy-American-family—something I had perhaps failed to achieve, but was glad nevertheless to know did exist. But then I decided if Louisa did not care, why should I? And obviously Louisa didn’t. And after all what could be more truly American, than that the man of the family should have his peccadilloes and that the wife should forgive him and not care as long as she had him himself and his love. That was
truly
the perfect happy-American-family.

And of course, Harry was working on scripts for most of these girls; and in his favor it had to be admitted that they all certainly made themselves exceedingly available. Whether it was simply their supreme availability, or whether something deeply important inside Harry had been torn apart by the ignominy of his forced flight from Hollywood, I would not presume to judge.

But now suddenly in my apartment it all came out. Louisa did care. She had only been putting up a front. The story I had heard was substantially the story Louisa unfolded to me that day in September of ’59 in my apartment. And not only that, the same thing had been going on a long time before, even out on the Coast, long before Harry fled Hollywood and the Un-American Activities Committee for France. And now the crowning indignity had come.

Harry had been writing a screenplay for a French producer which was designed to hit the American market with a new young French male star, and for it two beautiful American actresses had been imported. One of these was
very
young and beautiful, and in fact would soon marry the French producer and go on to become a big international sex-star. And the other, while older, was still not anything to be sneezed at. Well, each girl had (individually and privately, of course) invited Harry down to Cannes to visit her, where each hoped he would be able to enhance and expand her role in the film. Each girl felt that her role was not quite up to snuff and needed expanded characterization, particularly when confronted with the role of the other girl. Each had written a warm letter to Harry, after her private dinner conference with Harry and the producer. And Harry had gone, Louisa said. Of course, he had had to go anyway, to work on the script with the producer. But both ladies had written him very warm thank-you letters to his Paris address after his return from Cannes, each saying how much she had enjoyed working with a writer of his understanding, of his sensibilities and discernment about roles and characterization.

“And he didn’t even bother to hide the damned letters!” Louisa said, red-faced, and blew her damp hair back off her forehead. She was 31 then in 1959, and exceedingly attractive. “Neither the first ones, nor the
thank-you
letters that came after!”

Insensitive as it was, I had to fight down a grin, and swallow to keep from laughing: thinking of Harry down there in Cannes, slyly doing both of these girls, these ladies, turn and turn about every other night apparently, and paying them for their favors by working secretly on each’s role against the other’s in their greedy competition.