The New Confessions (54 page)

When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1937—I flew from New York, fifteen hours, a UAL Sky Lounge Mainliner via Chicago—it had almost been like returning home. Half of Berlin seemed to be there—Wilder, Reitlinger, Thomas Mann, Lang, many others. I stayed with Werner and Hanni Hitzig for the first month. Egon Gast lived three houses away. Most of the German émigrés had settled in the cheaper districts around the Santa Monica Canyon, mainly in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. On our reduced budgets we socialized as energetically as we could in each other’s small houses. I joined the Hollywood Ant-Nazi League and some days spoke more German than English. Most of my fellow émigrés were dejected and cast down—with good reason. Their country had rejected them, or vice versa, and all the fame and renown they had known there counted for little in their new home. They were employed—apart from a few—in dead-end charity jobs in various studios. Most spoke the language badly or not at all. The future was dark, with dwindling prospects. But I, on the contrary, was excited. For a start
I liked the sunshine and the proximity of the huge ocean. And I was relieved to be out of Britain. Remember, unlike the others, I was coming to Los Angeles from a position of no great advantage. And I had no language problems. I was not leaving some sumptuous villa in the Grunewald to live in a small frame house tucked up in a steep road in a canyon suburb. To me Pacific Palisades was a more than fair exchange for the Scotia Private Hotel, my father’s house and my flat in Islington. To me at that time Britain represented bad faith, broken promises, my ruined marriage, thwarted ambition and unjust legal persecution. I was perfectly happy to convalesce in California.

Stirrings of liberal conscience prompted many of the studios to offer jobs to émigrés. However, this usually involved little more than paying them a modest salary to stay away. Egon Gast was on contract to 20th Century–Fox. He had been in Los Angeles a year and a half and was still waiting to make his first film. He got me a job as a writer there on a salary of a hundred dollars a week. In those days I suppose that was a living wage—just. Some writers, I hear, earned as much as thirty-five hundred per week. Aldous Huxley once told me he got fifteen thousand dollars for two months’ work. The studios were being thoughtful but not generous.

The first day I went to my office on the Fox lot, the name above my door read J. J. T
ODT
. The other four offices on that floor were all occupied by Germans—directors and writers. It felt like something of a ghetto, or like a quarantine ward in a hospital. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that we tended to cling together. At lunch we would eat in a group in the corner of the canteen and the others would moan and bitch about the venality and crassness of the work they were expected to do—the debased standards under which they were obliged to operate. They had all the highbrow disdain of the chronically insecure. Men—I will mention no names—who had produced vulgar musical comedies and mindless historical epics now became thoroughbred intellectuals and
artistes
, grand arbiters of good taste.

I did not complain. It is extraordinary, but true, but in the months that I was at Fox I was paid thousands of dollars and did not a stroke of work. On the strength of the new salary I left the Hitzigs and rented a small apartment—361½ Encanto Drive—off Chautauqua Boulevard. It was half a house, the top half, which I sublet from an illustrator called Ernst Kupfer. A lugubrious solemn man, he was now known as Ernest Cooper and had a steady job working as an animator for Walt Disney. He and his wife, Utta, had four children who all lived with them downstairs.
Utta was small, dark and of stout peasant build, with a huge sagging shelf of bosom. She worked indefatigably about the house, controlling her children (three boys and a little girl) with swift vicious punishments, usually powerful stinging slaps to the backs of legs, just like Oonagh had administered.

Upstairs, I had a bedroom, a bathroom, a small sitting room dominated by a horsehide davenport and, off that, a kitchenette with a three-burner stove, an electric icebox and a woodstone sink. I used to feel guilty about all my space when I heard the six Coopers crashing about below.

From the kitchenette window you could see the Pacific, always gray; it never looked blue even on the sunniest days. The house itself was wooden, set in a plot hacked out of a scrubby hill, and it had three flights of steps leading down to the road from a screened porch. Ernest cut the steep lawn from time to time, but it would have smartened the place up unduly to do it regularly and made it stand out from its neighbors. Encanto Drive had a shabby well-worn look. And there seemed to be kids everywhere. Some evenings when I parked my car after work and looked at the lounging adolescents, the toddlers, the shouting brats on their bicycles, I felt like a solitary adult in a school playground.

I settled in at Fox easily and quickly. My salary check too was made out to J. J. Todt, but I never thought of complaining. It was generally understood that I was working on my own project, which I would eventually show to the script editor (I never met this man after the first day). Weeks passed pleasantly. What did I do? I learned how to play tennis, acquired a sun tan and put on some weight. I went swimming in the sea with Ernest’s two older boys, Clancy and Elroy. (“They Yamericans now,” Ernest would say. “Europe finish.”) I tinkered with my script of
The Confessions: Part II
. I felt oddly unreflecting and unbothered about things. One reason for this was that Europe might as well have vanished from the map of the world as far as life out here on the Pacific littoral was concerned. At our dinner parties, on beach picnics and in Anti-Nazi League meetings we energetically debated political events in Europe, but emerged from these sessions into sunny, prosperous, disinterested and indifferent realms. Soon, inexorably, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia,
Anschluss
, came to have the status of arguments in a university seminar group: abstract posits, forensic positions. Somehow, or so it seemed to me, these distant agitations just weren’t my problem anymore.

The second reason was that I lost all sense of urgency. This was new,
and harder to explain. Lethargy, as far as I am now concerned, is to do with spirit of place rather than state of mind. I simply find it impossible to work in some milieux. Perhaps in Los Angeles it was something to do with the absence of real seasons. The thermometer shifted down a few degrees; you put on a sweater; it was overcast and rainy—that described an average day in an English summer, not
winter
. And the trees were always green. Passing time lost its common demarcations. The sap never rose in spring; the days never shrunk; the nights never grew longer.… I was approaching my fortieth birthday, half my life had gone and yet I looked younger than ever. Those extra pounds I gained smoothed out the mature angles and declivities of my face. I tried to generate some energy but to little avail. In compensation I told myself I was biding my time.

But then perhaps, like a field, every life needs its fallow period. As it turned out mine lasted two years and ended with the invasion of Poland. But I am jumping ahead.

I did three things almost immediately on arriving in Los Angeles: I wrote to Thompson and I tried to find Doon and Eddie Simmonette. I had left England without informing anyone. Thompson, as he put it, was “devastated.” To his eyes the whole affair looked like the worst sort of fraud and betrayal. He contemplated repaying the loan himself, but decided in the end to let me take the consequences of my actions. I quote a portion of his letter to me:

And on and on. I could see that there had been a massive loss of face on his part and I was genuinely sorry. But what else could I have done? I wrote back briefly, apologized again and said I would send a hundred dollars a month, and more if circumstances permitted, until my debt had been cleared. While I worked at Fox, I was as good as my word.

Very surprisingly, and somewhat worryingly, there was no news or sign of Doon. Few people seemed even to remember her. “Didn’t she
go to Europe in the twenties?” was the best I could come up with. I came to the reluctant conclusion that she was still in France. Willi Gast, Egon’s brother, arrived in Los Angeles and told me there was a sizable community of émigrés in Sanary, in the South of France, among whom he had noticed Mavrocordato. I assumed that was where I could find Doon—if I wanted to.

Eddie Simmonette, I discovered, was in New York, where he was making films in Yiddish. I wrote to him and he—typically—offered me a job, but I declined. I had settled in by then and the effort of moving east seemed too much. The Californian lethargy was already in my blood, coagulating it, slowing me down. Besides, I couldn’t speak Yiddish … but neither could Eddie, as far as I knew. I stayed put.

I earned some extra money on top of my Fox wage from a man named Smee, Monroe Smee, whom I met at the Anti-Nazi League meetings. Smee was an unfortunate-looking fellow with receding hair and chin and yellow equine teeth with large gaps between them. He said he ran a small production company and I acted as a freelance script reader for him at twenty-five dollars a script. I read seven before I asked to be relieved of the job. The scripts were absurdly bad, quite appalling. I had been expecting earnest, liberal-minded tracts, but what he sent me was the worst sort of trash—turgid thrillers with creaking conspiracy theories and cloying romances with a strain of positively nauseating sentimentality, as far as I recall. Smee had great hopes for these scripts and I was reluctant to dash them as wholeheartedly as I felt they deserved, but I did. He was paying me for my honest professional opinion, I reminded him.

For a few weeks we saw a fair amount of each other. I didn’t dislike Smee, but he just wasn’t my type. He had only one joke, which he employed endlessly. If, as you left a coffeeshop, say, you asked, “Are you coming?” he would respond, “As the Actress said to the Bishop.” If you said, “Shall I stay inside?” he would pipe up with “As the Bishop said to the Actress.” I became almost maddened by this jocular tic. It was astonishing how the most innocuous question could be turned in Smee’s mind into a Bishop/Actress gag.

I handed the last—the seventh—script back to him one night after a league meeting and told him I was quitting. I apologized.

“I just can’t do it anymore,” I said.

“As the Bishop said to the Actress.”

“No, seriously, Monroe, wherever you’re getting these screenwriters from, I’d dump them. They’re useless, worse than useless. You must be
able to find some better ones. Ask the first person you meet outside.… I mean this is crap. Really. And that
Falling Snow
, I think that’s probably the worst script I’ve ever read. The guy should be locked up. What was his name?”

“
Falling Snow?
That was, ah, Edgar Douglas.”

“Well he ought to have his brain examined. There was something actually rather disgusting about that story.”

Smee grinned. “Well, anyway, I’m grateful to you, John. At least you’re honest.” His face was damp, Smee sweated easily. “But I should level with you now that you’re quitting. I’m Edgar Douglas. I wrote
Falling Snow
. I wrote them all.”

“
Jesus Christ!
Monroe! God, why didn’t you—”

“No, no. Don’t worry. I’m grateful.” His grin was now distinctly cheesy. “I’d never have known. I can’t judge my own stuff. I needed an honest opinion.”

“Jesus.… I’ve got to give you your money back.”

“Nonsense, you earned it.”

“But I feel such a prick.”

“As the Actress said to the Bishop.… No, really, John, I needed to hear it. I respect your honesty. So I’m not cut out to be a screenwriter. Now I know. Once a loation manager, always a location manager.”

“Monroe, I—”

“No hard feelings.”

We shook hands. “I owe you one,” he said. “I mean it.”

I felt bad about it and continued to apologize when we met at league meetings. He kept telling me to forget it and eventually I did. I held on to the money he had paid me, though. He was right: I
had
earned it.

And so I drifted through 1938 and into ’39. On the day of my fortieth birthday (I looked ten years younger) I was invited to a tennis lunch-party at the Bel Air home of an English director called Cyril Norman. Norman was a North Country homosexual who took his sport seriously, and the day was mapped out with a series of round-robin competitions of singles and doubles. I was scheduled to start proceedings off with a doubles match: me and Clive Brook against Ronald Colman and Richard Barthelmess. I had left my racket in the office and drove there to pick it up before going to the party.

I parked in a vacant reserved space and ran upstairs. I came out two minutes later to find a large Chrysler coupe partially blocking me in. Its driver, a small red-faced man in a light-gray suit with a yellow silk display handkerchief stood beside it. I was in white flannels, white shirt,
navy cotton jersey. I was carrying my tennis racket. It was Wednesday, 11
A.M
.

“Sorry,” I said. “Won’t be a second.”

“You work here?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

He looked me up and down. “Could have fooled me. What do you do?”

“I’m a writer,” I said. I didn’t like his tone.

“Oh yeah? Chances are you can read, then.”

I looked at him, then at my watch. “Look, I’d love to stay and chat but I’m pressed for time.”

He pointed. “What the fuck you think that sign says? ‘Please park here’?”

There was a sign:
PRIVATE, RESERVED
, and a name I couldn’t read from that distance.