The New Confessions (55 page)

“If you move your car,” I said patiently, “you can have your space back. I was in a hurry.”

“I don’t give the steam off my shit if you’re in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be there in the first place, dork.”

I got into my car.

“Hey! Jerk-off. You English?”

“Scottish.”

“What’s your name?”

“Todd.” I started the engine.

“Todd? Todd?…” He thought. Then his eyes widened. “J. J. Todt! You’re the fuckin’
German
writer. What do you mean you’re
Scottish?
We don’t hire
Scottish
writers here! There are no fuckin’ Scottish refugees!”

“You’d better move your car, you little prick, or I’ll hit it.”

“You’re fired, asshole! I’m going to sue you for fraud.”

“So sue me!” I contemplated getting out and laying into him with my tennis racquet. But instead I backed out fast and took the front fender neatly off his new car. For good measure I ran over it as I drove off.

I
was
fired. The very next day. I don’t know who the man was, some self-important junior executive, I suspect, but somehow word got around that it was Darryl Zanuck himself. I’m sure it wasn’t, but the rumor circulated anyway, and even made some gossip columns. “Hapless German writer J. J. Todt clipped D. F. Zanuck’s fender on the Fox lot last week and promptly got himself fired.” “Writer J. J. Todt left his car at the curb in the Fox lot and dropped by the office to pick up
his tennis racket. But the rookie writer had parked in the Vee Pee’s place and got himself blasted out of court with a Zanuck ace! Nein, nein, J.J.!”

In the way these things happen, I even started dining out on it myself. It may have made a good story at a cocktail party, but it also meant it proved almost impossible to get another job.

“God. So you’re the guy Zanuck fired.”

“No,” I would say, “it wasn’t him. I’ve never met him.”

“But I read about it. Didn’t I read about it? Jeez, what did you say to him, for God’s sake?”

My remonstrations had no effect. None of the major studios would hire me. I was not only burdened with the Zanuck misapprehension, but I was now irrevocably associated with the émigrés. People would often congratulate me on my excellent English, and there were too many Europeans looking for too few jobs. I realized then the extraordinary tenacity of first impressions. From then on I ceased putting such trust in my own.

I was out of work for two or three months. Of the two hundred or so émigrés in Los Angeles, I suppose thirty or forty were regularly employed. Among the others there was fierce competition for the available jobs. I had to take my chances with everyone else.

I supplemented my rent by coaching Elroy Cooper with his maths—or math, as I was now instructed to call it. Elroy was a bright kid, but lazy. I kept him hard at it and found I rather enjoyed myself. I enjoyed the mathematics too; it took me back to the early days with Hamish at Minto Academy.

But I soon ran low on funds and I ended up accepting the first job I was offered. The Associated Motion Picture Releasing Corporation sounded quite grand. In reality it was one of the “Poverty Row” film companies producing B-movie horror films and—this was its speciality—Westerns. The man who offered me the job was called Brodie McMaster. He came from Illinois but was deeply proud of his heritage. The ethnic connection worked to my advantage, for once.

The only difficulty was that AMPR paid its writers fifty dollars a week. As a result they tended to be very old, very poor or heavily dependent on narcotics. In my time at AMPR I worked with two morphine addicts, a cocaine junkie and half a dozen soaks. I received shared writing credits on several AMPR films, but I have no recollection now of which ones.

So my life restarted but on more reduced terms than before. I had
virtually no savings by now and had stopped repaying my loan from Thompson’s bank. Apart from my salary, I earned only a trickle of royalties from my films (
Jean Jacques!
was currently playing in Francophone Africa) and from my patents. The graph line of my fortunes was still heading downwards.

But I was happy enough. Those two years in Hollywood before the Second World War now seem to me to be among the most placid and carefree of my life. The experience was similar, I imagine, to that of going to university: a finite period of independence with few responsibilities and limited funds. The sun shone; I had work, a little money, friends, a social life, a place to live. What more did I want?

Sex. Sex was something of a problem until Monika Alt arrived in town. It may sound strange, but I had been practically celibate since Doon had left me. I had had one unsatisfactory visit to a prostitute during my sorrow-drowning binge after
The Confessions: Part II
had ended, and a heartless fortnight’s affair with the head of makeup during filming of
The Divorce
(it ended the day we wrapped—her decision). Otherwise, I swear, nothing. After Doon left I felt sexually dessicated. From time to time the old urges returned, with Senga for example, and for a hot week at Drumlarish, a sort of rutting season, I suppose. I asked Mungo what there was available locally and he told me about an old woman who lived in a filthy bothy on the road to Glenfinnan with whom you could have your way for a tumbler of whiskey, but I was not tempted. Doon’s betrayal had left me emotionally mawkish. I returned to the solace and 100 percent reliability of adolescent methods.

However, America had stimulated me once again, and shortly after I moved into 361½ Encanto Drive I courted and won the manageress of a coffeeshop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Her name was Lorelei, Lorelei Madrazon. I think she was half-Turkish and Lorelei an approximation to her Turkish name. She was in her forties, a divorcée with three young children—Hall, Chauncy and Nora Lee. Lori’s, her coffeeshop, was a pleasant ten-minute saunter from Encanto Drive. Her ex-husband was a Filipino who ran a garden maintenance service. He had set her up in the coffeeshop and they remained good friends. I met him several times. Anyway, Lori was solid, fleshy, with wiry blond hair—she was a victim of the permanent wave—and a pretty face, always bright with makeup. I think it was a combination of the olive skin and primary colors set against the improbable Nordic blondness of her hair that attracted me. We enjoyed efficient, uncomplicated, fairly regular sex, twice a week on average, usually in the early evenings after
she’d closed, and after which we would go out for a meal or take in a movie.

I was glad to see Monika again. She had left Berlin in 1934 and had come straight to Hollywood, where she enjoyed brief and modest success in two or three sub-Marlene Dietrich thrillers. This trip had the bonus of securing her an American husband and citizenship. For a year she had been content to be Mrs. Geraldo Berasconi, but then came divorce and another attempt to return to the screen. Monika, however, was now in her fifties, astonishing though that fact seemed when I stopped to consider it, and the flood of émigrés had provided a glut of sensual foreign vamps. She still looked good, I must say—hair shorter, as thin as ever but more groomed. Unfortunately, her new consort was Harold Faithfull.

Faithfull was still a successful second-rater—they never truly succeed, these types, but they never seem truly to fail, either. He was in Hollywood under contract to Warners and, like most of the European directors in the place, was engaged in serving up a trashy version of “Old Europe” for American consumption.

I met Monika and Faithfull at a cricket match in Bel Air (once again organized by the indefatigable Cyril Norman, a ghastly annual occasion for all the has-beens, bit-parters and lounge lizards to parade their stage Englishness). Faithfull ignored me except to comment, “Hard times, Todd? Hard luck,” and wander away. He was very fat but still annoyingly handsome in his sleek prosperous way, with his thick gray hair brushed straight back from his forehead. Every time I saw him I felt a bizarre cannibalistic urge to carve a steak of his plump haunches. I have a feeling Faithfull would have tasted good—porkish, with crackling, served up with roast potatoes, sprouts and applesauce. He had a superb tailor. His immaculately cut dark suits made him look tapered rather than bulky.

Monika wouldn’t leave him for me (she said he’d had his teeth fixed) and they made a stylish couple. However, she would motor down from Mulholland Drive to see me occasionally in my little apartment. I always liked Monika and we got on well. The sex was not the sole reason for the continued association. She was no snob. Faithfull wouldn’t be seen with me because I was a fifty-dollar-a-week writer on Poverty Row. Monika had a European egalitarianism that the British don’t possess. Hard times?… Hard luck. No one from Berlin would have said that in 1939.

*     *     *

I drove to Tijuana to the American consulate to renew my resident’s visa. I waited for an hour to see the consul, a Mr. Lexter, a quiet elderly man and a lay Baptist minister, so he told me later. He had a big shock of unruly gray hair that kept falling into an unlikely boyish fringe. He looked over my form, and me, and said he would get it processed right away. Then, dropping his functionary’s guard for a moment, he said, “I think your country is doing a fine and noble thing, Mr. Todd. I pray for an end to this evil.” It was only then (he obligingly fetched an American newspaper) that I learned war had been declared.

I left the consulate and went round the corner to the Hotel Cuatro Naciónes. I sat in the bar and read the news. I drank several beers and wondered what to do next. How did I feel?… First, oddly divided. Then emotionally and tearfully patriotic. Then irritated and frustrated. I thought of my years in Berlin and of all my German friends. Then I thought of those mad bastards with their uniforms and their flags. I wasn’t at all surprised by the news. Our Santa Monica chapter of the Anti-Nazi League had been predicting war in Europe for years. Now it had come and abstract arguments were suddenly concrete facts. I thought, for some reason, about my father, Hamish and Mungo before I considered my three children. These misplaced loyalties upset me. I felt a rush of self-hatred for so easily abandoning Vincent, Emmeline and Annabelle to Devize. I ate a solitary lunch of
chorizos
, goat’s cheese and a bottle of sweet wine, growing steadily more depressed as the particular fears—destruction of country, death of loved ones—elided into the generally maudlin.

My mind went back to 1917. I thought of the Salient, the bombers, that day with Teague. It was just my luck to fit
two
European wars into my four decades. How could all this be happening
again?
And so soon?… Then,
Christ!
Karl-Heinz! What about Karl-Heinz? Then I felt bitterly sorry for myself, alone in this noisy, noisome border town. What the hell was I doing here? I grew angry. I strode back round to the consulate, but it was shut. I had a vicious argument with an impassive concierge. I left a note urging Lexter to process my application with the greatest speed as I wished to return to Britain at once.

It was a curious day. I drove back to Rincón and packed my suitcases. Then I unpacked them. That evening I went down to the Cervecería Americana. The place was full of glum Germans. As I sat on the terrace and talked with them I suddenly realized that notionally we were enemies.
To cope with this absurdity I drank too much
tequila añeja
and took a hundred-dollar bet with an affable man called Ramón Dusenberry that the U.S.A. would declare war on Germany before the end of November. When I left the
cervecería
at 2
A.M
. it was still loud with the noise of morose disputation.

I confess the events of the next week or so are hard for me to untangle. My journal entries are undated.

This was an astonishing blow. I had been in Mexico for getting on for three weeks, and despite the unprecedented delay I had never once suspected that I would not be allowed to return to the United States. Lexter was apologetic but formal. He declined to explain why I had been refused entry. His sympathy for me, his decent pro-European liberal sentiments, disappeared behind apparatchik reserve. As symbol of my plight he naturally became my enemy. Suddenly I found his mop of hair an offensive affectation. Shouldn’t a man of his age, I suggested to him, stop pretending to be a college kid? He called a Marine in to throw me out. I apologized, said I was overwrought; my country was at war; I just wasn’t myself. We sat down again. It must be a simple mistake, he said. He would investigate further. He advised me to do what every frustrated emigrant did: be patient and reapply.

I took his advice. There was one other course of action I could have followed: catch a boat to England from a Mexican port. But I was now
running into the other eternal problem—money. Brodie McMaster’s chauvinistic loyalty to a fellow Scot had its limits. He sent me one week’s salary in lieu of notice. I was unemployed. The Coopers wrote and said that without the rent they could only hold my apartment until the end of October. Soon I would be homeless. I left the hotel and moved into a clapboard cottage behind the Vera Cruz. It cost sixteen pesos a day, cheaper than a double room at the Max. After a week there and more fiscal calculations, I transferred to a single room in the main hotel that bore an unfortunate resemblance to my cell at Weilburg, but it cost only eleven pesos a day.