The Seeds of Fiction (21 page)

Duvalier showed his copy of
The Comedians
to Paul Blanchet, his xenophobic Minister of Information. Blanchet, it was said, understood that Duvalier was instructing him to ‘take care' of Graham and his book. So in his ‘newspaper'
Panorama,
the circulation of which was limited mostly to government offices, Blanchet published the only review of the book that was permitted in Haiti at the time. His broadside, in fractured French, was headlined, ‘Graham Greene:
La machine a fairepeur
(‘The machine that frightens'). ‘As for Greene,' the review intoned, ‘he invents and makes machines to frighten us with. This is a compulsion: he must build up sinister and morbid situations.' Graham's message in
The Comedians,
in
Panorama'
s interpretation, ‘is a monstrous one and reveals only the Greene-type sensibility, that of the unsatisfied, or a Catholic living in hopelessness; it means a failure of Greene in so far as the difficulty of being a Christian could not be conquered'. The review made no mention of Duvalier or Haiti.

Travel writers were invited to Haiti specifically to dispel the ‘lies' spread by
The Comedians.
Duvalier pulled out all the stops to publicize a visit by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia as well as the opening of the Dr François Duvalier International Jet Airport, constructed at a location known infelicitously as Maïs Gate (Rotten Corn). Emperor Selassie was on a visit to the Caribbean, and Haiti was one of his stops. Decked out in top hat and tails, Duvalier greeted the Ethiopian ruler at the new airport, which together with the architectural monstrosity known as Duvalierville was one of his pet projects.

When Aubelin Jolicoeur first learned about the book and its characters he was delighted to find himself in a novel by such an illustrious writer as Graham Greene. But when he weighed the potential consequences of his enthusiasm, he became uncharacteristically aloof on the subject. He knew the dangers of attracting the wrong publicity in Papa Doc's Haiti. He was careful for a time not to mention or write a word about
The Comedians.
It did not take long, however, before, true to form, he was bending over feminine hands and introducing himself as Petit Pierre. He confided to his friends, ‘If Greene had described me as he knew me, I would have looked like an angel among devils — and that would have made me vulnerable to the Tontons Macoutes. I was grateful to Greene.' However, years later he complained to me, ‘Greene is haunted by spies, and he made me into a spy, which I was not. The government saw me as against the regime because I had appeared in a book that was anti-Duvalier. I suffered both ways. People were afraid of me, both sides were afraid of me. The truth is they couldn't touch me because I had no greed for money or power. I don't care for either … I live in harmony with myself.' Sitting in his art gallery in Port-au-Prince among unframed, unsold paintings of primitive artists during a 1991 interview, and by then sixty-seven years old, Jolicoeur had lost little of his
joie de vivre.
‘How could I worry? I don't drink or smoke. I indulge only in sex. Oh, la, la!' he said his high-pitched laugh, making the paintings on the wall dance. ‘More champagne?' In 2005 Jolicoeur passed away. He was buried in the Jacmel cemetery in which he claimed he had been born. He died a poor man.

In a letter to me dated 20 December 1965 Graham announced, ‘I am leaving England on January 1 to take up residence abroad and my address will be 130 Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris 17. Do look me up if you are ever in Paris at the same time as me.' Just as
The Comedians
appeared in the bookshops, he was busy writing the screenplay for the movie version of his novel. In another letter to me, written from his new base in Paris and dated 5 January 1966, he could hardly conceal his excitement. The film rights had been sold, he reported, even before the book was finished. Hollywood's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had bought the rights and intended to make it a big-budget film with a stellar cast; the studio hoped to begin filming within days. In his letter Graham added:

It was a very happy surprise when I came back here from Canada after Christmas to find your long letter. Even more pleasant was the fact that you liked
The Comedians.
I was very much afraid that you might find that I had got everything wrong owing to my short acquaintance with the country, and it gives me enormous pleasure that you praised it. I had heard in Havana that they were broadcasting extracts from the book so Papa Doc must be quite irritated by it.

He was also pleased, he said, that the film's director would be Peter Glenville, a Brit who had directed Graham's play,
The Living Room.
Glenville had abandoned his law studies at Oxford to pursue a career in the theatre. He became a celebrated stage director in London and eventually moved to Hollywood.

In Port-au-Prince, the poet—sycophant Gérard Daumec broke the news to Papa Doc:
The Comedians
was going to be made into a movie. A dangerous silence ensued, Daumec recalled to me. When Papa Doc finally lifted his head from his desk he uttered one word. ‘Conspiracy!'

To Duvalier, this was another phase in a plot to sabotage his self-styled ‘revolution'. His terror apparatus continued to operate but on a slightly more sophisticated level, as he was making an effort to entice tourists back to Haiti. In fact, a government communiqué had recently instructed Haitians to go out in the evenings and enjoy themselves. The government wanted to make the capital's night life more attractive, and the official communiqué directed ‘state employees and Duvalierists in general … to frequent bars, restaurants, and the International Casino'. During the height of repression the regime had turned the city after sundown into a morgue. Now the Duvalier faithful were under orders to bring it back to life. It was not an easy transition. Only the highest-ranking bureaucrats and gun-toting Macoutes ventured out at night to paint the town red.

Meanwhile Papa Doc had triumphed over Rome. His excommunication was revoked, and he returned to a state of grace in the Catholic Church. The
Holy See had agreed to Duvalier's choice for the post of Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor François Wolf Ligonde. He was Haitian-born and considered a Duvalierist.

To Papa Doc the film version of
The Comedians
was a distraction of the worst kind. Feeding his paranoia, Duvalier's palace ghostwriter, Gérard de Catalogne, who was also in charge of reviving Haitian tourism, suggested that the impact of the film version of
The Comedians
could be disastrous for tourism. The film, according to Daumec, was suddenly seen by Papa Doc as a threatening monster. Foreign Minister René Chalmers and Gérard de Catalogne were called to the Palace for what amounted to a council of war. Daumec sat next to Papa Doc. Various options and plans were presented and studied. Duvalier was more than ever convinced that the film was part of a larger CIA conspiracy and that Graham was working for the CIA.

According to Daumec's account, Chalmers was instructed to deprive the producers of the movie of a location in which to film it. He was to inform each and every country where the film could potentially be shot, including the United States and the Caribbean and African nations, that allowing it to be made on their territory would be interpreted as a hostile act against Haiti and its President-for-Life and that it would lead to grave consequences. In retrospect, Papa Doc's attempt to extend the long arm of his censorship around the globe must go down as one of the more bizarre episodes in diplomatic history.

The Comedians
(the book) was still being reviewed in the United States when Peter Glenville began his search for the film location. It would have to be a place that resembled Haiti yet offered all of the necessary amenities to shoot a major motion picture. ‘I must have done the world looking for a location,' Glenville recalled. He said he had visited Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, Martinique and Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean and several other islands in search of a Haiti lookalike. ‘French Guinea wasn't bad, but it had its limitations, and I finally settled on Dahomey in Africa,' Glenville explained in a 1993 interview with me at his summer home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Dahomey, now known as Benin, was chosen for a number of reasons, he added. Dahomeyans spoke French in addition to their native Fon language; and there were daily flights to Paris, which meant the film rushes could be sent back to the editing studio there every day. Not least important for an all-star cast working on location in West Africa, ‘We could receive food flown out daily from Paris.' The President of Dahomey, General Christophe Soglo, was hospitable and wise enough to understand that the film would bring business and an influx of money to his country of 2,300,000 people at a time when its economy was at a standstill. Revenues from Dahomey's principal exports of palm-tree products and castor oil were not enough to cover the
government's $29 million annual budget. Moreover, the government had guesthouses available, which it was only too happy to rent. The country's largest city, Cotonou, is close to the sea on the Gulf of Guinea, which was important for the film. The government had also built an impressive four-lane sodium-lit boulevard along Cotonou's seafront. ‘And I had six stars to worry about, so I chose Dahomey,' Glenville concluded.

In another important step in preparing for the movie Glenville decided it was worth the risk to visit Haiti. Posing as a tourist, he flew to Port-au-Prince in October 1966 to see the country for himself and savour the character of the Grand Hotel Oloffson. Glenville was accompanied by a French architect (Glenville identified him to me as an interior decorator) whose job would be to design the movie-set replica of the Oloffson, which would be reproduced in the film as the Hotel Trianon.

Glenville had barely been shown into his room at the Oloffson — the ‘John Gielgud Suite' — when, as if on cue, Aubelin Jolicoeur appeared and introduced himself, adding that he was the famous Petit Pierre of the Graham Greene novel
The Comedians.
Years later Jolicoeur charged that Glenville ‘lied to me, saying he was here to make a film on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, our great revolutionary hero'.

Glenville got more than a taste of the fear and anxiety that permeated Duvalier's police state. His most memorable experience occurred while he and his architect colleague were waiting at the Port-au-Prince airport preparing to depart. ‘It was a horrendous experience,' Glenville recalled. A Haitian friend had informed him that an edition of a New York publication containing an article about
The Comedians
being made into a movie had just arrived, and a Duvalierist airport censor was dispatching the article to the Palace. The article mentioned that Glenville was going to direct the movie.

‘There we were waiting at the airport when an announcement said our plane was delayed. I really thought they were going to nail us at the last moment,' Glenville recounted. ‘The American ambassador had warned us that there was very little foreign embassies could do for their nationals in Haiti when they were imprisoned.' Glenville and his architect worried about the innumerable photographs they had taken for reference to recreate Haiti in Africa. Had Papa Doc by now got word of their mission? Finally their flight was called, but neither allowed himself a sigh of relief until Haiti was far behind.

When Papa Doc read the news that Dahomey would be the location for the filming of
The Comedians,
he was, as described by Daumec, apoplectic. Dahomey of all countries! Duvalier saw this as a treasonable act. The people of this West African nation have a special kinship with Haitians. Dahomey was the ancestral home of many Haitians whose forebears had been taken away and sold as slaves. Besides being their original home, the country had spiritual significance for
Haitians, who still practised the Dahomey Voodoo rites. Duvalier ordered Foreign Minister Chalmers to make a strenuous protest to Cotonou. President Soglo, no shrinking violet himself — he had been instrumental in ousting three of his predecessors since the country's independence — shrugged off Duvalier's efforts to quash the filming.

The cast of
The Comedians
began descending on the small African nation and setting up house. Their behind-the-scenes experiences during the filming were a saga in themselves. Cotonou was not exactly a replica of Port-au-Prince. Although it is near the sea, it lacks the backdrop of mountains. Still, there were plenty of similarities. Dahomey was also a tropical black country that had been colonized by the French. Following independence in 1960 it also suffered a series of coups d'état.

The film luminaries arriving in Cotonou included Elizabeth Taylor, her husband and co-star Richard Burton and actors Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, James Earl Jones (who played Dr Magiot) and Raymond St Jacques, whose character was the sadistic police officer Concasseur. Roscoe Lee Browne, who was an uncanny Jolicoeur lookalike, was on hand as Petit Pierre. Max Pinchinat, a Haitian painter who lived in Paris, was persuaded to act as the fictional
houngan
(Voodoo priest). (During the filming Pinchinat insisted on biting the head off a live chicken and not a fake one, despite worries about protests from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.)

‘In the papers yesterday there is news that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor … have received anonymous threats of what will happen to them if they play in the film which is starting in a few days in Dahomey,' Graham reported in a letter to me. ‘I hope to go there for ten days in February to see how things are getting on.'

When Graham arrived in Dahomey, he recalled, he got a ‘terrible shock'. While driving from the airport to the capital, he was marvelling at certain similarities to Port-au-Prince when suddenly an iron sign loomed ahead along the roadway, with a look of permanence, that announced: ‘Welcome to Haiti.' Although the sign was only a prop for the movie, for an anxious moment Graham thought he had landed at the new Dr François Duvalier International Jet Airport in Port-au-Prince instead of Cotonou.