Travels (30 page)

So we have long since worked this out. One of the assistant directors is in the open cab of our locomotive, with a walkie-talkie. As we start each shot, he calls out the speeds. When we hit the prearranged speed, we begin filming. This is the procedure we have used throughout.

I click the walkie-talkie. “Chris, how fast was the train going on that last shot?”

From the locomotive, the voice says, “Thirty-five miles an hour.”

I look at Sean, shrug.

Sean grabs the walkie-talkie and says, “
How do you know it was thirty-five miles per hour?
”

There is a long pause.

“We count telegraph poles,” the voice says.

Sean hands the walkie-talkie back to me.

Slowly the pertinent facts emerge. The engine is an actual 1863 locomotive, and it has no speed instrumentation at all. To estimate speed, the men in the cab time telegraph poles as they go by. But this is obviously a terribly inaccurate method. Suddenly we wonder: how fast was the train really going?

The helicopter was flying parallel to the train for most of the shot. We radio the pilot. “How fast was the train going on the last shot?”

“Fifty-five miles an hour,” comes the reply. “We thought Mr. Connery was bloody crazy to be up there!”

Vindicated, Sean folds his arms across his chest. “You see?” he says.

In the end, that episode represented to me all the power of a fresh perspective. We had been filming for days, we had fallen into a comfortable routine, and not one of us had bothered to look at what the cab of the locomotive was like. For days no one had thought to ask, How do you
know the speed? The question was always there to be asked. It was just that no one had asked it, until Sean did.

One day, after lunch, Sean says, “I’m through at the end of the day.”

“What?”

“I’m through on the train,” he says evenly. “Finished. Going back to Dublin, have a kip.”

We have three more days of filming scheduled. I don’t think we’ll need all three days, but I feel there is at least one more full day of work. Why is he quitting?

“I’ve had it with this bloody train,” he says.

It has been such fun, such exhilarating fun, I can’t understand why his mood has changed so suddenly. Of course, he has seen all the dailies, and he knows how much good footage we already have. I have already shot about six hours of film to make what will eventually be a fifteen-minute sequence. So I am just being overcautious, as directors tend to be. Is he calling my bluff?

“I’m done,” he says. “I’m done.” And that is all he will say. He leaves at the end of the day, driving back to Dublin.

The next morning we shoot some final bits and pieces, points of view, establishing shots, and so on. I am on top of the train, with a stunt man and a camera operator. We are going very fast. At high speeds, the train rocks and jerks erratically; it is nerve-racking.

And suddenly, in an instant, I am done with the train, too. The tunnels aren’t fun any more, the overhanging wires aren’t a challenge any more, the jolts from the track and the freezing wind aren’t bracing any more. It is just dangerous and exhausting and I want to stop at once and get off the train. And I realize that is what happened to Sean the day before. He’d had enough, and he knew when to stop. The sequence is finished. It is time to go back to the studio, and do something else.

London Psychics
 

It was called the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain; I called it the psychic smorgasbord. They had all kinds of psychics, and you could consult them for only ten dollars an hour.

The association used its psychics to attract people to the religion of spiritualism. I had no interest in that, but I was very interested in the possibility of psychic phenomena, and the range of psychics was wonderful.

There were psychics who worked by psychometry, holding an object while they read; there were psychics who just started reading as you walked in the door; there were psychics who read tea leaves, others who read tarot cards, others who read flowers; there was one who did something with sand; there were psychics who told you about your family, your dead relatives, and your past lives; there were psychics who were psychological, and others who were very pragmatic. All together there were forty psychics associated with the association, and for anyone who had an interest in the general phenomenon of psychic behavior, it was almost too good to be true.

I went nearly every day, on my way home from work.

Coming in the door, you passed the chair of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the association’s most famous and influential member. That chair was always a sobering reminder to me. Anyone with a scientific background who becomes interested in metaphysical things must find the example of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle disturbing.

* * *

The creator of Sherlock Holmes was a Scottish physician, a lapsed Catholic, a vigorous athlete, and a Victorian gentleman. Although he is most closely associated with the cool, deductive mind of his fictional detective, Conan Doyle showed an interest in spiritualism, mysticism, and metaphysics even in medical school. His stories frequently contained a strong element of the supernatural; in such works as
The Hound of the Baskervilles
there is a continuous tension between a supernatural and a mundane explanation for events.

In 1893 Conan Doyle joined the Society for Psychical Research, a highly respectable organization: the politician Arthur Balfour was its president, and its vice-presidents included such eminent scientists as the American psychologist William James and the evolutionary naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Yet there was controversy as well, as exemplified by the scandal of the physicist William Crookes and the medium Florrie Cook.

In the nineteenth century, séances were popular. A group of paying customers would sit together in a dark room, and a medium would attempt to call up spirits from the Other Side. A good deal of paraphernalia was involved: silver trumpets through which the dead spoke, cabinets in which the mediums were locked, flying tambourines and other luminous objects that whipped through the air above the sitters. In the most spectacular displays, the medium would manifest ectoplasm, the face or form of a dead person. This was the specialty of Florrie Cook.

During her séances, Florrie would be locked in a cabinet, where she would go into a trance. Soon an extremely attractive young woman, wearing phosphorescent gowns, would step out. This beautiful apparition, supposedly a murderess named Katie King, would walk around the room. Naked beneath her diaphanous veils, she caused a sensation in Victorian England.

After attending a séance, William Crookes became so fascinated by mediumship that he moved Florrie Cook into his house for a period of months. In due time, Crookes pronounced Florrie genuine.

But it seemed obvious to most people that Florrie Cook and Katie King were the same person. Crookes claimed on two occasions to have seen both Florrie Cook and Katie King appear simultaneously, but his own objectivity was considered compromised, and in any case he was famous for his bad eyesight.

Eventually the controversial ghost Katie King ceased to appear, and Florrie Cook materialized a new ghost named Marie. One night Sir
George Sitwell grabbed Marie, who screamed and ran from the room. The sitters opened the locked cabinet and found it empty, with Florrie Cook’s clothes lying on the floor. Fraud was finally confirmed.

The episode of William Crookes and Florrie Cook seems an object lesson in the gullibility of a scientist. Yet Conan Doyle behaved much like Crookes; all his life he evinced a surprising willingness to accept all sorts of unlikely events. Although he said “the unmasking of false mediums is our urgent duty,” and although he exposed several instances of fraud himself, he was generally trusting to an extraordinary degree. This culminated in the episode of the fairy photographs, which bears all the characteristics of an incautious Conan Doyle adventure into the spiritual world.

In 1920 two Yorkshire children, Elsie and Frances Wright, claimed they had photographed fairies in a country garden. The girls’ father was an amateur photographer who kept his own darkroom. For this and for other reasons, the photographs immediately aroused suspicion. A spokesman for Eastman Kodak claimed they were “visibly fake.” An expert for the New York
Herald Tribune
said the fairies were dolls. Many people asked why the fairies were dressed in contemporary Paris fashions.

Conan Doyle sent a friend to interview the girls—he himself never met them. Then he examined the photographs, and published, in
The Coming of the Fairies
, his belief that the pictures of little winged people were genuine and proved fairies were real.

This was my concern: that an otherwise sensible physician-turned-author could go so far as to persuade himself, by degrees, of the existence of fairies. I had in the past strongly identified with Conan Doyle, and now I appeared to be following in his footsteps rather closely. I determined to proceed with caution.

It seemed as if the first thing was to get a sense of whether “psychic” behavior really occurred at all. Because I certainly knew, from my own medical experience, that you could learn an enormous amount just by observing somebody. And I had once spent a memorable hour watching a pair of Turkish street vendors in the Istanbul bazaar accost passing customers in a dozen different languages, always correctly. Plenty of ordinary, nonpsychic insight was possible, and I wanted to minimize that. So I set the following rules for myself:

1. I never gave my own name.

2. I never gave verbal cues during the reading. In practice, this meant I tried to say nothing at all, so that the psychic wouldn’t even know if I
was English or not. If I was pressed to speak, I would make a nondescript murmur like “Ummm” or “Hmmm.” However I first said this murmur, I would try to repeat it exactly the same way, with no change in inflection, for the rest of the interview. If the psychic pushed me to speak, I would say “Maybe” or “I’m not sure.” And then stick to that phrase throughout the reading.

3. I never gave visual cues during the reading. No extraneous body movements, no shifting in the chair as the reading was given. Take a position and hold it.

4. I tried to keep my mind blank. Just in case somebody could read my mind. You never know.

5. I tried to keep track of everything said, the hits and misses. There is a tendency to be impressed by the hits in psychic readings and to ignore the misses. I wanted to retain the balance. I took constant notes.

I was satisfied with this plan, but I knew it would be extremely difficult to carry out in practice. Although it was my intention not to give the psychics anything to “read” about me through ordinary channels, the fact is that we all present a huge amount of information to one another—clothing, posture, skin tone, body position, body movement, body smell, breathing rates, and so on—all the time. There isn’t any way to prevent that except by doing an interview by phone. Our physical presence is inescapably informative.

And although I did not intend to permit any body movements or voice inflections that would give feedback, I felt it unlikely that I would be able to follow my plan as perfectly as I would have liked. Nevertheless, I intended to make it as tough as possible.

As luck would have it, the first psychic I saw was wonderfully suited to my plans. She was past sixty, and nearly blind. She couldn’t hear very well, either, because she thought I was from London. I didn’t disagree with her. I just sat there. To make my mind blank, I concentrated on her swollen ankles.

She talked about this and that, making a few psychological comments, but nothing particularly specific. After about half an hour of rambling, she suddenly said, “What on earth do you do for work?,” with a sort of alarm in her voice.

Immediately she said, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. It’s just that I can’t put it together. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Then she told me what she was seeing.

She saw me working in a room like a laundry, with huge white baskets,
and there were black snakes coiling in the baskets, except that they weren’t snakes. And she heard this terrible sound, repeated over and over again, a kind of
Whaaaa-whoooo, whoooo-whaaaa
, and she saw pictures going forward and backward, forward and backward. And something about hats, or high hats, or old-style fashion.

This was what she couldn’t put together. And she found it unpleasant, these sounds and snakes and things. She said, “You are the most peculiar person.”

I, of course, knew exactly what she was seeing. She was seeing the place I had been virtually living in for the last two weeks, the editing room where we ran the film back and forth to the accompaniment of those hideous sounds. The film was
The Great Train Robbery
and the actors all wore high hats.

There was absolutely no way this little blind lady with swollen ankles could have known about that.

I left the interview feeling odd. All my careful plans now seemed irrelevant. No matter how I might have failed to control my body movement, my verbalizations and grunts, no matter how much she might have feigned blindness as she did a “cold reading” on me, I knew damned well I couldn’t have conveyed to her images of what an editing room looked like—images she would misconstrue as a laundry with snakes. I hadn’t tipped her off about that. It wasn’t possible. And not many people in the world had ever seen an editing room: it wasn’t common knowledge.