Cuts and Bruises E-Book

Frederic Raphael

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Personal Terms, was greeted in the TLS as 'a small masterpiece'. With the publication of Cuts and Bruises, the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. Cuts and Bruises concerns the 1970s, during which Raphael travelled widely (not least to Hollywood, which yields a mordantly sweet and sour account of figures such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and John Schlesinger) and wrote the acclaimed television series The Glittering Prizes. Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the world of the famous, though, and has little interest in 'names' and gossip except to notice the discrepancies between public and private faces and to convey the texture of life around him. Greece remains an abiding passion, and the conduct of Greek friends during the last months of the Colonel's tyranny leads to surprising reflections on exile and return. Raphael's notebooks, never intended for publication, are exercises in candour, precise observation and wit. Cuts and Bruises adds to the growing impression that Raphael is creating an engrossingly readable, stylish and enduring chronicle of his times.

Leseprobe

Frederic Raphael

Cuts and Bruises

Personal Terms 3

For Beetle

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction197419751976IndexAbout the AuthorAlso by Frederic Raphael from CarcanetCopyright

Introduction

A friend of mine at Cambridge, a pioneer of computer technology, claimed to have begun his PhD thesis with ‘As I have said before’. Since this is the third volume of my notebooks, it may sound more hollow than convincing to say again that I never intended to publish them. It is, however, still true. Notebooks are like a huge shadow which lengthens as you go forward, but remains invisible until you look back.

All but one or two of my cahiers are written in the spiral-bound squared exercise books of the kind used by French students. They have accumulated, as if written by some stealthy third hand, into a self-generated dossier of my life as a writer. I might have been spying on myself. The disjunctive paragraphs supply a join-up-the-dots portrait of the writer among others. If I am unsparing of those whom I describe, I have been hardly less harsh on F.R.

Since my purpose was to catch and pin ideas and images which might be useful later, I did not strive to be a phrase-maker, still less an entertainer, even of myself. Yet, since they are written in pen, these notes have more of a physical connection with their author than whatever I have typed or, more recently, entered on a word-processor, which is, nevertheless, the compulsive reviser’s and rewriter’s invention of choice. Holding a pen makes manuscript more like drawing than does the use of mechanical means. You declare yourself more revealingly in handwriting.

Only one criticism of the last volume, Rough Copy, stung me when I glanced at it. A reviewer about whose fiction I was less than complimentary some forty years ago, had bided his time, it seemed, to accuse me of ‘name-dropping’. In truth, the company of the famous has small appeal for me; and that of the titled or the rich none at all. I remember an occasion when I was in George Steiner’s house in Cambridge and he invited me, at short notice, to stay for dinner. Arthur Koestler was coming, as well as ‘two Nobels’. Presumably some classy person had failed the Steiners’ feast, and disrupted their seating plan, at the last moment. I was, Steiner reminded me, being given the chance to meet ‘a living legend’ (much of Steiner’s speech is cursively emphatic): Koestler was on more blacklists than anyone alive. He dared not return to (still Communist) Hungary, although frequently solicited. The Russians had never forgiven him for Darkness At Noon.* I was indeed tempted, but I had promised my wife that I would be home for dinner. I declined to be impressed. ‘You are uxorious, sir,’ George said.

Oh, is it name-dropping to call Steiner George? Or to say that one has been in his house? Come on! Since I am now over seventy years old and will, next year, have been publishing books, writing articles, essays, scripts and plays, for half a century, must I really apologise for having met a number of people whose names are, or have become, widely known? That I include notes about some of them, and have been friendly with a few, hardly turns me into Chips Channon, Cecil Beaton or Alan Clark.

I have, for most of the time, abided by Willie Maugham’s advice: if you have to choose between the company of a prominent politician and that of a suburban vet, the chances are that the latter will be more unguarded, and tell you spicier stories, than a cabinet minister.

These notebooks are evidence less of self-importance or social climbing (I have no head for those heights) than of long and emulous addiction to the Carnets or Cahiers in which French writers, of many persuasions and styles, have encapsulated their private views of life. Logan Pearsall Smith is one of the few English authors who have done the same; and he was a trans-cultural American. Cyril Connolly, who was briefly Pearsall Smith’s secretary, did something similar, but more showy (and delicious) in The Unquiet Grave, his masterpiece. The quality of a writer is measured more by the attention he gives to his work than by whether or not he ‘really means or really feels’ what he says: sincerity is not an art-form.

Those who write cahiers need by no means be at the centre of things. My most recent purchase in the genre is of the work of Joseph Joubert, who began writing in the last decade of the ancien régime. Born in 1754, he lived through the Terror, the Consulate, the Empire and the Restoration of the Bourbons, without much altering his tone of ‘innocence mélancholique’ or, it seems, his style of life: his passport of 1822 notes, as a distinguishing mark, that he wore a perruque (and that he was more than six feet tall, a useful height for an over-viewer). During all this time, he rarely commented directly on current history, though in 1804 he did allow himself to say of Napoleon, ‘Il a tué le duc d’Enghien, mais le duc d’Enghien a tué sa gloire.’ Napoleon had killed the Duke d’Enghien, but the duke had killed Bonaparte’s good name. This is neater than Talleyrand’s famous ‘Pire qu’un crime…’

Provincial philosophe and classical scholar, Joubert described himself as ‘Platone platonior’: one who out-Platoed Plato. He sustained his succinct prolificity through no less than 205 cahiers as well as in many pages of unbound observations. If he was never in the first rank, Sainte-Beuve’s Portrait littéraire says of him that his work crowned the series of French aphorists which began with La Rochefoucauld, continued with Pascal, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues ‘et qui se rejoint, par cent détours, à Montaigne’.

More recently, Maurice Blanchot pointed out that Joubert did not, like the others, specialise in bons mots. Typical of Joubert’s austerity is his remark of July 1797: ‘La Bible est aux religions ce que l’Iliade est à la poésie’ (The Bible is to religions what the Iliad is to poetry). It is not an aperçu of rare quality, but then we get: ‘… et [les gens] puisent dans ce livre une sagesse qui n’y est pas’ (and people read into this book a wisdom which is not there). The dry ambiguity matches that of Gibbon’s footnote about Apollonius of Tyana: ‘Apollonius… was born at about the same times as Jesus Christ. His life (that of the former) is related in so fabulous a manner… that we are at a loss to discover whether he was a sage, an impostor, or a fanatic.’

Joubert’s own literary creed was advertised in a programmatic entry of the previous day: ‘Ne pas: – définir ce qui est connu: un bavardage. Mettre en question ce qui est en fait: mauvaise foi, ignorance. Rendre abstrait ce qui est palpable: charlatanisme. Et offrir des difficultés qui ne s’offrent pas elles-mêmes ou n’ont qu’une vaine apparence: chicane.’ Which, being translated, comes to: Dont’s: define what is already known: windbaggery. Put in question what is actually the case: bad faith, ignorance. Render abstract what is palpable: charlatanry. Create difficulties which are not really there, or have nothing but the empty appearance of problems: quibbling (with a hint of chic perhaps). The list just about covers the sins of the showboating intellectual down the ages, never so keenly paraded as virtues as in today’s academic hermeneutics.

As a philosophe (and youthful protégé of Diderot), Joubert was as keen a reader of Locke and Berkeley as of Descartes, about whose scepticism he was, to say the least, sceptical. Noting that Locke observes ‘Maxims do not enlighten’, Joubert adds that they may not, but that they guide and direct: ‘Elles sauvent aveuglement. C’est le fil dans le labyrinthe, la boussole pendant la nuit’ (They save blindly: the thread in the labyrinth, the compass at night).

Joubert’s irony often goes no further than an accurate record of casual remarks. For instance: ‘Le mot de Mme de Genlis: “Aux yeux de la religion, il n’y a point de mariages mal assortis”’ (A remark of Mme de Genlis: In the eyes of religion, there is no such thing as unsuitable – or ill-suited – marriages). Does this hint that Joubert was happily or unhappily matched? Or that Mme de Genlis ‘believed in’ marriage or that she was a libertine wit? The remark stands free; you may make of it what you will, and welcome. In this, Joubert is wittier, and more varied, than E.M. Cioran, a voluble modern epigrammatist who has his glum elegance, but is so resolutely and invariably disillusioned as to smack of smugness.

I have dwelt on Joubert because he is a recent discovery of mine (in an excellent bookshop in Bergerac). I am delighted by his occasional company, but would I have liked him personally? Would he have liked me? What does it matter? An artist’s style need in no way match the man himself; a disshevelled, ill-dressed scribbler may be a meticulous grammarian and an obsessive corrector of trifling infelicities. Horace described himself as Epicuri de grege porcus (a pig from Epicurus’ herd), but his verses were never swinish.

One can perfectly well admire a man’s work and detest him personally. Certainly one can think little of someone’s work and yet regard him, or her, with affection or even with love. As I edited these pages, I was sometimes shocked, and surprised, by the rigour with which I commented on, for instance, Michael Ayrton, whose company and much of whose work I relished. Yet Michael struck me as he struck me, and there it is, undeniable, on paper. Why should I suppress it, and in whose interest? I still miss Michael and shall never, I hope, forget the day in the Périgord when he and Sarah Raphael, aged fifteen, and I sat side by side sketching the local town, Belvès. Contrary, and surprising, feelings are part of what we are. It is false tact not to acknowledge them.

People may take these cahiers as they wish, but in my own view there is no malice in them: nothing is perverted or misrepresented in order to wound. As before, I cannot deny that I have sometimes trimmed, and occasionally – for courtesy’s sake – tamed or omitted my raw material. I have tried to keep personal and ephemeral matters in the background: I am not and never wanted to be a diarist. However, since my wife and our children are at the heart of my life, it would be more pretentious than discreet to relegate them to insignificance.

I will, for form’s sake, apologise to any who are offended or incensed, but – in the reported words of Pontius Pilate – ‘Ho gegrapha, gegrapha’: what I have written, I have written.

I leave Joubert to supply the last mot: ‘Ecrire, écrire! C’est un talent, c’est un métier et c’est un art. L’exercise en apprend le métier, le goût en fait deviner l’art’ (Scribble, scribble! It’s a talent, it’s a skill and it’s an art. By its exercise the skill is learned; taste gives a clue to its art).

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

2006

* Not a Koestler scholar, I wonder whether it is often remarked that Rubashov, the Old Bolshevik ‘hero’ of Koestler’s novel, bears a Jewish name. It is a mark of Koestler’s artfulness that the Inquisitors never (so far as I can remember) taunt Rubashov for being a zhid. However brave A.K.’s denunciation of Stalinist paranoia, the fact that Rubashov is neither taunted as a Jew nor physically tortured, as so often happened in fact, suggests that even Koestler could not quite bear to see Soviet Russia for the fascisto-gangster régime it was.

1974

Feb. 74. Ralph’s in Beverly Hills. A female a little older than a girl, wearing beltless, faded jeans so low on her hipless hips that you saw the crease of her ass and, when she turned, the shadow of her groin; her face veiled by the usual sunglasses, seemingly marooned in a narcissistic nightmare, she drifted up to me and asked, did I know where she would find blue cheese. I looked and there it was. She turned her flat behind and helped herself, as if inviting me to do the same. But her problem was not solved: she wanted crumbled blue cheese. Did she want it for a dressing? Right, she told the guy, but she had to be sure it was ‘pure’. Had she been dogged previously by impure blue cheese?

The Malibu beach house. A wooden box on a stage of railroad sleepers. You look out of the living room window onto the ocean. Sandpipers race the waves, scampering to avoid wet ankles, then chasing the receding wet for food.

I went with Stanley Donen to a ‘bagel-ah’. We had hot Chicago pastrami sandwiches. A young guy runs the place: dark eyes, pageboy haircut, confident grin. ‘Where’s your friend?’ he asked Stanley. ‘In London.’ ‘Yvette go with him?’ His wife is more famous along the coast than Stanley is these days.

It was the same with the tennis coach, Forrest Stewart: ‘Oh sure,’ he said, ‘I know Yvette.’ He has longish greying hair and his young eyes look at you with venal caution. He charges $20 an hour. The first afternoon he had a canvas harness on his elbow, with straps to keep the arm crooked. It gave the impression that he was playing in pain and needed the money. He recently had a hernia operation and is trying to get back into shape. He played in a tournament on the weekend: four matches in one afternoon. Presumably he got to the final. It was an over-35 event, so despite his skill, he must be a failure. He hits the lines with enviable regularity.

Bill Ballance. We listen to Billo’s radio show as we drive to the beach. People call in with stories of their personal grievances, often about ungrateful bosses or cheating spouses. When they tell him a good one, he says, ‘You can’t beat that with a stick.’

He called one boss about the raise his employee was too frightened to ask for. The boss said, ‘Is that Raymond you’re talking about?’ ‘Raymond, that’s right. He says you owe him.’ ‘You tell that cheap bastard he’s fired. Tell him not to come in tomorrow.’ Raymond interrupted, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK.’ ‘Forget it,’ the boss said, ‘far as I’m concerned you’re through.’ Raymond was devastated. ‘Way it goes sometimes,’ Billo said.

K. dropped in casually to see Stanley. They were chatting when suddenly he said, ‘Of course you know I’m impotent.’

‘How do you want your whisky, Ken? Ice?’

She had been in analysis for six years. Her abiding problem was that she could not choose between two men. During one session, she burst out, saying that her analyst knew her better than she knew herself; he must help her decide. He said it was absolutely forbidden by his professional code that he do anything like that. She told him he was a coward and a hypocrite and a moral eunuch and she had no further use for him; she was terminating her analysis forthwith and she would never come back. Five days later she received a letter from him. Since he was no longer her psychiatrist, he was absolved from professional reticence. He could not help her to choose between the two men in her life because he was in love with her himself and had been for five years. He left his wife and children and went to live with her. His wife committed suicide and he then married his ex-patient. He was barred from practising in New York, so they moved out of town.

I wrote a short story called He’ll See You Now after hearing this (true) story. In 1984, I directed Susan Sarandon in a TV version of it, in the BBC series Oxbridge Blues. Susan did it for pennies and won a Best Actress award.

Billy Wilder. He was in Dominick’s when we dined there on Tuesday, a thick man with a large greying head, but still snappy enough with a comeback to be tough to pass at the net. Stanley told us that Billy wanted to make a movie about a Russian scientist who defects to the West. His wife and child are arrested and tortured. Then he goes back, because that was exactly what he wanted to have happen.

Wilder said of ‘the Hollywood Ten’, the ‘unfriendly witnesses’ arraigned by Joe McCarthy, ‘Only two of them are talented; the rest are just unfriendly.’

Stanley told me that he was very frightened at the time of the hearings. People were being blacklisted on a points system, so many for having contributed to the Abraham Lincoln brigade, so many for belonging to the Russo-American Friendship society, and so on. Stanley had ‘points in all directions’: he had contributed to everything. He escaped because, at the time, he was too unimportant to be worth sacrificing: ‘too skinny for the sharks, and anyway, they had enough directors.’

I asked if the town was full of ghosts for him.

‘No. Truth is, I don’t really care about anybody. Not anybody.’ He said it with sly bravado, as if it were a sexual confession. He added quickly, ‘Well, not many people. I care about you. I feel as if we’re really friends, even if we don’t see each other very often.’

Stanley has bought a very big property on Stone Canyon, in Bel Air. The house resembles a wing of a disused airport terminal. You approach up a sweeping, swept drive, under a huge sycamore; the wide verge is veiled with ivy. A circular plateau in front of the house had so many cars parked there that I thought at first that the place was an apartment building. They belonged to the staff: secretary, maid, Hickey the chauffeur (who left his wife to come with Stanley from London), and who all else.

Yvette was writing a script for ABC TV in longhand on a yellow legal pad in the vastness of the living room. Through wide glass walls you could see a kidney-shaped pool in the windless patio. Stanley says he bought the house only because they couldn’t put in a tennis court at Oak Pass, Yvette’s house, which we have rented for $1,500 a month. Near where Yvette was working was a model of the new version of the house. Paramount’s design and construction department is charged with the operation.

Stanley also bought the house because, had he not done so, he would have had to pay a fat slice of tax on the £285,000 he got for his house in Montpellier Square. Unless he spent the same amount on a ‘primary residence’, Uncle Sam would grab it. When he got to Beverly Hills, he found there was a property slump, as a result of the recession. He was shown one house after another by the realtor (Mrs Music, whose boards are all around town). She was delighted to have a customer at all and kept telling him what a bargain he would be getting. Finally, he said, ‘Excuse me, but don’t you have anything that’s overpriced?’

He is going to be fifty in a couple of months and likes to think that he wants to retire. He no longer longs to make movies, but he needs, or likes, to make money. He is surrounding Yvette with a soft prison; he shackles her with generosity. He has her sit on his lap at dinner parties, the envy of staider couples. Plump with happiness, a little pot of pride spills over the top of his diet. Yet his eyes foresee the tragedy which he cannot help imagining, and for which he is building the sets. They never did put in a tennis court.

The fog comes in off the ocean at Malibu, rolling up the sunshine like an old yellow carpet.

Tennis at Carter de Haven’s house. A Mexican gardener carries one treelet after another across the terrace. Carter is neat and bearded and has two lessons a week from Forrest Stewart. The latter’s life had been ruined by the ponies. He kept the ladies happy around Beverly Hills by telling them how much their game has improved.

In the middle of the tennis game, Carter becomes agitated. ‘Excuse me, I see something that disturbs me.’ The Philippino houseboy is cleaning the windows with soap and water. Carter signals to him (he is upstairs, inside) and calls, ‘Hot water only.’ The glass has been specially treated; soap destroys the finish.

The conversation afterwards, with Irwin Winkler, is about grosses. Zardos has opened big, but will it hold? By way of courtesy, Carter asks me how April, June and November is doing. ‘My books don’t sell,’ I say. ‘They’re just good.’ He greets this with the uncomfortable smile of an atheist confronted by faith.

On the beach. The loud, broadcasting voice of a rather handsome girl, face without make-up, who came and sat on the step of sand marking the limit of where the tractors sweep the foreshore. She was joined by a man in his thirties, dark with deep-set eyes and the kind of beard too blue for television. ‘My life has been on the downside for the last six months,’ he said, ‘and now I think I’m due for the upside. What do you think?’

‘Questionable.’

He did not speak again. She thrust her white, unshaven legs in front of her and her monotonous voice told him how she could join the artistic community in San Francisco as easy as anything, only he had introduced a new factor in her life. He looked at her with apprehensive lordliness as if he had taken delivery of something that carried an altogether too heavy tax.

Ray Stark can no longer get the stars to come to the parties in the house he shares with his hated wife, Fran. She is lacquered from the shoulders up and doesn’t sway in the strongest winds. I was asked to play tennis at his house. ‘It’s worth it just to walk through the garden. He has over three million dollars’ worth of sculpture in the place.’

‘I consider myself a pretty hip guy,’ Stark once said to me, in a suite at the Dorchester, when he was trying to get me to write a piece for Miss Streisand (‘She’s a number one cunt’). He was wearing a yellow sweatshirt and car-salesman’s pants. His parties are all black tie affairs. Barbra would come only if he sent a car for her.

The cars drive slowly. One evening there was a squeal of tires and a crash across the valley. Everyone is very polite. They wish you good day. On the morning of our third day a man was found beaten to death a couple of miles away.

Pauline Stone, who was married to Larry Harvey, was at dinner at Carter and Bobbie de Havens’. She has red hair and beautiful green eyes and wears widowed make-up: her grief is a cosmetic which adds interest to her face. She is here to dispose of the contents of Larry’s house on Coldwater Canyon. It is priced at $600,000, and has only one bedroom; a high price without Larry in the bed.

Dinner was Chinese, the usual with fried noodles. I helped myself modestly, leaving room for the next course. It was ice cream and then it was coffee time. Bobbie told me that she was most turned on by diamonds. She once had a dealer show her his stock. He opened a flat case and there was a million dollars’ worth of stones. Her dark eyes sparkled like zircons as she confessed her rapture. She no longer owns the diamonds she bought: ‘Too dangerous.’

Before dinner, Carter’s daughter Melinda came in to say hullo. A man had come up to her in the parking lot of a supermarket and ‘flashed’, right there in broad daylight. ‘Yes, I’ve got one,’ he said. She said, ‘You won’t have if I kick it.’ Then she realised that she was being filmed at the same time. As she went out, she promised to be home ‘before curfew’. ‘Good girl.’

R.G. asked Robin Straw’s wife Patty how things went on vacation with her neighbour, songwriter Tommy W., and made it clear what kind of things he meant. She said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

R.G. said, ‘Oh come on, darling!’

She assured him that she and Tommy went on long walks together and admired the stars. ‘It was purely Platonic.’

R.G. then saw that Tommy had his hand under Patty’s skirt and she her hand inside his fly. Which Plato was she thinking of?

Sinatra can fix anything; it is his supreme luxury. Natalie had a make-up man in New York whom she wanted to come and work on the Coast. The California union never allows New York to work out here. She tried everything, and then Sinatra. The make-up man was given an address and an appointment. He was confronted by a well-known Chicago gangster who gave him to understand that this was a one-off concession. He became the only New York make-up man to work on the West Coast, once.

John Schlesinger has a ten-foot-square Japanese bed. His bedroom looks onto the pool where a troop of young men are constantly on parade. ‘I call them my puppies, dear,’ he told Jimmy Clark.

‘What’re you going to do? Are you going to stay here?’

He looked very alarmed. His lover, Michael, is a Californian photographer, and an ambitious one. If John goes back to England, how will he keep Michael? John is not faithful to his love: who knows how many of his puppies have been in his basket? Jim thinks he is in great danger: the young men are as vicious as they are handsome. When Ramon Navarro was murdered by a collection of charmers, he was tortured for twenty-four hours first, and castrated, before they finally allowed him to die. They were never caught.

Robert Cohen, at Mo-Town, told us he was at a Beverly Hills party for Sunday Bloody Sunday, when ‘a guy came up to Schlesinger and said, “That was a film made by a Jew faggot about a Jew faggot and the only people who’re going to go see it are other Jew faggots.” John turned his back’. Figures.

Lunch at the Brown Derby with Stanley’s lawyer, Harold Berkowitz. ‘I’m an old, old admirer of yours,’ he said to me.

Stanley said, ‘I knew about the old, old part.’

A friend of H.B.’s, another lawyer, went to Europe on a ‘much-needed’ holiday. He no sooner arrived than he had a call in the middle of the night. His second daughter, a student at UCLA had been murdered, ‘right here in Beverly Hills, beautiful girl, twenty years old’.

Ray Carpenter. He came to Carter’s house to make up a four. Irwin Winkler had shaved his beard, and his smile, and was jet-lagged, but he and Carter took the first set 6–0. Carpenter wore a light-blue tracksuit and played with a metal racket that needed tuning. He was very disagreeable, with the face of a Disney fox, eyes narrowed with calculation, mouth half-open for anything tasty. I won whatever points he did not throw away. He woke up when Carter made a $5 side bet on the second set, and gave us two games lead. We won 6–1.

When Irwin dropped out with a bad ankle, ‘Chip’ – Carter’s twelve-year-old son – came in. Carpenter took him as partner and the bets were replaced. The kid played well and his father went to pieces. They beat us in the first set and lost the second, which Carpenter did not want to play, 7–5. He treated the boy with amiable gruffness, calling him ‘Chipper’, but grew testy.

Over a Martini, he reminisced about ‘the old Beverly Wilshire, where we used to play eight and nine sets a day’. He played with Gonzales and Segura, ‘all those people. There was everything: tennis, sex, laughs.’ He played a lot with an actor called Mark Stevens. ‘Know what he’s doing now? He’s bought a place in Mallorca and he’s teaching tennis. That guy teaching tennis!’

‘You know something,’ Carter said, ‘he’s probably happy.’

‘He may be, but I’ll tell you something: you think I’ve got bad strokes, you shoulda seen his.’

Stevens was something of a star during the war. ‘He was 4-F and just about the only guy under thirty in the place who wasn’t a fag. He was a nut, used to walk around Beverly Hills with a German shepherd and a big club. Said he never knew when he might be attacked. Guy ruined his chances by insulting one studio head after the other. “You Jewish cocksucker,” he used to shout at them until finally every gate was shut against him.’

Peter Guber at Columbia. About thirty, he has the big office and the two secretaries. As soon as he promised to speak frankly you knew you couldn’t trust a word he said. He sat very energetically, constantly altering his posture to emphasise the dexterity of his enthusiasm as he told the beads of his latest purchases. He had paid $200,000 for this book and $300,000 for that. He chided Mardigian – only kidding! – for never sending him any properties.

I said, ‘Have you ever consulted your files and checked on all the books your predecessors spent two and three hundred thousand dollars buying?’

He never had, and he was not about to pay much for the suggestion.

David Begelman wandered in during the meeting. I remember him a genial man, plumply available, who was going to do great things for me if I joined CMA. Now he is head of Columbia, but – having recently been in hospital – he looks like a sick prospector, determinedly returning to the scene of the mine. He has been ordered ‘complete rest’. There is, it seems, nothing incompatible between that and running the studio. Begelman looks as if he had less lost weight than been robbed of it.

In conversation with my agent, I described Peter Guber, who never sat still, as ‘The Electric Jew’. Not long afterwards I was phoned by a New York publisher who wanted to commission a novel with that title. ‘Great title.’ A fat deal was made for the book and a movie tie-in, but I could never write a word of it. I gave back the advance. My agent said, ‘Tell them you did a lot of work on it. You don’t have to give it all back.’ But I did.

Yvette is like one of those easy quotations one keeps forgetting. What exactly does she look like? Slim, blonde, light on her feet, she is humble, soft-spoken (in the style of Audrey H.) and constantly smiling. One can enumerate her qualities, as one paraphrases the elusive line, but she still escapes exact definition. Elusiveness is crucial to her style. She does nothing out of the ordinary but her modesty seems too perfectly modulated not to be covering something less harmonious. The house in Oak Pass which she has rented us has the same stringent propriety; it was too perfect, a dream with no subconscious stuffing.

S.D. is reticent about The Little Prince, which was recently re-edited. He seems to have quarrelled with all the available personnel, including Lerner of Lerner and Loew, who did not conceal their disappointment with the semi-final result.

S.D.’s Fox picture (Lucky Lady) seems likely to go ahead. Warren called when I was with S. down at the Malibu beach-house, next to the Jiffy station where, by the end of February, you were no longer served in a jiffy, or any other way.

‘Warren, tell me the truth now, Warren, what do you think?’

I absented myself and walked round the house to where Yvette was reading a Corgi of The Limits of Love, which she had bought from John Sandoe in Chelsea. She praised it with such exact enthusiasm that I might have been a potential enemy she was keen to disarm. She is, one feels, a mistress of calculated spontaneity: her advertised desire for S. may be more to do with honouring a deal than with true passion. The publicity of their embraces seems to be his greatest satisfaction. Bob Shapiro says that they ‘neck like teenagers’ at Hollywood parties. A cynic may wonder if Yvette is adhering loyally to a scenario rather than gratifying an urgent impulse. A l’époque, every young actress had to play the nun’s part, at least once. Yvette’s devotion is hardly devout, but it has the decided docility of the convert.

I picked up the telephone and had composed the first four digits of John’s Hollywood Hills number when I thought, ‘Why the hell should I want to speak to Schlesinger?’

Stanley says he is fond of me. It’s nice of him. Even if he is pulling the wool over my eyes, I have the consolation of knowing that it’s the finest cashmere.

On the last day of our stay, Beetle, Stee and I were asked to the beach-house to eat a pot of chili Yvette had cooked. We hesitated, with one-fifth of a tank of gas in the Mercury, but we went. Stanley was on the sandy patch next to the porch and a swimsuited girl was face-down beside him. Her hair was browner than I remembered Yvette’s, but hair-colours change like stoplights. The slim body, more athletic than some, could have been Yvette’s, but it actually belonged to Yvette’s friend Julie Anthony, who reached the quarter finals at Wimbledon last year. She had strong legs and small breasts and greeted us with the keen caution of a celebrity’s receptionist. She is ‘in school’, taking a PhD in psychology at UCLA.

At half past noon, S. offered the chili. Yvette was at the hairdressers’ and running late: she had called, there had been some mess-up about appointments. The newest excuse for unscheduled absence is the energy crisis. Stephen Spielberg was supposed to be there, but maybe he had a hairdresser too. He had told Stanley he had seen Two for the Road eight times. S. served the chili, with assistance from Hickey, while Julie Anthony, the good sport, cooked Stee a hamburger. Stanley worried about Yvette.

She arrived in a halo of curls. They did the big kiss. She was so sorry, everybody; had they messed her around or what? She put herself out so charmingly for Stee that one only just failed to be charmed. She ran, with a pretty display of her slim hips and rounded rump, down to the sea with him and, with an amazing show of heedlessness, spent her whole hair-do in the first available waves. Failing to notice the implausibility of her action, I needed B.’s later prompting before I could see it as both silly and sinister. Stanley, it seemed, was quicker: the afternoon was charged with unexpressed dismay. What woman spends all morning at the hairdresser, arrives with her hair newly combed (B. says it could all have been done in ten minutes) and goes straight into the sea? Yvette has had many men and no doubt they have been ‘generous’ as she is to her family (‘The generosity of that girl you just would not believe,’ Stanley told us).

Harvey Orkin told how old Joe Schenk used to go up to attractive girls and say, ‘Here’s the deal, if you want to be my girl: a thousand a week, chequing account, etc. Whaddaya say?’ Warren is more economical: ‘I’m Warren Beatty, the movie star. How would you like to get laid by a movie star? It won’t take long.’

Yvette’s feelings for Stanley are not incompatible with prudent consideration. In California, women who like money are not in the least disreputable: they are a comfort to those who have only money to offer. To be accessible for money is a kind of generosity: to deny a man because you will not have him except for nothing (a love match indeed) is to remind the ugly of their ugliness and the old of their age.

There are hotels on Sunset where you can hire a waterbed in a mirror-lined room, with closed-circuit porno, for less money, and fewer questions asked, than for an hour’s tennis. Prostitution is just another personal service, like murder.

The conviction of Charles Manson, the very fact of his capture, should enable householders to sleep easier, but if Manson is behind bars, his spirit cannot be caged: the most amiable kid could feel like killing you; and what you feel like doing, man, that’s your trip, right? To be surprised is to be passé. Stanley can enjoy his suspicions (whatever turns you on), but cannot be seen to suffer from them: that would be to break the pact of superficiality to which ‘the community’ demands allegiance.

Sandy Shapiro (to Bobbie de Haven): ‘Beverly Hills is so tacky.’ ‘Tacky?’ ‘It’s so tacky.’ ‘Beverly Hills?’ ‘I think so.’

‘How did you like Disneyland? Isn’t it wonderful?’ We went on a windy morning. The Anaheim streets were out of focus with dust. ‘It’s the cleanest city you’ve ever seen,’ Bob Shapiro said. It is a bogus town and the wind dispersed its charm. It panders to every vapid fantasy that vapid people will buy in commercially viable numbers. The management’s lack of imagination chimes perfectly with its customers’. The ‘fun-loving’ pirates are watched ‘sacking a town’ and those who gaze at so harmless a charade see no analogy with Vietnam and Uncle Sam’s fun-loving soldiery. To criticise this innocence in solemn terms is to use the methods of the (old) New Criticism to analyse the jingles on a birthday card. Disneyland is the projection of the asexual, pre-Freudian childhood in which old Walt dreamed of lodging the world, and did: he literally cleaned up.

The spotlessness of Disneyland emphasises the dirt it eliminates. It is the triumph of the mechanical and the fraudulent. The Haunted House fails to work as a scary spectacle because it cannot be allowed to remind us of anything genuinely frightening. Ambiguity is forbidden; and a shadow that is not ambiguous cannot give you the chills. The violence works because it is part of the childish mind: war is modern man’s second childhood, in which heroin, not candy, keeps you going. Disneyland is a cat-house for juvenile desires.

The Vietnam war reflects the California ethos: the rich man wins and the poor man yields way. ‘Why don’t the Vietnamese love us?’ really means, ‘Why don’t they bow to wealth the way we do? Why can’t they understand how much money we’re throwing at them when we bomb the shit out of them?’

Alan Pakula. The russet beard supplies a leonine appearance. You’re not sure whether it’s because he is a lion or because he’s a leper.

5.4.74. In Belize. The first we heard of Karl was in the dining room, when he said loudly, ‘If they ever need to give the world an enema, this is where they’ll put the tube in.’ Karl had blundered into marine survey (he wore a badge with K.R. MARINE SURVEYOR on it) after service in the Royal Canadian Navy. No salvage expert claims to be one. He is employed by a company in NYC. He never sees his boss and does not even know what his salary is; he lives on his expenses and his wife takes care of the rest. He is consciously Jewish and would conform to the stereotype of a Jewish marine surveyor, if such a thing existed (he greeted me as ‘Landsman!’). He is dapper (the upsweep of his moustache maintained by wax specially ordered from France) and, he says, a dedicated coward. He tries to think of, and prevent, the smallest conceivable danger. He is devoted to his wife and children, but above all to his mother.

He and she had a hard time during the war. They lived in a Ukrainian district of Vancouver, BC. Karl was an only child and his father was overseas for five years. The Ukrainians were vigorously anti-Semitic. ‘That was when I learnt to handle myself, and that meant staying alive.’ Their landlord wanted to evict them (to get a higher rent from a defence worker), but it was illegal to get rid of servicemen’s families. He gave them a hard time instead.

Karl’s father was a mild man; Karl never heard him raise his voice. When he came home from the war he kissed R.’s mother and then he threw the landlord through a plate-glass window and then he went and changed his clothes and took a bath.

Karl’s mother is now a widow. He telephones her once a week: ‘I get a hook-up wherever I am, Brazil, New Guinea wherever.’ The Canadian at the next table in the restaurant at the Fort St George Hotel called over that he had been to New Guinea. Karl capped all his stories. He told how one time he had been going down a river in a canoe and remarked on the thickness and strength of a liana hanging from a tree they were about to pass under. ‘Liana?’ said the boatman. ‘We don’t have lianas.’ The man then pulled an elephant gun from under the thwarts and fired. The ‘liana’ was an anaconda. ‘I’ve seen them twenty-five feet long,’ the other Canadian said. ‘This one was thirty,’ Karl said. ‘At least.’ The recoil of the elephant gun pushed the canoe twenty feet back upstream.

While he was in New Guinea, Karl treated a native woman’s child for a septic ulcer (‘He had a hole this big in his leg’). Penicillin was more effective than balls of spiders’ webs mixed with mud. The woman gave Karl the amulet which he showed us he was wearing on his wrist. At first he had thought it was a copper bangle. When he got home, he discovered it was 22 carat gold. ‘My wife said, “Your arm is worth more than the rest of your body put together.” She ought to know.’

At home, he works out every morning with the Early Birds Club from his local temple. Then he swims two miles. Sometimes he doesn’t have time to go home at all between jobs; his wife meets him at the airport with a change of clothes and a packet of sandwiches.

He investigates all kinds of losses. One client was being robbed of tons of grain, although there was never any sign of a door or window being forced. Karl found an old map which showed that a disused sewer ran below the building. The thieves had driven upwards through the floor and piped the grain out, through the sewer, into tanker trucks parked several blocks away.

On another case, shipping containers were being robbed even though their seals remained unbroken. Karl asked to go to the plant where they were being manufactured. He realised that some of them were made with special hinges which allowed the doors to be opened the wrong way, using the sealed side as the hinge.

He makes enemies. A longshoreman once asked him what he was going to do about a racket he had uncovered. Karl said, ‘If you’re stupid enough to ask, you’re too stupid to be told.’ The man pulled a gun. R. swiped him with a steel bar that happened to be handy. The man lives in an iron lung; it’s not easy to shift cargo with a broken back.

The hands that were working for him on the reef where his present problem had been wrecked have gone to the local ‘cathouse’. Karl left them to it: ‘Me, I figure if you can have filet mignon at home, why mess with bought hamburger?’

The skipper of the current wreck won his affection by saying, ‘Before we talk, let’s have a drink.’ His crew were in a bad state until, and even after, the lifeboat arrived. They wanted to get the hell off the ship, which was holed and balanced on the reef. They made a commotion when the lifeboat stood off. Two of the lifeboat crew dived into the terrifying seas and swam to the reefed steamer. ‘Got any cigarettes?’ they called. The ship’s crew was pacified by this act of leisurely cadging; they figured the sea couldn’t be that dangerous.

The wreck took place because someone had gone out to the reef and stolen the now valuable mercury on which the marine light floated. Such a thing never happened even during the war when there was an unspoken agreement between the allied and German ships’ captains not to interfere with marine lights.

Karl had been in Biafra helping to clear the river at Port Harcourt. There were so many cadavers in the water that it was bright red. An ichthyologist and Karl were to go down to examine the obstacles. Karl was over the side when the other man flipped him back in the boat. The water was alive with sharks, over fifteen hundred of them. Looking through his specialised equipment, the ichthyologist said that he had seen species he had never seen before.

There was no defence to a shark except perhaps to remain quite still. The shark has very poor vision and is attracted by any disturbance in the water. He cannot stop, or he will drown; he must move constantly forward in order to drive water through his gills. It is false that he has to turn belly upwards if he wants to eat. He does that only to twist a joint off a torso. Holt, the Australian Prime Minister who drowned, was almost certainly attacked by a shark. He had been spear-fishing and was swimming back with his catch attached to his waist. A shark was probably alerted because the fish jiggled and glittered as he swam along. Once one of those things comes in a line towards you, nothing can make him stop. ‘A shark in a feeding frenzy is the most terrifying thing you can ever hope to see.’

Karl tries to think of everything: ‘It’s the only way to stay alive.’ Once he was working with an Englishman whom he much respects on a big job which involved cutting a lot of steel plate. They loaded cylinders of acetylene in the hold of the supply ship. When the time came to sail, Karl refused to board. Why? He said that the caps of acetylene cylinders had a way of working loose sometimes and if they did the cylinders went off with enough force to blow a hole in the side of the ship. He would go on board only if they were stowed on deck. ‘To oblige a coward’, they moved the cylinders. Two days out to sea, one of them came unscrewed and went off like a rocket. If it had been in the hold, it would have sunk the ship.

In Brazil one time, an ocean-going barge had sunk in the main channel of Bahia harbour. It was deep enough not to interfere with shipping but the admiral in charge of the harbour insisted on having it removed. Karl wanted to blow it up, but the admiral refused. The lifting gear necessary was several thousand miles away and it cost $8,000 a day to get it there. Karl realised that the wreck had settled on very soft sand. At four in the morning, he laid charges, quite small ones, in strategic places on top of the aluminium hull. When the charges were blown, the water of the tideway did not even blister. The weight of the water was sufficient, as he had calculated, to return the force of the explosion and drive the wreck downwards into the sandbank with enough impetus to bury it completely.

The next morning, the admiral said, ‘When are you going to move that boat?’ Karl said, ‘What boat?’ The admiral said, ‘Don’t play games with me.’ ‘There is no boat,’ Karl said, ‘look for yourself.’

The admiral sent for naval divers who went down and reported no sign of a boat in the channel.

Karl’s employers were asked to salvage a ship sunk in Bahrain harbour. He had it conveyed to the Sultan’s agent that he was a Jew. After some time, he received a message from the Sultan’s assistant to go and see him in his hotel suite. The Sultan was pleased, he was told, on this occasion to allow him to undertake the work, despite being a Jew. Karl said he was glad to hear it, but he still couldn’t do the job. The Arab told him that he had misunderstood: the difficulties had been removed, he could enter Bahrain freely. Karl said that he was not interested in the Sultan’s permission and walked out. His boss backed him.

By our last day in Belize, Karl’s steamer was off the reef, with a six-inch (?) hole in her bottom which had let in enough water to spoil a third of the cargo. A British army chopper was due to guide her into Belize City harbour through the reef. We saw it taking off as we went to the airport on our way to Guatemala.

Karl loved books and music almost as much, a sour judge might say, as he loved himself. I liked him. He promised to send Stee (who was seven years old) a shark’s jaws, but he never did.

‘Do you know everything?’ He thought for a moment and then he said, ‘No.’

What Ken McLeish failed to appreciate in my translation of Catullus 3 is the mocking element in C.’s commiseration over the dead ‘sparrow’. Surely he was jealous of the endearments Lesbia lavished on the bird. ‘Damned sparrow’ seems to me a proper phrase here. The rival has been removed; all that remains to vex C. is the evidence of Lesbia’s regret.

Two old, academic friends, living some distance apart, have a fierce epistolary quarrel in the public prints (say, the TLS). Violent rupture seems certain, but they agree on a final face-to-face, with a neutral audience. The atmosphere is tense when they arrive, but – to the amazement of the witnesses – they no sooner see each other than they burst out laughing and fall into each other’s arms. No one else can understand the reason for their change of face: since last seeing each other, they have both grown identical Che Guevara moustaches.

Francis Cairns in Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry, says of Catullus 31 that it ‘reflects the normal responses and conventional utterances of a homecomer’. Colin Macleod comments ‘The freshness and humanity of that poem is no more nor less than its appropriateness to its situation.’ What useful critical information can be extracted from this? How do the experts account for the use of ‘cachinnorum’ and its significant last place in the last line? And why is the same word used in 56 with the strong suggestion that sexual derision is implied by it? There is surely an element of insinuation (a kind of nostalgic grope even!) in 31 which makes nonsense of the greetings card reading contributed by Cairns.

The moral tone of Jane Austen’s novels is sustained by her attention to what is essential to the English sense of self-respect: money.

A woman begins to have her murderer’s dreams.

Hollywood agent (Bob Shapiro) to Ted Kotcheff: ‘Lose the tie, Ted. You’re creative.’

An angry film director: ‘You wouldn’t talk to me like that if I had my writers with me.’

Jeremy. He has a Jewish daughter, having married a Jewess after a casually – even charmingly – confessed career of anti-Semitism at Eton. He has been an eager homosexual and declares, ‘I still love bums, don’t you?’

We drove to London to dine with John Peter and his wife. He is a short, ambitious, russet-haired Hungarian who arrived in England in 1956 and went to Oxford, before becoming a drama critic. When the buzzer was answered, I said, ‘Hullo, it’s us.’ ‘Freddie!’ Mrs Peter greeted us with such warmth (we hardly knew her) that Beetle and I raised eyebrows at each other. In truth, Mrs P. had taken me for another Freddie, A. (Alfred) O’Shaughnessy, who soon arrived with his wife.

Mrs P. had lit a joss stick as well as lacquering her hair. That, and an aura of spent shampoo, almost effaced the reek of cats. The flat is filled with dusty utility furniture. Wall cupboards are posted at unlikely heights. Beetling volumes of Shaw and Shakespeare are almost at ceiling level. All the ornaments and the peaks of the chair-backs wear little pointed caps, like witches’ hats. The place has an air of suspended catastrophe: those pendulous cupboards might come crashing down at any moment.

O’Shaughnessy was a blue-eyed, grey-haired man in pinkish middle-age. He has made a career in television drama. His wife was a handsome, large-boned woman with the dangerous dryness of old gunpowder in a neglected vault. She had been an actress. Twenty years ago, she was chosen for a production which Jed Harris (about whom, years later, I wrote an unproduced screenplay for Joel Silver) intended to direct in London. Three days before her audition, she had ‘carried her little bottle to Harley Street’. She never took the part. The son presaged by the contents of the bottle was going up to Cambridge in October.

O’Shaughnessy had wanted to direct films, but had done so only once. During the shooting, he was asked by an actor if he could go to an audition with Binkie at three that afternoon. The actor was due for a close-up, but Freddie lacked the hardness to insist that he stay on the set. Later the missing close-up proved crucial to the assembly. ‘Freddie’ seemed to be regretting – and advertising – that he was too nice for the movies. He went into television.