Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

‘Dear Gretchen,’ - she read, - ‘It’s raining in Venice and Jean is out in it taking pictures. She says it’s the best time to get the quality of Venice, water on water. I’m snug in my hotel, undriven by art. Jean also likes to take pictures of people for the series she’s doing under the worst possible circumstances. Hardship and age, she tells me, preferably the two together, tell more about the character of a people and a country than anything else. I do not attempt to argue with her. I prefer handsome young people in sunshine, myself, but I am only her Philistine husband,

‘I am enjoying, to the utmost the glorious fruits of sloth. Within me, after all the years of hustle and toil, I have discovered a happy, lazy man, content to look at two masterpieces a day, to lose myself in a foreign city, to sit for hours at a cafe table like any Frenchman or Italian, to pretend I know something about art and haggle in galleries for paintings by new men whom nobody ever heard about and whose works will probably make my livingroom in Whitby a chamber of horrors when I eventually get back there.

‘Curiously enough, with all our travelling, and despite the fact that Pa came from Germany and probably had as much German in him as American, I have no desire to visit the country. Jean has been there, but isn’t anxious to go back. She says it’s too much like America, in all essential ways. I’ll have to take her opinion on the subject.

‘She is the dearest woman alive and I am terribly uxorious and find myself carting her cameras around so as not to miss a moment with her. Except when it rains, of course, She has the sharpest of eyes and I have seen and understood more about Europe in six months with her than I would in sixty years alone. She has absolutely no literary sense and never reads a newspaper and the theatre bores her, so I fill in that section of our communal life. She also drives our little Volkswagen very well, so I get a chance to moon and sightsee and enjoy things like the Alps and the valley of the Rhone without worrying about falling off the road. We have a pact. She drives in the morning and drinks a bottle of wine at lunch and I drive in the afternoon, sober.

‘We don’t stay in the fancy places, as we did on our honeymoon, because as Jean says, now it’s for real.

We find ourselves striking up friendships with the widest variety of people - a winegrower from Burgundy, a masseur on the beach at Biarritz, a rugby player from Lourdes, a non-objective painter, priests galore, fishermen, a bit-part actor in the French movies, old English ladies on bus tours, ex-commandos in the British army, GIs based in Europe, a representative in the Paris Chamber of Deputies who says the only hope for the world is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. If you happen to bump into John Fitzgerald Kennedy, pass the word on to him.

The people it is almost impossible not to love are the English. Except for other English. The English are dazed, although it doesn’t do to tell them so. Somehow, all the wheels of power went wrong, and after winning the war, with their last ounce of blood and courage, they gave the whole thing away to the Germans. I don’t want the Germans, or anybody, to starve, but the English had a right to expect that they could live in a world at least approximately as comfortable as the old enemy once the guns fell silent. Chalk one up against us, I’m afraid.

‘Whatever you do, you must make sure that Billy gets a good dose of Europe before he’s twenty, while it’s still Europe and before it becomes Park Avenue and the University of Southern California and Scarsdale and Harlem and the Pentagon. All those things, or at least some of them, may be as good for us, but it would be sad to see it happen to places like Rome and Paris and Athens.

‘I have been to the Louvre, to the Rijks-museum in Amsterdam, to the Prado, and I have seen the lions at Delos and the gold mask in the museum in Athens, and if I had seen nothing else and had been deaf and mute and unloved, these things alone would have been worth much more than the six months of my life I have been away.’

The phone rang and Gretchen put the letter down and got up and answered. It was Sam Corey, the old cutter who had worked with Colin on the three pictures he had made. Sam called faithfully, at least three times a week, and occasionally she would go with him to the showing of a new film at the studio that he thought would interest her. He was fifty-five years old, solidly married, and was comfortable to be with. He was the only one of the people who had been around Colin that she had kept up with.

‘Gretchen,’ Sam said, ‘we’re running one of the Nouvelle Vague pictures that just came in from Paris tonight. I’ll take you to dinner after.’

‘Sorry, Sam,’ Gretchen said. ‘Somebody, one of the people from my classes, is coming over to work with me.’

‘School days, school days,’ Sam croaked, ‘dear old golden rule days.’ He had left school in the ninth grade and was not impressed with higher education. ‘We’ll do it some other night, eh, Sam?’ ‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘Your house wash down the hill yet?’ ‘Just about.’ ‘California,’ Sam said. ‘It’s raining in Venice, too,’ Gretchen said. ‘How do you get top-secret information like that?’ ‘I’m reading a letter from my brother, Rudolph. He’s in Venice. And it’s raining.’

Sam had met Rudolph when Rudolph and Jean had come out to stay with her for a week. After they had left Sam had

said Rudolph was okay, but he was crazy about his wife.

‘When you write him back,’ said Sam, ‘ask him if he wants to put five million dollars in a little low-budget picture I would like to direct’

Sam, who had been around enormously wealthy people for so long in Hollywood, believed that the sole reason for the existence of a man who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in the bank was to be fleeced. Unless, of course, he had talent. And the only talents Sam recognised were those involved in making films. ‘I’m sure he’ll be delighted to,’ Gretchen said. ‘Keep dry, baby,’ Sam said, and hung up. Sam was the calmest man she knew. In the storms of temperament that he had been through in the years in the studios, he had survived serenely, knowing that he knew, running a hundred thousand miles of film through his hands, catching mistakes, patching up other men’s blunders, never flattering, doing the utmost with the material he was handed, walking off pictures when the people making them became insufferable, going through one style after another with imperturbable efficiency, something of an artist, something of a handyman, loyal to the few directors who, despite failures, were always what Sam considered pros, committed to their craft, painstaking, perfectionist. Sam had seen Colin’s plays and when Colin had come to Hollywood had sought Colin out and said he wanted to work with him, modest, but secure enough in what he did to know that the new director would be grateful for his experience and that their collaboration would be fruitful.

Sam had a long talk with Gretchen and

had warned her that if she just was going to hang around Hollywood, doing nothing, just being a widow, she would be miserable. He had seen her with Colin enough in the course of the three films Colin had made, with Sam as cutter, to understand that Colin had depended upon her, and with reason. He had offered to take her in with him, teach her what he knew about the business. ‘For a lone woman in this town,’ he had said, ‘the cutting room is the best place. She isn’t on her own, she isn’t flinging her sex around, she isn’t challenging anybody’s ego, she has something methodical and practical to do, like baking a cake every day.’ Gretchen had said, ‘Thank you, no,’ at the time, because she didn’t want to profit, even by that much, On Colin’s reputation, and had opted for the graduate course. But every time she talked to Sam she wondered if she hadn’t said no too quickly. The people around her in school were too young, moved too fast, were interested in things that seemed useless | to her, learned and discarded huge gobs of information in hours while she still was painfully struggling with the same material for weeks and weeks.