William Boyd - The New Confessions

One effect of this was to salve my patriotic conscience. If the British Diplomatic Service could connive at my being dubbed an undesirable alien, then I certainly wasn’t about to hurry back to serve my country. In any case, Hollywood was full of British actors, directors and producers — Korda was here, Wilcox, Olivier, Spenser, Bellamy, Norman and many others. I did not stand out.

I didn’t mix with the British community; I stayed with the émigrés, my Berlin friends. By now it was clear who was going to flourish in Hollywood and who was going to just make do. Eddie, I must say, was loyal to the Realismus boys. Hitzig, Gast and I were kept busy on the Lone Star B-features. Our fortunes had leveled out — at least they weren’t declining — while others’ ascended. Lang, Glucksman, Wilder, Strauss, Brecht — these were the feted and the high flyers. We wished them well. Honestly.

I had another reason for avoiding the British. In 1942 Leo Druce arrived with Courtney Young to film A Close-Run Thing , a torpid epic about the duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo, thinly disguised British propaganda to be directed at American audiences. I was walking along the beach one Sunday at Malibu and passed in front of the jutting deck of a beach house. A loud lunch party was going on and with a cold, spine-jolting shock of recognition I saw Druce’s face in the crowd. Someone leaned over the rail and shouted down to me to come and join them. I saw Druce’s head swivel round at the mention of my name. I made sure our eyes did not meet. For an instant I was tempted by the thought of reconciliation — we had been friends for close on twenty years, after all — but my charity was snuffed out by memories of that day he had so earnestly and altruistically advised me to turn down Great Alfred (a half success, like all his other films). I knew I could never forgive him. His own greed and ambition had lost me The Confessions and effectively driven me from my own country. There was no possibility of ever recovering our old warm friendship. I waved, shouted an excuse and walked on.

Around this time there was another arrival in Los Angeles whom I was, paradoxically, happier to see. Alex Mavrocordato turned up in the émigré community, impoverished and jobless. He didn’t look well: his weight and bulk seemed a burden to him now, a slack load. He was still a big man but he had lost his big-man aura, if you know what I mean. Before, he had seemed to fill a room, as if his personality emitted some kind of force field. That was all but gone. A difficult journey through Vichy France and Spain, followed by a long wait in Lisbon for a boat west, seemed to have dispirited him, to have decanted his bullishness. He was staying with the Coopers and I went round to see him shortly after he arrived. We walked down to Lori’s and I bought him a fourteen-ounce steak with two fried eggs, french fries and a green salad on the side.

We sat down in the bright diner. Young people laughed and chattered in the booths. Lori and her smiling waitresses patrolled the aisles. The merry lights of Malibu Pier stretched out languidly into the darkness. Mavrocordato chewed vigorously on his steak. I ordered him another beer.

“My God,” he said with some bitterness. “War is hell.” He looked round him incredulously. “You should see Europe.”

I felt an itch of guilt. “You’ll get used to it,” I said a little ruefully. “It’s quite easy.”

“Always in the right place at the right time,” he said. “You find your feet, eh, Todd?”

“That’s not how it looks from my angle,” I said, and added pleasantly, “You can’t possibly know what you’re talking about.”

“Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen?…” He had a sense of humor, had Mavrocordato.

“Something like that.”

“Well, I have to thank you for the meal. What do you want?”

“Where’s Doon? What happened to Doon?”

“I haven’t seen Doon for …” He thought. “My God, eight, nearly nine years. Nineteen thirty-four, Paris.”

I felt the strangest sensation in my body, an odd mixture of alarm and elation.

“But she was in Sanary with you.”

“For one week. Then she left. She went to Neuchâtel to look for you.”

“But we’d left.…”

Bafflement clogged my brain. I felt thick, dull, like a man with a heavy cold.

Mavrocordato told me that he had seen Doon for a week in Paris in January ’34, after our unhappy Christmas together. She seemed very depressed, he said. She was drunk most of the time. They left Paris for Sanary together; he thought the Riviera would do her good. But all they did was fight. She talked all the time about going to America. She left for Neuchâtel to tell me her decision, he said. That was the last he had seen of her.

We walked slowly back up the road towards the Cooper house. My mind was squirming with the revelations I had heard.

“So she must have gone … come here?”

“Yes. I always thought so.”

“I thought …” I was suddenly close to adolescent tears. “I thought she had gone off with you.”

“I asked her,” Mavrocordato said, with some of his old vehemence. “You know, I even asked her to marry me again.” He shrugged. “You know Doon. I always think she’s a little bit mad.” He tapped his head.

I was still thinking. “But if she came here, where is she?”

“If she’s drinking like Paris, she’s got to be dead. Or very sick.”

We stopped at the three flights of steps that led up to the Cooper house. Mavrocordato was sharing 361½ with two other destitute émigés.

“I’d better try and find her,” I said vaguely.

“Say hello from me.”

We shook hands.

“Listen Todd, if you are needing assistant on your film … bygones can be easily bygones.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll bear it in mind.” I felt only an immense gratitude towards Mavocordato. I derived no pleasure from this triumph,

I went home and drank half a bottle of Vat 69 as I thought about Doon and this news. She hadn’t betrayed me. She had simply run away. I felt peculiar: I should have been elated, my heart big with joy. But I wasn’t. If she had been in America since 1934, why was there no sign of her? No trace at all? All her old friends from Berlin were in Hollywood; why had she not once made contact?

Eddie said I should get in touch with the Bureau of Missing Persons.

“Where was she from?” he asked. “You know, her hometown?”

“I’ve no idea. My God.”

“Very useful.”

Eddie was married now, to a small dark woman called Artemisia Parke. It struck me that in all the years I had known him, this was the first time I had ever associated him with a woman. Somehow a lovelife, even a sex life, had seemed inappropriate for him, superflous to his needs. He was like one of those worms or amoebas, hermaphroditic, that can service themselves (and I don’t mean that unkindly). Like most facets of his life these days, Eddie’s marriage seemed a means to some mysterious end. He appeared unconcerned and incurious about the Doon mystery.

“She was a strange girl, Johnny, I told you so years ago. She could have suicided.” He snapped his fingers. “They break, these types, like that.”

“Not Doon.”

“You should know.”

He sighed. He was on his way to play golf, wearing an outfit patterned with lozenges of lemon yellow, burnt sienna and maroon. I had a slight headache resulting from my attack on the Vat 69—and the colors seemed to press against my eyeballs painfully. I took a pair of green sunglasses out of my jacket pocket and put them on. We were sitting in his vast Beverly Hills home.

“Anyway,” he said, “don’t go running off. I’ve got a new project for you. The biggest yet.”