William Boyd - The New Confessions

This might have traveled no further except for the fact that some cineast in the editorial department of the London Times read it, and on a quiet day wrote a third leader “deploring the example set by English artists and intellectuals who sat out the war in the Lotusland of the U.S.A., far from the hardship and suffering being endured by Europe.” Furthermore, “the example of John James Todd, an English director, is particularly unedifying,” the leader said and went on to adumbrate Cinema Monthly’s allegations, concluding with an exhortation that the government seize and impound all the said artists’ assets in this country until “they deigned to return to our beleaguered shores and defend themselves.”

This was the signal for the rest of the press to join in. Stories were run about me; photographs were printed of starlets and swimming pools, supermarkets and sunny beaches. Here and there an old photograph of myself, dark and grinning, looked out as if to say, “Too bad, suckers!” One caption read:

John James Todd, a notorious hellraiser at Hollywood parties, drives a luxury car and lives in an eight-bedroomed house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Another English film director, who visited Hollywood recently on a war-bond fund-raising drive, said Todd seems very much at home. Quite frankly, he’s not the sort we want back here. We’re better off without him.

I felt first warm with shame, then this was replaced with a more general state of nausea. This must be Druce’s revenge. I went back to the original Cinema Monthly piece. The byline was “From our special Hollywood correspondent.” Old familiar feelings of helpless impotence returned. Dutifully I rebutted all the points to Shumway. I had left Berlin in ’34. I was and had always been anti-Nazi. I had been in an anti-Nazi organization in Berlin in the twenties and I was a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. I explained about Mexico and detailed the modest size of my house and the temperance of my life.

“What about this fight you had at L.A. Airport?”

“That was a personal matter.”

“Didn’t Zanuck throw you off the Fox lot?”

I refuted that one too. Druce’s features came to mind. I very nearly told Shumway about the self-inflicted wound, but wisely decided against it. Shumway wrote everything down in a notebook. Two days later on page 4 of the L.A. Times a small two-column piece appeared, headed “Director Todd Slams British Smears.”

Nobody read it, or at least nobody commented on it. But the lies had their effect on me. Coupled with the failure of my reunion with Doon, they sent me into something of a nervous decline. I imagined people I knew reading these stories and believing them. I wrote to my family — even Sonia — asking them to spread the truth. I saw the way the world’s perception of a person could change so easily. Who would now recall the triumphs of Julie and The Confessions: Part I ? What was Julian Teague’s letter against this huge tide of calumny and innuendo? I felt my life had been wasted, both as an artist and as a human being. All my films were forgotten. The emotional center of my life — Doon — had disappeared and abandoned me. The world and the future seemed dull, hostile, uninviting. I began to drink more than was good for me, not venturing out of my house for days at a time. I knew I had to do something soon or I would go under. Eddie, who was delighted with The Equalizer , was offering me a script about Jesse James. But the unfair stories about my craven absence from the war unsettled me. I began to feel guilty. Guilt infected me. Me, of all people … But that sort of accusation is insidious — it touches the very core of our self-esteem. I forgot about the Salient, the horrors I had endured in the Great War. Fool that I was, only one course of action seemed open to me: I began to plan my return to Europe.

But in what capacity? I was too old to enlist. And besides, I had no desire to kill anyone — except Leo Druce. Ramón Dusenberry solved my problem when I confided in him. I became an accredited war correspondent for the Dusenberry press syndicate. I would report the latest news from the European battle fronts for the Chula Vista Herald-Post , the El Cajon Sentinel , the Imperial County Gazette , and the Calexico Argus . I had my old job back. I packed my Leica, bought a portable typewriter and headed east to New York to embark for London.

VILLA LUXE, June 26, 1972

For some reason Emilia didn’t come today. At lunchtime I went into the village to buy some oranges, but no one knew if she was ill or not. I cleaned up the kitchen, and washed the dirty dishes, partly to please her, partly to make her feel guilty. I’m alarmed at the rapid growth in the complexity of my feelings for her. She’s been working here for at least three years and until recently I never gave her more than a passing thought.

This evening I take my drink out to the seat on the cliff edge and watch the sun set. I notice that although the hill on the crocodile promontory casts a shadow onto the villa, my small beach on the bay below still gets the sun for another half hour or so. Perhaps I will go down tomorrow. I feel like a bathe.

And so I took myself off to a war once more again for just as idiotic motives as led me off to the first. However, before I left for Europe I paid a visit to Hamish in Zion.

I had some spare days in New York before I embarked, and decided to spend one of them visiting Hamish. I telephoned him and made the arrangements. I caught a train to Princeton and from there took a taxi over to Zion. It took several inquiries before we discovered where the National Research Institute was. We found it eventually, situated in an old school on the outskirts of the small town. It was a pleasant red-brick single-storied building around a grassy quadrangle. I waited in a sort of porter’s lodge until Hamish came to collect me.

He hadn’t changed a great deal. He was even wearing the same clothes I’d last seen him in: gray flannels, stout shoes, a tweed jacket — still pervaded by his musty bachelor smell. I noticed he had some teeth missing. Hamish was not a man overburdened with vanity. His only concession to the warmth and American taste was the absence of a tie. His collar was open, exposing his white throat. We shook hands with some nervousness.

“I thought you’d be in uniform,” he said.

“Well, I’ve got one but I’m not comfortable wearing it, not yet.”

“Same here. I’ve got one too. It seems silly, somehow.”

We chatted a little awkwardly as we walked through the wide quadrangle. On the other side of the building were playing fields and tennis courts, but the courts were now covered by neat rows of new Quonset huts. Power lines looped from the main building. Some of the huts had whitewashed windows. Here and there were incomprehensible signs: NRI/77/DEC. 1/2 55TH.

“We’ve doubled our staff,” Hamish said. “Hence these rabbit hutches.”

“What do you do here?”

“Oh, government stuff. Mainly maths.”

He led me to his hut, which was raised on brick piles on the edge of the football field. On the door it said NRI MAJOR H. MALAHIDE.

“Are you a major?” I asked astonished.

Hamish laughed. “It seems they had to make me one, because of my work. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference; they just pay me more money.”

Inside the hut was an orthodox desk, a couple of old leather armchairs, a sink and a stove. Beyond them were row upon row of automatic electronic calculators. A small bespectacled man was bent over one of them, reading the numbers it had printed out.

“Fancy a dry martini?” Hamish asked. “The most wonderful invention known to man.”