William Boyd - The New Confessions

In 1950 I was dropped from the Legion’s list, but Red Connections and AMPOPAWL never left me out. Briefly in 1952 I appeared on the MPAPAI list and got a call from a man in Alert Inc. offering to get my name cleared for a cost of one thousand dollars. I didn’t have the money then so I asked him to call back, but he never did. As I hadn’t made a film since 1944, I assumed that Alert Inc. had concluded that it was hardly worth clearing someone so evidently unemployable as me.

I had some savings, profits from The Equalizer , some money I’d inherited from my father, and I was soon reduced to living off my capital. I did three versions of the Jesse James script for Eddie, until I realized he had no intentions of making the film and it was merely a way of giving me money. Eventually I told him I wouldn’t go on. So I wrote another script, a story of adolescent love loosely based on my own entanglement with Donald Verulam and Faye Hobhouse. I embellished my experiences in World War II with Two Dogs Running and produced a war adventure called Alpha Beach, St.-Tropez . Eddie paid me for them out of charity.

I sublet the ground floor of my house. I rented a room to Nora Lee Madrazon and the rest to an Austrian couple, the Linds, friends of the Coopers. When funds ran lower still, I took up teaching again, some maths but increasingly English lessons, mainly to Japanese immigrants and some Filipino relatives of Nora Lee. Ends met with some difficulty.

When I told Karl-Heinz what had happened, he seemed more concerned for me than for his own prospects. Curiously, from that point on his own career advanced. He acted under the name K. H. Cornfield and he soon had a steady supply of small roles — usually playing shady or dandified foreigners — in films and on television. He never moved from his two-room apartment in the Hotel Cythera on the seafront. The hotel became another 129B Stralauer Allee: its unpretentious decrepitude was the sort of environment he flourished in, and besides, as he put it, the beach was so very handy. He would reassure me when, in my low moments, I used to bemoan my wretched luck. “Don’t worry, Johnny,” he would say. “I know we’ll finish The Confessions. ” He saw something talismanic in our encounter in Weilburg in 1918. Over thirty years ago, he would remind me. Who could have guessed then that the two of us would be living in Los Angeles? There had to be some reason for it. I wished I could have shared his confidence.

Outbreaks of war always affected my life in surprising ways. At the end of June 1950, the day after the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel, my affair with Nora Lee Madrazon began. She came upstairs with a cousin to arrange an English lesson for him and stayed on for a coffee after he had left. Lori, though hefty, had had a pretty face. Nora Lee had inherited this, modified somewhat by her half-Filipino blood. She looked Eastern — dark skin, slanted eyes, straight black hair — but she was in fact unregenerate American. It was this juxtaposition that particularly attracted me. I admit that the fact she was nineteen years old had something to do with it as well. She had a slim brown body with perfectly round, almost black nipples. She was tired of boys, she said; that’s why she liked me. She had been renting the room from me for almost a year before we became lovers and couldn’t understand what had taken me so long.

“Chauncy and Hall figure we’ve been balling since I moved in.”

“They do?” I didn’t go to the diner very often, but that explained the leering familiarity with which they greeted me. “Don’t they mind?”

“Why should they? They know about you and Mom. You’re practically one of the family.”

And so my life progressed on this somewhat reduced level. I still had my small circle of friends — Karl-Heinz, the Gasts, the Coopers, the Hitzigs and Monika. Monika’s career too had taken a leap forward. Now that she conceded she was a mature woman she began to get more work, particularly on television. She urged me to try the television and then the radio companies, which I did, only to find that the graylist made me if anything even more of a pariah. As long as I appeared on lists I would get no work. I thought vaguely about paying to have my name “cleared,” but when I rang Alert Inc. they told me it would now cost between five and ten thousand dollars. The longer I left it, the harder it became.

I had plenty of time on my hands. One bonus of my new leisure was that I discovered California north of Los Angeles. Karl-Heinz and I spent two long holidays near Carmel and the Monterey Peninsula in ’51 and ’52. I liked the coast up there. It reminded me vaguely of Scotland — the pines, the cliffs, the small beaches in coves — and of holidays I had taken as a child with Oonagh, Donald, Thompson and my father.

However, it was on that second trip in ’52 that I noticed the surveillance had begun again. I spotted a maroon Dodge behind us on the highway from Ventura to San Luis Obispo, where we stopped for lunch. I saw it again two days later when we made a trip to the hot springs at Tassajara. I didn’t tell Karl-Heinz because I didn’t want to spoil his vacation. I wasn’t that perturbed. Since the day I had been called before the Brayfield Subcommittee I knew I had been watched. As Eddie had predicted, my phone was tapped for two years. My mail was intercepted regularly (everything from Britain was opened). I was often aware of being followed, though I could never identify the men doing it. Once or twice I had seen a figure in the crowd that looked oddly familiar. He reminded me of the man I had seen jump into his car the day I was subpoenaed. I never saw his face. It was something about his posture that nagged at me: the set of his shoulders, the rake of his hat … I couldn’t place it.

The year turned, my fifty-fourth birthday came around, and for the first time I began contemplating giving it all up. One evening with Karl-Heinz, drinking Scotch in his rooms at the Cythera, he began talking about the five months he’d spent at Drumlarish with Mungo Dale — old Sir Hector had passed away in ’39. (In fact Karl-Heinz talked very fondly of Mungo and from time to time prurient speculations flitted across my mind.…) Anyway, I felt a sudden urge to abandon everything, to go back home to Scotland and settle down. I confided this to Karl-Heinz. He laughed at me. “You’d go mad,” he said. “Wait till you’re sixty, and besides we have to finish The Confessions. ” I was moved by his faith. It was much stronger than mine. “Don’t worry,” he said, “this crazy witch-hunt can’t last forever.”

He was wrong. A few weeks later I was round at Ernest Cooper’s house having Sunday lunch when a U.S. marshal knocked on his door and served him with the dreaded pink subpoena. Ernest looked as if he had been shot. I tried to calm him down.

“They can’t do anything to you, Ernest. It’s not like it was in Germany. They can’t lock you up. Just plead the Fifth like I did.”

“Then they blacklist you. You haven’t worked for three years.”

“Well, not properly, that’s true. But … why don’t you lie? Look at Bertolt.”

I could make no headway. He was terrified.

The next day Monika Alt phoned me. She had been subpoenaed too. Werner Hitzig as well.

“Have you been subpoenaed?” she asked.

“No. Why? I was subpoenaed in ’48.”

“Well, why are they calling us and not you? They’ve been watching you for years, you said.”

I didn’t like the implication in her tone of voice.

“It’s got nothing to do with me, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny. No, it’s just that I’m worried. Everything’s going so well for me now. I got a film at Fox. Eddie promised me something at Lone Star. I can’t go on those filthy lists, I just can’t.”