William Boyd - The New Confessions

The day war began in Europe was the day my temporary resident’s visa ran out. As Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 3, 1939, I left my home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, to drive south across the border to Tijuana, Mexico. I had an old gray Mercury in those days, a 1935 model. It got me down to Tijuana with no problem.

I drove on to Rincón, a small village outside Tijuana on the road to Tecate, on the other side of the mesa where the airport is. In those days it was just about preserving its status as an independent township. There was a main street with a small square at one end, a couple of hotels and a courthouse, nothing too attractive but far more pleasant than Tijuana and much cheaper than the scandalously inflated prices you find there. Saving money was the only reason you stayed in Rincón while you waited for your resident’s visa to be renewed. I say “you” but I mean the Europeans, the exiles. There was a fairly constant shifting population of about two dozen Europeans — Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Poles — from Los Angeles. The odd composer, artist, musician or novelist, but mainly people from the film world. The two hotels were the Vera Cruz and the Emperador Maximilian. The Max, as it was called, had a very small swimming pool and a restaurant. The Vera Cruz was cheaper. At the back were six clapboard cottages for long-term residents. The last time I had been here was a year previously. It had taken only a week to arrange a new permit. Once we had that document we could drive back to Los Angeles and pick up our lives for another year.

I checked into the Max. It had been a long drive. I had some ground steak, fried potatoes and fríjoles with a glass of beer and then went up to my room. I hadn’t recognized any of the other faces in the restaurant. I stood at my hotel window looking down on the main street — the Avenida Emilio Carraza — lined with dusty nutant trees. It was getting dark. The streetlights all worked but they were irregularly spaced. Two together brightly illumined the forecourt of a gas station. A little mall of shops and a doctor’s surgery stood in inconvenient darkness. Overhead a twin-engined airplane came in to land at Tijuana Airport. Further down the street multicolored fairy lights were strung in the two large fresno trees that shaded the terrace of the Cervecería Americana. Some Mexican youths lounged outside a cinema that was showing Los Manos de Orlac . I saw an elderly German novelist and his wife return from their morose constitutional. A dog urinated against the whitewall tires of an old Ford. It was a warm night.

When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1937—I flew from New York, fifteen hours, a UAL Sky Lounge Mainliner via Chicago — it had almost been like returning home. Half of Berlin seemed to be there — Wilder, Reitlinger, Thomas Mann, Lang, many others. I stayed with Werner and Hanni Hitzig for the first month. Egon Gast lived three houses away. Most of the German émigrés had settled in the cheaper districts around the Santa Monica Canyon, mainly in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. On our reduced budgets we socialized as energetically as we could in each other’s small houses. I joined the Hollywood Ant-Nazi League and some days spoke more German than English. Most of my fellow émigrés were dejected and cast down — with good reason. Their country had rejected them, or vice versa, and all the fame and renown they had known there counted for little in their new home. They were employed — apart from a few — in dead-end charity jobs in various studios. Most spoke the language badly or not at all. The future was dark, with dwindling prospects. But I, on the contrary, was excited. For a start I liked the sunshine and the proximity of the huge ocean. And I was relieved to be out of Britain. Remember, unlike the others, I was coming to Los Angeles from a position of no great advantage. And I had no language problems. I was not leaving some sumptuous villa in the Grunewald to live in a small frame house tucked up in a steep road in a canyon suburb. To me Pacific Palisades was a more than fair exchange for the Scotia Private Hotel, my father’s house and my flat in Islington. To me at that time Britain represented bad faith, broken promises, my ruined marriage, thwarted ambition and unjust legal persecution. I was perfectly happy to convalesce in California.

Stirrings of liberal conscience prompted many of the studios to offer jobs to émigrés. However, this usually involved little more than paying them a modest salary to stay away. Egon Gast was on contract to 20th Century — Fox. He had been in Los Angeles a year and a half and was still waiting to make his first film. He got me a job as a writer there on a salary of a hundred dollars a week. In those days I suppose that was a living wage — just. Some writers, I hear, earned as much as thirty-five hundred per week. Aldous Huxley once told me he got fifteen thousand dollars for two months’ work. The studios were being thoughtful but not generous.

The first day I went to my office on the Fox lot, the name above my door read J. J. TODT. The other four offices on that floor were all occupied by Germans — directors and writers. It felt like something of a ghetto, or like a quarantine ward in a hospital. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that we tended to cling together. At lunch we would eat in a group in the corner of the canteen and the others would moan and bitch about the venality and crassness of the work they were expected to do — the debased standards under which they were obliged to operate. They had all the highbrow disdain of the chronically insecure. Men — I will mention no names — who had produced vulgar musical comedies and mindless historical epics now became thoroughbred intellectuals and artistes , grand arbiters of good taste.

I did not complain. It is extraordinary, but true, but in the months that I was at Fox I was paid thousands of dollars and did not a stroke of work. On the strength of the new salary I left the Hitzigs and rented a small apartment—361½ Encanto Drive — off Chautauqua Boulevard. It was half a house, the top half, which I sublet from an illustrator called Ernst Kupfer. A lugubrious solemn man, he was now known as Ernest Cooper and had a steady job working as an animator for Walt Disney. He and his wife, Utta, had four children who all lived with them downstairs. Utta was small, dark and of stout peasant build, with a huge sagging shelf of bosom. She worked indefatigably about the house, controlling her children (three boys and a little girl) with swift vicious punishments, usually powerful stinging slaps to the backs of legs, just like Oonagh had administered.

Upstairs, I had a bedroom, a bathroom, a small sitting room dominated by a horsehide davenport and, off that, a kitchenette with a three-burner stove, an electric icebox and a woodstone sink. I used to feel guilty about all my space when I heard the six Coopers crashing about below.

From the kitchenette window you could see the Pacific, always gray; it never looked blue even on the sunniest days. The house itself was wooden, set in a plot hacked out of a scrubby hill, and it had three flights of steps leading down to the road from a screened porch. Ernest cut the steep lawn from time to time, but it would have smartened the place up unduly to do it regularly and made it stand out from its neighbors. Encanto Drive had a shabby well-worn look. And there seemed to be kids everywhere. Some evenings when I parked my car after work and looked at the lounging adolescents, the toddlers, the shouting brats on their bicycles, I felt like a solitary adult in a school playground.

I settled in at Fox easily and quickly. My salary check too was made out to J. J. Todt, but I never thought of complaining. It was generally understood that I was working on my own project, which I would eventually show to the script editor (I never met this man after the first day). Weeks passed pleasantly. What did I do? I learned how to play tennis, acquired a sun tan and put on some weight. I went swimming in the sea with Ernest’s two older boys, Clancy and Elroy. (“They Yamericans now,” Ernest would say. “Europe finish.”) I tinkered with my script of The Confessions: Part II . I felt oddly unreflecting and unbothered about things. One reason for this was that Europe might as well have vanished from the map of the world as far as life out here on the Pacific littoral was concerned. At our dinner parties, on beach picnics and in Anti-Nazi League meetings we energetically debated political events in Europe, but emerged from these sessions into sunny, prosperous, disinterested and indifferent realms. Soon, inexorably, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia, Anschluss , came to have the status of arguments in a university seminar group: abstract posits, forensic positions. Somehow, or so it seemed to me, these distant agitations just weren’t my problem anymore.