William Boyd - The New Confessions

The second reason was that I lost all sense of urgency. This was new, and harder to explain. Lethargy, as far as I am now concerned, is to do with spirit of place rather than state of mind. I simply find it impossible to work in some milieux. Perhaps in Los Angeles it was something to do with the absence of real seasons. The thermometer shifted down a few degrees; you put on a sweater; it was overcast and rainy — that described an average day in an English summer, not winter . And the trees were always green. Passing time lost its common demarcations. The sap never rose in spring; the days never shrunk; the nights never grew longer.… I was approaching my fortieth birthday, half my life had gone and yet I looked younger than ever. Those extra pounds I gained smoothed out the mature angles and declivities of my face. I tried to generate some energy but to little avail. In compensation I told myself I was biding my time.

But then perhaps, like a field, every life needs its fallow period. As it turned out mine lasted two years and ended with the invasion of Poland. But I am jumping ahead.

I did three things almost immediately on arriving in Los Angeles: I wrote to Thompson and I tried to find Doon and Eddie Simmonette. I had left England without informing anyone. Thompson, as he put it, was “devastated.” To his eyes the whole affair looked like the worst sort of fraud and betrayal. He contemplated repaying the loan himself, but decided in the end to let me take the consequences of my actions. I quote a portion of his letter to me:

… Your behavior, after the initial shock, did not seem on reflection to be all that surprising. You have always been far and away the most selfish member of our family, the most wayward and irresponsible. This sort of cavalier attitude to one’s most serious obligations may be regarded as the norm in your “world,” but I assure you that it is anathema to the banking community. I consider your defaulting on the bank’s loan a gross personal insult as well as an act of criminality. I cannot forgive you for the distress and embarrassment you have caused both me and Heather.…

And on and on. I could see that there had been a massive loss of face on his part and I was genuinely sorry. But what else could I have done? I wrote back briefly, apologized again and said I would send a hundred dollars a month, and more if circumstances permitted, until my debt had been cleared. While I worked at Fox, I was as good as my word.

Very surprisingly, and somewhat worryingly, there was no news or sign of Doon. Few people seemed even to remember her. “Didn’t she go to Europe in the twenties?” was the best I could come up with. I came to the reluctant conclusion that she was still in France. Willi Gast, Egon’s brother, arrived in Los Angeles and told me there was a sizable community of émigrés in Sanary, in the South of France, among whom he had noticed Mavrocordato. I assumed that was where I could find Doon — if I wanted to.

Eddie Simmonette, I discovered, was in New York, where he was making films in Yiddish. I wrote to him and he — typically — offered me a job, but I declined. I had settled in by then and the effort of moving east seemed too much. The Californian lethargy was already in my blood, coagulating it, slowing me down. Besides, I couldn’t speak Yiddish … but neither could Eddie, as far as I knew. I stayed put.

I earned some extra money on top of my Fox wage from a man named Smee, Monroe Smee, whom I met at the Anti-Nazi League meetings. Smee was an unfortunate-looking fellow with receding hair and chin and yellow equine teeth with large gaps between them. He said he ran a small production company and I acted as a freelance script reader for him at twenty-five dollars a script. I read seven before I asked to be relieved of the job. The scripts were absurdly bad, quite appalling. I had been expecting earnest, liberal-minded tracts, but what he sent me was the worst sort of trash — turgid thrillers with creaking conspiracy theories and cloying romances with a strain of positively nauseating sentimentality, as far as I recall. Smee had great hopes for these scripts and I was reluctant to dash them as wholeheartedly as I felt they deserved, but I did. He was paying me for my honest professional opinion, I reminded him.

For a few weeks we saw a fair amount of each other. I didn’t dislike Smee, but he just wasn’t my type. He had only one joke, which he employed endlessly. If, as you left a coffeeshop, say, you asked, “Are you coming?” he would respond, “As the Actress said to the Bishop.” If you said, “Shall I stay inside?” he would pipe up with “As the Bishop said to the Actress.” I became almost maddened by this jocular tic. It was astonishing how the most innocuous question could be turned in Smee’s mind into a Bishop/Actress gag.

I handed the last — the seventh — script back to him one night after a league meeting and told him I was quitting. I apologized.

“I just can’t do it anymore,” I said.

“As the Bishop said to the Actress.”

“No, seriously, Monroe, wherever you’re getting these screenwriters from, I’d dump them. They’re useless, worse than useless. You must be able to find some better ones. Ask the first person you meet outside.… I mean this is crap. Really. And that Falling Snow , I think that’s probably the worst script I’ve ever read. The guy should be locked up. What was his name?”

“ Falling Snow? That was, ah, Edgar Douglas.”

“Well he ought to have his brain examined. There was something actually rather disgusting about that story.”

Smee grinned. “Well, anyway, I’m grateful to you, John. At least you’re honest.” His face was damp, Smee sweated easily. “But I should level with you now that you’re quitting. I’m Edgar Douglas. I wrote Falling Snow . I wrote them all.”

“ Jesus Christ! Monroe! God, why didn’t you—”

“No, no. Don’t worry. I’m grateful.” His grin was now distinctly cheesy. “I’d never have known. I can’t judge my own stuff. I needed an honest opinion.”

“Jesus.… I’ve got to give you your money back.”

“Nonsense, you earned it.”

“But I feel such a prick.”

“As the Actress said to the Bishop.… No, really, John, I needed to hear it. I respect your honesty. So I’m not cut out to be a screenwriter. Now I know. Once a loation manager, always a location manager.”

“Monroe, I—”

“No hard feelings.”

We shook hands. “I owe you one,” he said. “I mean it.”

I felt bad about it and continued to apologize when we met at league meetings. He kept telling me to forget it and eventually I did. I held on to the money he had paid me, though. He was right: I had earned it.

And so I drifted through 1938 and into ’39. On the day of my fortieth birthday (I looked ten years younger) I was invited to a tennis lunch-party at the Bel Air home of an English director called Cyril Norman. Norman was a North Country homosexual who took his sport seriously, and the day was mapped out with a series of round-robin competitions of singles and doubles. I was scheduled to start proceedings off with a doubles match: me and Clive Brook against Ronald Colman and Richard Barthelmess. I had left my racket in the office and drove there to pick it up before going to the party.

I parked in a vacant reserved space and ran upstairs. I came out two minutes later to find a large Chrysler coupe partially blocking me in. Its driver, a small red-faced man in a light-gray suit with a yellow silk display handkerchief stood beside it. I was in white flannels, white shirt, navy cotton jersey. I was carrying my tennis racket. It was Wednesday, 11 A.M.

“Sorry,” I said. “Won’t be a second.”