William Boyd - The New Confessions

“You work here?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

He looked me up and down. “Could have fooled me. What do you do?”

“I’m a writer,” I said. I didn’t like his tone.

“Oh yeah? Chances are you can read, then.”

I looked at him, then at my watch. “Look, I’d love to stay and chat but I’m pressed for time.”

He pointed. “What the fuck you think that sign says? ‘Please park here’?”

There was a sign: PRIVATE, RESERVED, and a name I couldn’t read from that distance.

“If you move your car,” I said patiently, “you can have your space back. I was in a hurry.”

“I don’t give the steam off my shit if you’re in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be there in the first place, dork.”

I got into my car.

“Hey! Jerk-off. You English?”

“Scottish.”

“What’s your name?”

“Todd.” I started the engine.

“Todd? Todd?…” He thought. Then his eyes widened. “J. J. Todt! You’re the fuckin’ German writer. What do you mean you’re Scottish? We don’t hire Scottish writers here! There are no fuckin’ Scottish refugees!”

“You’d better move your car, you little prick, or I’ll hit it.”

“You’re fired, asshole! I’m going to sue you for fraud.”

“So sue me!” I contemplated getting out and laying into him with my tennis racquet. But instead I backed out fast and took the front fender neatly off his new car. For good measure I ran over it as I drove off.

I was fired. The very next day. I don’t know who the man was, some self-important junior executive, I suspect, but somehow word got around that it was Darryl Zanuck himself. I’m sure it wasn’t, but the rumor circulated anyway, and even made some gossip columns. “Hapless German writer J. J. Todt clipped D. F. Zanuck’s fender on the Fox lot last week and promptly got himself fired.” “Writer J. J. Todt left his car at the curb in the Fox lot and dropped by the office to pick up his tennis racket. But the rookie writer had parked in the Vee Pee’s place and got himself blasted out of court with a Zanuck ace! Nein, nein, J.J.!”

In the way these things happen, I even started dining out on it myself. It may have made a good story at a cocktail party, but it also meant it proved almost impossible to get another job.

“God. So you’re the guy Zanuck fired.”

“No,” I would say, “it wasn’t him. I’ve never met him.”

“But I read about it. Didn’t I read about it? Jeez, what did you say to him, for God’s sake?”

My remonstrations had no effect. None of the major studios would hire me. I was not only burdened with the Zanuck misapprehension, but I was now irrevocably associated with the émigrés. People would often congratulate me on my excellent English, and there were too many Europeans looking for too few jobs. I realized then the extraordinary tenacity of first impressions. From then on I ceased putting such trust in my own.

I was out of work for two or three months. Of the two hundred or so émigrés in Los Angeles, I suppose thirty or forty were regularly employed. Among the others there was fierce competition for the available jobs. I had to take my chances with everyone else.

I supplemented my rent by coaching Elroy Cooper with his maths — or math, as I was now instructed to call it. Elroy was a bright kid, but lazy. I kept him hard at it and found I rather enjoyed myself. I enjoyed the mathematics too; it took me back to the early days with Hamish at Minto Academy.

But I soon ran low on funds and I ended up accepting the first job I was offered. The Associated Motion Picture Releasing Corporation sounded quite grand. In reality it was one of the “Poverty Row” film companies producing B-movie horror films and — this was its speciality — Westerns. The man who offered me the job was called Brodie McMaster. He came from Illinois but was deeply proud of his heritage. The ethnic connection worked to my advantage, for once.

The only difficulty was that AMPR paid its writers fifty dollars a week. As a result they tended to be very old, very poor or heavily dependent on narcotics. In my time at AMPR I worked with two morphine addicts, a cocaine junkie and half a dozen soaks. I received shared writing credits on several AMPR films, but I have no recollection now of which ones.

So my life restarted but on more reduced terms than before. I had virtually no savings by now and had stopped repaying my loan from Thompson’s bank. Apart from my salary, I earned only a trickle of royalties from my films ( Jean Jacques! was currently playing in Francophone Africa) and from my patents. The graph line of my fortunes was still heading downwards.

But I was happy enough. Those two years in Hollywood before the Second World War now seem to me to be among the most placid and carefree of my life. The experience was similar, I imagine, to that of going to university: a finite period of independence with few responsibilities and limited funds. The sun shone; I had work, a little money, friends, a social life, a place to live. What more did I want?

Sex. Sex was something of a problem until Monika Alt arrived in town. It may sound strange, but I had been practically celibate since Doon had left me. I had had one unsatisfactory visit to a prostitute during my sorrow-drowning binge after The Confessions: Part II had ended, and a heartless fortnight’s affair with the head of makeup during filming of The Divorce (it ended the day we wrapped — her decision). Otherwise, I swear, nothing. After Doon left I felt sexually dessicated. From time to time the old urges returned, with Senga for example, and for a hot week at Drumlarish, a sort of rutting season, I suppose. I asked Mungo what there was available locally and he told me about an old woman who lived in a filthy bothy on the road to Glenfinnan with whom you could have your way for a tumbler of whiskey, but I was not tempted. Doon’s betrayal had left me emotionally mawkish. I returned to the solace and 100 percent reliability of adolescent methods.

However, America had stimulated me once again, and shortly after I moved into 361½ Encanto Drive I courted and won the manageress of a coffeeshop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Her name was Lorelei, Lorelei Madrazon. I think she was half-Turkish and Lorelei an approximation to her Turkish name. She was in her forties, a divorcée with three young children — Hall, Chauncy and Nora Lee. Lori’s, her coffeeshop, was a pleasant ten-minute saunter from Encanto Drive. Her ex-husband was a Filipino who ran a garden maintenance service. He had set her up in the coffeeshop and they remained good friends. I met him several times. Anyway, Lori was solid, fleshy, with wiry blond hair — she was a victim of the permanent wave — and a pretty face, always bright with makeup. I think it was a combination of the olive skin and primary colors set against the improbable Nordic blondness of her hair that attracted me. We enjoyed efficient, uncomplicated, fairly regular sex, twice a week on average, usually in the early evenings after she’d closed, and after which we would go out for a meal or take in a movie.

I was glad to see Monika again. She had left Berlin in 1934 and had come straight to Hollywood, where she enjoyed brief and modest success in two or three sub-Marlene Dietrich thrillers. This trip had the bonus of securing her an American husband and citizenship. For a year she had been content to be Mrs. Geraldo Berasconi, but then came divorce and another attempt to return to the screen. Monika, however, was now in her fifties, astonishing though that fact seemed when I stopped to consider it, and the flood of émigrés had provided a glut of sensual foreign vamps. She still looked good, I must say — hair shorter, as thin as ever but more groomed. Unfortunately, her new consort was Harold Faithfull.