Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

Mariella Novotny was found dead in bed in February 1983, when she was forty-one, from a drug overdose according to the police. In 1978, she had announced that she was going to write her autobiography, in which she would reveal details of her work for MI5. In 1980, she went further, announcing that her book would include details of a ‘plot to discredit Jack Kennedy’. She added: ‘I kept a diary of all my appointments in the UN building. Believe me, it’s dynamite. It’s now in the hands of the CIA.’ The book never appeared. Christine Keeler later wrote: ‘The Westminster Coroner, Dr Paul Knapman, called it death by misadventure … I still think it was murder.’ We need not necessarily believe Keeler, but Lobster Magazine said of Novotny that ‘… shortly after her death her house was burgled and all her files and large day-to-day diaries from the early 1960s to the 70s were stolen’.

As a fan of the lurid and the fantastic, Muriel would have loved all that, as well as being able to see the few shots of Mariella or Maria or Stella that are available on the Internet, and it’s true, she did bear a resemblance to Anita Ekberg. The photo I like best, and which I know would have delighted him, is like a still from a film, but one made not in 1961, which is when the photo was taken, but even earlier. It’s yet another demonstration of the effect passing time has on reality, turning everything into fiction, and when we ourselves are long gone, any photos of us will suffer the same fate and we, too, will look like invented people who never existed. I’m already beginning to feel that way about pictures of Beatriz and Muriel, and in his case, the black eyepatch only reinforces the impression that what we’re seeing is a still from a film, or perhaps an illustration from a book, and yet I know that they did both exist and I know their tenuous history and have told it at least once.

In the photo, Mariella looks thoughtful and slightly abstracted; she’s wearing a ridiculous and yet very modest hat, and her throat and neck are discreetly covered, it seems to have been taken at the moment of her arrest at Towers’s apartment or perhaps when she’s about to go into the police station shortly afterwards. The FBI agent with her is a heavily built man with a broad face, hard eyes and a scornful mouth. Perhaps he was the one who pretended to be a client and laid the trap for her, let’s hope not: she surely wasn’t that stupid, because it stands out a mile that he’s either a cop or some kind of thug. Or perhaps that’s what he looks like now, when time has covered them both with a large enough dose of unreality.

Muriel, however, did not entirely forget about me nor why I had insisted on seeing him while he was in the middle of shooting a film, not even on the day when Herbert Lom commandeered our conversation. Before dismissing me so that he could do another take of the scene — he didn’t want any unnecessary people present, and so I never saw that great and fearsome actor give his speech — Muriel said to me in Spanish:

‘Listen, young De Vere, regarding what you told me: continue along that path, keep going. Try to draw the Doctor out about the past, ask if he ever managed in the past to have his way with a woman who didn’t want to but couldn’t say No, isn’t that what he said? I don’t much care what he gets up to now, these are different times, and people take things less seriously. So go ahead and have a good time with whoever you want, those young friends of yours are no concern of mine. See if he’ll tell you how he managed it back then.’ And as if offering a thread of hope, he concluded: ‘If it really did happen and he really did get away with it.’

In marked contrast to the dark, angry look in his eye when he first mentioned to me his friend’s possibly indecent behaviour with a woman, I had been surprised to see a benevolent, rather amused glint in that same eye when he was told about Towers’s clearly indecent behaviour with several women, especially if the story of the vice ring at the UN proved to be true. None of this seemed to bother him in the least, not even the suspicion that those women had been used both to earn Towers money (while he, their pimp, sat back and did nothing), and to blackmail prominent individuals and celebrities, indeed, Lom’s story lent an additional fascination to the character of Towers, whom Muriel saw as a worthy subject of a work of fiction. He regretted now that Towers only rarely appeared during filming and was almost always travelling abroad somewhere, for while one of his projects was underway, Towers would already be planning the next one and seeking out new sources of finance. Muriel would like to have met his employer more often, to see if he could get the full story from the horse’s mouth and flesh out all the details of his shady activities in the 1960s and of his turbulent relationship with the FBI, to have him confirm or deny that his former, fleeting lover, Novotny, had screwed Kennedy and his brother Robert and their brother-in-law Lawford, to be told whether this was all true or mere fantasies and lies. One shouldn’t believe everything one finds on the Internet, but I did read somewhere that Mariella and another prostitute by the name of Suzy Chang once disguised themselves as nurses to provide the Presidential ‘patient’ with some physical therapy; if that’s true, Kennedy’s tastes were not so very different from those of any ordinary male. I was surprised at my boss’s reaction to Towers, but, in part, I understood it: like nearly all those in the world of cinema, including those who fancy themselves as intellectuals or artists, he was as much of a mythomaniac as anyone.

I also noticed that in Harry Alan Towers’s very long and frenetic filmography, there is a gap following our failed project, as if his career had been somehow jinxed by Muriel’s failure and misfortune: his next title as producer does not appear, most unusually, until 1983. By then, however, he had already disappeared from our lives and we still more from his (well, I was never really part of it), transformed perhaps into a grim memory that was best left behind. It’s also possible that, by the time he had got rid of us, Towers was once again able to visit the country he had fled from and the forbidden city of New York. I suspect that the American authorities never actually allowed him to settle there, for I see that he continued filming in such out-of-the-way places as South Africa and Bulgaria, that he took Canadian nationality and moved to Toronto, where he died in 2009, at the age of eighty-eight. He certainly lasted a long time for someone who bore all the marks of having been an utter scoundrel, in the world of cinema and a few others. A scoundrel, however, who was instantly forgiven by Muriel.

Muriel had little time to probe further during what remained of the project, what with Harry’s endless travelling and his own promise to Lom not to say anything about the matter unless Harry himself happened to mention those remote events; he didn’t have much chance to ask. Taking advantage of a visit by Towers to Madrid to see how everything was going and to view the rushes of what had been filmed in his absence, Muriel invited him to supper one night along with his wife, the Austrian Maria Rohm, Lom, Van Vechten and Rico (the last two could get by quite well in English, much better, of course, than Roy), the witty Oxford Hispanist Peter Wheeler, who happened to be visiting Madrid, a couple from the British embassy and two of the actresses from the film: the veteran Shirley Eaton, who achieved fame after being painted with gold in the James Bond film Goldfinger , and the very youthful Lisa Raines. And Beatriz, of course, whose irascible husband always expected her to be there to welcome guests and organize a proper supper and flatter any producer or hypothetical source of finance. Muriel intended to steer the conversation on to the topic of the political sex scandals of the early 1960s, and Wheeler’s presence suited him perfectly: like many Oxbridge dons, he knew all about MI5’s and MI6’s past shenanigans, and he had known Profumo well. Muriel was hoping thus to tempt Towers to challenge the mischievous, talkative Hispanist for the limelight and to boast and tell all, even if he gave only a watered-down version that showed him in a favourable light (depending on how you looked at it: favourable in the eyes of the police or a judge, less so at a sophisticated supper party), the version in which he proclaimed himself to be completely innocent, ingenuous and stupid.