James Salter - Burning the Days

We drove up to Paris. I remember the hotel and the first evening. We were at the window; I was behind her, standing close. Across the river the lights of the city glittered, as far as one could see.

We had come up through the Rhône valley and many small towns. Past Dijon we were on a back road along a canal and came to a wide dam from which the lines of fishermen dropped forty or fifty feet into clear green water. The dark shapes of fish — I took them to be pike — were coasting lazily about. We watched the biggest ones approach, ignore the bait, and move off to lie motionless. “Like sultans,” she commented. I felt she knew.

—

What I remember is a kind of glamour and sleekness. Travel, the great hotels. James Kennaway, the Scottish writer, coming into a suite at Claridge’s one January in a belted, supple black-leather coat — he had time for just one drink before catching the night train to Edinburgh, not alone, my impression was. He was sharp-nosed, laughing. I knew him only slightly, though I had once gone for a weekend to his house in Gloucestershire. One of the other guests was a lively old woman who had been his father-in-law’s governess and, at the appropriate period of youth, mistress. She remained close to the family. “Traditional,” they assured me.

I remember, in Santa Monica, beneath the palm-lined bluff on the beach, the brief row of houses, one of which — a large, imitation Normandy farmhouse — had been rented by Roman Polanski and his young wife, Sharon Tate.

I had met Polanski through Redford. A call had come from London, in a warm, faintly accented voice — the producer, Gene Gutowski. Could I come there to talk about writing a film, the film about a ski racer? Somewhere in the whirl of London nights — restaurants so in fashion that their telephone numbers were unlisted, headlong drives through parks and narrow streets — Polanski gave me in a single sentence his idea of the movie: It was to be something like High Noon; the sheriff has been killed — in this case the lead racer on the team has broken a leg — and they have to send for a replacement. I was impressed by the succinctness.

Polanski was already famous, in his early thirties, although he appeared younger. He had a small, speedy car with a telephone — innovative then — a large apartment, and an air of freedom from the dullness of being always and only oneself. With pride, but hastily, he showed me photographs of Sharon, to whom he was not yet married. There was something that both drew one to him and cautioned one — his eye seemed to skim over so many things. Beyond the shrewdness and candor, he gave the strange impression of not playing for anything real, as if chips were certain at some point to be redeemed. His banter was filled with confidence. One night in a restaurant we sat with Nureyev, who was eating a dish of magnificent strawberries with his fingers. “See? I told you he ate like a peasant,” Polanski said. Nureyev didn’t bother to smile.

He had passed, as a child, through the terror of massacre and war. He had seen a column of men being taken from the Krakow ghetto, doomed, his father among them, and had run alongside like a calf, wanting to go. His father ignored him and finally muttered threateningly, “Get lost.” The small boy of ten stopped, stung, and watched them leave him behind, to life, as it turned out, although, astonishingly, his father survived also. For such a miraculous escape and the rich life that followed, was there a price to be exacted?

That summer in Santa Monica — it was 1967—at the Mori Fencing Academy, Polanski was a prize pupil. He was also rehearsing an important film he was about to direct. In the enormous cavern of a sound stage, the floor of the apartment which would be in Rosemary’s Baby had been laid out with white tape. Polanski’s instructions to the actors had the same verve and precision he showed with the foil.

At the oversized beach house Sharon wore white pants and a long-sleeved black polo shirt, the buttons open. Her hands stole around me affectionately from behind. Polanski was weary from the long day with actors. We ate in the kitchen, steaks Sharon had thriftily bought at the post exchange in San Francisco — her father was an army officer — and just as Roman had shown pictures of her to me, she showed one of herself in some film magazine to him. An army brat, I was thinking, although I had never seen one like her. The ease and devotion of their life seemed plain.

For reasons not worth going into, Polanski was dropped from the movie I finally wrote, and thus I never lost the admiration I had for his energy and charm, a charm that was not learned but came from some deeper source, as well as his power to command. I could not imagine him being unable to reply to a question or think quickly. He had an instinct for the visceral; in his hands even familiar material could become interesting.

As for Sharon, she remains for me a kind of Hera, the emblem of marriage. If she was not a very good housekeeper, she was pure of heart and her flesh was a poem. One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman, looking at her, talking, touching, as well as other ways.

August morning. In a white nightgown, barefoot, with lovely arms and long hair she comes to the table in their suite in the Essex House. Polanski, barefoot too, has been watching television. We sit down to breakfast together. May I have the syrup? Mmm. The butter? A hand passes it. Would you like any toast? A crisscrossing of plates and offerings, together with his and her concealed smiles. It was a duet from Noël Coward. The suite was on the south side, high up. All of downtown New York spread before us. The previous night had been frenzy and excess, the morning freshness and reason. On top of the building were large red letters that spelled its name in neon, at night visible for miles. They were a landmark, like a lighthouse, at the edge of the park, and also a schoolboy legend when for a time, inexplicably, the first “E” and “S” were burned out. In the ambience of pleasure and art we talked about the ski-racing script. He was at the time shooting the movie he had rehearsed in California. Ours would be the next.

I saw them at Cannes a year later, together, for the last time. He was serving as a judge at the festival. He was wearing a dinner jacket when we talked and a white, ruffled shirt. She was in a matchless gown. They were to come to the country for lunch, but never showed up.

When Sharon Tate, along with four others, was senselessly murdered in Los Angeles one night, there was, in addition to horror and disgust, the shame. America had slaughtered one of its innocents. It was incomprehensible, God would not permit it. Perhaps Polanski, who had been in Europe at the time, had overreached himself, achieved too great a happiness, and it had been taken from him. His child, unborn, had died, too — the karma his father had given him was not to be passed on. I felt the sorrow for him that one feels for kings. His powers defied simple grief.

I thought of the bedroom in Santa Monica. It was spacious, on the second floor, facing the sea. I had stood in its corner. The sun was burning the floor. The large bed in which they had slept was unmade, the sheets rumpled, the pillows tossed. In the drawers of the built-in dresser were narrow glass windows to enable one to see the color of the shirts in each. There were Matisse drawings in the beautiful bath.

Among the road maps, cards, old addresses — the lost world never put in order — there is, I know, a photograph: the brilliant, almost demonic director on a couch with the tall, graceful girl. It was taken one night when we had dinner. I envied him his wife. It is difficult now to imagine the woman she would have become. She remains as she was, as if among all the herd there had been this exceptional creature, slightly awkward perhaps, but without blemish and carrying in her person the essential traits, the true heart of the paradise he had somehow bargained for.