James Salter - Burning the Days

Lotte Lenya, old and nearly disregarded, had a small role, and it is she I remember best. We sat and talked — she was very approachable — with the intimacy of those who are inessential. Her physical sensuality was long gone but the history of it was still in her face. She was that unmistakable type, lower class risen, and comfortable in either world.

The ultimately ridiculous movie I had written was shown at Cannes the next year as the American entry. I found myself sitting with Helen Scott, a large, homely woman who worked in films, was close to what was called the New Wave, and whom I knew from Paris. The theater was packed with well-dressed people conversing in every language.

The screening was less than a triumph. The audience, at a moment when they should have felt fulfillment, broke into loud laughter. On the terrace of the Carlton afterwards we could not help overhearing the acid remarks. I felt the brief pleasure of having had my doubts confirmed, while Helen Scott, a veteran of the business, sat silent in embarrassment. She was afraid that I might burst into tears. The sole consolation was that I had been paid. I might, if I’d been more provident, have stuffed some of the money in my stocking.

You are, in the audience for a couple of hours, in the hands of the director, who may or may not be trusted. The vulgar falsehoods of the cinema, as someone has put it. Movies are like passion, brilliant and definitive. They end and there is an emptiness. They are narcotic, they allow one to forget — to imagine and forget. Looking back, I suppose I have always rejected the idea of actor as hero, and no intimacy has changed this. Actors are idols. Heroes are those with something at stake.

In the war, I remembered, we went to movies almost nightly. We laughed at them as the men and women in evening dress at Cannes had laughed at mine.

Nevertheless, filled with ambition, I was soon directing a film of my own. It was the one taken from the story of Irwin Shaw’s, and I now can see that I was too restrained, to mention only one shortcoming, in both the scenes I wrote and the direction that I gave the actors.

In the course of shooting we worked our way from the south of France down to Rome, traveling always by car. It was like a campaign of Hannibal’s. The days were long and exhausting. There was never a minute empty and almost no solitude.

The star — and she was that — had agreed to be in the film, then changed her mind, and at the last minute was persuaded again when we flew all night to Rome, where she was shooting something else, to meet with her. Visconti, she said — he was just then directing her — was a true genius. I tried not to be disheartened. I was judging her unfairly, by her conversation and personality, while there she was, flesh and blood and perhaps willing to perform. She refused dinner — to get back to a boyfriend, I was sure — and after twenty or thirty minutes raced off in a car. Her agreement to be in the film, however, enabled us to get the money to make it.

I was to learn many things about her: that she chewed wads of gum, had dirty hair, and, according to the costume woman, wore clothes that smelled. Also that she was frequently late, never apologized, and was short-tempered and mean. When she arrived in France to work, she brought an English boyfriend and his two small children along. She had told me she hated hotels, and in their room were soiled clothes piled in corners, paper bags of cookies, cornflakes, and containers of yoghurt. The boyfriend, a blond highwayman, was a vegetarian. He prescribed their food. “Meat,” he murmured in the restaurant, looking at a menu, “that’ll kill you.” In the morning sometimes they danced maniacally in the street, like two people who have just become rich or had an enormous piece of luck. During the day, after every scene she flew into his arms like a child while he kissed and consoled her.

Midway through shooting — we were near Avignon — she refused to continue unless her salary was doubled and, equally important, her boyfriend took over as director. She got the money but the producer refused to back the mutiny and set me adrift. When I heard what had happened I found it hard to suppress my loathing, although in retrospect I wonder if it might not have been a good thing. The boyfriend might have gotten some unimagined quality from her and made of the well-behaved film something crude but poignant — that is to say compelling.

The truth is, in stars, their temperament and impossible behavior are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties — these are the stuff of the myths; modern deities should be no different. If the movie is a success, even if it is not, all memories are cherished.

In the end the film we made, Three, was decorous and mildly attractive. It was popular at Cannes and had some flattering reviews in America. A young women’s magazine voted it the selection of the month and critics had it on their ten-best lists, but they were alone in this. Audiences thought otherwise.

There were opportunities to direct again, but I remembered, when we were close to finishing, lying on the stone beach at Nice late in the day in a pair of Battistoni shoes, utterly spent. I felt like an alcoholic, like Malcolm Lowry. I had forgotten it was Céline I liked, Cavafy. It seemed the morning after. The ball was over. I looked down and saw the white legs of my father. All of it had demanded more than I was willing again to give.

—

For its real adherents the life never ended. I liked the stories of producers driving down to Cap d’Antibes in convertibles with two or three carefree girls. I had had notes placed in my hand by the wives of leading men, bored and unattended to, that said in one way or another, Call me. I had seen Harry Kurnitz’s Bentley and his accompanying girlfriend, and the actors emerging from the Danieli in Venice, wrapped against the fall weather in expensive coats, fur-lined within and cloth out. The fur was the luxury in which they lived, the cloth an emblem of the ordinary world from which they were removed. Off to Torcello for lunch, jolting across the wide lagoon, the wind blowing the dark green water to whiteness, past San Michele with its brick walls, the island on which Stravinsky and Diaghilev lay buried — the real and the false glory, one moving past the other, though there are times one cannot tell which is which.

I liked the producers best. It may have been because I had more to do with them or because their job was to always have money, or perhaps it was their resilience. They were like prospectors, optimistic, willing to toil for years in hope of a strike. They needed neither honesty nor education, although the one I came to admire most was hampered by both.

I first met him at a lunch high above Fifth Avenue. Some well-heeled investors had invited him to give his opinion on a proposal Lane Slate and I were making to form a small company. In a tweed jacket and with the air of having been taken away from more important things he calmly asked a few questions and then proceeded to chop us to bits. It was like listening to a banker give all the reasons for turning down a loan. Films, even documentaries, could not be made for the amounts we suggested; there were no arrangements for distribution or sale even if the films were somehow made; finally, he did not find the subjects we had chosen interesting. There seemed to be nothing to be said in rebuttal other than “You are wrong.” It had a pathetic sound. I disliked this man intensely. His arrogance was enraging. I could not remember his name. Battered, Lane and I descended to the street.

Some months later my agent came across a producer he was certain I would like, a man of taste, imaginative, young. He would be at the bar of the Four Seasons and we could have an introductory drink. I was appalled to find myself sitting down next to the same haughty expert who had flayed us before. My recollection is that in his self-esteem he did not recognize me.