James Salter - Burning the Days

Rassam had many friends at La Coupole. With some, passing among the tables, he sat a long time, with others he exchanged a greeting and a word or two. He was almost always alone. It was because of the dream that one night he would meet the woman of his life there, and he didn’t want to be with anyone else at the time. It was a misconceived idea; you are always with someone else.

Helen Scott had been a mother to him — whether the one he had referred to or not, I cannot say — during a long year when he suffered from serious depression. He emerged from it at last. “In his own milieu,” Helen confided, “he is unbeatable, and he always finds his milieu.”

She drank that night and talked about the past, her father who had been an actor. When military music used to play, he would salute and march around the room. He didn’t speak to her mother except through the children (“Tell your mother she’s a murderous bitch”), and it was only at his funeral that Helen began to understand him, she said. His funeral marked his reentry into her life. We continued to drink. There was something of the coquette in her, unlikely as it seemed, beneath the heavy body and crude features. She knew Truffaut very well, and once in a hotel had come to his room in a negligee, hoping to seduce him. He had to lock himself in the bathroom. Before Paris, she had worked for the United Nations in New York, for the Polish delegation. Scottka, they called her. She had worked with Kropotski.

“Who was Kropotski?”

“Dr. Kropotski. His digestion was bad,” she said.

She was big; she was lonely. She had tried to lose weight in a clinic near Grasse and had come to dinner with her food in a small paper bag — one meager slice of cold veal — but her main preoccupation was transportation, how to get places: she didn’t drive.

When we left that night she was singing in the street, something from times even more distant, a vanished girlhood when her homeliness seemed perhaps like a mark of character. “You’ll eat corned beef and cabbages,” she sang, “and miss your Abie …”

Rassam remained remarkable, the most extraordinary person they’d ever known, people said. Unforgettable words. A few years later he was living at the Plaza Athenée and producing films, among them Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and an outrageous, beyond category, so to say, obscene comedy called La Grande Bouffe. He married an actress and had a child, but his excesses were deeply ingrained and his talents inseparable from his flaws. Heroin was among his pleasures.

The last that I knew of him he was living on the Avenue Montaigne in a beautiful old apartment with hardly a stick of furniture. The living room was absolutely bare. In the dining room was a large table, able to seat sixteen, and two sofas. Not long afterwards he was dead, from an overdose of barbiturates. It was accidental, they said.

—

In the floating world, of those I knew, the one who seemed most to embody its contradictions was a prince of the blood, Christopher Mankiewicz, the son of not only a man but a family renowned for its talent. His uncle had written the film often named as the best ever made in this country, Citizen Kane, and his father’s achievements were even more celebrated — Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz, borne by the immigrant tide but destined to become the purest of American voices.

His father was in every respect large, and Christopher inherited the dimensions. Tall, blue-eyed, and arrogant, he had the satisfaction of knowing, whatever misfortune, that he would always possess a distinguished name. Misfortune seemed unlikely. He had charm, intelligence, and, not unexpectedly, a good measure of self-indulgence. In the familiar way, he suffered from the long life of a powerful father, a man of prodigious appetite and wit, famous for his love affairs with stars, Judy Garland, Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, who fell on her knees and cried that the baby might have been hers.

His mother was an Austrian beauty, Rosa Stradner, an actress who had come to Hollywood to be a star but despite marriage to an important director did not achieve it. There were fierce fights at the dinner table; the father would storm out and the mother begin drinking. On countless nights she would come to her son’s room to wake him and talk, sometimes passing out on the floor. She was still beautiful when she committed suicide at the age of forty-five.

Her son grew up to marry an Italian dancer. They met in Rome during the shooting of his father’s momentous failure, Cleopatra, with the strange excitement of catastrophe on a grand scale somehow increasing the passion. Christopher was a romantic in every way. Devoted to classical music, susceptible to literature, mad about women, it was only the lack of wealth that in the end served to protect him. As a young studio executive in New York where we first met, he wore expensive double-breasted suits with the enviable aplomb of a fat man, spoke perfect Italian, used a cigarette holder, and possessed a failing, to me invisible, but which his wife saw clearly: the millions he promised her he would have before he reached thirty were not forthcoming. Perhaps, like Rassam, he was too brilliant for ordinary success.

Still, his shrewdness and the momentum of his early career carried him far. He had strong friendships, many based on his wit and taste as well as his outspoken opinions which, despite their validity, were often undiplomatically rendered. The confusion of letters strewn about a large desk; the heaping meals in restaurants, quickly devoured; the apartments and luxurious suites — these began to slowly slip away. He worked in Los Angeles, where, in his father’s assessment, he ruined his chances on innumerable occasions. “Isn’t it time you left town?” his father commented finally. “You’re finished here.”

In Rome, in the early 1970s, he was working for Grimaldi, an important Italian producer. His life had become nocturnal. At four in the morning the lights were still on. In an undershirt he sits at his desk doing a vast jigsaw puzzle. His mother-in-law, of whom he is very fond, is asleep, his young son also. This son, Jason, is six years old, beautiful and petulant, a compulsive talker with a slight lisp. Early in the morning he comes into the room. “Do you know what this is?” he demands. “This is my favorite book. In this book you can learn about everything. You can learn about the stars, and what is the deepest hole in the sea, and about thunderstorms and how to stop them. This is my best book. And this,” he says, showing it to me but also to himself, “is a script I wrote. All alone. And this! This is a book — have you seen this book? This is about soldiers.” He then begins to explain to me, with remarkable accuracy, how children are born.

Now he is still sleeping, however. The blue haze of cigarette smoke hugs the ceiling. The third act of Aïda is on. Christopher passes his hand over the table. “I’ve done all this section here,” he indicates. His face is innocent, unweary, a face that will never show corruption.

We were working on a script, the odyssey of which had only begun. This was the best part, the freshness and hope at the start. There had even arrived an encouraging letter from his father, remarkable in that it was only the second, and turned out to be the last, Christopher had ever received from him. In addition to praise the letter went on to suggest an entirely different approach. Day after day we talked about it until it grew dark.

Once, late in the afternoon, there was a tapping at the etched-glass door to the garden. Pressed against the glass, arms spread, was a figure like a huge moth against a pane. “My God!” Christopher cried. “Bruna!” His wife, from whom he was virtually separated. In she came, out of the evening, smiling, her face filled with joy. She was working as a model. She had canvas luggage and a long, stylish coat. She went in immediately to surprise her young son.