James Salter - Burning the Days

A festive hour. All was laughter, excitement, familiarity. One would never dream they were a couple on the brink of divorce.

They had married too young, that was the trouble, Lydia, the mother-in-law confided. What did I think? “Bruna was too young,” she continued sadly, “Chris was too young.”

We dined, all of us, at a trattoria on Via Flaminia, beneath bright lights, as if on a stage. It might have been a play; the dialogue was polished, the actors had worked together many times. By the end of the evening they were at each other’s throat.

The next scene: London, a year or two later. The Grimaldi days were over. Chris was living in the basement room of a friend, trying to put together the elements of the film I had written. He had a Mercedes and a black overcoat, chalky with stains, but little else. He was, he said, keeping up with events by reading the newspaper under the cat dish.

I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.

We ate at inexpensive Greek restaurants with his associate, Ned Sherrin, who had considerable theatrical experience and had joined forces with him. We were definitely going to make the film; it was called Raincoat. “The deal is almost done,” they said.

They were like revolutionaries. For the cause, even if dubious, one gave everything. Their feet were not really on earth; they were leading a visionary existence, the life which was to come. One day they would walk up wide steps to tremendous applause. What was I doing now? they asked indulgently. Finishing a book, I explained.

“Is there a film in it?”

“There’s no film in anything I write, not even scripts,” I said.

Things, however, take time. The tide of battle wavered. They had a star, Alan Bates, who had agreed to play the lead, and based on that, much of the financing. A few months later the star was gone, though the money was still there. Then a studio materialized and someone wanted the script revised and the location of it changed. The drama moved to Los Angeles. For a while there was a flaring of interest and a flight to Rome to obtain the commitment of another star, Donald Sutherland.

Months passed, an uneventful week at a time. Years. At some undetermined point the whole thing slipped into an unmarked grave, the common fate, as it were. We spoke of it less and less, finally not at all. It had simply perished along the trail.

It is probably the common touch that is crucial in movies, not only for their success but for their very existence. Without it, one is at a disadvantage. I think of a producer Christopher worked for at one time, the hero, like a mobster or corrupt politician, of many favorite stories — Bruna rather liked him, as it happened. He once told Christopher the actual secret. He had made ten movies, he confided, and not one of them, not one, had ever made a penny. But he would go on making them, he said, you know why? “Because I know how the game is played.”

—

In Toronto, under amiable conditions, the last of the films I wrote was made. It was called Threshold, prophetically for me. Although I wrote other scripts, I had a deserter’s furtive thoughts.

The movie was about a cardiac surgeon and the first mechanical heart. The writing, as one sees often in retrospect, was imperfect, but I could not at the time imagine how to improve it. The budget was too small and the actors were not all ones we wanted. Some of the best scenes were dropped or awkwardly played as a result.

The entire screen, I wrote, is filled with an image too immense at first to have shape, a gigantic sun — big as a city, grainy, raging — that in silence or to strange, unnerving music slowly opens to reveal its core, for the heart is the sun of the body. There were a number of other defining metaphors, only one of which rather startlingly survived.

When I finally saw the movie, feeling as always naked in the audience, I saw mostly the flaws, quite a few of them my own fault.

Sometime in here, perhaps a little earlier, I flew to London one final time. I was with a producer who was said to have been one of two heirs, the displaced one, to a great studio. We had taken a night flight from Los Angeles over the Pole, bringing a script I’d rewritten to a director who was about to begin shooting, a delicate mission. We arrived at five in the morning and fell into the illusory world of the Dorchester’s luxurious rooms — rich woods, fabrics, carpet. I woke after a few hours, dazed, the winter light gray at the windows, muffled sounds in the hallway, an apologetic maid half-entering.

In the hotel’s dining room we sat down with the director, Mark Robson, a wizened man in a little hat, vicuña scarf, and camel’s-hair coat, far from what I heard were his Texas beginnings. The producer bravely introduced the subject. “The boys feel the script could be better,” he said.

Robson inquired calmly, “Which boys?”

“The boys,” the producer repeated, avoiding mentioning the name of the head of the company.

Robson nodded. That was enough; he understood completely, there was nothing to worry about. “I spent an hour on the phone with Robert Shaw this morning,” he commented pleasantly, naming the star. “He loves the script. He doesn’t want a word of it changed.”

“James,” the producer said to me, “will you tell him some of the proposals?”

The original script was weary cliché—no worse than many, certainly, and not difficult to improve. A large plate of pea soup growing cold before me, for twenty minutes, I described at some length the rationale behind the changes while Robson sat quietly. After I had finished there was silence.

“Well?” the producer asked.

Robson smiled politely with the gentle quality of a false priest. “I don’t understand,” he said simply.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just that I don’t understand anything you’ve said.” I could not but admire him.

He went on to make the original film. It has been forgotten, of course. It was designed to be forgotten. Its sole distinction was that the star, Robert Shaw, died during the shooting of it. It may be that Robson had been right in not wanting to complicate it or attempt to have it carry more weight. He may just have wanted to be done with it, like an ugly neighborhood one drives through on the way to something better. Perhaps he had run out of strength. The best is the enemy of the good, as my onetime agent, Kenneth Littauer, often cautioned me, and the same relationship probably exists between the passable and mere rubbish.

I wrote one (I thought) final script, years later — overwrote, I should say. Again only the seed of a story was provided: a reclusive star of the first magnitude who has not permitted an interview for years grants one to a very private, literary writer, one of whose books she happens to like. She has everything, he has almost nothing other than familiarity with the great dead and the world they define. Somehow it enthralls her, and for an hour or a week they fall in love.

Perhaps I dreamed I was the writer and the irresistible woman who had not, for years, had the least whim denied her was a symbol for film itself, though in fact the writer was closer to John Berryman, able to coax the birds with his cockeyed, intimate language.

I prepared myself — why, I cannot remember — by reading Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, and in a stifling upstairs bathroom, then outside beneath the trees, attended by swarms of yellow jackets, and finally in the airless upstairs reading room of the village library, I wrote the script. Something might have come of it but never did.