So it was like passing, that first time, over lost, sunken fleets. I had come into the city with our navigator, a stocky, powerful Hawaiian named Fred Hemmings. We behaved like sailors. We had nothing to do but find ways to be appealing. We jumped from place to place like fleas.
It was later that I had the first glimpse of a movie being made. I had met Samuel Goldwyn in Honolulu — it had somehow been arranged by my father — and he invited me to come to the studio when I was next in Los Angeles. Without his secretaries and beyond his domain, he was an ordinary-looking man with no particular authority. Unexpectedly he remembered me when I called, although of course I was not permitted to speak to him directly. The guard at the gate — the very emblem of the studios was the unsmiling guard — would have my name. I was directed to a sound stage where for an hour or two I watched an actor dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman descend a flight of stairs and deliver some dialogue, never to the complete satisfaction of the director. The actor was David Niven. It all seemed tedious. It seemed — the artifice and repetition, the naked back of the set — false.
Seven years later, an officer still, in civilian clothes I sat in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside, going from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Points of rain appeared on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine in which the models, maddeningly prim, wore little hats and white gloves there was a curious article that caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plumpish Welsh poet whose photograph, taken outside the door of his studio in a seaside town, a manuscript stuck in the pocket of his jacket, was beguiling. John Malcolm Brinnin, perhaps excerpting it from his book, had written about Dylan Thomas and somehow the piece had appeared in Mademoiselle. There was a picture of Dylan Thomas’s wife, children with Celtic names, and even a snapshot of his mother.
Brinnin’s lyric description of seedy, romantic life was an introduction to the poem that followed, in overwhelming bursts of language, page upon page. It was Under Milk Wood, roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. In the soft, clicking comfort of the train I feasted on it all. The drops of rain became streaks as the dazzling voices spoke, housewives, shopkeepers, shrews, Captain Cat — the blind, retired sea captain dreaming of a strumpet, Rosie Probert (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”).
It was an unforgettable performance, singing on and on — the longest poem, though written as a play, I had ever read — and its imagery was such that I was enthralled by the unoriginal idea of seeing it as a film. It could be, and eventually was one, of course, though I was then incapable of realizing that even a perfect film would illustrate only one facet of all the glittering possibilities. The poem’s power was greater than any alternate version of it could be, and in fact it would be limited by such translation.
With me in that Bundesbahn car that had, I suppose, survived the war — within me — was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem I had read, and the longing to do so, never wholly absent, rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?
—
As it turned out, my entry into films was by way of a cluttered back room, toppling with papers, in the offices of the prominent theatrical lawyers, Weissburger and Frosch. The most junior member of the firm, theatrical in his own right, large, soft, animated, the son of a movie writer and brother of another, was Howard Rayfiel. He performed the essential drudgery: completing contracts, drafting letters, laboring in the stables of kings. On his own time he was impresario of a phantom company. He wore a velvet-collared overcoat and an Astrakhan hat in which he appeared, like a sophomore Diaghilev, at Carnegie Hall, not in the auditorium but in the large-windowed studios above, reached by a majestic ancient elevator. He arrived not with a ballerina but with a paper bag containing Camembert and apples, lunch for those conferring with his partner, a theater director who had had limited success but was confident of his talents. Together they were going to make films. They invited me to join them, to write a script. Flattered, ready to believe I could put my hand to anything, I began what turned out to be a long affair.
The director already had a first film behind him. I recall it as having almost no dialogue, the endless, headlong flight of what seemed to be a fugitive or survivor through dense woods, a man pursued by demons or perhaps dogs. Well into the film, as he bent over to drink from a stream, there was the glint of something dangling from his neck. It was a pair of silver bombardier’s wings, and the source of his agony — I forget how it was made clear — was that he had been one of the crew members who had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. He could flee but would never escape the memory. I was certain I could write something less banal.
I worked in a quiet, odd-numbered house on Sutton Place, one of a pair that belonged to a devoted pupil of the director, convert would be a better word. She was rich but did not contribute any money to the venture, only part of her premises. This was wise in one way and foolish in another. She would have probably lost the money and been criticized by her bankers, but a year or so afterwards she died in a plane crash — on her honeymoon, as it happened — and what did it matter then?
One afternoon in the studio at Carnegie Hall I encountered what I took to be the genuine: a man with an accent and a long, ascetic face, dressed in the unmistakable manner of an artist — pants from one suit and a double-breasted jacket from another. Adolphus Mekas was his name. He was renowned both for a film he was then directing and also because his brother, Jonas Mekas, was the uncompromising judge of all film culture which, capitalized, was the name of his didactic magazine.
I was eager to hear and ready to embrace Adolphus Mekas’s views, especially regarding scripts. There was a then current idea that one should work without them, improvise, allow the actors freely to create a story. Plot was the curse of serious drama, as Bernard Shaw had said.
Was he, I asked cautiously, working from … did he have a script? Yes. He had scripts, but he kept them locked up, Mekas said, not to keep them from falling into possibly rival hands but to prevent the actors from reading them — that was the way they formed preconceptions, he explained. When the time came for the scene, he gave them the necessary lines and those only. He said all this with assurance and European calm. I have no idea what the movie he made was like.
My own script was a sentimental bouquet laid, as it were, at the feet of a young, irresistibly cynical New York girl, the flower of every generation, in this particular case nurtured in such bygone hothouses as El Morocco and the Stork Club. She was seen through the eyes of an infatuated but unforceful man who is put off by certain incidents she expects will endear her, and in the end they part. She disappears into the swift currents of Manhattan. His voice perhaps offers an elegy.
The story, which was called “Goodbye, Bear,” had no barb. It was merely a history and would have been better as a poem; it had some aching lines. It also had a kind of lonely dignity, which produced an unexpected result, in the manner of the Chinese fable of the mandarin who for years stood along the river fishing with, instead of a hook, a straight pin. The word of this curious behavior spread until it finally reached the emperor himself, who came to see. What could anyone hope to catch with such a hook? the emperor asked the mandarin. For what was he fishing?
The answer was serene. “For you, my emperor,” the mandarin said.