He had been divorced, from an Italian woman he described as beautiful, whom I never saw. She had garnisheed his salary. Driving into the city together we would often stop at an out-of-the-way New Jersey bank where he was obliged to shelter his always strained assets. He worked for a television network in a division called Public Affairs. We helped ourselves to the rich supplies of notebooks and stationery and planned movies we would make together.
There is a language within language, a kind of code, and it was the joy of this that drew us close. I liked the way he spoke, the speed of his conclusions, the breadth of his scorn, the exactness of his references. Also his aplomb. He had not been to college — he had read his way up and somehow knew everything. Though I could not quite picture it, he had been in the navy. He retained none of its lore except for a belief that one could always make out with girls who wore little gold crucifixes.
We formed a company and began to make a documentary on New York called Daily Life in Ancient Rome, with a narrative taken from Livy and Sallust. Early morning. Shooting on Fifth Avenue. A car pulls up at the corner and a girl in an Air France uniform with a trim, tailored skirt gets out. The car has diplomatic plates, and a pale, spent driver leans across to bid goodbye and close the door behind her. She runs, hobbled by the skirt, towards the broad glass front: AIR FRANCE. The night has ended.
We sat on stools in the dark looking at the rushes, weighing cuts. Into the bright sunlight of West Fifty-fifth Street in the afternoon, to the Brittany for lunch. The film will have faces, illicit couples emerging from the “21” club, dizzying shots up sleek façades towards dark skies, while beneath it in calm tones the prophetic description, centuries old, of decay.
This was the New York of Balanchine, Motherwell, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as Jack Smith, Yoko Ono, and George Kleinsinger, performers whom the years had yet to deplume. Kleinsinger was a composer. In his rooms at the Chelsea Hotel he had a tropical rainforest, uncaged birds hopping from branch to branch, fish in pools, fountains. Nearby was a gleaming black piano at which he was writing the music for an opera called Archy and Mehitabel. His daughter stood beside him and sang parts of it in a great, passionate voice, then returned to stretch out on the daybed beside another young woman, Kleinsinger’s fiancée.
Yoko Ono was married to an acquaintance of mine who acted as her manager and dedicated himself to her career. She had been married before. He was somewhat ingenuous; she was not. They lived in one place and another, always struggling for money, and had a little daughter to whom he was devoted. I would see him in the Village with the baby in his arms and her bottle in a musette bag over his shoulder. His wife was above this. A performance artist, she radiated ambition. She was determined to have her chance, and in the end, in a very unexpected way, she found it.
Daily Life in Ancient Rome was never completed. We did make ten or twelve other films, documentaries, scraped together, some of them eloquent. We traveled over the country together, flying, driving, checking into motels, in the mindless joy of America, beer bottles lying by the roadside, empty cans tumbling light as paper. I can see his hands moving in small, inviting circles as he explains himself and his requests to someone. He sketched broadly and only lightly filled things in. He could so quickly make himself liked. It is his curious charm that I am remembering, the pockets with money crumpled in them, some of which often fell to the floor, the migraine headaches, which eventually came in clusters, the familiarity with names of all kinds, the cars in need of repair, the essential loneliness.
His older son, named for him, was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and died a few days later. It was at a time when we had already begun gradually to separate. Perhaps we had lost the power to amuse each other. We made one final film, on American painters: Warhol before his real recognition, Rauschenburg, Stuart Davis, a dozen others. From the small, asbestos-shingled house in Piermont he moved to Sneden’s Landing, an exclusive enclave where the houses, though passing through the hands of various owners, had their own traditional names. Disasters followed, principal among them the death of his wife.
On envelopes addressed in his beautiful handwriting the postmarks moved west, to California, where, if it was to happen, he would at last become a director. He lived for a time in a house owned once by Greta Garbo, came back East for a third, unsuccessful marriage, and then retreated to Arizona and a ranch with the unlikely name of X-9. There the trail came to an end.
—
I had a friend, knot-jawed and earnest — Hurley was his name — who lived in a snug, orderly apartment like a captain’s cabin on Sixty-first Street and who always used to ask, “But how did you meet them?” as if it were inconceivable. He also accused me — a cut slow to heal — of writing down everyone’s address in a little book as soon as I met them. Was there really a time when I was trying to meet people? Oh, yes. I was ecstatic at the chance, in about 1963, to meet Peter Glenville, an Englishman, a director who had directed Rashomon on the stage and the film Becket. He had an undeniable gift and lived like a prince.
There were four of us at dinner, all men, in his New York town house. The meal was served by a uniformed maid. Glenville asked if I would be interested in writing a script, an Italian story he wanted to make. The mere proposal seemed a reward. He was showing his faith in me; he had tapped me, as it were. It was easy to see that he was discriminating — the house, the fine clothes, the tall, soothing companion, Bill Smith.
I was sent a typewritten outline and felt, upon reading it, disappointment. It was trash: A young man in Rome, a lawyer, meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl who is strangely evasive about her personal life. She is either only uncertain and innocent or — the evidence is flimsy but his suspicion mounts — a call girl. He marries her anyway, but incidents recur that are disturbing. I have forgotten the cliché climactic moment, but it causes her to attempt suicide and there is a final reconciliation amid the white sheets of the ospedale, or perhaps she dies.
No matter what was done with it, I told Glenville frankly, it would never possess the least merit. He understood my misgivings, but still the theme of jealousy was interesting and the locale …
The producer called from California. They were all “fans” of mine there. He had talked at length to Glenville. They were confident that I was the one to write the film. Forgetting everything, I inhaled.
There is the feeling that directors are dependent on you. In reality they are only attendant, waiting to see what is brought back, with luck something plump in your jaws. You are at most a preliminary figure. Their view extends past yours to meetings, cajolings, intrigues. They are the ones who actually create things. How reassuring it is to be drawn along by their energy, to linger in their society, which seems luxurious and perhaps elevated, intimate with that of the stars themselves.
I once sat near a victor at Cannes. He was in a buckskin coat and a sort of black peddler’s hat. The party was all young, and as he spoke, the girl beside him took his hand, fingers intermeshed with his, raised it to her lips, and began to kiss it in devotion. He continued to talk, his free arm extended like a pope’s.
—
In Rome, ochre and white, uninterested in me, I had the name of a Count Crespi; Glenville had supplied it. He was cool on the telephone. I had to wait several days for an evening appointment.
He came out of his office to introduce himself, tan, handsome face, ears close to his head, shattering smile. “I am Crespi,” he said, taking me into a small, plain room where he sat down across from me.