August morning. In a white nightgown, barefoot, with lovely arms and long hair she comes to the table in their suite in the Essex House. Polanski, barefoot too, has been watching television. We sit down to breakfast together. May I have the syrup? Mmm. The butter? A hand passes it. Would you like any toast? A crisscrossing of plates and offerings, together with his and her concealed smiles. It was a duet from Noël Coward. The suite was on the south side, high up. All of downtown New York spread before us. The previous night had been frenzy and excess, the morning freshness and reason. On top of the building were large red letters that spelled its name in neon, at night visible for miles. They were a landmark, like a lighthouse, at the edge of the park, and also a schoolboy legend when for a time, inexplicably, the first “E” and “S” were burned out. In the ambience of pleasure and art we talked about the ski-racing script. He was at the time shooting the movie he had rehearsed in California. Ours would be the next.
I saw them at Cannes a year later, together, for the last time. He was serving as a judge at the festival. He was wearing a dinner jacket when we talked and a white, ruffled shirt. She was in a matchless gown. They were to come to the country for lunch, but never showed up.
When Sharon Tate, along with four others, was senselessly murdered in Los Angeles one night, there was, in addition to horror and disgust, the shame. America had slaughtered one of its innocents. It was incomprehensible, God would not permit it. Perhaps Polanski, who had been in Europe at the time, had overreached himself, achieved too great a happiness, and it had been taken from him. His child, unborn, had died, too — the karma his father had given him was not to be passed on. I felt the sorrow for him that one feels for kings. His powers defied simple grief.
I thought of the bedroom in Santa Monica. It was spacious, on the second floor, facing the sea. I had stood in its corner. The sun was burning the floor. The large bed in which they had slept was unmade, the sheets rumpled, the pillows tossed. In the drawers of the built-in dresser were narrow glass windows to enable one to see the color of the shirts in each. There were Matisse drawings in the beautiful bath.
Among the road maps, cards, old addresses — the lost world never put in order — there is, I know, a photograph: the brilliant, almost demonic director on a couch with the tall, graceful girl. It was taken one night when we had dinner. I envied him his wife. It is difficult now to imagine the woman she would have become. She remains as she was, as if among all the herd there had been this exceptional creature, slightly awkward perhaps, but without blemish and carrying in her person the essential traits, the true heart of the paradise he had somehow bargained for.
—
In first-class cabins, paid for with movie money — a good portion of the money, as it happened — in the warm autumn of 1967 we sailed on the France. Tremendous departure, crowds on the pier, the water widening, the ship assuming life. In the blue, oceanic evening, waiters brought drinks and packs of cigarettes to the table.
We dressed for dinner. Madeleine Carroll and her daughter were aboard, and Edward Albee en route to Paris and Leningrad for the openings of his play. As they entered, the bartender called out greetings to familiar couples by name. At afternoon tea there was an orchestra, and miniskirted girls without partners sat slumped in chairs. A theater producer told stories of Ireland — men who approached him in the street crying grandly, “Sir John!” He tried to correct them but could not. “A little something for charity,” they pleaded.
“What charity?”
“Sir John!” they wailed.
The second night at three in the morning, I woke abruptly. Someone was throwing gravel against the port-holes. It was heavy rain; we had run into a storm. The ship rolled, soared ominously, slid down. The steel shivered and creaked. We had three staterooms and four children, most of whom became seasick. His twin sister, Claude, was smiling and unaffected, but in the empty dining room I could see my son’s face — he was five, Fidi was his pet name — changing color as food was brought to the slanting table.
There was bingo in the calm of the next afternoon. Amid the old couples and children sat a dark-browed Edward Albee, two cards in front of him. The handsome blond boy he was traveling with we saw little of.
We were going to France for a year, to a village in the south, not far from Grasse, where we had rented a large, sparsely furnished farmhouse — a mas in the regional dialect — solidly built with walls two feet thick. It had been occupied the year before by Robert Penn Warren and his wife, Eleanor Clarke. I wrote to ask if they recommended it, and a letter came from her in reply. It described a paradise, from the windows of which the sea could be distantly seen. You will have the most wonderful year of your life, it concluded, if you don’t happen to freeze to death. The house, of course, had no heat. In the worst months of winter the sheets were so cold we could not turn over in bed — we lay like statues of saints, rigid, arms crossed.
La Moutonne, the house was called, the female sheep. The long, descending driveway was bordered by great eucalyptus trees, whose bark hung in sinuous strips. The front of the house more or less faced empty air. There was an embankment, the roofs of a few houses below and, far off, the tinfoil sea. The most wonderful year of your life — the simplicity of that promise.
All through the summer, to prepare them for regular French school—école communale—our two oldest daughters had been taking French lessons. In the Manhattan apartment of a professor, several times a week they sat and talked for an hour. The amount they learned, it turned out, was limited by a large wart the professor had on the tip of his tongue, visible when he spoke and absolutely mesmerizing to two little girls.
It was a long, beautiful fall. Many mornings I rose before dawn and went out on the bedroom balcony to read. Grasse rose blue in the distance. Its buildings had the luminous form and serenity of palaces. The only people we knew in the first months were Harvey Swados, the writer, and his family, half an hour away in Haut de Cagnes. It was they who had persuaded us to come to France — he was on a sabbatical.
Haut de Cagnes was on top of a hill, overlooking its then sleepy sister, Cagnes sur Mer, where Modigliani once lived and the gypsies used to come and bathe their horses in the sea. The Swadoses’ small house belonged to a sculptor or perhaps his children — he had abandoned his family, and his wife had died of drink, with empty bottles piled on the stairs. There were hundreds of books, many moldy, and often inscribed by famous figures from the 1920s, when a disheartened Scott Fitzgerald had sat in the square not far from the house and moaned, “Ernie’s done it,” of The Sun Also Rises, which had just come out.
The village of which La Moutonne was part was less distinguished, able to claim only some years when Renoir, the painter, had lived there. There was a stucco church and a restaurant or two, and beneath our olive trees with their silvery leaves a white goat danced on her hind legs, striving to strip the lowest boughs. This was Lily, sweet-smelling, graceful, and deeply unaffectionate. The children adored her, though treating her with caution. Her face offered little in the way of expression other than satisfaction at eating, and her yellow eyes, set high on her head, were as cold as those of a serpent. It was impossible to estimate what she knew, but whatever it was, we came to realize, was firmly ingrained. At night she was kept in a roomy stone shed attached to the house. During the day she would graze, often climbing onto the red-tile roof of the shed, from there stepping onto the balcony where I worked, and even, if they were open, through the french doors into the bedroom. It was only at milking time that she disappeared.