I had flown with them, each of them, in Korea with Grissom, in the war. I saw the two of them moving now, along the walkway, slow as divers, clad in the same cloth mail. Over the threshold they stepped, into their sepulcher.
The capsule had become a reliquary, a furnace. They had inhaled fire, their lungs had turned to ash.
A month after White died I wrote to his widow, from afar, in the silence of the afternoon. Dear Pat.
I had dreamed of him many times, I wrote. He was precious to me. I believed in him. In him I saw myself, what I might have been. More, I felt the pride one has when intimate with greatness. He was on his way to greatness, needing only, as Matthew Arnold said in a different context, that two things concur: the power of the man and the power of the moment. It seemed the procession of heaven would stop for him, that it already had. We were convinced he was going to make his mark in history, not the history of his country or even of flight, but the history of mankind.
He was great, I wrote, in his ability, his strength, his character. He was great in achievement and great in his goals. But the moment did not occur.
Sometimes — I never knew when to expect it — the image of it all would return, the disaster with which I had some vague connection. At those times all else became trivial. It could translate itself into a genuine despair. It had managed to enter my soul.
I remember lying in bed in Paris, late at night. The hotel was silent. I was thinking of White. I put one finger to my temple. I was practicing shooting myself. It was very hard to pull the trigger. I waited, I began to count, one, two, three … A tremendous explosion! Then utter relief. What would I look like, I wondered? One side, the dark side, completely gone, splashed onto the walls and door. Who would care? On three, then. Ready …
Slowly the illness passed and came back less and less often. It was like some unhappiness in childhood, annealed by time. The road was leading elsewhere, to what seemed a counterlife, if not in importance then in its distance from the commonplace — a life of freedom, style, and art, or the semblance of art.
—
In some mysterious way which I accepted without wonder, the films I had been writing with little more behind them than undamaged belief all went into production within a year.
The one in Rome — it was called The Appointment—was badly miscast and had the wrong director. Because of his ability and reputation he had the unquestioning confidence of everyone, though he later told me he had agreed to make the movie mainly because he wanted the chance to learn something about color from the experienced Italian cameraman. Whatever the reason, he was ill adapted to the script which, like a poor garment, should have been ripped at the seams and completely refashioned to make it fit.
Lotte Lenya, old and nearly disregarded, had a small role, and it is she I remember best. We sat and talked — she was very approachable — with the intimacy of those who are inessential. Her physical sensuality was long gone but the history of it was still in her face. She was that unmistakable type, lower class risen, and comfortable in either world.
The ultimately ridiculous movie I had written was shown at Cannes the next year as the American entry. I found myself sitting with Helen Scott, a large, homely woman who worked in films, was close to what was called the New Wave, and whom I knew from Paris. The theater was packed with well-dressed people conversing in every language.
The screening was less than a triumph. The audience, at a moment when they should have felt fulfillment, broke into loud laughter. On the terrace of the Carlton afterwards we could not help overhearing the acid remarks. I felt the brief pleasure of having had my doubts confirmed, while Helen Scott, a veteran of the business, sat silent in embarrassment. She was afraid that I might burst into tears. The sole consolation was that I had been paid. I might, if I’d been more provident, have stuffed some of the money in my stocking.
You are, in the audience for a couple of hours, in the hands of the director, who may or may not be trusted. The vulgar falsehoods of the cinema, as someone has put it. Movies are like passion, brilliant and definitive. They end and there is an emptiness. They are narcotic, they allow one to forget — to imagine and forget. Looking back, I suppose I have always rejected the idea of actor as hero, and no intimacy has changed this. Actors are idols. Heroes are those with something at stake.
In the war, I remembered, we went to movies almost nightly. We laughed at them as the men and women in evening dress at Cannes had laughed at mine.
Nevertheless, filled with ambition, I was soon directing a film of my own. It was the one taken from the story of Irwin Shaw’s, and I now can see that I was too restrained, to mention only one shortcoming, in both the scenes I wrote and the direction that I gave the actors.
In the course of shooting we worked our way from the south of France down to Rome, traveling always by car. It was like a campaign of Hannibal’s. The days were long and exhausting. There was never a minute empty and almost no solitude.
The star — and she was that — had agreed to be in the film, then changed her mind, and at the last minute was persuaded again when we flew all night to Rome, where she was shooting something else, to meet with her. Visconti, she said — he was just then directing her — was a true genius. I tried not to be disheartened. I was judging her unfairly, by her conversation and personality, while there she was, flesh and blood and perhaps willing to perform. She refused dinner — to get back to a boyfriend, I was sure — and after twenty or thirty minutes raced off in a car. Her agreement to be in the film, however, enabled us to get the money to make it.
I was to learn many things about her: that she chewed wads of gum, had dirty hair, and, according to the costume woman, wore clothes that smelled. Also that she was frequently late, never apologized, and was short-tempered and mean. When she arrived in France to work, she brought an English boyfriend and his two small children along. She had told me she hated hotels, and in their room were soiled clothes piled in corners, paper bags of cookies, cornflakes, and containers of yoghurt. The boyfriend, a blond highwayman, was a vegetarian. He prescribed their food. “Meat,” he murmured in the restaurant, looking at a menu, “that’ll kill you.” In the morning sometimes they danced maniacally in the street, like two people who have just become rich or had an enormous piece of luck. During the day, after every scene she flew into his arms like a child while he kissed and consoled her.
Midway through shooting — we were near Avignon — she refused to continue unless her salary was doubled and, equally important, her boyfriend took over as director. She got the money but the producer refused to back the mutiny and set me adrift. When I heard what had happened I found it hard to suppress my loathing, although in retrospect I wonder if it might not have been a good thing. The boyfriend might have gotten some unimagined quality from her and made of the well-behaved film something crude but poignant — that is to say compelling.
The truth is, in stars, their temperament and impossible behavior are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties — these are the stuff of the myths; modern deities should be no different. If the movie is a success, even if it is not, all memories are cherished.
In the end the film we made, Three, was decorous and mildly attractive. It was popular at Cannes and had some flattering reviews in America. A young women’s magazine voted it the selection of the month and critics had it on their ten-best lists, but they were alone in this. Audiences thought otherwise.