There were opportunities to direct again, but I remembered, when we were close to finishing, lying on the stone beach at Nice late in the day in a pair of Battistoni shoes, utterly spent. I felt like an alcoholic, like Malcolm Lowry. I had forgotten it was Céline I liked, Cavafy. It seemed the morning after. The ball was over. I looked down and saw the white legs of my father. All of it had demanded more than I was willing again to give.
—
For its real adherents the life never ended. I liked the stories of producers driving down to Cap d’Antibes in convertibles with two or three carefree girls. I had had notes placed in my hand by the wives of leading men, bored and unattended to, that said in one way or another, Call me. I had seen Harry Kurnitz’s Bentley and his accompanying girlfriend, and the actors emerging from the Danieli in Venice, wrapped against the fall weather in expensive coats, fur-lined within and cloth out. The fur was the luxury in which they lived, the cloth an emblem of the ordinary world from which they were removed. Off to Torcello for lunch, jolting across the wide lagoon, the wind blowing the dark green water to whiteness, past San Michele with its brick walls, the island on which Stravinsky and Diaghilev lay buried — the real and the false glory, one moving past the other, though there are times one cannot tell which is which.
I liked the producers best. It may have been because I had more to do with them or because their job was to always have money, or perhaps it was their resilience. They were like prospectors, optimistic, willing to toil for years in hope of a strike. They needed neither honesty nor education, although the one I came to admire most was hampered by both.
I first met him at a lunch high above Fifth Avenue. Some well-heeled investors had invited him to give his opinion on a proposal Lane Slate and I were making to form a small company. In a tweed jacket and with the air of having been taken away from more important things he calmly asked a few questions and then proceeded to chop us to bits. It was like listening to a banker give all the reasons for turning down a loan. Films, even documentaries, could not be made for the amounts we suggested; there were no arrangements for distribution or sale even if the films were somehow made; finally, he did not find the subjects we had chosen interesting. There seemed to be nothing to be said in rebuttal other than “You are wrong.” It had a pathetic sound. I disliked this man intensely. His arrogance was enraging. I could not remember his name. Battered, Lane and I descended to the street.
Some months later my agent came across a producer he was certain I would like, a man of taste, imaginative, young. He would be at the bar of the Four Seasons and we could have an introductory drink. I was appalled to find myself sitting down next to the same haughty expert who had flayed us before. My recollection is that in his self-esteem he did not recognize me.
Thus began one of the truest friendships of my life.
Harvard, ex — naval officer, former curator, writer, editor, his name was Robert Emmett Ginna, the “G” hard and the last syllable rhyming with “way.” Though it was through error mispelled on his birth certificate, he had been named, like his father, for the enduring Irish patriot Robert Emmet. He had acquired, it turned out, the rights to a drably written novel with a central, melodramatic idea. These were the days of unforgiving dictatorships in Eastern Europe. In one such regime the hated chief judge — the equivalent of minister of justice — an icy man of no mercy, is also, unknown to anyone, its most famous and revered dissident. Once a year, during carnival, when identities are masked and all inhibitions put aside, the feared judge, disguised, becomes a legendary clown. Women fall in love with his daring, and of course this is the path to downfall. I was to write the script.
We arranged to go to Europe for research. In the February dusk a limousine drove us to the Pan Am Building, where we rose, throbbing, from the windblown roof in a helicopter and glissaded across the river and far-reaching suburbs. In my pocket was a wad of traveler’s checks he had handed me for “incidentals,” though during the trip I had the chance to cash very few of them. In the first romantic darkness, on Lufthansa, we moved towards the runway, and soon after takeoff, trim stewardesses were moving slowly down the aisle with a huge roast, which they carved to order. We were in first class. In Ginna’s attaché case were an eyemask and a pair of slippers. When, after dinner and fine cognac, the talk gradually ceased, he bade a pleasant goodnight, put on the equipment, and leaned back in the seat. We were companions.
He was a man of firm habits, intense loyalties, great knowledge of art — his only real knowledge, he called it — and a fierce temper. His mouth could set in a line as taut as if drawn by a scrimshaw artist. He was a writer himself, as I have said, a journalist of long experience. He knew countless stories, as well as the names of serious restaurants in a dozen countries. He was a passionate fisherman and a superb cook.
We went to the heart of Europe and the carnivals in Munich, Cologne, and Prague. Also Basel. In the ballroom of the Bayerischer Hof I was dressed as a rooster — elaborate costumes were for rent — and he as a Roman senator with a gilded laurel wreath. Did we really see or did I imagine, he later wrote, kneeling girls naked to the waist being ridden like horses?
The resulting script, written towards the end of the 1960s, acquired a long history. Over the years, six or seven, when the movie that might be made possessed some animation, a faint breathing or wan, unexpected smile, various actors and directors drifted in and out of involvement. Joseph Losey, a lofty exile, said he would like to do it. We met in his London town house. He sat in a chair near the window. He had the watcheye, as Ginna commented afterwards, pale and slightly bulging; ponies had it. He also had an indigestible idea, that the movie should be made not in Europe but in South America. They had dictatorships there, and the background would be fresh. “The arcades,” he said mysteriously several times.
Later, to our great happiness, Paul Scofield agreed to be in it. A studio decided to go ahead, providing we could get one of three actresses they named to play opposite him. By now, three or four years had passed. We flew to London once again; the three actresses were all there. The black eyeshade had been worn out or lost. Ginna tied a blue, dotted handkerchief over his eyes and promptly went to sleep.
London was his refuge and his sea. He had gone to Europe originally only a year or two before I had, but with different eyes and inclinations. He knew literary as well as architectural and social London, people like Jane Portal Welby and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Airey Neave. He knew the glories of the National Gallery and writers for The Times. The hall porters at Claridge’s and the Connaught pronounced his name “Jinnuh.”
I had grown to love him, his unbreakable spirit and style. He lived in beautiful houses, one year high above Salzburg, the ancient meadows falling away on either side. The first cathedral in Salzburg had been built in 774. Eight times it had suffered the great scourge of such edifices, fire. Finally it was demolished. I learned this listening to his wife, Margaret, giving their children lessons at home. Below us, Salzburg was invisible, drowned in a silvery mist.
He had lived with Margaret in Paris, in the old Hôtel Alsace, in a room with hideous wallpaper, the very room in which Oscar Wilde had died. He had lived alone in Rome at the American Academy, in Dublin, and New York. They had almost been married in Dublin, where, despite the romance of it, there were difficulties since he, a Catholic, had been married before. Friends interceded for them, among them Brendan Behan and his wife. Celebrating the nuptials in advance, Ginna, with Margaret in tow, unwisely began with the Behans what became a colossal binge. By noon they were, Margaret excepted, dead drunk. Ginna somehow managed after lunch to go up to his room in the Dolphin for a few minutes of rest, hands crossed on his chest. As a wedding gift that morning, Behan and his wife had given the couple a beautiful Waterford flask they had picked up somewhere for a few shillings as it had no stopper. It stood on the mantel. When Ginna woke, there was a note in the top of it. So long, it said. It was from Margaret — surveying the wreckage she had gone back to America.