We had moved to the Cadogan Hotel, the hotel where Wilde had been arrested, and on a June evening drove out to Chiswick to see Vanessa Redgrave. It was a house facing a small green park. The tall Greek Revival windows had no drapes. We waited in the large sitting room. There was a shabby couch with a huge framed mirror leaning behind it, books and records strewn about, seashells, toys, a kind of bar, and pillows on the floor by the garden window. It was the house of all suburban women with unraveling lives. Here and there a bare nail was driven into the plaster wall.
Then she came in, tall, very nearsighted, in a mauve jersey dress with no sleeves and a slit skirt. Near her shoulder was the glint of a white, embroidered brassiere strap. She was completely natural. She could not find ice to put in our drinks. One liked her immediately.
She was thirty-four years old and already at the pinnacle of a celebrated life, playing the lead in Mary, Queen of Scots, then being made. Her young son came in and began climbing over her. Glass beads and part of her drink spilled onto the floor. Later her two daughters, plump and with dirty feet, came to say they were going to bed, they wanted her to read to them. She promised them two chapters. We had imagined a smooth seduction but the distractions were hindering us. I asked about some reel cans stacked near the couch. They contained a film she liked very much, she said; “It’s Italian. It’s called The Policeman. It’s about a young man from a village who becomes a policeman — is recruited — and how, slowly, bit by bit, he is changed and grows away from all the things that formed him, becomes less human, less kind, and in the end … well, the end is a little too much — that’s not the point of it.”
I felt that familiar moment of unhappiness; I realized I had written the wrong script. All one could do was not think about it or perhaps suggest some similarities between that one and ours.
She would read our script, she said, although the script she enjoyed most, she added cryptically, was one that was read to her, by the director.
Driving back to town, Ginna remarked how deeply the story of the movie she described had affected him. “Yes,” I agreed.
“The Interpreter,” he said, naming the original story on which a movie he had produced, Before Winter Comes, was based, “was that kind of story. But we never made it,” he confessed.
By now Max Schell had agreed to be the director. He, too, liked a script read to him, and in the luxury of his London house, rented from a maharanee, he listened, proposed changes, acted out portions, and told stories. One of his examples I remember, to illustrate character, was from Anna Karenina. In the railway carriage, he said, when the old woman comes in with her coat all bundled up and complains that it’s cold. “It’s cold, isn’t it,” she says, to one person after another, but they ignore her. At last she turns to Anna and says, “It’s cold.” “Yes, it’s cold,” Anna says.
His cook made lavish lunches that week, and often there were interruptions from visitors, telephone calls, unexplained matters. Late one afternoon a flawless Nefertiti appeared in simple, expensive clothes; long nose, perfect skin and hair. “Miss Bode,” Schell introduced her in a low voice with pointed brevity. Work was over that day.
I wrote in the mornings according to what we had sketched out, variations on scenes, additional pages. In the end Vanessa Redgrave came to dinner. She was to give her answer.
She arrived wearing workman’s overalls and a railroad engineer’s cap, a woman of convictions. Over her shoulder was a large canvas bag filled with books on Chinese communism. She began talking about politics and the evils of bureaucracy. With his famed charm, Schell attempted to divert her from these subjects. He had only limited success.
At the table she ate very little — she was not hungry, she said — and continued along the lines of her interests. What was the political significance of the script? she asked.
Heads turned towards me. Though I knew every word and meaning of the film we hoped to make, politics was not part of it. Falteringly I talked about human emotions and their greater importance and summoned up classics like Les Enfants du Paradis, though from the first moment I could see this was not the response required.
Ginna and I sat in gloomy silence for a long time until Schell, having seen the unfed Maoist to a taxi, came back up the stairs. We wanted to voice our despair, but like the good captain he was, perhaps springing from his role in The Young Lions, he prevented it. His face filled with warmth, in purest movie talk he said confidently, “I think the last goodnight kiss did it.”
It did not.
There was still Ingrid Bergman, who was appearing in a play at the time, but for other reasons, including, I think, the health of her husband, she too said no.
—
The best scripts are not always made, just as the hardest fought campaigns may not end in victory. I say this merely as an observation, beyond any experience of mine. There are so many factors: timing, impulse, frivolity, accident. The films that are made are like menhirs, standing amid the rubble of everything broken or lost, the pure lines, scenes, the great effort lavished like milt over roe. The agents and stars kick through it idly. Perhaps it is this waste, this vast debris, which nourishes the glory.
As a producer, Ginna may have had limitations. He was scrupulously honest. He was a classicist — his interests were cultural, his knowledge large — and unequivocal in his statements and beliefs. His past was filled with figures who, rising on the wings of his telling, assumed legendary status: Behan, of course; the ballerina Pat McBride; Neville Cardus, the old writer of cricket; Carol Reed; Jack Nugent, solitaire-playing owner of the Dolphin; Kennaway; John Ford; and the two Swedish girls, sisters, who were waitresses at Durgin Park, fabulous girls, unattainable, as he said — they were picked up after work in large cars. There was a quality of Fitzgerald in his stories, of the romantic and unpossessed.
We never parted. I am going into the city on the morning train with him, the sun still flickering in our faces, people boarding sleepily at the stops, the beautiful coastal country, Southampton, Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Bay Shore. I guard his heroes, among them Jacques Callot, one of the greatest of printmakers — Rembrandt collected him also — Goya.
In the late 1970s, returning to journalism, he became a magazine editor. The circle was closing. Midnight. We return to the office. There is some final checking to do. He sits correcting the piece of a writer he likes whose telephone has been disconnected for nonpayment. The restaurants are being swept, beneath us the traffic along Sixth Avenue is thinning out. The life of reporters, writers. The night is their noon. On the couch, curled amid books and papers, a woman in a white suit, whom we have had dinner with, is sleeping.
Ginna gave me my first work in journalism, a field which eventually supported me. I was sent to Europe to interview writers: Graham Greene, Nabokov, Antonia Fraser. When I reached Paris there was a telegram from Greene, who was famously reclusive, saying he could not meet me. Then word came that Nabokov had canceled as well. Disaster loomed. I was more concerned with disappointing Ginna, who had faith in me, than with being rejected. Late at night I walked up a sepulchral Boulevard Malesherbes and slipped a note, humble though not abject, under Greene’s door, and later I found the courage to call Montreux and plead with Mme. Nabokov. “Montreux Palace Hotel,” a voice said in English. “Mr. Nabokov, please.” “One moment.”