You’re always trying to dig up dirt – I’ll give you a little dirt. I’d put Hedy up in one of my rented cottages in Bel Air. I had her under contract at the time. The problem was that in my opinion she was a lousy actress. She may have been a decent actress when she started out, but she had become passé. Her acting technique didn’t measure up. And I couldn’t really find anything for her, so I just kept her in the bungalow.
I used to visit her every now and then, and spend the night with her. Beautiful woman – smooth skin, white like talcum powder. Lovely accent when she spoke English. But she was a very peculiar girl. For example, she was caught for shoplifting a few years ago in Los Angeles. And she stole me blind in that house. By the time I got her out of there the silverware was missing, and a few precious knickknacks – an ivory elephant, for instance, with a broken trunk, a present somebody once gave me. And my favorite golf ball. She didn’t only take things of value – she was a kleptomaniac.
She also had some peculiar sexual notions, which I wouldn’t go along with. She was A.C.-D.C, and she had a certain perversion which – let’s say only a behind man could have gone for it. I refused. I’d just as soon stick my pecker in a wet loaf of bread.
These interviews leave me washed out. Why don’t you talk for a while? Tell me about your life, about your pleasures and your mistakes. You must have some good stories to tell – you’ve led a full life for a comparatively young man.
I’ve told you a lot, here and there.
Tell me some more. See how it feels.
What’s the matter with you tonight?
I’m all in a turmoil inside. Got a cat sewed up in my gut. I’m sorry to be getting at you that way. The point is that I haven’t told the whole truth a number of times. I’ve been thinking about this. I told you on two occasions what I thought you wanted to hear instead of what I knew to be the truth. Maybe it’s your fault, because you seem to expect a certain macho attitude from me.
I guess I’ve also told you a lot of things that I didn’t intend to tell you. But it’s just so difficult for any man to sit down and tell the whole truth about himself. There’s too much that galls. Especially the unpalatable truths that we all have to face. And mine, I assure you, are as unpalatable as anybody else’s.
You’re referring to something that happened with Hedy Lamarr?
No, just other personal things we’ve talked about, I felt a sense of shame, because I’ve been trying to impress you in some way. This is what I meant when I said it was your fault, because you seem to be so interested in sex – you believe that sex motivates people far more than I believe it does. And I don’t understand why I should feel I have to impress you, or anybody.
Just the other day I asked myself why I was doing this. Because it’s going to be published? It will be published only if I allow it to be.
Nevertheless, it’s depressing to recount all this and see your life being swallowed up by a tape recorder. It seems to me, as I’ve spoken to you, the life I’m talking about could be viewed as an unbroken record of things half accomplished, gestures made for God knows what reason. And I mean particularly on the very personal level, and at this stage of my life that’s all that really interests me. Someone very close to me once told me that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. I’m examining my life now, and I don’t like it – and even an examined life, in this case, sometimes seems as if it was not worth living. I feel it all the time these days, and that’s the reason for my being glum, since you asked.
In what ways do you feel you’ve failed?
The simplest thing I can say is: I haven’t measured up to my own image of what a man should be. That image was based on my father. I suppose every man-child grows up with that idea in mind – that he’s got to outdo his father, and I was no exception.
You told me you’d licked that father-image when you took the Hercules off the water.
I licked it in the sense of physical challenge. I outdid my father. I’ll put it to you this way. I know it’s common to every man, but I only live in my own skin. Your problems don’t interest me. That’s probably a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Maybe most men feel that way, and won’t admit it. I do admit it. My own problems are what concern me. If you have insights into them, good for you, but it doesn’t help me, because it’s me who’s got to have those insights. And the insights have to be comforting, not unpleasant.
So many times in my life I’ve had flashes of understanding – flashes that gave me tremendous hope, and made me think, ‘Yes! Now I see what I have to do.’ It may have been something that someone said to me, or just a moment when I had some communion, some osmosis with whatever is going on around us, whatever spirits are in the air – the Great Spirit the Indians talk about – and those flashes really elevated me.
And then day-to-day existence wipes them out, and a week after you’ve had that wonderful moment, you stop, and you look, and you say, ‘Shit, I’m doing exactly the same things I was doing before. No better.’ New Year’s resolutions.
I’m on the wheel of life. That phrase, when I read it, made not much sense to me. But I understand it now. I understand something else, even more depressing, which is that people don’t change. More hundreds of times than I care to remember, I’ve said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve learned my lesson, I’ll never do that again’ – only to find myself doing exactly that, whatever it may have been, within hours sometimes. How do you escape from that? What’s the answer? Do you know?
I don’t know the answer. I have the same problem and so does almost everybody I know. I’ve done the same thing. I’ve got myself into a situation where I behaved badly, mostly out of cowardice, because I was afraid to hurt someone, and therefore hurt that person twice as badly by being dishonest. When the mess and shouting were over, I swore to myself I’d never do it again. And yet I did precisely the same thing again.
Well, this may sound callous, but that’s encouraging. It means I’m not alone in this way, as I sometimes thought I was.
The problem is that the learning process is such a slow one that we don’t have enough time. And it’s not even a matter of willingness to change. It’s a matter of ability. I think that the mold we’re cast in goes back to our genes and from then on we’re in the hands of destiny.
I’ve been in a state of depression, and the reasons for that are still with me. And those reasons were – to be blunt – the one or two lies I told you earlier. One in particular. You remember I told you about how I fixed up the Gotha and flew north and broke down on the beach near Monterrey?
Yes. You and Frank Clarke, when you were shooting Hell’s Angels in 1928.
I’ve been thinking about that story and it’s made me squirm. Because, although we did fly up north and did come down near Monterrey, and we did spend the night in Tortilla Flat, with those two girls – for my part, nothing happened.
The four of us were there. Frank was a little drunk and I was sober, but Frank had to screw them both. I couldn’t do anything with mine and she despised me for it, and I despised myself for it.
Howard, all men have bouts of impotence, and the fact that you didn’t tell me the truth about it is common.