Stirrings of liberal conscience prompted many of the studios to offer jobs to émigrés. However, this usually involved little more than paying them a modest salary to stay away. Egon Gast was on contract to 20th Century — Fox. He had been in Los Angeles a year and a half and was still waiting to make his first film. He got me a job as a writer there on a salary of a hundred dollars a week. In those days I suppose that was a living wage — just. Some writers, I hear, earned as much as thirty-five hundred per week. Aldous Huxley once told me he got fifteen thousand dollars for two months’ work. The studios were being thoughtful but not generous.
The first day I went to my office on the Fox lot, the name above my door read J. J. TODT. The other four offices on that floor were all occupied by Germans — directors and writers. It felt like something of a ghetto, or like a quarantine ward in a hospital. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that we tended to cling together. At lunch we would eat in a group in the corner of the canteen and the others would moan and bitch about the venality and crassness of the work they were expected to do — the debased standards under which they were obliged to operate. They had all the highbrow disdain of the chronically insecure. Men — I will mention no names — who had produced vulgar musical comedies and mindless historical epics now became thoroughbred intellectuals and artistes, grand arbiters of good taste.
I did not complain. It is extraordinary, but true, but in the months that I was at Fox I was paid thousands of dollars and did not a stroke of work. On the strength of the new salary I left the Hitzigs and rented a small apartment—361½ Encanto Drive — off Chautauqua Boulevard. It was half a house, the top half, which I sublet from an illustrator called Ernst Kupfer. A lugubrious solemn man, he was now known as Ernest Cooper and had a steady job working as an animator for Walt Disney. He and his wife, Utta, had four children who all lived with them downstairs. Utta was small, dark and of stout peasant build, with a huge sagging shelf of bosom. She worked indefatigably about the house, controlling her children (three boys and a little girl) with swift vicious punishments, usually powerful stinging slaps to the backs of legs, just like Oonagh had administered.
Upstairs, I had a bedroom, a bathroom, a small sitting room dominated by a horsehide davenport and, off that, a kitchenette with a three-burner stove, an electric icebox and a woodstone sink. I used to feel guilty about all my space when I heard the six Coopers crashing about below.
From the kitchenette window you could see the Pacific, always gray; it never looked blue even on the sunniest days. The house itself was wooden, set in a plot hacked out of a scrubby hill, and it had three flights of steps leading down to the road from a screened porch. Ernest cut the steep lawn from time to time, but it would have smartened the place up unduly to do it regularly and made it stand out from its neighbors. Encanto Drive had a shabby well-worn look. And there seemed to be kids everywhere. Some evenings when I parked my car after work and looked at the lounging adolescents, the toddlers, the shouting brats on their bicycles, I felt like a solitary adult in a school playground.
I settled in at Fox easily and quickly. My salary check too was made out to J. J. Todt, but I never thought of complaining. It was generally understood that I was working on my own project, which I would eventually show to the script editor (I never met this man after the first day). Weeks passed pleasantly. What did I do? I learned how to play tennis, acquired a sun tan and put on some weight. I went swimming in the sea with Ernest’s two older boys, Clancy and Elroy. (“They Yamericans now,” Ernest would say. “Europe finish.”) I tinkered with my script of The Confessions: Part II. I felt oddly unreflecting and unbothered about things. One reason for this was that Europe might as well have vanished from the map of the world as far as life out here on the Pacific littoral was concerned. At our dinner parties, on beach picnics and in Anti-Nazi League meetings we energetically debated political events in Europe, but emerged from these sessions into sunny, prosperous, disinterested and indifferent realms. Soon, inexorably, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia, Anschluss, came to have the status of arguments in a university seminar group: abstract posits, forensic positions. Somehow, or so it seemed to me, these distant agitations just weren’t my problem anymore.
The second reason was that I lost all sense of urgency. This was new, and harder to explain. Lethargy, as far as I am now concerned, is to do with spirit of place rather than state of mind. I simply find it impossible to work in some milieux. Perhaps in Los Angeles it was something to do with the absence of real seasons. The thermometer shifted down a few degrees; you put on a sweater; it was overcast and rainy — that described an average day in an English summer, not winter. And the trees were always green. Passing time lost its common demarcations. The sap never rose in spring; the days never shrunk; the nights never grew longer.… I was approaching my fortieth birthday, half my life had gone and yet I looked younger than ever. Those extra pounds I gained smoothed out the mature angles and declivities of my face. I tried to generate some energy but to little avail. In compensation I told myself I was biding my time.
But then perhaps, like a field, every life needs its fallow period. As it turned out mine lasted two years and ended with the invasion of Poland. But I am jumping ahead.
I did three things almost immediately on arriving in Los Angeles: I wrote to Thompson and I tried to find Doon and Eddie Simmonette. I had left England without informing anyone. Thompson, as he put it, was “devastated.” To his eyes the whole affair looked like the worst sort of fraud and betrayal. He contemplated repaying the loan himself, but decided in the end to let me take the consequences of my actions. I quote a portion of his letter to me:
… Your behavior, after the initial shock, did not seem on reflection to be all that surprising. You have always been far and away the most selfish member of our family, the most wayward and irresponsible. This sort of cavalier attitude to one’s most serious obligations may be regarded as the norm in your “world,” but I assure you that it is anathema to the banking community. I consider your defaulting on the bank’s loan a gross personal insult as well as an act of criminality. I cannot forgive you for the distress and embarrassment you have caused both me and Heather.…
And on and on. I could see that there had been a massive loss of face on his part and I was genuinely sorry. But what else could I have done? I wrote back briefly, apologized again and said I would send a hundred dollars a month, and more if circumstances permitted, until my debt had been cleared. While I worked at Fox, I was as good as my word.
Very surprisingly, and somewhat worryingly, there was no news or sign of Doon. Few people seemed even to remember her. “Didn’t she go to Europe in the twenties?” was the best I could come up with. I came to the reluctant conclusion that she was still in France. Willi Gast, Egon’s brother, arrived in Los Angeles and told me there was a sizable community of émigrés in Sanary, in the South of France, among whom he had noticed Mavrocordato. I assumed that was where I could find Doon — if I wanted to.
Eddie Simmonette, I discovered, was in New York, where he was making films in Yiddish. I wrote to him and he — typically — offered me a job, but I declined. I had settled in by then and the effort of moving east seemed too much. The Californian lethargy was already in my blood, coagulating it, slowing me down. Besides, I couldn’t speak Yiddish … but neither could Eddie, as far as I knew. I stayed put.