I wrote that entry as we sat in a small tented village to one side of the farmhouse, listening to the rain rumble on the stretched canvas overhead. The Tri-Kamera was set up and ready to roll. The beehives were in position and Georg Pfau had five thousand bees ready to be loosed on the grassy meadows and orchard blossoms whenever the sun broke through the clouds. We had been waiting for sun — which the meteorological office in Grenoble had been assuring us was on its way — for four days. Everyone was numb with boredom. We had one scene left to shoot and The Confessions: Part I would be over.
I did not care what the weather was like for Rousseau’s departure from Les Charmettes, and had already shot it in a dismal drizzle, but it was absolutely essential that when he arrived the gorgeous sunshine should, in the best traditions of the pathetic fallacy, reflect his mood. Remember, he has only recently betrayed Maman with Mme. de Larnage, and conscience has now redirected his steps to Les Charmettes — his arrival unannounced and unexpected. I had changed things somewhat from the book. There, Jean Jacques encounters Mme. de Warens in her dressing room. In the film I wanted him to walk up the country road lined with bulging flowery hedgerows, his face animated with joyous expectation. He knocks at the farmhouse door. No reply. He hears a distant peal of female laughter. Slowly he walks down towards the orchard (we should recall the idyll of the cherry-picking sequence here) and comes across Maman and Witzenreid picnicking, Witzenreid stretched out on the grass, his head in Maman’s lap. (Witzenreid was dismissed by Rousseau as “a hairdresser … tall, pale, with a flat face and dull wits, whose conversation betrayed all the affectation and bad taste of the hairdresser’s trade”!) Jean Jacques approaches them. We go to three screens — the three faces in close-up, all trying to disguise their respective emotions. It is the end of the affair. I wanted it to be a moment of bitter poignancy set in a scene of fragrant summer beauty. But all we had was rain.
I was prepared to wait it out. I had not let the weather spoil my film thus far and was not about to make compromises now. Doon sat in a deck chair beside me, in costume and makeup, reading a book. I glanced at her strong profile and felt a pleasant pang of love for her. My one night with Monika Alt at Falkenhagen had been a momentary aberration, a mere matter of circumstance and mood (and Monika) conspiring against me. I had no guilt about it because it had made no difference. Doon and I still saw each other virtually every day. I spent most nights at her apartment. I kept many of my clothes and possessions there. I talked from time to time of buying a new larger apartment for us both — Doon did not object and the implication was that we would both be living together before too long. My only worry was to do with future filming. Mme. de Warens, at the end of Part I, disappears completely from the story of The Confessions. We would be often separated over the coming three years as I filmed Part II and Part III.
Doon reached into her handbag and removed a cigarette case. I smiled, enjoying the oddly exciting anachronism of an eighteenth-century noblewoman smoking a Lucky Strike. She looked round and caught my eye.
“Bloody rain,” I said.
“Jamie, I was thinking, wouldn’t the scene be better in rain? I mean, it’s a low moment.”
“Absolutely not.” I reiterated my reasons. She was bored, idle. She knew she would never get me to compromise.
“Well, could I go down to the hotel? I’ve got some stuff to sort out.”
I looked up at the massed, packed gray clouds. If the sun appeared we would only have time to do Jean Jacques’s walk to the front door. I said yes. She went off with understandable relief.
What took me back down the valley early? What made me leave in advance of the cast and crew? I cannot remember. I think Leo brought a cable from Eddie querying some expense and I think I wanted to check my production notes before I dictated a reply. Anyway, whatever it was, I had myself driven down to the Hôtel de France on the Quai Nezia (I can recommend it, if ever you find yourself in Chambéry). It was an agreeable drive, even in the rain. I remember that because my mood was so placid and settled. I had one scene left to film; The Confessions: Part I was everything I had dreamed it to be. I felt the benign confidence of a great artist — a da Vinci, a Rembrandt, a Monet — staring at his completed canvas, wondering only where to inscribe his signature.
Did I stop at my room before I went to Doon’s suite? (The hotel had only one, rather poky, on the top floor under the eaves, converted from servants’ quarters.) I think so. I think I confirmed or refuted Eddie’s inquiry. Then I sauntered along the corridor and up the steep stairs, and walked into Doon’s sitting room.
Alexander Mavrocordato sat there, smoking, reading a script, my script. A briefcase rested against his chair leg. He was dressed casually—à l’anglaise—sports coat, twills, a cream shirt and a cravat. He looked up as I came in. There was no surprise, no guilt, no welcome.
“Ah, Todd,” he said. “I hear the weather is causing you problems.”
I thought for an instant I was going to have a heart attack, so intense was the pain that seemed to zigzag transversely across my chest from my left armpit. But it passed with gratifying suddenness. (Did I tell you Mavrocordato was Russian? Or so he claimed to be. He spoke English with a clotted central European accent. I am sure his name was assumed. Someone once told me his real name was Otto Blâc — the c pronounced ch.)
“Yes,” I managed to say, forcing my head to stay still and not swivel round to Doon’s bedroom door. “Minor problems. Minor. Very minor.… Yes, entirely minor.”
He threw the script on the table. “That’s some film you’re making.”
“Thank you.” I stood like a major domo, unnaturally rigid in the middle of the room, canted forward ever so slightly, as if waiting to receive an order. I felt that if Doon did not come in soon I would shatter, so tensely was I holding myself.
She came through the door brushing her hair. I saw the bed for a second — flat, unrumpled. I relaxed, marginally.
“Hi, darling,” she said to me. “Look who’s here,” she said, indicating Mavrocordato.
“Yes,” I said, turning to him. “What exactly do you want?”
“He’s making a film,” Doon said. “He wants me to be in it.”
“No,” I said.
“No what?” Mavrocordato asked.
“No, she will not be in your film.”
“Jamie? Are you all right?”
Mavrocordato smiled wearily. “I don’t think that’s your decision, Todd, with great respect.”
“Forget it,” I said. “With great respect.”
Doon fixed me with a wide-eyed angry look. She turned to Mavrocordato. “We’ll talk later.”
He got up, picked up his briefcase, opened it and placed a script on the table. I picked it up and handed it to him. I smelled the sour reek of his cheroot.
“I leave you script, Doon,” he said, setting it down again. I picked it up and handed it to him. We did this three times.
“Take it, Blâc,” I said.
He swore expansively at me in his tiny improvised language, mangled munching sounds.
“Fuck off, cunt,” I said. Proud Anglo-Saxon brevity.
“Stop it, Jamie!” Doon was furious but I did not care. I felt cool, as if all my arteries and veins were ventilated suddenly with clear Alpine air. He stood there with his hands on his hips as if I were some irritating mendicant who would not take no for an answer.
“Is he always such a child?” he asked Doon.
It was the look he gave her that did it. Familiar, possessive, knowing.