Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (14 page)

I turned and saw Orson Welles standing beside his table, beckoning to me to come over. When I got there, he introduced me to his friends, and then said, “I hope I didn’t disturb you. I just wanted you to know what a pleasure it is to meet you, Mr. Wilder. I’m a great admirer of yours. Thank you for coming over.” In the taxi on my way back to the hotel, I wondered if I could truly absorb this lesson in generosity that was unfettered by ego.

Towards the end of October we were filming on a quay along the river Seine. It was one of the last scenes to be done before we all said good-bye.

I was sitting alone at the water’s edge, watching actresses dressed as great ladies get in and out of 1789 carriages, with the fringe of their white petticoats showing underneath their long dresses. Tall men dressed as aristocrats, in beautiful blue satin costumes, rehearsed their sword fights on the steps of the quay. Ducks, geese, and pigs were being loaded onto 1789 barges—all in preparation for the next shot.

I sat watching all these things, and a deep sadness came over me. Nothing to do with the Demon—it had to do with real life. Well, that’s a silly thing to say, because nothing I had been seeing or doing for the past three months was real; it was a movie. It was all remote from everyday experience. Even the real cobblestoned streets in Paris and the old buildings and houses that were constructed with curves and rounded moldings were all fantastical
and very romantic. At first I thought I was sad at the thought of going back to the straight lines and glass rectangles of New York; then I realized that I was actually afraid of going back to Jo and Katie, which made no sense to me at the time.

On the plane ride home I began writing my first screenplay, which I called
Hesitation Waltz
. It was never produced.

When I got back to New York, we had a warm family reunion, but during the next several months little troubles started popping up, like buds in spring. Emily Dickinson wrote, “The heart wants what it wants, when it wants it, or else it doesn’t care.” It was certainly what Katie felt, and she was just eight years old.

I was holding Katie’s hand one day as we were walking along the sidewalk on our way to the butcher, and she said that she wanted me to buy her some strange mechanical contraption that she saw in the stationery shop next to the butcher. I thought the thing she wanted was a little bizarre, apart from being fairly expensive.

“Why do you want that crazy thing?” I asked.

“I just want it.”

“I know you want it—I’m not saying I won’t buy it for you. I just want to know
why
you want it. Do you have a reason?”

“I have a reason,” she said, very frustrated, “I just don’t know what it is.” The originality of that answer was good enough for me; I bought her what she wanted.

After Katie started growing a potbelly, Jo found a stockpile of empty candy bar wrappers stuffed into her desk drawer. The curious thing was that she could so easily have gotten rid of those wrappers—if she didn’t want us to see them—in any of those
KEEP NEW YORK CLEAN
baskets that were on every street corner. Why keep
empty
candy wrappers in her desk drawer?

When the three of us sat down to dinner, Jo would say something like, “Honey, don’t you think it would be better if you ate this?” or, “better for you if you didn’t eat that?”

I asked Margie for advice. She said, “When you talk to Katie, don’t talk about food!”

I received a film script with the oddest title:
Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx
. The script told an unusual story: A cheerful, uneducated young Irishman, in 1959, follows horses all around Dublin, collecting horse manure to sell to middle-aged women gardeners, with whom he occasionally has sexual dalliances. He wakes up one morning to find that all the horses that had been pulling milk wagons around Dublin for years have been replaced by motorized vehicles, and so he loses the only job he ever knew.

When I finished reading
Quackser
, I knew I wanted to do it—but it certainly wasn’t the most commercial script I’d ever read. Sidney Glazier, who had produced
The Producers
, was leaving for England that night. I gave the script to him to read on the plane.
He called me from London the next day and said that he wept after reading
Quackser
and that we were going to do it together. Sidney had backing from a wealthy company that wanted to invest in films. (Not Joe Levine’s company, thank goodness.)

When Sidney came back from England, I told him that I thought the most important thing for us to do now was to find the right director, preferably an Irishman. The next week, we flew to London, where we stayed at the great Connaught Hotel. It was very difficult to get a room there, but Sidney always managed to get a suite because he brought the manager a special kind of bacon from a gourmet shop in New York. (
That’s
a producer.) On this trip he obtained his usual beautiful suite, and I got a little cubicle the size of a cloakroom—but it was a cubicle in the Connaught Hotel. We interviewed many directors, especially Irish ones, but none had a vision that impressed us.

One afternoon, after another disappointing series of interviews, I casually exhaled a loud, “Oh, to find a Jean Renoir somewhere.” I pronounced the name correctly, but Sidney was a New Yorker who used to work in burlesque houses.

“Who’s Gene Renwer?”

“Oh, just one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century—
Grand Illusion, Rules of the Game
. His daddy was a famous painter.”

“Well, let’s get him.”

“Sure, why don’t you just call him up and say, ‘Jean, baby, how’s about doing a nice little film about a young Irishman who collects horse shit for a living?’ ”

The next morning Sidney said, “Pack your suitcase—we’re going to Paris. We have an appointment tomorrow morning with Gene Renwer. I sent him the script, and he’s reading it today.” (Now that’s
really
a producer.)

We flew to Paris and stayed at the Hotel Raphael that night. The
next morning we took a taxi to the address that was given to Sidney over the phone. It was just off Place Pigalle.

I said, “Sidney, this can’t be right. That’s the Moulin Rouge across the street. We’re in a neighborhood of strip joints.”

Sidney showed the taxi driver the small piece of paper on which he had written Renoir’s address.

“Oui, oui, oui—c’est là!”
the driver said, pointing to an iron gate.

We got out of the taxi, and Sidney rang a bell that was attached to the side of the gate. I thought some pimp was going to answer. The gate buzzed open and—as in a fairy tale—we walked into a nineteenth-century street lined with tall chestnut trees, behind which were little gardens in front of very old town houses.

Sidney started hollering, “MISSHURE RENWER—HELLO! MISSHURE GENE RENWER!” (I had tried earlier to explain the difference between “Gene” and “Jean” but failed. I didn’t attempt to change “Misshure.”)

After Sidney had shouted, in his beautiful French, to all the second-floor windows on both sides of the street, a gardener who was working nearby finally pointed to a door. Sidney rang the bell, and the door buzzed open. We walked up one flight of stairs, then another, and then we heard a woman’s voice, with a beautiful English accent, call out to us, “Right here, gentlemen—just on the next landing.” We were expected.

When we got to the landing, a distinguished-looking woman in her sixties, Renoir’s secretary, showed us into the sitting room. She pointed to two chairs that were facing a beautiful desk and asked us to sit down. She was French, but her English was impeccable.

“Monsieur Renoir will be with you in just a moment. May I offer you some coffee or tea?” We both declined.

After a minute or two, Jean Renoir walked in, slowly, followed by his secretary. He must have been close to eighty. His right eye
seemed bigger than his left. After his secretary introduced us, she left the room. Renoir had lived and worked in the States, so speaking English was no problem for him.

Renoir sat behind his beautiful desk, with the sun shining through the window next to him, hitting him directly in his right eye. We talked pleasantries for awhile, but when I saw tears starting to drop from the large, red eye, I asked—in as inoffensive a way as I could—if he wouldn’t like to change seats with me. “No, no,” he said. “The sun feels good on my bad eye.”

To break the ice I said, “Monsieur Renoir, do you mind if I ask—which is your favorite restaurant in Paris?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s an old bistro called Chez Allard. It may not be the best food in Paris, but it’s a good restaurant, and the wine is honest.”

“So, Misshure,” Sidney began, “did you have a chance to read the script?”

“Yes, I’ve read it. Not since Chaplin have I come across such a character as this Quackser. I’ll do your film.”

My heart jumped.

“But I cannot do this film for one year,” Renoir said, “because of obligations I have. And I know this movie business—you may not have the money one year from now. It’s a long time to wait. I know this problem. But, if you still want me . . . I’ll do this film.”

After we said polite things and how honored we were to have met him, Sidney finished our meeting with, “Okay, we’ll keep in touch.” We shook hands again, and Sidney and I left the room.

On the way down the staircase, Sidney said, “He’s a smart man. He’s right, you know—I have the money now, but I don’t know if I’ll have it in a year from now. It’s up to you—you want to take a chance, I’ll wait. But it’s a chance. You think about it.”

I thought about it overnight. I knew this would be the only chance I would ever have to work with Jean Renoir, but I kept
thinking of his words: “. . . I know this movie business—you may not have the money one year from now.” I thought about Joe Levine and how fickle money people can be. I decided I didn’t want to take a chance that
Quackser
wouldn’t be made. I told Sidney, “Let’s do it now,” but for a long while afterward I thought,
What if?

When we got back to England, we hired an Indian director, Waris Hussein, who lived in London. He had directed some wonderful dramas for the BBC and a lovely film with Sandy Dennis called
Thank You All Very Much
. In May, two months before filming was to begin, I went to Dublin with the author, Gabriel Walsh, in order to study Irish accents. Gabriel was born and raised in Dublin. With my miniature tape recorder I recorded people in all the restaurants and little shops where Gabriel took me. I discovered that there was a great difference in Irish accents, depending on which side of the river Liffey a person lived. The sounds were softer and more poetic in people who lived south of the Liffey, so I decided that when we started filming, I would try to sound like I was born and raised south of the Liffey.

I wanted to live in the countryside when Jo and Katie came to live with me, so I went with the line producer, John Cunningham, to search for a home or a cottage somewhere south of Dublin. Cunningham knew the area very well. As we traveled through a quiet fishing village, called Greystones, we passed a simple, but beautiful home, and I casually remarked, “Now that’s the kind of place I’d like to find.” Cunningham stopped the car and started to get out.

“Where are you going?”

“To see about that house,” he answered.

“But you can’t just walk into someone’s home and ask them if they’d like to rent it if there isn’t even a sign in front.”

“Yes you can. In Ireland you can.”

He disappeared for three or four minutes and then waved for me to come in.

“It’s yours, if you want it. They could use the money, and they have a little place in Dublin they can live in for the summer.”

. . . Well, I never.

Two months later we were filming in one of the poorest sections of Dublin, but you wouldn’t have known it because the doors and the window frames and the shutters of each house were painted in soft, yet daring, colors—orange, green, blue, red, pink—and everything was extraordinarily clean. I was invited to take a look inside of the house that had been selected as “Quackser’s house.” We would only be using the exterior, but I wanted to see what it looked like inside. I found that everything was just as clean inside as it was outside. There were three large photographs placed prominently, side by side: John F. Kennedy, the pope, and Robert Kennedy.

Children of the neighborhood gathered around us every day to watch us film. One little boy—a four-year-old named David—was like the mascot of the group. Everyone protected him. He was dressed so nicely, and scrubbed clean, and he always had a stoic face, except if one of us gave him an ice cream; then he would smile, slightly, and say, “Tanks very mooch.”

I asked the director if we could use David in one of the scenes. It would mean money for his family. That afternoon he was my sidekick in a very short scene. He just held my hand, and I led him wherever I was supposed to go. The next day I had a slightly bigger scene for him. We were sitting on the step, in front of “my” house, as I was trying to digest the fact that the horses had all been replaced. We had to do the scene several times. David didn’t have any dialogue; he just had to sit quietly on my lap. After the fourth take, just as the camera started rolling, he said, “I don’t want ta do dis no more.”