Portraits and Observations (43 page)

At this juncture Marella arrived, and she said to us: “He thinks we are all Americans. That’s why he is being so rude.” Then, turning to the captain, still unconcernedly preparing his stew, she announced: “
I
am an Italian.”

And in Italian the captain said: “Italians are no good either. Why,” he shouted, pointing at the delicious-looking mess simmering in his kettle, “why do you people come here and stare at our food? Do
we
stare at your food?” He gestured toward the yacht riding at a distance on the ultra-clear sea. “Do we go aboard your fine ship and watch you while you eat your food?”

“Well,” said Marella, as we walked away, “the old boy has a point, you know.”

“Personally,” said Eric, “I think he ought to be reported to the Tourist Bureau.”

What new can one say about Dubrovnik anyway? It is like some section of Venice drained of its canals and stripped of color: gray, medieval, Italian without Italian brio. In autumn and winter it must, in its emptiness, be most impressive; but in summer it is so crowded with excursion-fare vacationers, one can scarcely keep to the pavement. And for those holiday-makers the government has arranged a quite startling night life, altogether unlike any this diarist has seen in other so-called Communist countries (which, excepting Albania and China, includes the lot).

Above the city, nightclubs with sea-panorama vistas throb through the night; one in particular, an al fresco affair attached to a full-scale gambling casino, puts on a floor show reminiscent of those erotic hoedowns in pre-Castro Havana. And in fact the star of the show turned out to be that old-time Cuban legend: Superman!

All those who remember Superman from Havana will be interested to hear that his act, which formerly consisted of vigorous sexual intercourse on a brightly lighted stage, has changed: He is now the male section of a dance team. He and his partner writhe around to the banging of bongo drums, gradually removing
one another’s attire until such nakedness appears that Superman seems ready to go into the routine that once made him so famous—but there it stops. The whole thing is fairly humorous, though God knows the audience doesn’t think so: Their response is a kind of stupor, the dazed attention of pimply boys at an Ann Corio exhibit.

Now, leaving the warm moist southern climate, we steam steadily northward into spheres where the air, though it is only late August, trembles already with a beyond-September chill. It is as if a cold crystal ball had descended, enclosing and stilling the green sea, sky, the growing-greener coast bobbing by: gone is the harsh and stony Montenegrin grayness, the subtropic pallor, for now each northward-going day the scene is more fruitful, there are trees and fields of wild flowers and grape vineyards and shepherds munching close to the Adriatic’s edge.

I feel touched by some extreme magic, an expectant happiness—as I always do when that sense of autumn arrives, for autumn never seems to me an end but a start, the true beginning of all our new years.

And so our voyage stopped in the mists of a Venetian evening. With sea mists blurring the lights of San Marco, and sea buoys mournfully tolling watery warnings, the
Tritona
entered the saddest and loveliest of cities and anchored
alla
Salute.

The mood aboard is not all sad; the sailors, many of them Venetians, whistle and amiably shout as they swing ropes and lower launches. In the salon, Eric and Allegra are dancing to the phonograph. And I, huddled in the dark, on the upper deck, am very
pleased myself—pleased with the air’s promising chill, and the oily flickering lights, and the thought of an imminent visit to Harry’s Bar.

I’ve starved myself all day because … Oh, what joy to step out of the night into the chattering warmth of Harry’s Bar and wash down those little shrimp sandwiches with an icy martini or three!

THE FILMING OF
IN COLD BLOOD

One hot afternoon last March in a courthouse on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, Richard Brooks turned to me, between takes of the movie he was directing, and rather reproachfully asked, “What are you laughing at?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, but the truth was that I’d remembered a long-ago question by Perry Smith, one of the two murderers whose trial was being reenacted here. He had been captured a few days before, and his question was, “Were there any representatives of the cinema there?” I wondered what he would have thought of the present scene: the huge arc lights arranged inside the courtroom where he and Richard Hickock had been tried, the jury box filled with the very same men who had convicted them, the purring generators, whirring cameras, the whispering technicians dancing in and out among thick coils of electric cable.

The first conversation I ever had with Perry Smith was at the beginning of January, 1960. It was a cold day, glittery as an icicle;
Smith and I talked together at the sheriff’s office in a room where prairie winds pressed against the windows, sucked the glass, rattled it. I was fairly rattled myself, for I had been working for more than a month on a book about the murder of Herbert Clutter and his family,
In Cold Blood
, and unless I could establish close contact with this half-Irish, half-Indian young man, I would have to abandon the project. His court-appointed attorney had persuaded him to speak to me; but it was soon obvious that Smith regretted having granted the interview. He was remote, suspicious, sullenly sleepy-eyed: It took years, hundreds of letters and conversations, before I slipped all the way past this façade. At the moment, nothing I said interested him. He rather arrogantly began to question my credentials. What kind of writer was I, and what had I written? Well, he said, after I’d provided a dossier, he’d never heard of me or any of my books; but—had I written any movies? Yes, one:
Beat the Devil
. Now the sleepy eyes somewhat wakened. “Uh-huh. I remember. Only saw it because Humphrey Bogart was in it. Did you, uh, uh,
know
Bogart? Personally?” When I answered that Bogart had been a close friend of mine, he smiled in the flustered, fragile way I came to know very well. “Bogart,” he said, his voice so soft one could scarcely hear it above the wind. “I’ve always had this thing about him. He was my favorite actor. I saw
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
—oh, over and over. One of the reasons I liked that picture so much was—the old man in it, Walter Huston? that played the crazy gold prospector?—he was just like my father. Tex Smith.
Just
like him. I couldn’t get over it. It really hit me.” Then he said, “Were you there last night? When they brought us in?”

He was referring to the previous evening when the two handcuffed murderers, escorted by a regiment of state troopers, had arrived by car from Las Vegas, where they were arrested, to be arraigned at the Finney County courthouse in Garden City, Kansas.
Hundreds of people had waited for hours in the dark and zero-cold to glimpse them; the crowd, orderly, almost awesomely hushed, had filled the square. The press, too, had been heavily represented by newsmen from all over the West and Midwest; there were also several television crews.

I told him yes, I’d been present—and had minor pneumonia to prove it. Well, he said, he was sorry about that: “Pneumonia is nothing to fool around with. But tell me—I was so scared I couldn’t see what was happening. When I saw that crowd, I thought, Jesus, these people are going to tear us limb from limb. To hell with the public hangman. They were going to hang us on the spot. Which maybe wouldn’t have been the worst idea. I mean, what’s the use of going through this whole ordeal? Trial and everything. It’s such a farce. These prairie-billies, they’ll hang us in the long run.” He chewed his lip; something shy and bashful happened to his face—the aw-gee expression of a kid digging his toe into the ground. “What I wanted to know is—were there any representatives of the cinema there?”

This was typical of Perry—of his pathetic linguistic pretensions (the careful insertion of words like “cinema”), and of the kind of vanity that made him welcome “recognition” regardless of its nature. He tried to disguise it, shrug it off, but nevertheless he was undeniably gratified when I informed him that indeed the event had been recorded by motion-picture cameras.

Now, seven years later, I laughed to myself at the recollection, but I avoided answering Brooks’s query because the young men who were playing Perry and Dick were standing nearby, and I felt extremely uneasy in their presence. Self-conscious. I had seen photographs of Robert Blake (Perry) and Scott Wilson (Dick) before they were selected for the roles. But it wasn’t until I went to Kansas to follow the progress of the film that I met them. And meeting
them, having to be around them, was not an experience I care to repeat. This has nothing to do with my reaction to them as private individuals: they both are sensitive, seriously gifted men. It’s simply that despite the clear physical resemblance to the original pair, their photographs had not prepared me for the mesmerizing reality.

Particularly Robert Blake. The first time I saw him I thought a ghost had sauntered in out of the sunshine, slippery-haired and sleepy-eyed. I couldn’t accept the idea that this was someone pretending to be Perry, he was Perry—and the sensation I felt was like a free fall down an elevator shaft. Here were the familiar eyes, placed in a familiar face, examining me with the detachment of a stranger. It was as though Perry had been resurrected but was suffering from amnesia and remembered me not at all. Shock, frustration, helplessness—these emotions, combined with impending flu, sent me home to a motel on the outskirts of Garden City. The Wheat Lands Motel, a place I had often stayed during the years I worked on
In Cold Blood
. An accumulated remembrance of those years, the loneliness of the endless wintry nights with forlorn salesmen coughing next door, seized me like a sudden Kansas cyclone and threw me on the bed.

To quote from my day-to-day journal: “Presently passed out, having drunk a pint of Scotch in less than thirty minutes. Woke in the morning with fever, television still going and total lack of knowledge of where I was or why. All unreal because too real, as reality’s reflections tend to be. Called Dr. Maxfield, who gave me an injection and several prescriptions. But the trouble is in my mind (?).”

That phrase “reality’s reflections” is self-explanatory, but perhaps I ought to clarify my own interpretation of it. Reflected reality is the essence of reality, the truer truth. When I was a child I played a pictorial game. I would, for example, observe a landscape: trees
and clouds and horses wandering in grass; then select a detail from the overall vision—say, grass bending in the breeze—and frame it with my hands. Now this detail became the essence of the landscape and caught, in prismatic miniature, the true atmosphere of a panorama too sizable to encompass otherwise. Or if I was in a strange room, and wanted to understand the room and the nature of its inhabitants, I let my eye wander selectively until it discovered something—a shaft of light, a decrepit piano, a pattern in the rug—that seemed of itself to contain the secret. All art is composed of selected detail, either imaginary or, as in
In Cold Blood
, a distillation of reality. As with the book, so with the film—except that I had chosen my details from life, while Brooks had distilled his from my book: reality twice transposed, and all the truer for it.

As soon as the book was published, many producers and directors expressed a desire to make a film of it. Actually, I had already decided that if a film was to be made, I wanted the writer-director Richard Brooks to act as intermediary between book and screen. Aside from my long-standing respect for his imaginative professionalism, he was the only director who agreed with—and was willing to risk—my own concept of how the book should be transferred to film. He was the one person who entirely accepted two important points: I wanted the film made in black and white, and I wanted it played by a cast of unknowns—that is, actors without “public” faces. Although Brooks and I have different sensibilities, we both wanted the film to duplicate reality, to have the actors resemble their prototypes as much as possible, and to have every scene filmed in its real locale: the house of the murdered Clutter family; the same Kansas variety store where Perry and Dick bought the rope and tape used to bind their four victims; and certain courthouses, prisons, filling stations, hotel rooms and highways and city streets—all those places that they had seen in the course of their crime and
its aftermath. A complicated procedure, but the only possible one by which almost all elements of fantasy could be removed and reality thereby achieve its proper reflection.

I felt this particularly strongly when Brooks and I went into the Clutter house while Brooks was preparing to film the murder sequence. To quote from my journal again: “Spent the afternoon at the Clutter farm. A curious experience to find myself once more in this house where I have so often been, and heretofore under such silent circumstances: the silent house, the plain rooms, the hardwood floors that echo every footstep, the windows that look out on solemn prairies and fields tawny with wheat stubble. No one has really lived there since the murders. The property was bought by a Texan who farms the land, and who has a son who occasionally stays there. Certainly it has not gone to ruin; nevertheless it seems abandoned, a scarecrow without crows to frighten. The present owner gave Brooks permission to film there; a considerable amount of the original furniture was still on hand, and Brooks’s chief assistant, Tom Shaw, has done an extraordinary job of tracking down and retrieving the departed pieces. The rooms looked precisely the same as they had when I examined them in December, 1959—that is, soon after the crime was discovered. Mr. Clutter’s Stetson hanging on a wall hat rack. Nancy’s sheet music open at the piano. Her brother’s spectacles resting on a bureau, the lenses shimmering in sunlight.

“But it was the Venetian blinds that I noticed—that I, as it were, ‘framed.’ The blinds cover the windows of Mr. Clutter’s office, the room by which the murderers entered the house. Upon entering, Dick had parted the Venetian slats and peered through them to see if any witnesses were lurking in the moonlit night; again, on departing, and after the immense noise of the shootings, Dick’s eyes had explored the landscape through the slats, his heart pounding
for fear that the crash of four shotgun blasts might have roused the countryside. And now the actor who is impersonating Dick, and who is so uncannily like Dick, is on the verge of repeating these actions. Yet eight years have passed, the Clutter family are gone and Dick is dead, but the Venetian blinds still exist, still hang at the same windows. Thus reality, via an object, extends itself into art; and that is what is original and disturbing about this film: reality and art are intertwined to the point that there is no identifiable area of demarcation.