The New Confessions (57 page)

Eddie Simmonette had arrived in Hollywood in early 1940 with a considerable amount of money. I never knew how he became such a rich man again—it certainly wasn’t his Yiddish films. I think it was something to do with wartime currency restrictions and gold bullion. From time to time he made trips to South America. Once he went to the Bahamas. I asked him why.

“To see the duke of Windsor.”

“Oh yes, sure, Eddie.”

“It’s the truth. You don’t have to believe me.”

I laughed and told him of course I didn’t. I think if I had pressed him he would have told me then. But I thought he was having me on. Anyway, he bought a small company called Lone Star
Films and doubled its output. We made cheap Westerns and a few thrillers. I have a feeling that Lone Star was part of this wider financial manipulation, but I could never figure out just how and where it fitted in.

I was glad to be working, albeit on such a reduced level. It was pleasant, also, to be prosperous again. I stayed on in Pacific Palisades; I liked the ocean. I bought a larger house on Chautauqua Boulevard itself and Monika and I settled down to some sort of domestic routine.

We were divorced, quite amicably, six months later. We were tolerable lovers but lamentable spouses. We needed our liaison to be illicit for it to flourish. I think we rather bored each other, married. I started sneaking off to Lori’s again and Monika took up with some young man she met. It soon became apparent that we should separate.

However, she told me one fact that clarified the recent past somewhat. Evidently, during a drunken argument with Faithfull she had taunted him with our affair and its more intimate details—size of Todd organ vis-à-vis the Faithfull member, ingenuity of position, stamina reserves and so on. Faithfull threw Monika out and went blustering round to my house to confront me and “teach me a lesson,” only to find I was away in Rincón awaiting my residency renewal. He got straight on to a crony at the British consulate and had him warn U.S. Immigration about me. Fuller investigation on their part revealed that I was a registered debtor in Scotland. It was enough to keep me in Rincón all those months.

One effect of this was to salve my patriotic conscience. If the British Diplomatic Service could connive at my being dubbed an undesirable alien, then I certainly wasn’t about to hurry back to serve my country. In any case, Hollywood was full of British actors, directors and producers—Korda was here, Wilcox, Olivier, Spenser, Bellamy, Norman and many others. I did not stand out.

I didn’t mix with the British community; I stayed with the émigrés, my Berlin friends. By now it was clear who was going to flourish in Hollywood and who was going to just make do. Eddie, I must say, was loyal to the Realismus boys. Hitzig, Gast and I were kept busy on the Lone Star B-features. Our fortunes had leveled out—at least they weren’t declining—while others’ ascended. Lang, Glucksman, Wilder, Strauss, Brecht—these were the feted and the high flyers. We wished them well. Honestly.

I had another reason for avoiding the British. In 1942 Leo Druce arrived with Courtney Young to film
A Close-Run Thing
, a torpid epic
about the duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo, thinly disguised British propaganda to be directed at American audiences. I was walking along the beach one Sunday at Malibu and passed in front of the jutting deck of a beach house. A loud lunch party was going on and with a cold, spine-jolting shock of recognition I saw Druce’s face in the crowd. Someone leaned over the rail and shouted down to me to come and join them. I saw Druce’s head swivel round at the mention of my name. I made sure our eyes did not meet. For an instant I was tempted by the thought of reconciliation—we had been friends for close on twenty years, after all—but my charity was snuffed out by memories of that day he had so earnestly and altruistically advised me to turn down
Great Alfred
(a half success, like all his other films). I knew I could never forgive him. His own greed and ambition had lost me
The Confessions
and effectively driven me from my own country. There was no possibility of ever recovering our old warm friendship. I waved, shouted an excuse and walked on.

Around this time there was another arrival in Los Angeles whom I was, paradoxically, happier to see. Alex Mavrocordato turned up in the émigré community, impoverished and jobless. He didn’t look well: his weight and bulk seemed a burden to him now, a slack load. He was still a big man but he had lost his big-man aura, if you know what I mean. Before, he had seemed to fill a room, as if his personality emitted some kind of force field. That was all but gone. A difficult journey through Vichy France and Spain, followed by a long wait in Lisbon for a boat west, seemed to have dispirited him, to have decanted his bullishness. He was staying with the Coopers and I went round to see him shortly after he arrived. We walked down to Lori’s and I bought him a fourteen-ounce steak with two fried eggs, french fries and a green salad on the side.

We sat down in the bright diner. Young people laughed and chattered in the booths. Lori and her smiling waitresses patrolled the aisles. The merry lights of Malibu Pier stretched out languidly into the darkness. Mavrocordato chewed vigorously on his steak. I ordered him another beer.

“My God,” he said with some bitterness. “War is hell.” He looked round him incredulously. “You should see Europe.”

I felt an itch of guilt. “You’ll get used to it,” I said a little ruefully. “It’s quite easy.”

“Always in the right place at the right time,” he said. “You find your feet, eh, Todd?”

“That’s not how it looks from my angle,” I said, and added pleasantly, “You can’t possibly know what you’re talking about.”

“Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen?…” He had a sense of humor, had Mavrocordato.

“Something like that.”

“Well, I have to thank you for the meal. What do you want?”

“Where’s Doon? What happened to Doon?”

“I haven’t seen Doon for …” He thought. “My God, eight, nearly nine years. Nineteen thirty-four, Paris.”

I felt the strangest sensation in my body, an odd mixture of alarm and elation.

“But she was in Sanary with you.”

“For one week. Then she left. She went to Neuchâtel to look for you.”

“But we’d left.…”

Bafflement clogged my brain. I felt thick, dull, like a man with a heavy cold.

Mavrocordato told me that he had seen Doon for a week in Paris in January ’34, after our unhappy Christmas together. She seemed very depressed, he said. She was drunk most of the time. They left Paris for Sanary together; he thought the Riviera would do her good. But all they did was fight. She talked all the time about going to America. She left for Neuchâtel to tell me her decision, he said. That was the last he had seen of her.

We walked slowly back up the road towards the Cooper house. My mind was squirming with the revelations I had heard.

“So she must have gone … come here?”

“Yes. I always thought so.”

“I thought …” I was suddenly close to adolescent tears. “I thought she had gone off with you.”

“I asked her,” Mavrocordato said, with some of his old vehemence. “You know, I even asked her to marry me again.” He shrugged. “You know Doon. I always think she’s a little bit mad.” He tapped his head.

I was still thinking. “But if she came here, where is she?”

“If she’s drinking like Paris, she’s got to be dead. Or very sick.”

We stopped at the three flights of steps that led up to the Cooper house. Mavrocordato was sharing 361½ with two other destitute émigés.

“I’d better try and find her,” I said vaguely.

“Say hello from me.”

We shook hands.

“Listen Todd, if you are needing assistant on your film … bygones can be easily bygones.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll bear it in mind.” I felt only an immense gratitude towards Mavocordato. I derived no pleasure from this triumph,

I went home and drank half a bottle of Vat 69 as I thought about Doon and this news. She hadn’t betrayed me. She had simply run away. I felt peculiar: I should have been elated, my heart big with joy. But I wasn’t. If she had been in America since 1934, why was there no sign of her? No trace at all? All her old friends from Berlin were in Hollywood; why had she not once made contact?

Eddie said I should get in touch with the Bureau of Missing Persons.

“Where was she from?” he asked. “You know, her hometown?”

“I’ve no idea. My God.”

“Very useful.”

Eddie was married now, to a small dark woman called Artemisia Parke. It struck me that in all the years I had known him, this was the first time I had ever associated him with a woman. Somehow a lovelife, even a sex life, had seemed inappropriate for him, superflous to his needs. He was like one of those worms or amoebas, hermaphroditic, that can service themselves (and I don’t mean that unkindly). Like most facets of his life these days, Eddie’s marriage seemed a means to some mysterious end. He appeared unconcerned and incurious about the Doon mystery.

“She was a strange girl, Johnny, I told you so years ago. She could have suicided.” He snapped his fingers. “They break, these types, like that.”

“Not Doon.”

“You should know.”

He sighed. He was on his way to play golf, wearing an outfit patterned with lozenges of lemon yellow, burnt sienna and maroon. I had a slight headache resulting from my attack on the Vat 69—and the colors seemed to press against my eyeballs painfully. I took a pair of green sunglasses out of my jacket pocket and put them on. We were sitting in his vast Beverly Hills home.

“Anyway,” he said, “don’t go running off. I’ve got a new project for you. The biggest yet.”

“Oh yes? What?”

“A film about Billy the Kid. But listen, in color.”

I drove down to San Diego to see Ramón Dusenberry. Since he had been best man at my wedding we had become quite close friends. We would meet up from time to time when he was in Los Angeles on business. He was a great admirer of my Westerns. “Anytime you’re tired of movies, you can have your old job back,” he would joke. I liked Ramón and not just for his gratifying enthusiasm. He was older than I and I had unilaterally appointed him as surrogate older brother, now that Thompson had abandoned the role. I asked him what to do about finding Doon. He said he had a friend in the San Diego police force who might be able to help.

We sat in Ramón’s yacht club overlooking the marina. It was a clear day, the sky empty of clouds. A flying boat—a Catalina—flew past at a low level on the way to the naval base. Over in Europe the Red Army captured Kharkov on their advance to the Dnieper. The RAF bombed Cologne. The USAF bombed St.-Nazaire.

“So what’s the next movie?” Ramón asked.

“What? Oh, Billy the Kid,” I said.

“My God! Well, you’ve got to meet Garfield Barry.”

“I have?”

“Yes, old Garfield
knew
him, for God’s sake.”

After lunch Ramón drove me up the coast to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, to a retirement home called Bella Vista across the coast highway from the public beach. It was a series of attenuated bungalows in the English style linked by covered walkways. Here and there were palms and ancient pepper trees with wooden benches set beneath them. We found Garfield Barry sitting outside in a wheelchair rather too close to a lawn sprinkler. The back of his head and shoulders were quite damp from the spray. We wheeled him out of range.

Barry was a lively old geezer but physically incapacitated by a recent stroke. He had a big nose and bright watery eyes; an uneven skull beneath a thin floss of white hair. One of Ramón’s newspapers had run a long interview with him on his eighty-fourth birthday a couple of months previously, called “The Last Man Who Knew Billy the Kid.” (This was quite true, I believe. There were a couple of old ladies still living who remembered the Kid, but Barry was definitely the last male.)

Barry had been born in 1858. His father kept a saloon in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Barry himself had been postmaster there for forty years. In 1881, the year the Kid died there, Barry had been twenty-two, a year older than the desperado. It was strange talking to the old man. I realized that Billy the Kid himself could have lived as long, had
circumstances been different. I felt an odd melancholy. Here I was, forty-four, born eighteen years after Pat Garrett killed the Kid, talking to their contemporary. Meanwhile the sun shone on San Diego and the Red Army pressed on towards the Dnieper. I felt a swooning disorientation of space and time, the present and the past. The objective and subjective worlds I occupied seemed to swirl and dance round me. I forced myself to concentrate on the old man.

“What was he like?” I asked. “Billy the Kid?”

“Well, for a start his name wasn’t Billy the Kid, wasn’t even William Bonney. It was Henry McCarty, and I would say …” The old man paused for breath. A breeze stirred his fine hair and the branches of the pepper tree above him. I thought suddenly of old Duric Lodokian in his Berlin deathbed.

“…  I would say he was one of the meanest, shortassed, buck-teethed, foxy little fuckers I’ve ever met.”

With the help of Barry’s reminiscences I rewrote Eddie’s rotten script. Out went the American Robin Hood and in came something more sinister. The way I told it, my Henry McCarty was an evil runt who shot charming William Bonney and stole his name. Sheriff Pat Garrett, immensely tall (six feet four inches, according to Barry), became a moralistic, lugubrious avenging angel. I took plenty of liberties with the story, but the facts were accurate. It was the eighteenth Billy the Kid film, but the first one to portray him as he really had been.

“He wasn’t even left-handed,” Garfield Barry told me. We were examining the only known photograph of the Kid, where he stands with a rifle by his side. “Some fool reversed the picture first time it was used and now everybody thinks he was a left-handed gun,” Barry said, chuckled and coughed.

I looked closely at the photo. “My God. He’s got three-inch heels on his boots,” I said.

“Told you he was a stunted little bastard.”

I think that was one of my most brilliant ideas in the film. Sonny Pyle, an astonishing young actor (whose tragic death in 1944 was a huge loss to the cinema), played the Kid throughout the film in four-inch Cuban heels. It had the most bizarre effect on every posture and movement. Pyle was thin-faced with staring eyes and we gave him a plate of false teeth so we could get the famous jackrabbit smile. Many people have subsequently analyzed his performance without being able to say precisely why it is so mesmerizing. Quite simply, it is the high heels.
My Billy the Kid teeters; he has to go upstairs carefully, he jumps down from his horse with uncharacteristic caution. He walks with a curious bent-kneed gait. For the first time since
The Divorce
I worked with some enthusiasm on a motion picture.