Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (28 page)

By seven o'clock, in preparation for the far grander evening showings, the dour procession of Moguls' Wives forms along the parade. Sweating in their crinolines and farthingales, in their flounced gowns of flame-coloured taffeta, like so many Queens of Hearts, the Moguls' Wives seem to comprise a suspended, forgotten enclave in this teeming town. The result (one imagines) of alliances formed long before their husbands' success, they tend to approach in girlish pairs, joined at the last moment by their errant, tuxedoed consorts. Only the Moguls' Wives — and they only at evening — dress in a manner remotely appropriate to their years. Everyone else in Cannes divides their age by three and dresses accordingly. 'How far did you have to go,' I used to wonder, watching the clownishly spruced menfolk convene on the Palais steps, 'how many helicopters and jungle-beaters and water-diviners did you have to hire, before you found a dinner jacket as comical as
that?'

From eleven until three, after the moguls have dispersed with the Moguls' Wives, ritzy yahooism simmers along the strip — and suddenly Cannes is very much like anywhere else where people come to exchange high-spirits for cash. Sounds of brutish revelry that you would be startled to hear in, say, Yates's Wine Lodge in Blackpool mingle with the familiar clatter of dropped glasses and upended chairs. At one of Cannes' premier venues, the Night Bar at the Carlton, I sat at a table smothered in 1,000-franc notes and untouched champagne; I watched a fat little millionaire climb a graph of drunkenness so unswerving that it would have offended the sensibilities of a Glaswegian publican. The millionaire shouted, sang, danced, fought, sobbed - at one point managing to do all five at once. 'Why are they here so late?' I asked a regular visitor to the port — 'Have they been to late films or are they just nightowls?' 'No,' said my American friend. 'They just didn't get laid yet.'

*

Promotional gimmicks of one kind or another supply the main distractions. These gimmicks are often endearingly low-budget - a kid giving away oranges in the interests of some indeterminate forthcoming attraction, a little bouncing badge called a 'gizmo', designed to whet your appetite for a film called
Gizmo.
The presence in Cannes of a mauve taxi made you all the keener to see
Un Taxi Mauve.
A line of cars with girls in them went past beeping their horns (you couldn't tell why). A very competent brassy jazz-band struck up on La Croisette, and momentarily one's spirits lifted; but within seconds the band had been asphyxiated by photographers, and gaiety lapsed once more into staged frivolity.

Yum Yum Shaw, the oriental pornographess, drew attention to herself at the Martinez Hotel, thus doubling speculation about her
Concubine
film. Bigger breasts by far (the biggest I ever saw in Cannes) were being tensed down on the beach; they belonged to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Surrounded by starlets, Arnold showed photographers the appalling shape he had let his body get into. A pair of aeroplanes tirelessly circled the shore, day after day, bearing streamers saying
SUPERMAN NOW SHOOTING
and
BRANDO HACKMAN AND SUPERMAN.
By their thirtieth circuit or so, I felt I had made myself master of this information. 'Nah,' I heard a nearby mogul moan, 'the
Superman
hype has been building for years.'

Dunaway was there. People arched in their chairs when people mentioned Dunaway's name. Heston out-hyped Mon-tand (was it he?) in Carrier. Bronson was there, with Ireland, his wife. Loren was there, at a Lord Lew lunch thrown in the Eden Roc: 'All my films are great,' cracked Lord Lew. 'They're not all good, but they're all great.' Savalas was there. They threw a party at the Carlton, to welcome Telly to Cannes. Telly won a bomb that evening at the Cannes Casino (a repulsive gin-palace from whose Doric portals I was jeered away two nights later: it costs a fortune to join for
huit jours,
and a star's ransom to join for
la saison).
Ustinov was there. Finney was there . . . On La Croisette, closely ringed by personal bodyguards, secretaries, agents, shoe-polishers, tie-straighteners and about a dozen municipal policemen, an unseen star moved down the strip, raising heads, blocking traffic. This must be big. Nicholson? Streisand? Redford?
Brando?

'Quinn,' someone muttered appreciatively — 'Quinn.'

Now it was only after mature thought that I decided
not
to let Quinn know I was in Cannes. Many years previously, when the present writer was no more than a boy, I had co-starred with Quinn in a Fox production based on the Richard Hughes novel
A High Wind in Jamaica
(Price, Ventura, Frobe, Kerdrova and Coburn had all co-starred along with Quinn and me). It was my only experience of motion pictures - and one so traumatically embarrassing that it can still make me gasp with shame. I had got the part at the last minute, by pure chance. I was a plump and bewildered pubescent, with no theatrical talent whatever. My RADA-spawned kid co-stars could weep or giggle to camera at the drop of a hat; I said such things as 'hello' and 'yes' as if I had been heavily bribed to do so. (I once fainted with self-consciousness. During my death-scene, the distracted director, McKendrick, asked me to vivify matters with a death-scene death scream. 'Try one now,' he said, between Take Twenty-three and Take Twenty-four. 'What, now?' I asked, 'Now.' 'What, now?'
'Now.'
I released a barely audible moan, and blacked out.) Luckily my part was a small one, and most of it was cut.

To complete my humiliation, adolescence went and broke my voice during the course of shooting. In a series of great lurches and leaps, it descended from a piping soprano to its present didactic baritone. As you probably know, films aren't shot chronologically; as you probably don't know, when kids' voices collapse in this fashion they employ
old ladies
to dub you over. I never dared actually see the film, and only a couple of years ago, when it was shown on the small screen, did I catch a glimpse of the nauseous eunuch they had made of me.

Anyway, Tony and I had tangled over a game of chess. I had beaten the star — or at least the star was clinging on to a hopelessly compromised board, knowing full well that he would soon be rescued by a summons to the set. Quinn was ludicrously vain about his chess-playing prowess (he used to like playing simultaneous chess, so that he could get beaten by two or more people simultaneously). 'Will Mr Quinn please come to the set?' a megaphone inquired. Quinn cracked shut his pocket board. 'I think you lost,' I said, in a variety of octaves. But the great man, Fischer-like, had stalked off. In the four months of shooting it was the one recognisably human gesture I saw him make. For the rest, like virtually every other movie high-up, he was distinguished only by his celebrity from the hypocrites, hysterics and hangers-on that people his world.

The British contingent over here is depressed — with some show of reason, it would seem. An obsessive British cineast told me that the entire British budget for the Festival was a lousy £2,000, as compared to the Canadians' £50,000 and God knows what for the Australians
(DOWN UNDER DELIVERS,
says their poster). I could not establish whether this £2,000 defrayed the courtesy visit of HMS Apollo, the frigate in the bay whose ketchup-nosed, centime-less crew miserably walks the streets. The £2,000
does
defray Britain's incompetently run booth up on the despised third floor of the Palais. The facilities for doing deals are apparently quite inadequate. The British Film Producers Association, the obsessive cineast told me, is not doing its stuff; obsessively he went through a list of British representatives in Cannes and explained how second-rate most of them were, The obsessive cineast was named Rex, by the way — so obsessive that he is even
called
a cinema.

Rex is not as depressed as some of the people here. The beggars are more depressed than Rex is. I grew fond of the beggars - they cheered me up. Apart from the itinerant hippies and the odd knapsacked desperado, everyone here looks so healthy, happy and rich that the heart soars like a hawk to see this little lunatic fringe, to see these people so spectacularly down on their luck.

Or are they? There's a pair of self-mutilators, a toothless cowboy in a fringed jacket and his swarthy, Tonto-like side-kick, who work the strip thrice daily. They munch on lit cigarettes, eat entire kitchen-boxfuls of flaring matches, and gobble up razor-blades while the café crowds snicker and wince. I contributed to their purse, on the understanding that they would both need to be fed intravenously by the time
la saison
was over. One night I saw them flouncing up La Croisette, as sumptuously dressed as any of the butterflies.

There's a trio of fire-eaters, moustachioed lads in denim, who drunkenly ask you for money ('Un franc?
Un
franc? Non, deux francs,
deux
francs') whether they're eating fire for you or not. They approached me three times in half an hour, but were very apologetic when I said I had already coughed up. Then they coughed up — for my delight. They filled their mouths with paraffin, placed a taper to their mouths, and hawked out great zeppelins of flame. I contributed again, and handsomely, in lieu of their imminent deaths from internal combustion. The leader juggled a bottle of wine with his cask of paraffin; he confused the two quite frequently, taking a refreshing swig of high-octane hemlock to wash away the taste of that nasty
vin ordinaire.

There are, of course, real beggars in Cannes, people who don't just beg for the hell of it. They haven't the effrontery to disfigure La Croisette (perhaps the gendarmes restrain them), and tend to drop back to rue d'Antibes, which runs parallel some way inland. There's an old hooked woman who holds out a bent hand, saying Monsieur, Monsieur, Monsieur in the pitiful tone which I use on waiters.

There's a little girl who crouches all day on the pavement; making a bowl of her skirt, she counts centimes with rapid fingers.
These
beggars don't seem to be doing very well. The appearance of suffering may be good for a laugh, but the evidence of poverty amuses no one, least of all the golden denizens of Cannes. We don't like thinking of these people. We wish they weren't here. We wish they wouldn't hang about the place like this, trying to spoil our holiday.

Sunday Times, 1977

ISAAC ASIMOV

Professor Isaac Asimov sat in the opulent lobby of his New York apartment block, counting on his fingers. 'It took me nine months to write my autobiography.'

'Really?' I said. Isaac Asimov's autobiography is considerably longer than
War and Peace.

'Sure. It took me so long, I only published seven books the next year.'

'And that's well below average?'

'Yeah! People thought I was
dead!'

This week Gollancz publish Asimov's
Casebook of the Black Widowers,
a collection of waggish mystery stories. It is his 212th book. For the last decade he has averaged a dozen books a year. The Monthly Asimov' is no longer a joke: it is a statement of fact.

Asimov has been called 'the world's foremost science writer'. The description is inadequate. A random selection from the eight-page catalogue which ends his autobiography gives a more telling glimpse of Asimov's extraordinary energy and range:
Quick-and Easy Math; What Makes the Sun Shine?; Mars; How Did We Find Out About Antarctica?; The World of Carbon; The Roman Republic; Understanding Physics; Animals in the Bible; Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright; Constantinople; ABC's of Ecology; Asimov's Annotated 'Paradise Lost'; Ginn Science Program — Advanced Level B; The Sensuous Dirty Old Man; Still More Lecherous Limericks.
When I spoke to Asimov last spring, he was up to Opus 216. But that was several books ago now.

Asimov is probably best known in the UK as a pioneer of 'hard' science fiction - one of the old school, along with Robert Heinlein, Fred Pohl, Arthur Clarke, Poul Anderson and Clifford Simak, the men who filled the pages of magazines like
Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Universe, Super Science Fiction, Satellite
and
If
in the 19405. Like his peers, he wrote mock-technical conundrums about robots and computers (
I
,
Robot),
ecological jeremiads
(Earth is Room Enough),
schmaltzy space opera
(Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids)
and mediaevalised colonial fantasies (the
Foundation
trilogy). But Asimov started to diversify very early on and, by his mid-thirties, SF was for him no more than a sideline.

'My interest in
science-fiction
ended on 4 October 1957' — when the USSR sent up Sputnik I. After
Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn
in 1958, Asimov produced no full-length work of original fiction until 1972, when he managed to complete his worthy, wordy epic,
The Gods Themselves.
Nearly a hundred non-fiction books separate the two titles; and, since 1972, Asimov has published a hundred more. Nowadays, he is not an SF writer so much as a writing phenomenon.

Before going off to meet the great man, I took the trouble to absorb — or, at any rate, to buy and stare at — the hulking twin volumes of his autobiography,
In Memory Yet Green
and
In Joy Still Felt
(1979 and 1980). Asimov says that the books took about nine months to write. Well, they take about eight months to read. 'I had forty years of diaries to use,' Asimov would later tell me — and it shows.

Structurally, the autobiography makes an average collection of showbiz memoirs look like Nabokov's
Speak, Memory.
Furthermore, and on Asimov's own admission, nothing ever happened to him. I toiled through the first volume in a mood of scandalised admiration. How could anyone
dare
to record a life with such fidelity to the trivial? The book reads like an outsize experiment in tedium by Andy Warhol or Yoko Ono. After a while the effect is hypnotic and remorseless: you read on in tortured fascination.