Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

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The tedium of Santiago became the most tedious theme of our conversations. It seemed we’d reached an unbreachable consensus, in which all of us — Diana and I, her secretary, and the other members of the cast — concurred that Santiago was the most boring place in the world.

Instead of the well-wishing telegrams we usually send to friends on New Year’s Day, this year Diana sent two or three desolate cables. They all said the same thing, just one word: HELP!

Various circles formed. The leading man, famous as the hero of a television series, lived in a large, elegant house on the outskirts of Santiago with his girlfriend and the director, a saturnine but promising man who’d also made a name for himself in television. The melancholy hotel in the center of town was home to the cinematographer — an Englishman who explicitly worshipped at the altar of Onan — and an actor who’d been famous in the workers’ theater movement of the 1930s. But the sun around which the entire production revolved was the leading man, his girlfriend, and the director.

“They’re very nice, and I get along well with them,” said Diana. “But the deal is that we live apart and see one another very little. They like to spend their evenings drinking beer and playing poker.”

Something we would never do. But I did wonder what, aside from loving each other a great deal, we would do to pass the nights. Diana told me she’d invited the character actor of the film, an American named Lew Cooper, to live with us. “Don’t worry. He’s sixty and very intelligent. You’ll like him.”

I knew very well who he was. First, because he was the greatest actor in Clifford Odets’s plays during the 1930s and in Arthur Miller’s in the 1940s. Second, because he was one of the victims of Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt in the 1950s. I was disgusted by all those who’d squealed on their colleagues, condemning the victims to hunger and, sometimes, to suicide. On the other hand, all those who, like Lillian Hellman, had refused to accommodate conscience to the political fashions of the day were my heroes. Cooper strangely fell between the two categories. Some said he was a totally apolitical man and that his statements to the House Un-American Activities Committee had been innocuous: he’d named those who’d already been named or who’d come forward and declared themselves Communists. He never added an unpublished name, so to speak, to the inquisitor’s list. But even if he’d actually informed on no one, the moral fact is that he did give names, or at least repeat them.

How do you judge that kind of action? Cooper went on working. Others, who refused to talk, never again set foot on a movie set. Not part of the U.S. political world but from a moral world that transcended it, I was caught between my leftist convictions and my personal ethics, which rejected facile Manichaeanism and, above all, the slightest hint of Pharisaism. Was the case difficult to judge precisely because it stood between bloodthirsty, vengeful, envious, opportunistic squealing and the weaknesses and failures to which, perhaps, all of us are susceptible? Cooper’s moral ambiguity made him more interesting than blameworthy. One among so many people had to be my own double. Who could reassure me that under certain circumstances I myself wouldn’t have done what he did? My entire intellectual and moral self rebelled against the idea. But my sentimental side, human, affectionate, or whatever you’d like to call it, tended to forgive Cooper, just as one day someone else would have to forgive me something. There are people who replicate our weakness because we instantly recognize ourselves in them. Cooper deserved not my censure but my compassion.

Anyway, I was curious about all the people involved in the film, but Diana lost patience with my questions. “Hollywood adores capsule biographies. They save time and, best of all, excuse us from thinking. They let us put on airs of being objective, but actually we’re just swallowing gossip consommé. Marilyn Monroe: a sad, lonely little girl. Irresponsible father. Insane mother. Bounced from orphanage to orphanage. She never should have stopped being Norma Jean Baker. She couldn’t stand the burden of being Marilyn Monroe — pills, alcohol, death. Rock Hudson: an extremely handsome truck driver from Texas. Used to driving the highways by night, he would pick up boys and make love to them. He’s discovered. He becomes a star. He’s got to hide his homosexuality. He’s locked in a closet filled with spotlights and cameras. Everyone knows he’s a queen. The world has to believe he’s the most virile of leading men. Who disillusioned them? Death, death …”

She laughed and poured herself a whiskey without bothering to ask me to do it for her. “Sweetheart, don’t believe my biography. Don’t believe it when they say: Diana Soren. Small-town girl. The girl next door. Wins a competition for the part of Shaw’s Saint Joan. Wins out of eighteen thousand contestants. From anonymity to glory in a flash. A genuine sadist directs the film. He humiliates her, tries to get great acting out of her with his cruelty, but only manages to convince her she will never be a great actress. And that’s a fact. Diana Soren will take any shitty part the studios offer her so she can disguise herself, so the world will believe Diana Soren is just that: only a mediocre actress. Then Diana can dedicate herself to being what she wants to be and no one can impose limits on her …”

I toasted her. “What do you want to be?”

“We’ll be on location for two months.” Her gray (or were they blue?) eyes disappear behind a veil of amber glass. “You can tell me yourself when the time’s up.”