The New Confessions

15 Pacific Palisades

The day war began in Europe was the day my temporary resident’s visa ran out. As Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 3, 1939, I left my home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, to drive south across the border to Tijuana, Mexico. I had an old gray Mercury in those days, a 1935 model. It got me down to Tijuana with no problem.

I drove on to Rincón, a small village outside Tijuana on the road to Tecate, on the other side of the mesa where the airport is. In those days it was just about preserving its status as an independent township. There was a main street with a small square at one end, a couple of hotels and a courthouse, nothing too attractive but far more pleasant than Tijuana and much cheaper than the scandalously inflated prices you find there. Saving money was the only reason you stayed in Rincón while you waited for your resident’s visa to be renewed. I say “you” but I mean the Europeans, the exiles. There was a fairly constant shifting population of about two dozen Europeans — Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Poles — from Los Angeles. The odd composer, artist, musician or novelist, but mainly people from the film world. The two hotels were the Vera Cruz and the Emperador Maximilian. The Max, as it was called, had a very small swimming pool and a restaurant. The Vera Cruz was cheaper. At the back were six clapboard cottages for long-term residents. The last time I had been here was a year previously. It had taken only a week to arrange a new permit. Once we had that document we could drive back to Los Angeles and pick up our lives for another year.

I checked into the Max. It had been a long drive. I had some ground steak, fried potatoes and fríjoles with a glass of beer and then went up to my room. I hadn’t recognized any of the other faces in the restaurant. I stood at my hotel window looking down on the main street — the Avenida Emilio Carraza — lined with dusty nutant trees. It was getting dark. The streetlights all worked but they were irregularly spaced. Two together brightly illumined the forecourt of a gas station. A little mall of shops and a doctor’s surgery stood in inconvenient darkness. Overhead a twin-engined airplane came in to land at Tijuana Airport. Further down the street multicolored fairy lights were strung in the two large fresno trees that shaded the terrace of the Cervecería Americana. Some Mexican youths lounged outside a cinema that was showing Los Manos de Orlac. I saw an elderly German novelist and his wife return from their morose constitutional. A dog urinated against the whitewall tires of an old Ford. It was a warm night.

When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1937—I flew from New York, fifteen hours, a UAL Sky Lounge Mainliner via Chicago — it had almost been like returning home. Half of Berlin seemed to be there — Wilder, Reitlinger, Thomas Mann, Lang, many others. I stayed with Werner and Hanni Hitzig for the first month. Egon Gast lived three houses away. Most of the German émigrés had settled in the cheaper districts around the Santa Monica Canyon, mainly in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. On our reduced budgets we socialized as energetically as we could in each other’s small houses. I joined the Hollywood Ant-Nazi League and some days spoke more German than English. Most of my fellow émigrés were dejected and cast down — with good reason. Their country had rejected them, or vice versa, and all the fame and renown they had known there counted for little in their new home. They were employed — apart from a few — in dead-end charity jobs in various studios. Most spoke the language badly or not at all. The future was dark, with dwindling prospects. But I, on the contrary, was excited. For a start I liked the sunshine and the proximity of the huge ocean. And I was relieved to be out of Britain. Remember, unlike the others, I was coming to Los Angeles from a position of no great advantage. And I had no language problems. I was not leaving some sumptuous villa in the Grunewald to live in a small frame house tucked up in a steep road in a canyon suburb. To me Pacific Palisades was a more than fair exchange for the Scotia Private Hotel, my father’s house and my flat in Islington. To me at that time Britain represented bad faith, broken promises, my ruined marriage, thwarted ambition and unjust legal persecution. I was perfectly happy to convalesce in California.

Stirrings of liberal conscience prompted many of the studios to offer jobs to émigrés. However, this usually involved little more than paying them a modest salary to stay away. Egon Gast was on contract to 20th Century — Fox. He had been in Los Angeles a year and a half and was still waiting to make his first film. He got me a job as a writer there on a salary of a hundred dollars a week. In those days I suppose that was a living wage — just. Some writers, I hear, earned as much as thirty-five hundred per week. Aldous Huxley once told me he got fifteen thousand dollars for two months’ work. The studios were being thoughtful but not generous.

The first day I went to my office on the Fox lot, the name above my door read J. J. TODT. The other four offices on that floor were all occupied by Germans — directors and writers. It felt like something of a ghetto, or like a quarantine ward in a hospital. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that we tended to cling together. At lunch we would eat in a group in the corner of the canteen and the others would moan and bitch about the venality and crassness of the work they were expected to do — the debased standards under which they were obliged to operate. They had all the highbrow disdain of the chronically insecure. Men — I will mention no names — who had produced vulgar musical comedies and mindless historical epics now became thoroughbred intellectuals and artistes, grand arbiters of good taste.

I did not complain. It is extraordinary, but true, but in the months that I was at Fox I was paid thousands of dollars and did not a stroke of work. On the strength of the new salary I left the Hitzigs and rented a small apartment—361½ Encanto Drive — off Chautauqua Boulevard. It was half a house, the top half, which I sublet from an illustrator called Ernst Kupfer. A lugubrious solemn man, he was now known as Ernest Cooper and had a steady job working as an animator for Walt Disney. He and his wife, Utta, had four children who all lived with them downstairs. Utta was small, dark and of stout peasant build, with a huge sagging shelf of bosom. She worked indefatigably about the house, controlling her children (three boys and a little girl) with swift vicious punishments, usually powerful stinging slaps to the backs of legs, just like Oonagh had administered.

Upstairs, I had a bedroom, a bathroom, a small sitting room dominated by a horsehide davenport and, off that, a kitchenette with a three-burner stove, an electric icebox and a woodstone sink. I used to feel guilty about all my space when I heard the six Coopers crashing about below.

From the kitchenette window you could see the Pacific, always gray; it never looked blue even on the sunniest days. The house itself was wooden, set in a plot hacked out of a scrubby hill, and it had three flights of steps leading down to the road from a screened porch. Ernest cut the steep lawn from time to time, but it would have smartened the place up unduly to do it regularly and made it stand out from its neighbors. Encanto Drive had a shabby well-worn look. And there seemed to be kids everywhere. Some evenings when I parked my car after work and looked at the lounging adolescents, the toddlers, the shouting brats on their bicycles, I felt like a solitary adult in a school playground.

I settled in at Fox easily and quickly. My salary check too was made out to J. J. Todt, but I never thought of complaining. It was generally understood that I was working on my own project, which I would eventually show to the script editor (I never met this man after the first day). Weeks passed pleasantly. What did I do? I learned how to play tennis, acquired a sun tan and put on some weight. I went swimming in the sea with Ernest’s two older boys, Clancy and Elroy. (“They Yamericans now,” Ernest would say. “Europe finish.”) I tinkered with my script of The Confessions: Part II. I felt oddly unreflecting and unbothered about things. One reason for this was that Europe might as well have vanished from the map of the world as far as life out here on the Pacific littoral was concerned. At our dinner parties, on beach picnics and in Anti-Nazi League meetings we energetically debated political events in Europe, but emerged from these sessions into sunny, prosperous, disinterested and indifferent realms. Soon, inexorably, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia, Anschluss, came to have the status of arguments in a university seminar group: abstract posits, forensic positions. Somehow, or so it seemed to me, these distant agitations just weren’t my problem anymore.

The second reason was that I lost all sense of urgency. This was new, and harder to explain. Lethargy, as far as I am now concerned, is to do with spirit of place rather than state of mind. I simply find it impossible to work in some milieux. Perhaps in Los Angeles it was something to do with the absence of real seasons. The thermometer shifted down a few degrees; you put on a sweater; it was overcast and rainy — that described an average day in an English summer, not winter. And the trees were always green. Passing time lost its common demarcations. The sap never rose in spring; the days never shrunk; the nights never grew longer.… I was approaching my fortieth birthday, half my life had gone and yet I looked younger than ever. Those extra pounds I gained smoothed out the mature angles and declivities of my face. I tried to generate some energy but to little avail. In compensation I told myself I was biding my time.

But then perhaps, like a field, every life needs its fallow period. As it turned out mine lasted two years and ended with the invasion of Poland. But I am jumping ahead.

I did three things almost immediately on arriving in Los Angeles: I wrote to Thompson and I tried to find Doon and Eddie Simmonette. I had left England without informing anyone. Thompson, as he put it, was “devastated.” To his eyes the whole affair looked like the worst sort of fraud and betrayal. He contemplated repaying the loan himself, but decided in the end to let me take the consequences of my actions. I quote a portion of his letter to me:

… Your behavior, after the initial shock, did not seem on reflection to be all that surprising. You have always been far and away the most selfish member of our family, the most wayward and irresponsible. This sort of cavalier attitude to one’s most serious obligations may be regarded as the norm in your “world,” but I assure you that it is anathema to the banking community. I consider your defaulting on the bank’s loan a gross personal insult as well as an act of criminality. I cannot forgive you for the distress and embarrassment you have caused both me and Heather.…

And on and on. I could see that there had been a massive loss of face on his part and I was genuinely sorry. But what else could I have done? I wrote back briefly, apologized again and said I would send a hundred dollars a month, and more if circumstances permitted, until my debt had been cleared. While I worked at Fox, I was as good as my word.

Very surprisingly, and somewhat worryingly, there was no news or sign of Doon. Few people seemed even to remember her. “Didn’t she go to Europe in the twenties?” was the best I could come up with. I came to the reluctant conclusion that she was still in France. Willi Gast, Egon’s brother, arrived in Los Angeles and told me there was a sizable community of émigrés in Sanary, in the South of France, among whom he had noticed Mavrocordato. I assumed that was where I could find Doon — if I wanted to.

Eddie Simmonette, I discovered, was in New York, where he was making films in Yiddish. I wrote to him and he — typically — offered me a job, but I declined. I had settled in by then and the effort of moving east seemed too much. The Californian lethargy was already in my blood, coagulating it, slowing me down. Besides, I couldn’t speak Yiddish … but neither could Eddie, as far as I knew. I stayed put.

I earned some extra money on top of my Fox wage from a man named Smee, Monroe Smee, whom I met at the Anti-Nazi League meetings. Smee was an unfortunate-looking fellow with receding hair and chin and yellow equine teeth with large gaps between them. He said he ran a small production company and I acted as a freelance script reader for him at twenty-five dollars a script. I read seven before I asked to be relieved of the job. The scripts were absurdly bad, quite appalling. I had been expecting earnest, liberal-minded tracts, but what he sent me was the worst sort of trash — turgid thrillers with creaking conspiracy theories and cloying romances with a strain of positively nauseating sentimentality, as far as I recall. Smee had great hopes for these scripts and I was reluctant to dash them as wholeheartedly as I felt they deserved, but I did. He was paying me for my honest professional opinion, I reminded him.

For a few weeks we saw a fair amount of each other. I didn’t dislike Smee, but he just wasn’t my type. He had only one joke, which he employed endlessly. If, as you left a coffeeshop, say, you asked, “Are you coming?” he would respond, “As the Actress said to the Bishop.” If you said, “Shall I stay inside?” he would pipe up with “As the Bishop said to the Actress.” I became almost maddened by this jocular tic. It was astonishing how the most innocuous question could be turned in Smee’s mind into a Bishop/Actress gag.

I handed the last — the seventh — script back to him one night after a league meeting and told him I was quitting. I apologized.

“I just can’t do it anymore,” I said.

“As the Bishop said to the Actress.”

“No, seriously, Monroe, wherever you’re getting these screenwriters from, I’d dump them. They’re useless, worse than useless. You must be able to find some better ones. Ask the first person you meet outside.… I mean this is crap. Really. And that Falling Snow, I think that’s probably the worst script I’ve ever read. The guy should be locked up. What was his name?”

“Falling Snow? That was, ah, Edgar Douglas.”

“Well he ought to have his brain examined. There was something actually rather disgusting about that story.”

Smee grinned. “Well, anyway, I’m grateful to you, John. At least you’re honest.” His face was damp, Smee sweated easily. “But I should level with you now that you’re quitting. I’m Edgar Douglas. I wrote Falling Snow. I wrote them all.”

“Jesus Christ! Monroe! God, why didn’t you—”

“No, no. Don’t worry. I’m grateful.” His grin was now distinctly cheesy. “I’d never have known. I can’t judge my own stuff. I needed an honest opinion.”

“Jesus.… I’ve got to give you your money back.”

“Nonsense, you earned it.”

“But I feel such a prick.”

“As the Actress said to the Bishop.… No, really, John, I needed to hear it. I respect your honesty. So I’m not cut out to be a screenwriter. Now I know. Once a loation manager, always a location manager.”

“Monroe, I—”

“No hard feelings.”

We shook hands. “I owe you one,” he said. “I mean it.”

I felt bad about it and continued to apologize when we met at league meetings. He kept telling me to forget it and eventually I did. I held on to the money he had paid me, though. He was right: I had earned it.

And so I drifted through 1938 and into ’39. On the day of my fortieth birthday (I looked ten years younger) I was invited to a tennis lunch-party at the Bel Air home of an English director called Cyril Norman. Norman was a North Country homosexual who took his sport seriously, and the day was mapped out with a series of round-robin competitions of singles and doubles. I was scheduled to start proceedings off with a doubles match: me and Clive Brook against Ronald Colman and Richard Barthelmess. I had left my racket in the office and drove there to pick it up before going to the party.

I parked in a vacant reserved space and ran upstairs. I came out two minutes later to find a large Chrysler coupe partially blocking me in. Its driver, a small red-faced man in a light-gray suit with a yellow silk display handkerchief stood beside it. I was in white flannels, white shirt, navy cotton jersey. I was carrying my tennis racket. It was Wednesday, 11 A.M.

“Sorry,” I said. “Won’t be a second.”

“You work here?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

He looked me up and down. “Could have fooled me. What do you do?”

“I’m a writer,” I said. I didn’t like his tone.

“Oh yeah? Chances are you can read, then.”

I looked at him, then at my watch. “Look, I’d love to stay and chat but I’m pressed for time.”

He pointed. “What the fuck you think that sign says? ‘Please park here’?”

There was a sign: PRIVATE, RESERVED, and a name I couldn’t read from that distance.

“If you move your car,” I said patiently, “you can have your space back. I was in a hurry.”

“I don’t give the steam off my shit if you’re in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be there in the first place, dork.”

I got into my car.

“Hey! Jerk-off. You English?”

“Scottish.”

“What’s your name?”

“Todd.” I started the engine.

“Todd? Todd?…” He thought. Then his eyes widened. “J. J. Todt! You’re the fuckin’ German writer. What do you mean you’re Scottish? We don’t hire Scottish writers here! There are no fuckin’ Scottish refugees!”

“You’d better move your car, you little prick, or I’ll hit it.”

“You’re fired, asshole! I’m going to sue you for fraud.”

“So sue me!” I contemplated getting out and laying into him with my tennis racquet. But instead I backed out fast and took the front fender neatly off his new car. For good measure I ran over it as I drove off.

I was fired. The very next day. I don’t know who the man was, some self-important junior executive, I suspect, but somehow word got around that it was Darryl Zanuck himself. I’m sure it wasn’t, but the rumor circulated anyway, and even made some gossip columns. “Hapless German writer J. J. Todt clipped D. F. Zanuck’s fender on the Fox lot last week and promptly got himself fired.” “Writer J. J. Todt left his car at the curb in the Fox lot and dropped by the office to pick up his tennis racket. But the rookie writer had parked in the Vee Pee’s place and got himself blasted out of court with a Zanuck ace! Nein, nein, J.J.!”

In the way these things happen, I even started dining out on it myself. It may have made a good story at a cocktail party, but it also meant it proved almost impossible to get another job.

“God. So you’re the guy Zanuck fired.”

“No,” I would say, “it wasn’t him. I’ve never met him.”

“But I read about it. Didn’t I read about it? Jeez, what did you say to him, for God’s sake?”

My remonstrations had no effect. None of the major studios would hire me. I was not only burdened with the Zanuck misapprehension, but I was now irrevocably associated with the émigrés. People would often congratulate me on my excellent English, and there were too many Europeans looking for too few jobs. I realized then the extraordinary tenacity of first impressions. From then on I ceased putting such trust in my own.

I was out of work for two or three months. Of the two hundred or so émigrés in Los Angeles, I suppose thirty or forty were regularly employed. Among the others there was fierce competition for the available jobs. I had to take my chances with everyone else.

I supplemented my rent by coaching Elroy Cooper with his maths — or math, as I was now instructed to call it. Elroy was a bright kid, but lazy. I kept him hard at it and found I rather enjoyed myself. I enjoyed the mathematics too; it took me back to the early days with Hamish at Minto Academy.

But I soon ran low on funds and I ended up accepting the first job I was offered. The Associated Motion Picture Releasing Corporation sounded quite grand. In reality it was one of the “Poverty Row” film companies producing B-movie horror films and — this was its speciality — Westerns. The man who offered me the job was called Brodie McMaster. He came from Illinois but was deeply proud of his heritage. The ethnic connection worked to my advantage, for once.

The only difficulty was that AMPR paid its writers fifty dollars a week. As a result they tended to be very old, very poor or heavily dependent on narcotics. In my time at AMPR I worked with two morphine addicts, a cocaine junkie and half a dozen soaks. I received shared writing credits on several AMPR films, but I have no recollection now of which ones.

So my life restarted but on more reduced terms than before. I had virtually no savings by now and had stopped repaying my loan from Thompson’s bank. Apart from my salary, I earned only a trickle of royalties from my films (Jean Jacques! was currently playing in Francophone Africa) and from my patents. The graph line of my fortunes was still heading downwards.

But I was happy enough. Those two years in Hollywood before the Second World War now seem to me to be among the most placid and carefree of my life. The experience was similar, I imagine, to that of going to university: a finite period of independence with few responsibilities and limited funds. The sun shone; I had work, a little money, friends, a social life, a place to live. What more did I want?

Sex. Sex was something of a problem until Monika Alt arrived in town. It may sound strange, but I had been practically celibate since Doon had left me. I had had one unsatisfactory visit to a prostitute during my sorrow-drowning binge after The Confessions: Part II had ended, and a heartless fortnight’s affair with the head of makeup during filming of The Divorce (it ended the day we wrapped — her decision). Otherwise, I swear, nothing. After Doon left I felt sexually dessicated. From time to time the old urges returned, with Senga for example, and for a hot week at Drumlarish, a sort of rutting season, I suppose. I asked Mungo what there was available locally and he told me about an old woman who lived in a filthy bothy on the road to Glenfinnan with whom you could have your way for a tumbler of whiskey, but I was not tempted. Doon’s betrayal had left me emotionally mawkish. I returned to the solace and 100 percent reliability of adolescent methods.

However, America had stimulated me once again, and shortly after I moved into 361½ Encanto Drive I courted and won the manageress of a coffeeshop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Her name was Lorelei, Lorelei Madrazon. I think she was half-Turkish and Lorelei an approximation to her Turkish name. She was in her forties, a divorcée with three young children — Hall, Chauncy and Nora Lee. Lori’s, her coffeeshop, was a pleasant ten-minute saunter from Encanto Drive. Her ex-husband was a Filipino who ran a garden maintenance service. He had set her up in the coffeeshop and they remained good friends. I met him several times. Anyway, Lori was solid, fleshy, with wiry blond hair — she was a victim of the permanent wave — and a pretty face, always bright with makeup. I think it was a combination of the olive skin and primary colors set against the improbable Nordic blondness of her hair that attracted me. We enjoyed efficient, uncomplicated, fairly regular sex, twice a week on average, usually in the early evenings after she’d closed, and after which we would go out for a meal or take in a movie.

I was glad to see Monika again. She had left Berlin in 1934 and had come straight to Hollywood, where she enjoyed brief and modest success in two or three sub-Marlene Dietrich thrillers. This trip had the bonus of securing her an American husband and citizenship. For a year she had been content to be Mrs. Geraldo Berasconi, but then came divorce and another attempt to return to the screen. Monika, however, was now in her fifties, astonishing though that fact seemed when I stopped to consider it, and the flood of émigrés had provided a glut of sensual foreign vamps. She still looked good, I must say — hair shorter, as thin as ever but more groomed. Unfortunately, her new consort was Harold Faithfull.

Faithfull was still a successful second-rater — they never truly succeed, these types, but they never seem truly to fail, either. He was in Hollywood under contract to Warners and, like most of the European directors in the place, was engaged in serving up a trashy version of “Old Europe” for American consumption.

I met Monika and Faithfull at a cricket match in Bel Air (once again organized by the indefatigable Cyril Norman, a ghastly annual occasion for all the has-beens, bit-parters and lounge lizards to parade their stage Englishness). Faithfull ignored me except to comment, “Hard times, Todd? Hard luck,” and wander away. He was very fat but still annoyingly handsome in his sleek prosperous way, with his thick gray hair brushed straight back from his forehead. Every time I saw him I felt a bizarre cannibalistic urge to carve a steak of his plump haunches. I have a feeling Faithfull would have tasted good — porkish, with crackling, served up with roast potatoes, sprouts and applesauce. He had a superb tailor. His immaculately cut dark suits made him look tapered rather than bulky.

Monika wouldn’t leave him for me (she said he’d had his teeth fixed) and they made a stylish couple. However, she would motor down from Mulholland Drive to see me occasionally in my little apartment. I always liked Monika and we got on well. The sex was not the sole reason for the continued association. She was no snob. Faithfull wouldn’t be seen with me because I was a fifty-dollar-a-week writer on Poverty Row. Monika had a European egalitarianism that the British don’t possess. Hard times?… Hard luck. No one from Berlin would have said that in 1939.

* * *

I drove to Tijuana to the American consulate to renew my resident’s visa. I waited for an hour to see the consul, a Mr. Lexter, a quiet elderly man and a lay Baptist minister, so he told me later. He had a big shock of unruly gray hair that kept falling into an unlikely boyish fringe. He looked over my form, and me, and said he would get it processed right away. Then, dropping his functionary’s guard for a moment, he said, “I think your country is doing a fine and noble thing, Mr. Todd. I pray for an end to this evil.” It was only then (he obligingly fetched an American newspaper) that I learned war had been declared.

I left the consulate and went round the corner to the Hotel Cuatro Naciónes. I sat in the bar and read the news. I drank several beers and wondered what to do next. How did I feel?… First, oddly divided. Then emotionally and tearfully patriotic. Then irritated and frustrated. I thought of my years in Berlin and of all my German friends. Then I thought of those mad bastards with their uniforms and their flags. I wasn’t at all surprised by the news. Our Santa Monica chapter of the Anti-Nazi League had been predicting war in Europe for years. Now it had come and abstract arguments were suddenly concrete facts. I thought, for some reason, about my father, Hamish and Mungo before I considered my three children. These misplaced loyalties upset me. I felt a rush of self-hatred for so easily abandoning Vincent, Emmeline and Annabelle to Devize. I ate a solitary lunch of chorizos, goat’s cheese and a bottle of sweet wine, growing steadily more depressed as the particular fears — destruction of country, death of loved ones — elided into the generally maudlin.

My mind went back to 1917. I thought of the Salient, the bombers, that day with Teague. It was just my luck to fit two European wars into my four decades. How could all this be happening again? And so soon?… Then, Christ! Karl-Heinz! What about Karl-Heinz? Then I felt bitterly sorry for myself, alone in this noisy, noisome border town. What the hell was I doing here? I grew angry. I strode back round to the consulate, but it was shut. I had a vicious argument with an impassive concierge. I left a note urging Lexter to process my application with the greatest speed as I wished to return to Britain at once.

It was a curious day. I drove back to Rincón and packed my suitcases. Then I unpacked them. That evening I went down to the Cervecería Americana. The place was full of glum Germans. As I sat on the terrace and talked with them I suddenly realized that notionally we were enemies. To cope with this absurdity I drank too much tequila añeja and took a hundred-dollar bet with an affable man called Ramón Dusenberry that the U.S.A. would declare war on Germany before the end of November. When I left the cervecería at 2 A.M. it was still loud with the noise of morose disputation.

I confess the events of the next week or so are hard for me to untangle. My journal entries are undated.

Wednesday. To Tijuana. Lexter says he will do everything he can to expedite matters. Back to Rincón. Cervecería at night. F. says Hitler will sue for peace once he has Poland.…

Friday. To Tijuana. Lexter — no news. Cable Father for money. Telephone Lori to pass on message to the Coopers and Monika — no reply from AMPR.…

Tuesday. Herr and Frau K. return L.A.

Saturday. Americana — Dusenberry.

Sunday. Pack up. Settle bill—330 pesos.…

Monday. Cable AMPR for advance on salary. No news, Lexter. Cannot understand delay. Return Rincón. New room. Unpack …

Wednesday. Dusenberry bets me that Russia will ally with Germany against Britain and France — fifty dollars.… [Here there is an unexplained gap of one week.]

Wednesday. Lexter says my request for visa renewal has been turned down.

This was an astonishing blow. I had been in Mexico for getting on for three weeks, and despite the unprecedented delay I had never once suspected that I would not be allowed to return to the United States. Lexter was apologetic but formal. He declined to explain why I had been refused entry. His sympathy for me, his decent pro-European liberal sentiments, disappeared behind apparatchik reserve. As symbol of my plight he naturally became my enemy. Suddenly I found his mop of hair an offensive affectation. Shouldn’t a man of his age, I suggested to him, stop pretending to be a college kid? He called a Marine in to throw me out. I apologized, said I was overwrought; my country was at war; I just wasn’t myself. We sat down again. It must be a simple mistake, he said. He would investigate further. He advised me to do what every frustrated emigrant did: be patient and reapply.

I took his advice. There was one other course of action I could have followed: catch a boat to England from a Mexican port. But I was now running into the other eternal problem — money. Brodie McMaster’s chauvinistic loyalty to a fellow Scot had its limits. He sent me one week’s salary in lieu of notice. I was unemployed. The Coopers wrote and said that without the rent they could only hold my apartment until the end of October. Soon I would be homeless. I left the hotel and moved into a clapboard cottage behind the Vera Cruz. It cost sixteen pesos a day, cheaper than a double room at the Max. After a week there and more fiscal calculations, I transferred to a single room in the main hotel that bore an unfortunate resemblance to my cell at Weilburg, but it cost only eleven pesos a day.

My life took on a strange routine. I ate a modest breakfast at the Vera Cruz—pan dulce and coffee. I wrote letters in the morning. I lunched in a cheap restaurant (surrounded by suspicious monoglot locals — what was this gringo with his old newspaper doing here every day eating refritos eggs and rice with a bottle of Garci-Crespo mineral water?). After lunch I took a long siesta. In the evening I bought a couple of lardy quesadillas—hash and cheese — from a roadside stall on my way down the avenida towards the Americana. There, I tried, and usually succeeded, in getting mildly drunk on white tequila with beer chasers. I became a regular. There were always new émigrés to engage in conversation, but I am afraid people tended to avoid me after a couple of nights’ of my company. I could only talk about one subject and at length — the conspiracy to prevent me from entering the U.S. I had become a bore. Even Monroe Smee (whom the Anti-Nazi League had sent down with some money) stayed only twenty-four hours.

Three times a week, then once a week to economize on gasoline, I drove into Tijuana. I visited the consulate, where I inquired about the progress of my reapplication, and changed the books I was generously allowed to borrow from the small eclectic library they had there. Lexter was a thoughtful decent man, but even he admitted that this delay was more than bureaucratic ineptitude. But he couldn’t clarify matters any further. After that I went to the post office to post letters and collect mail, bought whatever English-language newspaper was available and drove back to Rincón and my drear accommodation at the Vera Cruz.

On Christmas Day 1939 I motored up to Tecate, parked the car in some scrub and walked several miles across the border to Potrero, where sanity returned and I retraced my steps. So many official inquiries had been instigated on my behalf, my particulars had been forwarded to so many government agencies, that I realized I must be the best documented would-be immigrant the U.S.A. had ever seen. I would be lucky to last a week before being deposited back in Tijuana with all hopes gone. And Lexter would never forgive me. He was my only hope. I simply had to be patient.

My begging letters kept me alive, hovering above the poverty line. Lori, the Coopers, Monika, the Hitzigs, the Gasts and the Anti-Nazi League subsidized me in my exile. All my Californian gloss disappeared. I grew thin again, my hair was cut rarely and my clothes were grubby. My friends corresponded regularly, sent me food, newspapers and magazines. Even my father wrote. I had cabled him for fifty pounds. He replied, saying he would see what he could do — then, silence. My letters to Eddie Simmonette were marked “return to sender.” To my eyes it looked suspiciously like Eddie’s handwriting on the envelope, but I couldn’t swear to it.

I felt as if I were in quarantine, a dog suspected of rabies. I was free, but I was not free. Free in Mexico to do what I pleased as long as it was not the one thing I desired — leave. I caught something very nasty from a charming whore in Tijuana that cost me a precious twenty Yankee dollars to have put right. I didn’t visit Lexter for two weeks out of pure shame. Those pale Baptist eyes of his saw everything, I knew.

My diary:

Rincón. February 1, 1940. The fiesta of El Rescate, in honor of our Lord of the Rescue. I lit a candle in the church of Our Lady of Los Dolores. It is all too horribly apt. The battery on my car has gone flat and I can’t afford a new one. Assets: one immobile 1935 Mercury. Two suitcases of worn clothes. One camera. $27.55. The frightening thought strikes me that I could keep going like this indefinitely. Years may pass. Enough money to hang on in Rincón, but not enough to escape. If only Thompson would help. I hate that fat sanctimonious bastard! I think I understand the poverty trap. You have to have a little money, a little self-esteem, a little respect for authority. That way you don’t starve, beg or steal. And that way you never do anything.

That evening I went down to the Americana to sell my camera, an expensive Leica I had bought in Berlin in ’32 (I still took photographs from time to time, mainly portrait shots of people I worked with). Juan, the patrón of the Americana, had offered me two hundred pesos for it.

The fiesta was more or less over. It was a bluey warm dusk. A band was playing and some people were dancing in the Plaza Zargoza at the end of the main street. Mercifully, all the fireworks seemed to have stopped. For once the Avenida Emilio Carraza was empty of cars. Beneath the nutant trees — strung with bunting — two exhausted policemen collected the NO SE ESTACIONAR signs. It was hard to imagine that all Europe was at war. For the first time I realized how easy it was to be neutral.

The Americana terrace was crowded with families. I made my way through the tables into the dark bar and asked for Juan.

“Mr. Todd, at last!”

I turned round. It was Dusenberry, smiling in a friendly way. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. Ramón Dusenberry was half-Mexican, half-American. He lived in San Diego, California, but kept a large house outside Rincón where his mother stayed. He was a slim, fine-boned man with a neat goatee. He was in the newspaper business. He owned a chain of local papers on both sides of the border. He was brown-skinned and dark-haired, but spoke English like an American.

“Hello,” I said without enthusiasm. The fiesta had depressed me.

“Still here?”

“For my sins.”

“You owe me a hundred dollars. The U.S. remains stubbornly neutral.”

I laughed and then felt sick. Briefly, with passionate terseness, I outlined my position to him. One of his slim hands lightly tapped the marble surface of the bar. It looked like an elegant woman’s hand — light brown, hairless, shiny-nailed, very clean.

“Well, what are we going to do with you, Mr. Todd?”

I sighed. “Don’t tell me this is an affair of honor.… Look, I’m broke. Flat, stony. Skinned. No tener un centavo, mate.”

He ignored my aggression. I apologized.

“I am, really. I’m even trying to flog this camera to Juan.”

“You a photographer?”

“Yes, of course. I’m a motion picture director, for heaven’s sake.”

“Ever worked for newspapers?”

“I was a newsreel cameraman in the Great War.” I suddenly felt old. I muttered, “You know—’14–’18.”

“Got a car?”

“What is this? Yes.”

He smiled. He was handsome in a faintly sinister, overrefined way. “You’re just the man I’m looking for.”

That was how I became a newspaper photographer for the Tijuana, Tecate, Rumovosa and Mexicali Diarios. During the weeks I was employed I presided at a dozen weddings, four fiestas, two mayoral inaugurations, several livestock shows, a warehouse fire at Mexicali, the arrest of a rapist in the village of Agua Hechicera, the Miss Baja California 1940 beauty pageant and, my scoop, the collision of a freight train with a lorry full of oranges on the railway between Mexicali and Nuevo León. My shot of the body of the lorry driver lying on a bed of spilled oranges was syndicated throughout Mexico and even, so I was told, made the pages of some American magazines.

Ramón Dusenberry paid me twenty-five dollars a week plus bonuses. I stayed on at the Vera Cruz, partly out of affection for the place (seediness has its own allure for the seedy) and partly to save money. I abandoned my plan of returning to Los Angeles; someone or something was blocking that route far too effectively. I decided instead, when I had some money saved, to make for Tampico and try to book a passage on a merchant ship heading for Britain. If that proved unsuccessful I would head down to British Honduras or cross over to the West Indies and make my way home from there.

It was curious, however, how a job relieved a lot of my anxiety. I had the Mercury repaired and drove up and down the border to whatever assignment one of my four editors deemed worthy of photographing. I took a strange pleasure in these trips, motoring through the dusty arid landscape along the badly paved highway parallel to the border. I had some coarse linen suits run up for me in Mexicali; I acquired a taste for mescal. I became a well-known figure in Rincón and opened a bank account in the Tijuana branch of the Banco Nacional de México, where my savings steadily accumulated. I was told that it was something of a social cachet in the border towns to have the gringo photographer turn up to cover your wedding. In short, I began to settle in.

Then, one evening in the middle of April, I turned down the Avenida Emilio Carraza and parked my car in front of the Vera Cruz. I had just returned from photographing the winner of the five-thousand-peso prize in the federal district lottery. The hotel owner’s daughter, Elisa, who acted as receptionist, handed me a message.

“Meet me in the bar at the Max, seven o’clock. Monika.”

I shaved, changed my shirt and went to meet her. She was waiting in the bar. She looked hot. A combination of the day’s lingering warmth and the Max’s ceiling fans contrived to dishevel her carefully waved hair. The little vertical creases in her upper lip gleamed with perspiration. We embraced, my palm on her damp bare shoulders,

“My God, what’s happened to you?”

I looked at myself in the bar mirror. “Nothing.”

“You don’t look … We were worried about you.”

It was a measure of my new contentment that I had stopped writing letters to my friends. No one had heard a word for weeks.

We went to the Americana and had a cold beer beneath the colored lights in the fresno trees. Monika’s hair was backlit with blue, green, red. I felt a surge of affection for her. I never expect to inspire friendship, let alone loyalty. These moments, these gestures, disarm me. I took her hand.

“It was sweet of you to come looking for me. But I’m fine. Well, I am now.”

“Eddie Simmonette’s in town. He wants to see you.”

“Eddie? Where’s he been? I must have written him a dozen letters.”

“Nobody knows. But he’s rich. He’s bought a film company. Werner’s already working for him.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants you to make a film.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Over dinner in the Max I explained my new travel plans to Monika. Vain months of trying to get a visa rendered other attempts futile. I was somehow going to make my way back to Britain.

“What’s the latest war news?” I asked. “We’re a bit behind here.”

“Oh God, I can’t remember.… Nothing much. Something’s going on in Norway, I think.” She took my hand. “You must come back. Eddie has plans.”

“Wonderful. But how?”

She smiled.

“Simple,” she said. “We’ll get married.”

I married Monika Alt on April 23, 1940, in the offices of the U.S. consul at Tijuana. Mr. Lexter officiated. My best man was Ramón Dusenberry. The other witness was Miss Raffaella Placacos Díaz, Lexter’s secretary. Two hours later we drove across the border into the United States. As the spouse of one of its citizens, I was passed through Immigration with no delay.

VILLA LUXE, June 26, 1972

I remember today, for some reason, a conversation that took place when

I was teaching Elroy Cooper.

Apropos of nothing he asked, “Can God hear everything we say?”

“No,” I said without thinking.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t believe there is a God.”

“Yeah? So what do you believe in?”

He was a bright boy, Elroy, not one to let things go by him. He was waiting for an answer and I realized I had never thought that deeply about it. I thought of something Hamish always said—“Anyone who can’t explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan.”

I tapped the cover of Elroy’s math book. Coincidentally, we were working on prime factors and how to factorialize. I had a go.

“Well, I’m inclined to believe in this,” I said. “In science — maths and physics. I prefer to believe what they tell us about the world.” I paused. “They say that the world is a highly complex place but at its root, at its basic elementary level, it is a realm of random events governed by chance and uncertainty. It doesn’t make sense, any logical sense that we can understand. It can’t be figured out by what you and I would regard as commonsense ideas. This is what lies at the bottom, at the foundation of everything.

“But what we do, us human beings, in our everyday life, is go around pretending it does make sense, that there is a meaning and solid foundation to everything which we will discover one day.” I smiled. “Mind you, I think in our heart of hearts we have to believe whatever the mathematicians and physicians are telling us. People have various ways of pretending the world makes sense and believing in God — or a god, or gods — just happens to be one of them.”

Elroy was skeptical. “But couldn’t God have made the world like that? You know, to fool us?”

“I suppose that’s a theory, but it’s a bit feeble. There wouldn’t be much point in believing in God, then. You see, people like to think there’s a meaning in life and a hidden order in the universe. It would be a pretty strange God who made his presence known by arranging things so it looked like there was no meaning, and making the universe random and unpredictable.”

“I don’t know. He can do what He likes.”

“A very famous mathematician said, ‘God may be devious but he doesn’t play dice’—or something like that. I don’t think you can have a dice-rolling God. There wouldn’t be any point. In fact I think they’re mutually exclusive as ideas, dice and God. You see if—”

“Can we get on with these prime factors?”

* * *

Another thing I forgot to tell you is that while I was in town the other day I went into a bookshop. In the English-language section I found a book called The Movie Encyclopedia. There was an entry under my name. I copied it out.

TODD, JOHN JAMES: b. 1899, d. 1960? English director of the silent era (Julie, Jean Jacques!); reappeared briefly in Hollywood during World War II, where he made a number of indifferent B-feature Westerns.