The New Confessions

16 The Kid

Between 1940 and 1943 I made eleven Westerns, all but one of them under an hour long. Among the titles I can recall are Gun Justice, Four Guns for Texas and Stampede! As always, the names tell you much about their quality. I shot them quickly, efficiently and wholly without passion. I might have been making deck chairs. All they had to do was work.

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.

I think this is what Eddie responded to, I had little trouble in convincing him that we had to shoot the film in New Mexico. The budget doubled, then trebled.

“Yes, Johnny,” he said patiently. “I know. Location authenticity. I’ve heard it all before, remember?”

Towards the end of the year I flew down to Albuquerque to do a location scout. We based ourselves in Roswell and motored out across the Pecos flats searching for small villages that could stand in for nineteenth-century Lincoln and Fort Sumner. For the first time too I became excited about the possibilities of color. Around me were the red and purple mountains, the pink and blue adobe houses, the hay meadows and the rolling alfalfa pastures, the canyon walls stippled with piñon and oak bush. This would be the backdrop for my morality play in which Sheriff Pat Garrett was the hero and the Kid the villain.

I was going to call the film Alias Billy the Kid, but I decided in the end that I would use the name the cowboys gave to their six-guns, The Equalizer.

I am proud of The Equalizer. It doesn’t rank with The Confessions: Part I but it was made — fast — with a kind of angry fervor that allowed me to invest a tired genre with a rare intensity. We filmed in the spring of ’44. Padika was Lincoln; Little Black was Fort Sumner. There was still snow on the Capitan Mountains and I kept them in the background of every exterior shot possible. Cold and remote, they are a continual presence in the film. We filmed also in a fruit ranch near the Ruidoso River. Acres of peach, plum, apple and pear orchards were in bloom. Their blossoms hung like a low-lying pink and white smoke across the landscape. (You will remember that scene when Pat Garrett — Nash McLure — stalks the Kid through the candied pink of the peach orchard.) I used color like a painter: I literally daubed it on. It was my first color film and I had every tone I could heightened. I repainted the adobe houses in Padika. The Kid smoked cigarettes wrapped in bright yellow paper. I ran blue dye down canyon streams. And everything in the landscape had a vernal freshness — the chaparral thickets, the cottonwoods, the bunchgrass and greasewood. The whole film glowed.

Where did this urgency and angry fervor I referred to come from? Why, I hear you ask, was it not present in Gun Justice, Four Guns for Texas and Stampede!? The answer lies in the fact that I ran across Leo Druce a week before I started filming — the encounter acted as a powerful goad.

We met in the Los Angeles Airport departure lounge. I was flying a Transcontinental and Western Sky Chief to El Paso and then flying on up to Albuquerque. Druce was traveling to New York. Both our planes were delayed. Druce was with an elegant woman (his wife?) and two other men. I was alone. It was the first time we had met face to face in six years. He was gray-haired now and stouter. He looked well off. I decided to ignore him and carried on reading my newspaper, but he came over. He was smoking a cigar and I suspect he’d been drinking. He stopped about six feet away from me. I looked up.

“Hello, Todd. Still here?” he said.

I ignored the implied insult. “So are you, I see.”

“Ah, but I’m on my way home. To England.”

“Bon voyage.” I returned to my newspaper. It was full of speculation about a second front.

“Any message for the folks back home?”

“Just go away, Druce,” I said. I am sure it was my indifference that galled him most.

“Been a long time in your funk-hole now.”

I stood up and advanced on him. He stepped back quickly, then recovered himself.

“Listen, Druce,” I said quietly but full of venom, “I don’t need to prove myself to you or anybody. I was three months in that fucking Salient and six months in a prison camp while you were convalescing and totting up figures in the quartermaster’s store. So just go away and leave me alone.”

“The next time you go up in a balloon make sure the wind’s blowing in the right direction.”

“The next time you shoot yourself in the leg, cut the powder burns out of your trousers.”

I swear, until that moment I had never regarded the bullet that had passed through Druce’s leg as anything other than German. The shock in his eyes confirmed the accuracy of my gibe.

He slapped my face.

“You bloody coward!”

I am told that my yell as I leaped on him was quite inhuman. I was hauled off him quickly enough by some TWA officials, but not before my flailing clubbing fists had connected with that self-satisfied, dishonest, craven face. I had shut one of his eyes and split his top lip. I felt a silent howl of atavistic triumph echo through me as I saw his party lead him away to the washrooms groaning, doubled over.

“Madman!” he shouted weakly at me. “You’ll pay for this!”

“Can’t you think of anything more original to say!” I yelled back. I’m delighted to report that the entire departure lounge burst into laughter.

I was in Albuquerque and then Roswell when the story broke in the newspapers and so saw nothing of it. I believe it was all reported with clumsy irony: the “Britishers” fighting each other in L.A. while the real enemy lay overseas. At any rate that, plus the Zanuck incident, was enough to get me branded as a “hellraiser.” For a good while afterwards, people greeting me would recoil with gestures of mock terror and hostesses would whimsically entreat me at parties not to rough up the guests. Never believe anything you read in newspapers.

We were within a week of completing the film when I received the message. The crew were in Padika shooting a scene under the shade trees in the square when the runner from the production office in Roswell arrived with a telegam:

DOON HOGAN LIVING IN MONTEZUMA ARIZONA STOP NEAR WINSLOW STOP GOOD LUCK RAMON

When the film ended I hired a car and drove up to Albuquerque and on through the mountains into Arizona. It took me two full days but I have no recollection of the splendid scenery through which I traveled. I have no recollection of my mood: I was moodless, I think. It had been so long; I didn’t want either pessimism or optimism to prejudice me. I would find what I would find.

I turned off the highway before Winslow and found Montezuma, a small town on the edge of the Navajo reservation. Distant mountains ringed the wide mesa. It was hot and dry.

I drove down the main street. There was a gas station, a used car lot, a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket and a cut-rate clothes emporium. I parked outside a funeral parlor and strolled down the cracked sidewalk to a small street market. At the market the stalls — fruit and vegetable — were manned mainly by Navajo Indians. If you wanted to hide away, Montezuma seemed like a fair choice. I asked one fellow selling cheap trinkets and bright woven rugs if he knew where Doon Bogan lived.

“Miss Bogan? Sure. Go back to the gas station and take a right. There’s an old ranch house two miles down the road — The Colony. Can’t miss it.”

I followed his instructions. The road ran through a dusty scrub of sagebrush and manzanita bushes. The Colony announced itself with a freshly painted sign. It was a low wooden ranch house with rusted screens on the windows and a tumbledown corral. Three cars were pulled up outside. Two had California plates. My mouth was quite dry. My movements were slow and studied, as if I were recovering from a grave illness.

I knocked on the door and got no answer. I went round the side of the house. In a kitchen a thin, bald, shirtless man in chino shorts washed up dishes in a tin basin.

“I’m looking for Miss Bogan,” I said.

“Hi. You must be Wally Garalga. Pleased to meet you, Wally. I’m Morris Drexel.”

He wiped his hands on a towel and offered me his right one to shake. I shook it.

“We kinda figured you wouldn’t get here till late,” Drexel said. He had a thin chest with gray hairs grouped round the nipples.

“My name’s Todd. I’m not expected. I’m an old friend of Doon.”

“Oh.… I’m sorry. We were expecting a Mr. Garalga.” He led me to the door and pointed. “See that arroyo? Just follow it down a way. Doon’s there.”

I set off. My God, had Doon set up home with Morris Drexel?… I couldn’t imagine it. I walked down the sandy bed of the arroyo, contemplating this notion further. I began to perspire. The heat seemed trapped in the gully. I took off my tie. I had left my jacket in the car.

Then I saw Doon and stopped. She stood with her back towards me, in front of an easel. She was wearing a denim shirt over white duck slacks. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head. I felt faint. My mouth was still as dry as the arroyo bed.

“Doon,” I said and advanced a few steps.

“Morris?”

“No, for Christ’s sake, it’s me!”

She took off her sunglasses and put on spectacles.

“My sweet Lord,” she said. “If it isn’t John James Todd.”

I sat in the main sitting room of The Colony, trying to bring under control the competing emotions of profound shock and mounting irritation. The comfortable plain room was lined with abstract paintings that might just have passed for landscapes. Doon’s work. To my eyes they seemed entirely without merit. Doon was in the kitchen making a pitcher of iced tea. She came back in.

“Sorry,” she said, “Rita hasn’t been into town for the ice. Will fairly cold tea do?”

“Fine. Perfect. Don’t you have an icebox?”

“We don’t have electricity.”

I forced a smile, trying to come to terms with the transformation in her. Doon was thinner and deeply tanned. Her hair was long, dry, dark brown streaked with gray. I had lived with her bobbed blond fringe for so long it was as if the person I was now conversing with were, an older sister, or an aunt. She put on her spectacles, searched for her cigarettes, found them and lit one. Her voice was deeper — raggedy — from smoking.

“You want one?”

“No, thanks. I’m trying to stop.”

“Don’t snap, Jamie.… So what happened after Mexico?”

I finished the brief sketch of the intervening years, leaving out my marriage to Monika. Doon had already told me her story. She had left Sanary, gone to Neuchâtel to tell me her decision to return to America. She had found no trace of us, only news that the film had collapsed. She went back to America and Hollywood. She stayed there for a month and found she was lonely, miserable and forgotten. She hated it and so, as she put it, she “resigned.” She bought this ranch house and took up painting. When her funds began running low, she established it as an artists’ retreat. She made ends meet with no great difficulty, she said.

“But why,” I had asked carefully on hearing this, “why in God’s name didn’t you contact me?”

“I tried. I tried to call you in Berlin; I got some policeman on the line. I went to Neuchâtel; you were all gone. It was over, Jamie, you know that. I couldn’t go chasing around Europe looking for you.”

I let that one go.

“I’m happy now,” she said. “Really, I wasn’t happy in Paris.”

So I told her what had happened to me. I felt glum, suddenly immensely tired. I could have slept for a week.

“So you’re making Westerns? For Eddie Simmonette? Isn’t that a bit degrading?”

“I make ends meet with no great difficulty.”

“See. We’re arguing already.… Sorry,” she said. “Have some more tea.”

She stood up to fetch the pitcher. I went over to her.

“Doon, I saw Alex Mavrocordato—”

“Alex? How is he?”

“Stop it! Stop being so fucking hardboiled!”

Morris Drexel glanced into the room. I calmed down.

“Don’t you see? I thought you had gone off with him. I thought you had chosen him instead of me.… That’s why I never tried to get in touch. I was trying to get over it, do you see? Trying to forget you.”

“Well, of course. You had to do that.”

“But then he told me what really happened.” I looked out of the window and saw two ladies walk by with canvases under their arms. Two “artists,” Like Morris, paying guests.

I shut my eyes. My head seemed to hum with a high, keening melancholic whine. I had been driving too long. The huge needless frustrations of the years without Doon were almost insupportable. Only my irritation with her own calm was preventing me from weeping. I was exhausted too from my weeks’ work on the film. What had I expected to find here? The Doon I had known in Berlin in the twenties? In her green dress and her short blond fringe? Dully, I started calling myself names: fool, idiot, hopeless romantic … I opened my eyes; Doon had sat down and was looking at me. She had hooked a leg over the arm of the soft chair she was sitting in. She still had that lean dancer’s grace I always associated with her. Perhaps, in time, we could reestablish old intimacies.… But too much history bulked between us. My Doon was a blond, smooth-skinned, provocative beauty full of crazy enthusiasms. This thin, tanned, deep-voiced cynic was someone else entirely.

“You’ve hardly changed at all, Jamie,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “You’re not so slim, maybe. A few gray hairs. You look a bit tired.” She smiled. “Why did you come?”

“I’ve missed you,” I said hopelessly. “Nothing’s been the same. I wanted to see you. I can’t tell you—”

“I hope you weren’t too shocked.” She got up and moved to the door. Clearly, she didn’t want to talk. “Staying for lunch?”

“Yes,” I said. I coudn’t simply leave. “Please.”

So I stayed, and chatted effortfully with dull Morris and Rita and Elaine, the two spry lesbians, and tried not to think about Doon and the past.

When I left that afternoon, she removed her spectacles to let me kiss her cheek. I looked into her myopic eyes and tried to conjure up that day in the Metropol Hotel in Berlin twenty years before.

“Don’t fret about it,” she said softly. “I remember you told me once, ‘Make your own rut.’ I’m happy, I told you. Now, you be happy. Come back and see us, soon.”

I drove off in blackest despair. I was convinced we would never meet again. I was wrong.

I could not shake off my depression. I could measure it in millibars. You know these moods? I’m sure you do. I saw my life as a catalogue of wasted opportunities, of intemperate decisions, of blind, crazy impulsiveness and, of course, heedless circumstance and filthy luck. It seemed to me to be the most desperate tragedy that Doon and I, of all people, had ended up almost strangers. I looked back over the last decade and saw it as a fruitless wasteland shadowed by clouds of disappointment, betrayal, flight and persecution. Perhaps, I thought, my individual life was merely acting as a conduit for the Zeitgeist of that low dishonest decade … but we now were four years into the forties — I was four years into my forties. I was as old as the century and yet entirely out of step with it. The world was at war and what was I doing? Undermining the Billy the Kid myth and making a forlorn and futile visit to my old love. I was stuck in my thirties mood — failure and disillusionment. It was time for a change.

There were two baffling letters waiting for me on my return from Montezuma, both a fortnight old. One was from Hamish. It announced merely that he had recently arrived in the States and was working for a U.S. government organization called the National Research Institute, in Zion, New Jersey, not far from Princeton. He said he hoped that we might meet up soon, then he added, “I can’t tell you how sorry I was to see you vilified in that despicable way. I wrote several letters in your defense but none were printed. I suspect you have become the scapegoat for more eminent appeasers.”

What vilification? What appeasement was he talking about? The second letter was from my father and even more perplexing.

My dear John,

I am prompted to write because I know the distress you must be suffering at these scandalous allegations. The fine letter in your defense from a Mr. Julian Teague published in Wednesday’s Times came a little too late. I fear, to undo the damage or halt the momentum. I merely wanted you to know that your family (and that includes Thompson) is standing by you during this difficult and unpleasant time.

I am surprisingly fit for an old man. Please convey my respects to your new wife, Monika, and I hope we will all meet soon in more happy circumstances.

Yours aye,

Dad

It was the “Dad” that shook me. He had never signed himself so affectionately before. But what was going on? Clearly some vile slander on me had been perpetrated in the British press. I wrote to my father and Hamish immediately asking for more information.

I didn’t have long to wait. I was in an editing suite at Lone Star working on The Equalizer when I received a call from a reporter on the L.A. Times. He would like to talk to me, he said. I assumed it was about the new film.

I met him in a bar round the corner. It was a sunny fresh morning and the place was quiet. Rumba music played gently on the radio. I ordered a Four Roses with ice and ginger ale in a tall glass. I munched some pretzels from the bartop bowl. The journalist arrived and introduced himself as Karl Shumway. He fanned out a series of newspaper clippings on the bar.

“What do you say to this?” he asked.

Let me summarize briefly the history of this particularly sordid campaign of character assassination. It had begun in a small-circulation British film magazine called Cinema Monthly, in an article entitled “Fun in the Sun: Our Absent Industry.” This purported to criticize the large number of British actors, producers, writers and directors who were living the high life in Hollywood while war was being waged at home. In fact, over three quarters of its length was given over to a sustained attack on me. Among the lies were these: I had been pro-Nazi before the war when I had made my name in Berlin during the twenties; I had stayed on long after Hitler came to power. I had been unable to further my career in Britain and had left for the U.S.A. when war clouds (predictably) “loomed” over Europe. In Hollywood I had consorted with Germans, married a German actress — one Mathilde Halte — and when the war began had fled to Mexico for several months before sneaking back to Hollywood when I thought the coast was clear. Now I whiled away my time making worthless films and living in a loud and ostentatious style.

This might have traveled no further except for the fact that some cineast in the editorial department of the London Times read it, and on a quiet day wrote a third leader “deploring the example set by English artists and intellectuals who sat out the war in the Lotusland of the U.S.A., far from the hardship and suffering being endured by Europe.” Furthermore, “the example of John James Todd, an English director, is particularly unedifying,” the leader said and went on to adumbrate Cinema Monthly’s allegations, concluding with an exhortation that the government seize and impound all the said artists’ assets in this country until “they deigned to return to our beleaguered shores and defend themselves.”

This was the signal for the rest of the press to join in. Stories were run about me; photographs were printed of starlets and swimming pools, supermarkets and sunny beaches. Here and there an old photograph of myself, dark and grinning, looked out as if to say, “Too bad, suckers!” One caption read:

John James Todd, a notorious hellraiser at Hollywood parties, drives a luxury car and lives in an eight-bedroomed house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Another English film director, who visited Hollywood recently on a war-bond fund-raising drive, said Todd seems very much at home. Quite frankly, he’s not the sort we want back here. We’re better off without him.

I felt first warm with shame, then this was replaced with a more general state of nausea. This must be Druce’s revenge. I went back to the original Cinema Monthly piece. The byline was “From our special Hollywood correspondent.” Old familiar feelings of helpless impotence returned. Dutifully I rebutted all the points to Shumway. I had left Berlin in ’34. I was and had always been anti-Nazi. I had been in an anti-Nazi organization in Berlin in the twenties and I was a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. I explained about Mexico and detailed the modest size of my house and the temperance of my life.

“What about this fight you had at L.A. Airport?”

“That was a personal matter.”

“Didn’t Zanuck throw you off the Fox lot?”

I refuted that one too. Druce’s features came to mind. I very nearly told Shumway about the self-inflicted wound, but wisely decided against it. Shumway wrote everything down in a notebook. Two days later on page 4 of the L.A. Times a small two-column piece appeared, headed “Director Todd Slams British Smears.”

Nobody read it, or at least nobody commented on it. But the lies had their effect on me. Coupled with the failure of my reunion with Doon, they sent me into something of a nervous decline. I imagined people I knew reading these stories and believing them. I wrote to my family — even Sonia — asking them to spread the truth. I saw the way the world’s perception of a person could change so easily. Who would now recall the triumphs of Julie and The Confessions: Part I? What was Julian Teague’s letter against this huge tide of calumny and innuendo? I felt my life had been wasted, both as an artist and as a human being. All my films were forgotten. The emotional center of my life — Doon — had disappeared and abandoned me. The world and the future seemed dull, hostile, uninviting. I began to drink more than was good for me, not venturing out of my house for days at a time. I knew I had to do something soon or I would go under. Eddie, who was delighted with The Equalizer, was offering me a script about Jesse James. But the unfair stories about my craven absence from the war unsettled me. I began to feel guilty. Guilt infected me. Me, of all people … But that sort of accusation is insidious — it touches the very core of our self-esteem. I forgot about the Salient, the horrors I had endured in the Great War. Fool that I was, only one course of action seemed open to me: I began to plan my return to Europe.

But in what capacity? I was too old to enlist. And besides, I had no desire to kill anyone — except Leo Druce. Ramón Dusenberry solved my problem when I confided in him. I became an accredited war correspondent for the Dusenberry press syndicate. I would report the latest news from the European battle fronts for the Chula Vista Herald-Post, the El Cajon Sentinel, the Imperial County Gazette, and the Calexico Argus. I had my old job back. I packed my Leica, bought a portable typewriter and headed east to New York to embark for London.

VILLA LUXE, June 26, 1972

For some reason Emilia didn’t come today. At lunchtime I went into the village to buy some oranges, but no one knew if she was ill or not. I cleaned up the kitchen, and washed the dirty dishes, partly to please her, partly to make her feel guilty. I’m alarmed at the rapid growth in the complexity of my feelings for her. She’s been working here for at least three years and until recently I never gave her more than a passing thought.

This evening I take my drink out to the seat on the cliff edge and watch the sun set. I notice that although the hill on the crocodile promontory casts a shadow onto the villa, my small beach on the bay below still gets the sun for another half hour or so. Perhaps I will go down tomorrow. I feel like a bathe.

And so I took myself off to a war once more again for just as idiotic motives as led me off to the first. However, before I left for Europe I paid a visit to Hamish in Zion.

I had some spare days in New York before I embarked, and decided to spend one of them visiting Hamish. I telephoned him and made the arrangements. I caught a train to Princeton and from there took a taxi over to Zion. It took several inquiries before we discovered where the National Research Institute was. We found it eventually, situated in an old school on the outskirts of the small town. It was a pleasant red-brick single-storied building around a grassy quadrangle. I waited in a sort of porter’s lodge until Hamish came to collect me.

He hadn’t changed a great deal. He was even wearing the same clothes I’d last seen him in: gray flannels, stout shoes, a tweed jacket — still pervaded by his musty bachelor smell. I noticed he had some teeth missing. Hamish was not a man overburdened with vanity. His only concession to the warmth and American taste was the absence of a tie. His collar was open, exposing his white throat. We shook hands with some nervousness.

“I thought you’d be in uniform,” he said.

“Well, I’ve got one but I’m not comfortable wearing it, not yet.”

“Same here. I’ve got one too. It seems silly, somehow.”

We chatted a little awkwardly as we walked through the wide quadrangle. On the other side of the building were playing fields and tennis courts, but the courts were now covered by neat rows of new Quonset huts. Power lines looped from the main building. Some of the huts had whitewashed windows. Here and there were incomprehensible signs: NRI/77/DEC. 1/2 55TH.

“We’ve doubled our staff,” Hamish said. “Hence these rabbit hutches.”

“What do you do here?”

“Oh, government stuff. Mainly maths.”

He led me to his hut, which was raised on brick piles on the edge of the football field. On the door it said NRI MAJOR H. MALAHIDE.

“Are you a major?” I asked astonished.

Hamish laughed. “It seems they had to make me one, because of my work. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference; they just pay me more money.”

Inside the hut was an orthodox desk, a couple of old leather armchairs, a sink and a stove. Beyond them were row upon row of automatic electronic calculators. A small bespectacled man was bent over one of them, reading the numbers it had printed out.

“Fancy a dry martini?” Hamish asked. “The most wonderful invention known to man.”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Not for me, Hamish,” said the little man. “I must be going.” He had a strong mid-European accent.

“By the way,” Hamish said, “this is Kurt.” I shook hands with him. “Kurt, this is John — the friend I was telling you about.”

“My God! My good heavens! John James Todd.” My hand was re-shaken vigorously by Kurt. “I am honored to meet you, Mr. Todd. Truly honored.” He shook hands with delighted incredulity.

He had a high voice. He was very warmly dressed with a thick jersey under his gray suit and had an unwrapped woollen scarf around his neck. His dark hair had dramatic broad streaks of gray and was brushed straight back off his forehead. There was a marked intensity in his gaze: friendly but profoundly curious.

“I never forget that evening in Berlin. Never,” he said. “Nineteen thirty-two. Your film, Die Konfessionen.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes. Three times in one week. Gloria-Palast.… Mr. Todd, I tell you. The most extraordinary film. A work of genius.”

“Thank you very much.”

He tied his scarf and took a tweed overcoat off the back of the door. The sun shone strongly on the green of the playing fields. He buttoned the coat.

“My only regret is I never saw Part II and Part III.”

“They were never made. I started Part II—we had to abandon it.”

“That’s a shame.… But you must finish it, Mr. Todd, you must. It is most extraordinary work. You mustn’t leave it incomplete.” At this he glanced at Hamish and gave an odd, high yelping laugh. Hamish joined in.

“Good one, Kurt,” he said.

Kurt shook my hand for the third time. “I mean it, Mr. Todd. I’ve never seen a movie like it. Finish it. I would be the most terrible waste.” He folded up the collar of his overcoat and turned to Hamish. “It looks fine, Hamish. I think you’re on the right track. Good-bye, Mr. Todd. It has been a most memorable meeting.” He left.

I looked at Hamish. “Who the hell was that?”

“Probably the most brilliant mathematician in the world.”

“Really?… Amazing that he saw The Confessions. What a coincidence.”

Hamish put some ice in his cocktail shaker. “He produced this theorem, the Incompleteness Theorem — that’s why we laughed. It was quite devastating.” He shook the shaker. “Changed the face of mathematics for all time.” He poured out two drinks and looked at me. “In fact I was going to write to you about it, try and explain Kurt’s theorem to you. It’s quite uncanny how it all fits together. Now you’re here, I can tell you about it.”

“Super,” I said.

Hamish handed me a glass.

“Good to see you, John.”

“Cheers.”

That night we had dinner in one of Zion’s better restaurants. I think we ate a kind of pot roast followed by ice cream. I can barely remember eating. Hamish talked constantly, and with the single-minded intensity of all lonely people, of quantum mechanics and its bizarre world of chance and supposition. He mentioned names: Einstein, Bohr, the Copenhagen Statement, de Broglie, thought experiments, Schrödinger’s cat. But he kept coming back to Werner Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle and how everything linked up with Kurt’s Incompleteness Theorem. Absolute truth, he said at one juncture, had been finally exposed as a chimera, an utterly vain ambition. In the sum of human knowledge there would always be crucial uncertainties. And Kurt had shown how even in the most abstract formal systems there would be holes, gaps and inconsistencies that could never be overcome.

Eventually we paid our bill and went outside. I felt stupid, my head stuffed with strange concepts. It was a warm night. I breathed slowly, deeply, as we walked back to the institute.

“Shifting sands, John. Shifting sands.”

“Yes?”

“We live in extraordinary times. They’ll call this the Age of Uncertainty. The Age of Incompleteness.”

“Yes,” I said again, simply.

“Strong stuff, isn’t it?” He paused. “Limits. Limits everywhere.”

“It’s rather depressing, in a way.”

“Why?” He seemed astonished at me. “There may be uncertainties, but don’t you think it’s better to live in the full knowledge of this than go on looking for illusory ‘truths’ that can never exist?”

“Well, yes. I suppose it is, actually.”

“It is, believe me. I find it all invigorating. Great gusts of fresh air. Like standing on top of Paulton Law. Remember?”

“God. Paulton Law.… I haven’t thought about the Academy in years.”

Hamish paused to light a cigarette. The flare of the match cast dark shadows in the rugged, pitted surface of his skin. I felt one of those epiphanic shudders of sadness pass through me — the sort that are meant to signal all manner of potential foreboding. I tried not to think of my future. What would be waiting for me up ahead? I hadn’t a clue.

“The Age of what did you say?” I asked.

“Of Uncertainty. The Age of Uncertainty and Incompleteness.”

“Seems pretty apt, now I come to think of it.”

“It is. Bang on.” He grinned. “That Kurt, he’s a clever old bugger. Set the cat among the pigeons. Remarkable.”

“I thought he seemed very nice.”

“I’m going to do some work on it, when I can find the time.”

“What?”

“Tying up Heisenbergs Uncertainty and Kurt’s Incompleteness.”

“Oh yes?”

“It’s all tremendously exciting.”

“I can see that.”

I blew cool air on my palms. For some reason they were suddenly hot and sweaty. We walked on in silence for a while.

“You’ll take care, won’t you, John?”

“What do you mean?”

“In Europe. The war. Don’t do anything, you know, foolhardy.”

I laughed. “No bloody fear, Hamish. No bloody fear.”

I left Hamish at Zion the next day. It had been a disquieting visit. We had gone back to his Quonset for a last drink and he went on talking for two more hours about Kurt and Heisenberg, Schrödinger and all that crowd. I felt slightly alarmed also: I was worried that he was becoming obsessed and he wanted me to share his obsession with him. I looked at his rows of calculating machines and asked him what he did with them all. He told me he was still working on prime numbers.

“Very, very big ones,” he said. “Enormous ones.” He thought he had found a way of devising an unbreakable cipher using these vast prime numbers. That explained why he was working for the government and why he had the rank of major.

He tapped out a number on a machine. It printed, “2,146,319,807.”

“That’s the largest prime number known to man,” he said. “I’m trying to find one half as big again.” He waved at the calculators. “With the help of these chaps. Once I’ve found that, I can make the code.”

He spent another hour explaining how the cipher would work, but it was all over my head.

I continued thinking about Kurt and his Incompleteness Theorem and its implications on the train back to New York. I was intrigued that the little man who loved my film had removed the foundations of certainty from the entire world of mathematics. How remarkable too that he had seen my film and how gratifying that it should have affected such an extraordinary man so. I felt a warm glowing surge of self-esteem within me. He was right, as well. The Confessions: Part I was a work of genius. It took one to recognize it. I knew its worth and I owed it to myself and to the world not to let it languish unfinished.

I looked out of the window at the New Jersey swamps. But first there was a war to get through.