Portraits and Observations

  Oh, but now the mental slides are moving very fast. The waves are closing over. Picking apples on an autumn afternoon. Nursing to life a bulldog puppy ill-to-death with distemper. And she lives. A garden in the California desert. The surf-sound of wind in the palm trees. A face, close by. Is it the Taj Mahal I see? Or merely Asbury Park? Or is it at long last love? (It wasn’t—God no, was it ever not.)

  Suddenly, everything is again spinning backward; my friend Miss Faulk is making a scrap-quilt, the design is of roses and grapes, and now she is drawing the quilt up to my chin. There is a kerosene lamp by the bed; she wishes me happy birthday, and blows out the light.

  And at midnight when the church-bell chimes I’m eight.

  Once more, the creek. The taste of raw turnip on my tongue, the flow of summer water embracing my nakedness. And there, just there, swiveling, tangoing on the sun-dappled surface, the exquisitely limber and lethal cottonmouth moccasin. But I’m not afraid; am I?

  PREFACE TO THE DOGS BARK

  (1973)

  It must have been the spring of 1950 or 1951, since I have lost my notebooks detailing those two years. It was a warm day late in February, which is high spring in Sicily, and I was talking to a very old man with a mongolian face who was wearing a black velvet Borsalino and, disregarding the balmy, almond-blossom-scented weather, a thick black cape.

  The old man was André Gide, and we were seated together on a sea wall overlooking shifting fire-blue depths of ancient water.

  The postman passed by. A friend of mine, he handed me several letters, one of them containing a literary article rather unfriendly toward me (had it been friendly, of course no one would have sent it).

  After listening to me grouse a bit about the piece, and the unwholesome nature of the critical mind in general, the great French master hunched, lowered his shoulders like a wise old … shall we say buzzard?, and said, “Ah, well. Keep in mind an Arab proverb: ‘The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.’ ”

  I’ve often remembered that remark—occasionally in a gaga romantic way, thinking of myself as a planet wanderer, a Sahara tourist approaching through darkness desert tents and desert campfires where dangerous natives lurk listening to the warning barkings of their dogs. It seems to me that I’ve spent a great bit of time taming or eluding natives and dogs, and the contents of this book rather prove this. I think of them, these descriptive paragraphs, these silhouettes and souvenirs of places and persons, as a prose map, a written geography of my life over the last three decades, more or less from 1942 to 1972.

  Everything herein is factual, which doesn’t mean that it is the truth, but it is as nearly so as I can make it. Journalism, however, can never be altogether pure—nor can the camera, for after all, art is not distilled water: personal perceptions, prejudices, one’s sense of selectivity pollute the purity of germless truth.

  The earliest pieces in the present volume, youthful impressions of New Orleans and Tangier, Ischia, Hollywood, Spanish trains, Moroccan festivals, et al., were collected in Local Color, a slim limited edition published in 1951 and now long out-of-print. I use the present occasion to reissue its contents for two reasons: the first being nostalgia, a reminder of a time when my eye was less narrowed and more lyric; the second, because these small impressions are the opening buds, the initial thrust of an interest in nonfiction writing, a genre I invaded in a more ambitious manner five years later with The Muses Are Heard, which also has appeared separately as a small book.

  The Muses Are Heard is the one work of mine I can truly claim to have enjoyed writing, an activity I’ve seldom associated with pleasure. I imagined it as a brief comic novel; I wanted it to be very Russian, not in the sense of being reminiscent of Russian writing, but rather of some Czarist objet, a Fabergé contrivance, one of his music boxes, say, that trembled with some glittering, precise, mischievous melody.

  Many in the cast of characters, Americans as well as Soviets, considered The Muses Are Heard just plain mischievous. However, in my journalistic experience it would seem that I’ve never described anyone to his or her satisfaction; or if, initially, some person was not unhappy with my revelations or small portraits, friends and relatives soon talked the subject into nit-picking misgivings.

  Of all my sitters, the one most distressed was the subject of The Duke in His Domain, Marlon Brando. Though not claiming any inaccuracy, he apparently felt it was an unsympathetic, even treacherous intrusion upon the secret terrain of a suffering and intellectually awesome sensibility. My opinion? Just that it is a pretty good account, and a sympathetic one, of a wounded young man who is a genius, but not markedly intelligent.

  However, the Brando profile interests me for literary reasons; indeed, that was why I wrote it—to accept a challenge and underline a literary point. It was my contention that reportage could be as groomed and elevated an art as any other prose form—the essay, short story, novel—a theory not so entrenched in 1956, the year the piece was printed, as it is today, when its acceptance has become perhaps a bit exaggerated. My thinking went: What is the lowest level of journalistic art, the one most difficult to turn from a sow’s ear into a silk purse? The movie star “interview,” Silver Screen stuff: surely nothing could be less easily elevated than that! After selecting Brando as the specimen for the experiment, I checked my equipment (the main ingredient of which is a talent for mentally recording lengthy conversations, an ability I had worked to achieve while researching The Muses Are Heard, for I devoutly believe that the taking of notes—much less the use of a tape recorder!—creates artifice and distorts or even destroys any naturalness that might exist between the observer and the observed, the nervous hummingbird and its would-be captor). It was a lot to remember, that long stretch of hours of Brando muttering and meandering, but I wrote it all out the morning after the “interview,” then spent a month shaping it toward the ultimate result. What I learned most from it was how to control “static” writing, to reveal character and sustain mood unaided by a narrative line—the latter being, to a writer, what a rope and pickaxe are to a mountain climber.

  In The Dogs Bark two pieces especially demonstrate the difference between narrative and “static” writing. A Ride Through Spain was a lark; buoyed along by its anecdotal nature, it skimmed off the end of a Black Wing pencil in a matter of hours. But something like A House on the Heights, where all the movement depends on the writing itself, is a matter of how the sentences sound, suspend, balance and tumble; a piece like that can be red hell, which is why I have more affection for it than A Ride Through Spain, even though I know the latter is better, or at least more effective.

  Much of the substance of this book appeared over the years in various publications, but they have never before found shelter under one roof. One of them, Lola, has a curious history. Written to exorcise the ghost of a lost friend, it was bought by an American magazine, where for years it reposed unprinted because the magazine’s editor decided he loathed it; he said he didn’t know what it was about, and moreover, found it forbidding, black. I disagree; still, I can see what he meant, for instinctively he must have seen through the sentimental disguises of this true tale and realized, without altogether recognizing, what it in fact concerned: the perils, the dooms of not perceiving and accepting the limits of one’s supposed identity, the classifications imposed by others—a bird that believes it is a dog, Van Gogh insisting that he was an artist, Emily Dickinson a poet. But without such misjudgments and such faiths, the seas would sleep, the eternal snows remain untracked.

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  (1974)

  Some years ago, rather more than fifteen, a friend and I decided to install, among the New York social curriculum, a series of surprise-guest lunch parties; the idea seemed amusing enough for February, the dreariest month in New York, so my friend and I invited four other friends to join us for lunch at a private apartment. The idea was that the six of us would, individually, supply an additional guest, a “mystery” guest—preferably someone interesting and well-know
n and yet not known personally to any or at least all of us. My choice was Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he wasn’t available that day; now I can’t remember who I brought.

  But I do remember the selection made by Lady Keith, who was then Mrs. Leland Hayward. Lady Keith, whom her friends call Slim, is a tall, coltish, California-bred aristocrat (northern California, need one add) with the most beautiful legs, ankles and feet extant. Her “surprise,” Elizabeth Taylor, was rather a runt by comparison—like Mrs. Onassis, her legs are too short for the torso, the head too bulky for the figure in toto; but the face, with those lilac eyes, is a prisoner’s dream, a secretary’s self-fantasy: unreal, nonobtainable, at the same time shy, overly vulnerable, very human, with the flicker of suspicion constantly flaring behind the lilac eyes.

  We had met once before—one summer afternoon on the farm of a mutual friend in Connecticut. At the time, her third husband, the tough and short and sexy Mike Todd, still had his plane crash ahead of him, was still alive and married to this beautiful child who seemed besotted by him.

  Often, when couples make oozing displays of themselves, always kissing, gripping, groping—well, often one imagines their romance must be in serious difficulties. Not so with these two. I remember them, that afternoon, sprawled in the sun in a field of grass and daisies holding hands and kissing while a litter of six or eight fat Newfoundland puppies tumbled over their stomachs, tangled in their hair.

  But it was not until I encountered her as Slim Hayward’s guest that Elizabeth Taylor made an impression on me, at least as a person; as an actress I’d always liked her—from National Velvet straight on, but especially as the rich girl in A Place in the Sun.

  In the years since our first meeting, much had happened to her, but the two worst things were that Mike Todd had died and that she had married the “singer” Eddie Fisher—an event almost as unsuitable as Mrs. Kennedy’s Grecian nuptials. Still, neither of these occurrences had dimmed the hectic allure Taylor radiates like a rather quivery light.

  The lunch was long, we talked a lot. My first discovery about her was that despite an amusing abundance of four-lettered profanity, she was in various areas a moralist, quite a strict one, almost Calvinistic. For instance, she was agitated at the thought of playing the ill-starred, hedonistic heroine of John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8; she had an unbreakable legal obligation to do the role (for which she later won an Academy Award), but she wished she could get out of it because “I don’t like that girl. I don’t like what she stands for. The sleazy emptiness of her. The men. The sleeping around.”

  At this point I recalled a conversation I’d once had with Marilyn Monroe (not that I’m making a comparison between Taylor and Monroe; they were different birds, the first being a take-or-leave-it professional, the other a morbidly uncertain, naturally gifted primitive). But Monroe’s moral attitude was similar: “I don’t believe in casual sex. Right or wrong, if I go for a guy, I feel I ought to marry him. I don’t know why. Stupid, maybe. But that’s just the way I feel. Or if not that, then it should have meaning. Other than something only physical. Funny, when you think of the reputation I have. And maybe deserve. Only I don’t think so. Deserve it, I mean. People just don’t understand what can happen to you. Without your real consent at all. Inside consent.”

  The second surprise was how well-read Taylor seemed to be—not that she made anything of it, or posed as an intellectual, but clearly she cared about books and, in haphazard style, had absorbed a large number of them. And she discussed them with considerable understanding of the literary process; all in all, it made one wonder about the men in her life—with the exception of Mike Todd, who had had a certain flashbulb-brightness, a certain neon-savvy, her husbands thus far had not been a whiplash lot: Nicky Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mr. Fisher—what on earth did this very alert and swift-minded young woman find to talk to them about? “Well, one doesn’t always fry the fish one wants to fry. Some of the men I’ve really liked really didn’t like women.”

  And so we began to discuss a mutual friend, Montgomery Clift, the young actor with whom she had starred in A Place in the Sun, and toward whom she felt an affectionate protectiveness. She said, “You know, it happened at my house. Or rather, just after he’d left my house. He’d had a lot to drink, and he lost control of his car. He was really all right before that—before the accident. Well, he always drank too much—but it was after the accident, getting hooked on all those pills and pain-killers. Nobody beats that rap forever. I haven’t seen him for over a year. Have you?”

  And I said yes, I had. He called a few days before Christmas, and he sounded fine. He wanted to know what I was doing for lunch, and I wasn’t doing anything, I was going Christmas shopping, so he said he’d buy me lunch at Le Pavillon if I’d take him shopping. He had a couple of martinis at lunch, but he was rational, very amusing; but on the way he stopped in the gents, and while he was in there he must have taken something, because about twenty minutes later he was flying.

  We were in Gucci, and he had picked out and piled on the counter perhaps two dozen very expensive sweaters. Suddenly, he grabbed up all the sweaters and sauntered outside, where it was pouring rain. He threw the sweaters into the street and began kicking them around.

  The Gucci personnel took it calmly. One of the attendants produced a pen and sales pad and asked me, “To whom shall I charge these sweaters?” The thing was he really didn’t know. He said he wanted some identification. So I went out into the street, where Monty was still kicking the sweaters around (observed by amassing voyeurs), and asked him if he had a charge card. He looked at me with the most manic, far-gone hauteur, and said, “My face is my charge card!”

  Taylor, her eyes always so liquid with life, acquired an additional mistiness. “He can’t go on like that. It will kill him.” She was right; it did. But not before, greatly because of her sympathy and insistence at a time when producers were reluctant to use Clift, they worked together in Suddenly, Last Summer—which contained Clift’s last worthy performance, and one of Taylor’s best—except, many years later, the subtlety and shrewish, constrained hysteria with which she pigmented the role of the alcoholic wife in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  Some years went by before we met again, on this occasion in London, where she was biding time before heading for Rome and the start of the doomed Cleopatra production. She and “The Busboy,” as Mr. Fisher was called by many of Mrs. Fisher’s friends, were living in a penthouse at the Dorchester.

  I’d visited that same penthouse often, as another friend had once lived there. Oliver Messel had tarted it up, and it was rather pretty, or had been: during the Taylor residency, the rooms were so crowded with shedding cats and unhousebroken dogs and a general atmosphere of disorderly paraphernalia that one could not easily espy the Messel touch.

  On the first evening I saw Taylor in this particular surrounding, she tried her best to give me a charming calico cat she had gathered up off some street. “No? That’s really very mean of you. I can’t cart all this …” she extended her arms, indicating the vastness of her burdens—enough animals to stock a pet shop, a male secretary serving drinks, a maid whisking in and out of the room displaying newly arrived dresses (“All from Paris. But I’ll have to send most of them back. I can’t afford it. I really haven’t any money. He doesn’t have any either. Debbie Reynolds—if you’ll pardon the expression—got it all”), not to mention “The Busboy,” who sat on the couch rubbing his eyes as if trying to rouse himself from a nap.

  She said to him, “What’s the matter? Why do you keep rubbing your eyes?”

  “It’s all that reading!” he complained.

  “All what reading?”

  “That thing you tell me I gotta read. I’ve tried. I can’t get through it somehow.”

  Her gaze disdainfully glided away from him. “He means To Kill a Mockingbird. Have you read it? It just came out. I think it’s a really lovely book.”

  Yes, I’d read it; as a matter of fact, I told her,
the author, Harper Lee, was a childhood friend. We’d grown up together in a small Alabama town, and her book was more or less autobiographical, a roman à clef; indeed, Dill, one of the principal characters, was supposed to be me.

  “You see,” she told her husband, “I may not have had a particular education, but somehow I knew that book was true. I like the truth.”

  “The Busboy” regarded her oddly. “Oh, yeah?”

  A few mornings later I rang her up, and was informed by her secretary that she was in the hospital, a circumstance the London evening press confirmed: LIZ CRITICAL.

  When I got Mr. Fisher on the phone, he was already balanced on the precipice of mourning: “It looks like I’m going to lose my girl.” He was so destined, though not in the style he presumed.

  Then I heard she hadn’t died after all, so I stopped by the hospital to leave her some books, and to my surprise, was ushered straightaway to her room. I was so impressed by the smallness of it; at least she wasn’t in a ward, but this claustrophobic closet, entirely stuffed by one narrow iron bed and one wooden chair, did not seem an appropriate arena for the life-death struggles of a Flick Queen.

  She was very lively, though one could see she had undergone a massive ordeal. She was whiter by far than the hospital’s bedsheets; her eyes, without make-up, seemed bruised and swollen, like a weeping child’s. What she was recovering from was a form of pneumonia. “My chest and lungs were filled with a sort of thick black fire. They had to cut a hole in my throat to drain out the fire. You see,” she said, pointing at a wound in her throat that was stopped with a small rubber plug. “If I pull this out my voice disappears,” and she pulled it out, and indeed her voice did disappear, an effect which made me nervous, which made her merry.

  She was laughing, but I didn’t hear her laughter until she had reinserted the plug. “This is the second time in my life that I felt—that I knew—I was dying. Or maybe the third. But this was the most real. It was like riding on a rough ocean. Then slipping over the edge of the horizon. With the roar of the ocean in my head. Which I suppose was really the noise of my trying to breathe. No,” she said, answering a question, “I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t have time to be. I was too busy fighting. I didn’t want to go over that horizon. And I never will. I’m not the type.”