When, late on that night of the award, Ion and I got back to the Basil Street Hotel for the last thoughtful drink of the day, the bar was closed.
I did not sleep. While I was breakfasting in the Basil Street’s wonderful restaurant, one which would have suited Henry James, I was called away to answer the phone. It was the Australian actor Bryan Brown, who had been with me in Sorrento two years before. He had also acted in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and was having success at that time through the miniseries A Town Like Alice. As did many Australians, he saw all these Australian phenomena as strikes against our cultural ignominy. “Isn’t it great,” he asked me, “when two boys from the western suburbs really rip it up the Poms?” I felt that perhaps this attitude took no account of the fact that a British jury had generously chosen me, but at the same time I shared in Bryan’s felon delight.
I was still prodigiously awake at ten that morning. I sat in the hotel’s living room, where I had a scheduled interview with a journalist from the Irish Times. Her name was Maeve Binchy, and she’d already had a manuscript accepted by Hodder. Indeed, she would become an outrageously successful writer of fiction. But for the moment she saw herself as the supplicant journalist, which bespoke her Irish no-nonsense, no-airs ways. She thanked me for not having canceled the interview now that I was, as she said, “a rock star.” In the Basil Street’s lounge, full of its chinoiserie, she murmured to me, “It’s late in the day.” She waved a hand at a waiter. It was just after ten. “Do you think they’d mind if we had whiskey in our tea?” Maeve Binchy and I became friends for life. She often holidayed in Australia, she told me, because her English husband, Gordon Snell, who worked for Irish radio and television, RTÉ, had spent years there after he was evacuated from Singapore as a boy.
I had lived a limited life as a youth, and my naivety was largely unpracticed. It was only arduously, and through extensive travel, that I had become anything approaching a man of the world. With Maeve and others, I showed my colonial lack of class by not disapproving of the Booker’s hoopla, which is the de rigueur pose of anyone destined to win it. “It’s all nonsense, it’s all a lottery, it makes the book no better than it was yesterday.” It is fashionable for writers to despise the prize till they are short-listed, and from there on to declare the whole exercise crass and, as some argued, rather like a beauty contest. But no one ever turned down his short-listing, though one admirable winner, John Berger, donated his prize to the industrial struggle of the West Indians who worked on the Booker McConnell sugar plantations. And no writer, as far as I know, ever withdrew his nomination from the Booker short list.
At home in Sydney, Judy heard in the small hours of the morning from a neighbor who came rushing down our street, crying out that the ABC news said I had won.
For Poldek, this was the validation of his belief that this story was for Gentiles. He showed it by giving away a signed copy of the book with every purchase of goods in the Handbag Studio over one hundred dollars. The question about whether the book was a novel or not raged on, but every morning new stocks of the book, printed the day before and rushed up from Kent, cluttered the marble lobbies of Hodder’s beautiful eighteenth-century headquarters in Bedford Square. Salesmen got there early so that they could pick up enough copies to satisfy the bookshops they served. What a heady and extremely rare time for a writer, when demand could not quite be satisfied!
I remember a glorious, boozy press-and-publishing bash in the back garden of the old Bedford Square house. But behind the celebration there lay the reality that this book was built on the blood of innocents. I went on suffering a merited and intimate nightmare, perhaps fueled by an excess of celebratory wine and spirits, of Amon Goeth selecting me from a line of prisoners for some unspecified death. The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.
In the following week I was called on as if a Londoner to perform civic duties—to open a new library in the City of London, for example. I wondered if I should tell them about my Irish Republican great-uncle, who was sentenced to transportation to Western Australia for sedition. Or my Uncle Johnny, who had come to London on rowdy Australian leave from the Western Front and fallen in love with a Scottish nurse in 1917, an ardor from which nothing developed.
Now, laden with accidental renown, I flew back to Australia. Judy organized a wonderful welcome party. The tension between Bookerdom and the knowledge that my work had benefited from testimonies from people who had suffered extremities of terror made me frequently but privately uneasy, and Judy understood this. Yet there was undeniable joy in the homecoming, and acceptance among my own. I was above all grateful for the excitement my teenage daughters felt over what had happened. They didn’t adopt any air of adolescent boredom at all.
Thirteen
* * *
Writers always complain about American tours. There is only one thing worse than your American publisher sending you out, city to city, condemning you to flights at 5:30 a.m. or else 11:05 p.m., and that is if your American publisher doesn’t care enough about the book to make you do it. The size of the United States, the proliferation of big cities, and the fact that early morning and late night television and radio were so popular in America, helped squeeze the writer’s available rest time. It is an experience full of semivivifying showers before the sun rises, and drinking grainy black coffee in departure lounges.
Simon & Schuster were publishing the book as Schindler’s List, in accordance with my earlier lost quarrel with Dan Green, and though they went back to print even before publication, based on the reaction of the booksellers, I found by the start of the third week of the tour that, as Poldek had predicted, they had sold out. I was expatiating on radio and TV into vacancy. I complained to Patricia Solomon, and informed Poldek of the sad fact. He did his What-did-I-tell-you? act with Patricia.
Out in California in mid-tour, I saw Poldek and the lawyer Glovin, Poldek omnisciently predicting that the next thing would be the film. The book had been reviewed on the front page of the New York Times, he said. His attitude was, if the film business didn’t react they weren’t worth the money copiously paid them.
Within a few days two interesting production houses had indeed responded. One was Goldcrest, the British company which had recently made the film Gandhi. The other was Amblin, Steven Spielberg’s production company at Universal. Apart from Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, I had had a few other experiences with film companies. Another book of mine, Gossip from the Forest, had been painlessly translated by Granada TV in Britain into a film for television. It had been shot in the forest near Chester, and I had been invited to visit the shoot but had never managed to do so.
I was something of a film option skeptic, in fact. Many of my books had been optioned by American, British or Australian producers. There seemed a pattern to the way things flowed. When a producer first approaches a writer, he or she is unapologetically in love with the book. To realize it in film is his sole desire. And the uniqueness of the book will override any of its problems, which he admits there are, but rather like the dimples of the beloved. And so he wants to tie up your book for a year or so by offering a small option price on the understanding that when he gets the money to make it, the horn of plenty will open, there will be a full contract and a glorious payday.
But after the producer has visited a number of studios, other funding sources and production companies, his ardor is always somewhat muted. The book now presents a series of real challenges—perhaps that it’s a period piece; that it belongs to a genre to which three other recently failed films belong (bye-bye uniqueness!); that the studios have been stung with projects like this before; that they presented it to the agent of the beloved actor of the moment, but the beloved actor and his agent had “passed on it.” The producer with whom you have the modest option deal has been trying intermittently to find other hunks, but the pre-option unconditional love has gone, and there is weariness
in the producer’s voice, a warning that nothing miraculous and unexpected is likely to happen. So I did not think this production company interest in Schindler would really lead anywhere.
Meanwhile the book was in print again, and Poldek and I had been invited back to New York to appear on the Today Show with Jane Pauley. They wanted Poldek so they could talk about what he had been through with Oskar and how he had placed the story in my hands, and so on. We caught a plane to New York, stayed a night in a hotel, and ended up together on the favorite morning TV show of the United States. I had told Poldek at dinner the night before that television is a frantic medium. A ruthless lack of elbow room prevails. One’s message has to be scaled down to a degree of rigor such as, I could see with some dread, was not in Poldek’s character to achieve.
We were made up by early morning cosmeticians who had applied pancake to every senator and rock star in America. In the green room in the studio in New York, Poldek was an instant hit with all the other guests, praising gifts of feature and talent in them. When they asked what he was doing there, he pointed to me as his Cervantes and told everyone to watch out for the movie. Poldek similarly tried to make a lifelong friend of the stage manager who ushered us onto the set between commercials. The producer of our segment approached us nervously and told him we would have eight minutes.
“Eight minutes,” he said. “That’s not nearly enough. You are a fine woman. Could you, darling, get us at least ten?” But the television gods were immovable on this.
As Jane Pauley rose to meet us, Poldek confessed his undying love despite the fact that “you are already married to that nice man the cartoonist” (Garry Trudeau, creator of the Doonesbury cartoon strip). There was the faintest panic in Jane Pauley’s lovely eyes as she hoped some allied presence out in the darkness of the studio might help her to control this force of nature. The floor manager interrupted Poldek’s praise of the Trudeau-Pauley marriage by crying urgently, “Thirty seconds!”
Poldek dropped his voice to an Irish whisper. “You must be so tired, darling, working like this every morning. Take care of yourself, Jane. For God’s sake, darling. You are still a young woman!”
Jane Pauley nodded when the stage manager said, “Ten seconds.”
As the lights came up on us, Pauley introduced us both and asked me about our first meeting, Poldek’s and mine. I explained it briskly, and then Poldek explained it with joyous expansiveness, and there was time for one last question. When did Poldek first see Schindler? Poldek told the story of his and Schindler’s first meeting at the Pfefferberg home in Grodzka Street in 1939. And suddenly we were being thanked and ushered out of the lit circle of brief national fame in which Jane Pauley remained.
“We did very well, Thomas,” Poldek told me on the way to get his makeup off. “But my God, what was wrong in giving us a little more time?”
I noticed that the young minders who ultimately got us from the green room to the street were quite refreshed by Poldek. They were used to folk who had learned by experience of other interviews to say things with the unnatural crispness the media required. It was a trick which, once you were on to it, took no particular gifts. But they had not encountered anything like Poldek’s omnivorous goodwill and lack of television pretense.
In terms of telling the story of the book, however, it seemed a catastrophic interview. So I thought then, anyhow. Now, I’m not so sure. As Poldek said in the taxi, “That should make those sons-of-bitch publishers print more and more copies.” Indeed, soon after this interview, the print run of the book, as Poldek had promised, sold out again.
And as we returned to California, November 1982 turned to December.
The message had come through the U.S. publisher that Steven Spielberg, whose E.T. was flickering from innumerable cinema screens throughout the world, wanted to see me on the following Saturday at the house of Sid Sheinberg (the head of Universal) in Bel Air.
“I’ll go too,” Poldek told me when he heard.
“I think I’m the only one invited, Poldek.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I know Spielberg’s mother. I eat at her restaurant all the time. She’s a beautiful woman. A tiny woman but gracious.”
Indeed, Spielberg’s mother, Leah Adler, ran an eclectic kosher dairy restaurant in Beverly Hills called the Milky Way. To prove the point, Poldek took me there a day or two later, and we ate the best kosher food I’d encountered, much better than the King David’s. I can’t remember the small-boned Mrs. Adler having any protection at that stage from celebrity hunters, or from enthusiastic screenwriters trying to pass on to her scripts for relaying to her renowned son. Much later in the century, she certainly employed a huge yarmulke’d man, reputed to be a former Israeli paratrooper, to repel such nuisances.
Mrs. Adler was a strong woman, a woman of presence. Though she hung Steven’s posters on the walls, she admitted that he had mystified her as a child. She would tell one journalist, “I didn’t know he was a genius. Frankly, I didn’t know what the hell he was.”
Poldek, of course, told her all about our coming meeting with her son, news of which she listened to with an ageless tolerance.
On Saturday morning, Poldek, having cleared it with Steven’s office, turned up at the little hotel, comfortably and miraculously remaining in the heart of Rodeo Drive, where I stayed. It was a bright, early winter morning without sea mist, and the air looked auspicious—not nearly as stained as usual. Some breeze from the mountains had flushed it clean overnight. I very much doubted that Spielberg would want to make a film, but it would be fascinating to meet him. Knowing a little about films, I knew not to be too enthusiastic, and as we ascended into the hills it was Poldek who twitched with certainty.
We passed improbable pavilions of marble, and majestic gates through which we saw curving driveways and swards of green almost too perfect to believe in. Extensive stone walls hemmed in mysteries of wealth. Indeed, the streets here were said to be confusingly pretzel-shaped to prevent intrusions into stars’ homes by fans or people with ideas for films. Along one of these thoroughfares we chased the number of Sid Sheinberg’s place. When we saw it we pulled up to the tall garden gates and I muttered into a voice box with Poldek egging me on. “Tell him you’re here to see Steven!” The gates opened.
A house could not yet be seen. It needed to be driven to, atop the hill beyond a screen of tall shrubs. Dickens had never been able to lay claim to such a mansion; James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were strangers to such places. This was the Bel Air version of Versailles created out of the minuscule filaments called movies, out of the work of screenwriters, blessed and unblessed, and of authors humble and grand. By the time Poldek had parked the car behind the house in a spot indicated by a muscular man, half waiter, half bodyguard, I felt a little disoriented. But it was Poldek’s policy not to be.
“All right,” he boomed to me. “Let’s go and meet the wonder boychickel!”
Sid Sheinberg appeared almost at once in the door of something like a Bel Air conservatory. He was a genial, slim, bald fellow. Physically, he resembled the sort of Californian of whom people said, “He has a tremendous backhand.” Obesity was considered God’s own curse in Beverly Hills, and he was lean as salvation. Lunch was set in a pleasant room within, where there was so much glass that one felt oneself to be outside anyhow.
Steven had not yet arrived, and we stood talking about such things as the publication of the book and Poldek’s experience of Schindler. “Sure I knew him, Mr. Sheinberg. I was black-marketeering for him before he went into business in 1939!” So we took up from where we left off with Jane Pauley. Barely a glass of water had been drunk when Steven Spielberg appeared, having been brought in from the front of the house. He had a fast-moving, Ohio-cum-Californian accent. We shook hands, and he said the sort of things film people always say about books.
Like a true out-of-his-depth colonial boy, I declared, “An honor to meet you, Mr. Spielberg. This is my friend Poldek Pfeffer berg, the man who introduced me to the story.”
Spielberg was dressed for the weekend, in sports shirt and slacks and sneakers. Of the four of us, Poldek was the only one wearing a tie. And he had no such reverence as mine in store for Spielberg, who now said hello to him and shook his hand.
Poldek said casually, “Steven, I was talking to your mother the other day, and she says you’re doing very well.” There was a suspicion in his voice that Mrs. Adler might have been exaggerating, and a sort of implied addendum—If you’d only studied harder in high school like your cousin Leon, you could have been a chartered accountant too. Thus, I noticed, did old Jews always put successful younger Jews in their place. Not a bad cultural habit, I suppose, but a tough one.
We sat to our light lunch. No wine was served, of course, wine wasn’t really the Californian style, despite the splendid vineyards of the north of the state. Spielberg proved to be particularly interested in exactly what I would have wanted him to be interested in—the ambiguity of Schindler, the balance between opportunism and human compassion, the fact that no one could tell where one ended and the other began. And the fact that Schindler, the unself-reflective hero, had been unable to tell anyone either.