The New Confessions

  One man spoke and the other two nodded. Thompson stared expressionlessly at his steepled fingers poised on the table in front of him.

  “We were very impressed with your … your ‘film’ proposal. All of us, I think.” Nods, grunts of accord. “You will understand, Mr. Todd, that the ‘cinema’ industry is not one in which the bank normally invests.” I nodded. This man had a deep superpolite Scottish accent. He pronounced “bank,” benk. “But I’m glad to say that in your case it was felt that this was an area which was well worth entering.”

  I felt relief ooze through me, warm and comfortable, almost as if I had wet myself.

  The senior man (I think his name was McIndoe) consulted his notes. “Consequently the Investment Division has decided to advance your company fifteen hundred pounds at current rates of interest. But at your brother’s insistence—and he, ha ha, put the case most eloquently—we have raised the loan to twenty-five hundred.”

  McIndoe stood and stretched his hand across the table.

  “Delighted to be doing business with you, Mr. Todd.”

  I managed—how, I will never know—I managed to control myself. I produced some sort of smile and shook Thompson’s hand as he escorted me to the main door.

  “It’s not as much as you hoped, I know,” Thompson said. “But it’s a start.” He smiled. “You can have no idea how heretical it seems to the board—some members of our board—to lend money to a film company.” He chuckled. “It wasn’t exactly a unanimous decision, I can tell you—in confidence, of course—cries of nepotism and all that.”

  “I’m very grateful to you.”

  “Remember, John, great oaks and little acorns …”He clapped me on the shoulder. “Good Lord, is that the rain on again?”

  I think it was my impotence that really distressed me. I was not quite able to rage and shout against injustice. I could hardly berate Thompson for not standing up for me, either. I honestly think I would have been happier if they had got their flunkies to throw me out on the street. What earthly good was twenty-five hundred pounds? What film studio was going to be convinced by this munificence? I had to get out of Thompson’s house at once. It was bad enough with Heather’s frozen good manners, but Thompson was so pleased with himself. His sunny pleasure in his good deed was intolerable. I think he had always felt guilty about me and somehow this loan canceled out all his childhood indifference. He was really upset when I said I had to go. I moved temporarily back in with my father, which proved a ghastly error. He was there to witness the final indignity.

  I was sitting in his drawing room half-reading The Scotsman. Father was in his study across the hall. It must have been four or five days after my meeting at the bank. I had an account there now, credited with twenty-five hundred pounds. From time to time I wondered what to do with it. I was coming to the conclusion that I should just give it back—I was not sure I could manage to pay the interest for more than a couple of months.

  I heard the doorbell. Jean, my father’s housekeeper, answered it. Some conversation ensued, then I heard my father emerge from his study. More chat. I paid it no further attention until my father came into the room.

  “John, there’s a gentleman here to see you.”

  Ian Orr entered. He wore his old shiny suit and carried his hat in his hand, hollow crown facing me so I could see clearly the effect of years of Orr sweat and brilliantine on the lining. I stood up. What could the man want?

  “Hello, Orr. What can I do for you?”

  “Are you John James Todd?”

  I looked closely at him. Was he mad? He seemed slightly embarrassed. His face was as badly shaved as ever, red and sore looking. He had sticking plaster on an earlobe.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Yes, of course he is,” my father said eagerly.

  Orr gave me a buff envelope. I opened it. “Dreadful sorry about this, Mr. Todd. I wish I could have said no. But there you are.”

  It was a writ. Leo Druce was suing me for defamation of character.

  My father took it from my hand.

  “Could I have a wee look? Thanks, John.”

  Three days later in London my solicitor explained the problem to me. He was a pale young man with long wrists, or at least that was the curious effect his hands gave as they extended from his starched cuffs. He was called Cordwainer and was a partner in the firm of Devize, Broome and Cordwainer. I had phoned Sonia to see if Devize would represent me. He declined but passed me on to Cordwainer.

  Cordwainer’s white clean hands needlessly smoothed the blotless blotting paper in the pad on his desk as I considered the news he had just given me. My crucial error did not lie in the fact that I had accused Druce of fabricating his role in the attack on Frezenburg Ridge. It was the allegation that he wore medals to which he was not entitled that had provoked litigation. I felt suddenly helpless. My brain emptied. All I was aware of was noises: distant traffic, someone talking down the corridor, the dry susurration of Cordwainer’s white hands on his blotter.

  “Can you prove,” he asked softly, “that Druce ever wore medals to which he was not entitled?”

  “Well, morally he’s … No,” I said.

  “We have no choice then,” he continued. “You must pay for a printed advertisement in the Herald retracting the statements in your letter and apologizing.”

  “Jesus Christ.…”

  “And Mr. Druce’s lawyer informs me that an out-of-court settlement of two thousand guineas will be acceptable.”

  “Two thousand guineas!”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But, God Almighty, I just don’t have … that … kind … of money.…”

  So Thompson’s loan placated Leo Druce. Once I had paid for the advertisement (as loaded with ambiguity as I could make it), my legal fees—Devize charitably arranged a 10 percent discount—I was left with some 325 pounds. I felt with powerful certainty that the only course of action available to me was to flee the country. But where could I go?

  VILLA LUXE, June 25, 1972

  Something odd is happening to Emilia. Today she came to work wearing a new dress, scarlet with white polka dots, and strappy shoes with wedge-shaped cork heels. Her broad horny feet looked most inappropriate in them. She’s being very friendly and solicitous.

  I compliment her on her dress. A terrible mistake. She simpers like an ingenue. The horrible suspicion strengthens: she is responding to what she sees as my own carnal interest in her.… But then, I rebuke myself. Her life isn’t circumscribed by her domestic duties at the Villa Luxe. God alone knows what she gets up to when she’s left this place.

  As she serves lunch she says, “Oh, yes. My friend told me a man was looking for you in town.”

  “In town? Not the village?”

  “No, in town. You know my friend who works at the post office. This man was asking there.”

  I drank some water. My throat was suddenly parched.

  “What was he like?”

  “She didn’t say. She just said a man. An American.”

  “Did she tell him anything?”

  “Of course not. This information is confidential. You want some more melon?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I brought it specially for you.”

  “No, no. I’m not hungry, thank you,”

  I felt the Past again, like a fog creeping in from the sea, curling round the house, seeping through its rooms. A damp, old, saline smell.

  * I discovered in 1955, on the publication of Boswell’s diaries, that Boswell and Thérèse had taken this opportunity to have a brief affair. According to Boswell’s log in his journal, they fucked fourteen times in three days. Thérèse was insatiable and the young Scot utterly exhausted. The revelation came as a genuine shock to me. To this day I cannot forgive Boswell his vile betrayal of Jean Jacques.

  15

  Pacific Palisades

  The day war began in Europe was the day my temporary resident’s visa ran out. As Adolf Hitler invad
ed 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 posi
tions. 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.…