In 1936 I moved from Rock Creek Park to the house, Merrywood, across the Potomac, and money suddenly hedged us all round. At the height of the Depression there were five servants in the house, white servants, a sign of wealth unique for Washington in those years. My stepfather was an heir to Standard Oil, the nemesis of T. P. Gore and Huey Long. Although I now lived the life of a very rich prince, I was still un- conscious of class differences other than the relation between black and white, which was something as fixed in our city then as the Capitol dome, and as unremarkable. But the rock that had landed between my grandfather and me in the back of the car was a sharp and unmistakable signal that there were others who were not, indeed, princes at all; that there were millions of people to whom an old-fashioned word applied—pauper.
Although something of an avatar of Mark Twain, I have never read The Prince and the Pauper, made into a film by Warner Brothers in the thirties.
Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination. I was Puck; I was a long-dead Egyptian; I was a time traveler to Rome; I was many other selves. But now, suddenly, I wanted to be not Puck, or even Mickey Rooney. I wanted to be the identical twin boys who played the prince and the pauper. I wanted to be myself, twice. I do not dare speculate upon what the school of Vienna—I refer, of course, to the Riding School—would make of this. But I don’t think that my response to the film was unusual, particularly if one were the actors’ age and so could easily identify with the notion of the two as really one and that one oneself, or with the general proposition that a palpable duplicate of oneself would be the ideal companion.
A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those “liberals” who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.
The childhood desire to be a twin does not seem to me to be narcissistic in the vulgar Freudian sense. After all, one is oneself; and the other other. It is the sort of likeness that makes for wholeness, and is it not that search for likeness, that desire and pursuit of the whole—as Plato has Aristophanes remark—that is the basis of all love? As no one has ever actually found wholeness in another human being, no matter of what sex, the twin is the closest that one can ever come toward wholeness with another; and, dare one invoke biology and the origin of our species, there is always, back of us mammals, doomed to die once we have procreated, our sexless ancestor the amoeba, which never dies as it does not reproduce sexually but merely—serenely?—breaks in two and identically replicates.
Anyway, I thought Billy and Bobby Mauch were cute as a pair of bug’s ears, and I wished I were either one of them, one of them, mind you. I certainly did not want to be two of me, as one seemed more than enough to go around even in a “famous” family. Yet doubleness has always fascinated me, as mirrors do, as filmed images do.
The Mauch twins as the Pauper and the Prince face to face. When the Prince read what I wrote about this mythic film he sent me an amiable letter and thus I entered, I felt, a magical narrative.
The plot is pure Shakespeare. It is also impure Samuel Clemens—or is he by now entirely Mark Twain? Certainly, he was obsessed by twins, and by the likeness of one to the other. But then what does his pen name mean? if it does not mean two or twain or twin? I often wonder what I might have become if Warner Brothers had filmed not The Prince and the Pauper but that blackest of American “twin” fables, Pudd’nhead Wilson.
Although Errol Flynn is charming as an ideal older brother, I had completely forgotten that he was in the movie. Plainly, I didn’t want an older brother. I was fixated on the twins themselves. On the changing of clothes, and the reversal of roles. On the descent of the boy prince into the life of the poor, which struck many bells for someone who had actually seen the Boners plain. We now know, through such FBI informers as Ronald Reagan, that in the thirties and the forties Hollywood was being infiltrated by the Reds and that writers in the pay of Moscow were subtly poisoning every script that they could with malicious attacks on greed and selfishness and those other traits that have made our country great. It is true, of course, that some of the movie writers were Communists but, as they all agreed in later years, you couldn’t get anything of a political nature into any film. This has also been true in my experience.
On the other hand, it is worth at least a doctoral thesis for some scholar to count how often in films of the thirties and forties a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt can be found, usually hanging on a post-office wall; and then try to discover who put it there: the writer, the director, the producer—the set designer?
At a subconscious level, there was actually a good deal of politics in even the simplest of everyday stories, while historical pieces could always conceal messages, since studios were certain that nothing that happened then could ever have anything at all to do with now. For me, at twelve, the poor of London in their encampment, Robbers’ Roost, were just like the Boners in the Anacostia Flats.
The film’s overt political message is straightforward: a good king will listen to the people and help them. Oddly enough, kings with absolute power were a staple of American movies. One seldom saw democracy in action and, when one did, the results were apt to be simpleminded fables like those of Frank Capra.
More is to be learned, I believe, from William Keighley, auteur of The Prince and the Pauper as well as of Babbitt, than from Capra. The prince’s father, Henry VIII, explains to his son the nature of power. Why the Warner Brothers thought that the American public would find interesting a disquisition on princely power in Renaissance times is a secret that Jack L. Warner took to his grave. On the other hand, the king’s musings were possibly addressed to the serfs at Warner Brothers, a studio known for its love of such traditions as the annual Christmas layoff.
The king confides: “Never trust too much, love too much, need anyone too much that you cannot betray them with a smile.” This is true Machiavelli and must have seemed startling to an audience imbued with such Christian values as turning the other cheek while meekly obeying your master. But I am now convinced that my generation of Americans either went to church or to the movies for spiritual guidance. As a third-generation atheist, I was nourished by the screen, and I was particularly struck by the king’s sermon, so like my grandfather’s bleak wisdom. “In politics you must always treat an enemy as if he might one day be a friend, and a friend as if he might one day be an enemy.” My grandfather did concede that he found the second part hard to do, but that did not make it any the less advisable.
The scene that I remembered best was a forest at night, much like A Wood Near Athens. The prince has been taken captive. He is told that he is to be killed right then and there with a knife. The lighting is beautiful, and if television ever decides to paint this black-and-white film, I hope they will use Gainsborough’s delicate earth colors.
There is a startling close-up of the prince’s face as he realizes that he is about to die. Then, invited to pray, he gets off a bold line: he hopes that his father is not watching from Heaven because the king would be ashamed of the treacherous Englishman, but not of his son. I still feel the force of this scene. For the first time, the boy knows that he is about to stop being. Like most children, I often used to imagine what death must be like. But unlike most, I had no belief, or even interest, in an afterlife. To me, if not the prince, death is not being; and that is why for us who know only being, death is literally unimaginable, try as hard as one might to imagine—what? An empty room where one is not? Put out the light and then put out the light? For the young, death is supremely unnatural. For the old, it is so natural that it is not worth think
ing about.
As I had never for an instant believed in an afterlife, I suppose that all I could come up with, at twelve, was the formulation that as one was not before birth, one will not be after death, and so there you are, or not, as the case may be. For some, the notion of images impressed on celluloid provides a spurious sense of immortality, as does, indeed, the notion that those light rays which record our images will keep on bending about the universe forever. There are those who find comfort in such concepts. I don’t.
Errol Flynn saves the prince in the wood, and as the pauper is about to be crowned king, the true prince is restored, and all is right with a world where a good boy-king will stand up to evil, whether played by Claude Rains or by Hitler.
So, in a single film, screened at the susceptible time of puberty, one experienced the shock, as it were, of twinship. Also, the knowledge of how to exercise power. Also, the contrast between rich and poor that even I had been made aware of as the Depression deepened, and there was no help on earth for the poor except from the king, if he be good and well-informed. This was much the attitude of the American people at that time to their sovereigns, Franklin and Eleanor, who were opposed, as was the good prince, by evil lords. Finally, there is the impact of imminent death upon a twelve-year-old. Of all the facts of life, death is the oddest. Suddenly, there it is, in a moonlit forest, at the hand of a traitor with a knife; and then no more life. No anything. Nothing.
Underlying the film, there is an appeal to altruism. Now altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred. Yet the prince in the film is obliged to note that there are others in the world beside himself (not to mention a pauper duplicate), and to those others he must be responsible. This is a highly un-American point of view but not without its charm for the youthful viewer, who will discover for himself, more soon than late, that one must always put oneself first, except when the American empire requires a war and then, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. I believe that my generation of Americans was the very last even to begin to take seriously that once-powerful invocation.
But now the feature film’s over. The newsreel begins. The Japanese sink an American gunboat on a river in China. Senator Gore is defeated for a fifth term. “All is lost,” he declares, “including honor.” The House Un-American Activities Committee is formed. The director of air commerce resigns. The Munich Agreement is signed. Hitler takes over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
I used to chat with Prince Philip of Hesse, the only person I ever knew who knew Hitler. Philip was son-in-law to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, and Italy was a founding member—with Germany—of the Axis powers. Prince Philip was always regarded with suspicion by Hitler, and, eventually, his wife, Princess Mafalda, was sent off to a German concentration camp where she died during an air raid—Puccini had dedicated Turandot to her. Prince Philip was rarely revelatory. Like his class, he regarded Hitler as a cheap demagogue, who was bringing a degree of order to the country. I asked about anti-Semitism. Prince Philip said he thought at first it was just pandering to voters. “Later, of course, when friends of mine were proscribed, I tried to intervene. Hitler was always agreeable. He even protected them for a time. But I never got him past his usual point: ‘in the professions they should never number more than their proportion in the general population,’ which made no sense to me.”
SIX
Next: Previews of Coming Attractions. And coming to this theater is—what else?—Fire Over England, yet again. Huey Long is murdered.
My whole family delighted in Huey Long not for his politics but for his comic speechifying. After my father divorced my mother he rented an apartment in the same Connecticut Avenue building where Huey was bacheloring it. Though my father disliked most politicians, Huey always made him laugh. The Kingfish, as Long was known, began performing when he stepped out of the elevator in the morning and confronted the day in the form of a desk clerk, a meek young man, whom Huey enjoyed lecturing on Success, to the young man’s embarrassment. Huey would declaim: “Why, when I was your age I would spend what little idle time I had with an instructive book not that racing form I see that you’re now trying to hide. Of course I was not given to late-night dissipation in the fleshpots of the District of Columbia! Oh, you can’t hide your ruinous habits from me! I can see by the trembling of your hands what demon rum is doing to you…” The poor clerk was indeed trembling—with terror—as the great voice thundered in his ears and Huey, particularly if an audience had now filled the lobby, would become prayerful as he invoked the lad’s aged mother back in Butte, Montana. “I know how each night she prays for your success—on her knees, little suspecting that all those hours that should be golden with study are scarlet with vice…” Tears would fill Huey’s eyes on cue as he contemplated that little old lady who had mothered a son so reprobate. Only my father’s arrival with his car would stop the great flow of language, and Huey would cadge a ride from the director of air commerce while lecturing my father on aviation as they proceeded to the Capitol where Huey had all sorts of somber public advice for President Roosevelt.
The great Huey Long is ready to crown every man a king, until a mysterious doctor gunned him down in the Louisiana State Capitol. He was preparing to run for president on a third-party ticket, splitting FDR’s vote for reelection.
Lately, Huey had been discussing a run for the presidency on a third-party ticket in 1936. Many thought he could keep FDR from being reelected and then in 1940 he would be the Democratic candidate and win the presidency. Possible? We shall never know. Huey was gunned down in the Louisiana State Capitol at Baton Rouge by a medical doctor with no known motive. It was rumored that Huey had actually been killed by his own guards. Forever after, the Long family believed that FDR had ordered his killing, which seems farfetched even in Louisiana. But it was about then that the conspiracy theorist doctrine was promulgated to make it impossible for anyone to investigate much of anything and so it was that we, a naturally suspicious and garrulous people, were officially silenced through our institutions and by a media seemingly devoted to a Sicilianesque omertà, even when Marine Corps General Smedley Butler revealed that he had been approached by right wing elements to overthrow FDR in his first term, a story that never really broke despite Butler’s own memoir of the events. Huey’s murder was the first of a number of stylized “unsolvable” murders committed by solitary lone killers given to motiveless acts of violence; witness, Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas. More later. It is as if we have a permanent Federal Bureau of Non-Investigation ever ready to chuckle about the relation between flying saucers and political assassinations or the “alleged” torture of those held in our military prisons.
In any event, Huey, whose slogan was “every man a king,” never did have his proper day. But there is a wonderfully comic bit of newsreel where he is sampling a New Orleans bartender’s Sazerac, a lethal cocktail full of whipped egg white. He praises his old friend behind the bar, sips delicately at the brew, and gives gentle instruction on the correct proportion of the ingredients. He finishes one glass which is refilled. Ever the perfectionist, he savors this ambrosia, complimenting the bartender—so let us leave the Kingfish there, contented, presidential, the people’s friend who built so many schools, roads, hospitals, and gleefully taxed “The Standard Oil” to pay for it all.
SEVEN
I sit now at a so-called partners desk where two people can sit directly across from each other. In 2003 my “partner” (as the politically correct call it) of fifty-three years—Howard Auster—died and now I work here alone. Here? Where? When? Who? We shall let “why” linger a while longer in the wings.
Howard and I in Arizona during the filming of Billy the Kid with Val Kilmer. I play a minister whose specialty is—what else?—funerals. Over the years I’ve done several Billy the Kids, the first for live TV with Paul Newman in 1955. Others turned my work into the film The Left Handed Gun, a perfect mess almost as highly
rated by the French as Jerry Lewis.
“Here” is the Hollywood Hills. “When” is today, December 31, 2004. New Year’s Eve is at hand and with luck—good or bad—tomorrow will bring the two thousand fourth year of the Christian era to a close. For several days television has been full of images of Southeast Asia drowning in tsunami tidal waves. As I watched the Thai island of Phuket being pummeled by wind, I looked in vain for the Royal Yacht Club (a hotel not a club) where we stayed a dozen years ago. It is now as gone as, indeed, are “we” reduced to the singular “me.” Rain has been falling for more than a week on Los Angeles. Since 1977 “we” have had a house here, usually rented out to others as neither of us ever had any intention of living here until the obligatory arrival of the Cedars-Sinai Hospital years which, finally, came two years ago, like a tsunami wind, for him. So now—“what?”
Barbara Epstein, editor of The New York Review of Books, has just rung to report a “what”: the death of Susan Sontag whose decades-long war with cancer is over. Years ago a celebrated guru of the day gravely admonished her: “What’s all the fuss about? Why don’t you just let go? After all, death is simply a natural part of life,” and so on. Susan was having none of this: “I don’t consider death at my age,” she said (she was still young—forties?), “to be just nothing,” echoing Tennessee Williams who once wrote: “I have never considered death to be much in the way of completion.” I last saw Susan when we acted in Norman Mailer’s production of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. I was the Devil; she was Donna Anna…What gifts Susan had for performance were reserved for her most successful portrayal—the autodidact who could play aspects of herself by ear, often universalizing them in the process.