He’s a media tycoon now and it’s no surprise, but he himself would have been surprised had he been told his future when he first came to us. So broke that he was sleeping under a bridge, he was so young that his long trousers looked like an affectation. He had a lop-sided smile that went halfway around his head, and his Scottish accent was so thick that I couldn’t understand a word. Richard and Elaine, however, both spotted him, correctly, as a fountain of ideas, which he advanced with daunting certitude and defended with bitter scorn. Generously, however, he paid attention to what I wanted to do in Berlin. This time I wanted to get the history in, because the history was everything. The Wall was down and some of the old Weimar Berlin had come back, but the Nazis were still a terrible memory. In the East of the city, though the skyline was thick with cranes, the old buildings still bore, all the way to the rooftops, the grey tidemark of the dreary empire that had retreated to the east before it boiled away. Somehow we had to get that in. It would mean doing a lot of narration while I drove the car.
The car was a Trabant from the communist era and it was perfect casting. We didn’t have to rig it to emit smoke, go backwards at the wrong moment and burst into flames. It did all that anyway. Up and down the Unter den Linden I drove, popping and banging through the Brandenburg Gate time after time. Goebbels had once ordered the Nazi torchlight parade to do the same thing while he improved the lighting. He was there ahead of us. So, of course, was Hitler. One of the best things we did in Berlin was to realize that the bunker where he spent his last days was a key location. There was nothing left to look at except a low bump in the wasteland, but the very fact that it looked like nothing made it mean everything. We got a long shot of me standing there in my blue suit on the apparently meaningless heap of dirt. But I knew what my voice-over was going to be. Finally it had come to this.
Hitler had never loved Berlin and I didn’t either. It was history I was in love with, and here was the place to talk about it, at its focal point. The great buildings are mainly a long way out of town, in the Mark Brandenburg, and most of the city was architectural blah: shop windows in the West, the old stone-faced apartment buildings in the East, block after block. But if I had been a young student again, and just starting off in Europe, I would have started there rather than in London or Paris. I would have had a room in Prenzlauerberg and sat at a table outside one of the cafes writing poems to the Russian waitresses. The story of the city in its dreadful modern times would have become mine. I tried to make it mine even though it was too late. The attempt to understand twentieth-century politics – by now I was writing about almost nothing else – had become one of my preoccupations, joining the urge to write poetry at the centre of my mental life. For a writer, comprehension is as close to being politically effective as he can ever get, or ever should. In the few years since the Wall came down, a seismic shift in the world’s political history had taken place, and I had played no part in it except, I hoped, to understand it.
The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia had partly been made possible by the ability of the leaders to communicate by computer. Harold Pinter had bought a computer for Vaclav Havel. The new President was lastingly grateful to Pinter and took care to be gentle every time he had to tell his fellow playwright, during one of Pinter’s visits to liberated Prague, to go easy on his tirades about the ruthlessness of the Americans when everybody listening to him was still getting over the ruthlessness of the Russians. But Pinter, though his geopolitical picture was essentially a prop doorway through which he could make entrances in profile, had his heart in the right place, and giving Havel a computer was exactly the right thing to do. I bought a computer for Rita Klimova. Though she died of leukaemia not long after the victory, she had been a vital figure in her country’s recovery of its freedoms. But all I had done was write a cheque.
Later on I wrote a few more cheques for the Viborg, the outfit, headed by Olga Havel, that devoted itself to the endless task of looking after some of the thousands of wrecked people left behind by a regime so dedicated to pollution that the children’s milk was full of acid rain. Olga had already suffered enough but she volunteered to suffer some more because she thought it was her duty. With the aid of my good friend Diana Phipps, who had now returned to her homeland in her original role as Countess Sternberg, Olga coped nobly with the heartbreaking task of bringing a measure of redress to a river of human ruin. Very feminine and graceful in appearance, she had an iron soul and could be quite tough with fools and bores. I was dining with her once at a restaurant beside the river. The steak was a challenge – unlike in Argentina, it had probably never been very good even while it was alive – and she caught me picking my teeth with a fingernail. She handed me a toothpick. I liked her for that. But financing a computer and a couple of oxygen machines for blue babies was as close as I ever physically got to being effective in the biggest set of European events in the late twentieth century. Mentally, however, I was right in the middle of it, and never more so than in Berlin. This, I finally realized, was why I had been collecting and reading all those old books that had been scattered across the world.
What I loved about young Martin was that he could go with my ideas even when he could not foresee how they would add up until we got the footage home. He could read my heart, if not my mind. It was easy for him to let me have my head when one of the Trabi’s regular nervous breakdowns happened at a set of traffic lights in the West as night fell on a long day’s work. A sports car full of party girls slowed down to heckle me and I thought of a sequence on the spot. We enrolled the girls, rigged more lights, and went on shooting for an hour so it would appear that the car full of raving lovelies stopped beside me, told me to follow them to a party and then, when the lights changed and I put my foot down to roar off after them, the Trabi went backwards before conking out. A baby spotlight clipped under the dashboard lit up my face to show me doing my patent resigned-loser look. It was an expensive hour but the results would obviously be worth the graft.
It was far less obvious that the outcome would be worth it when I asked for a whole afternoon of filming in the Ploetzensee prison, where the conspirators of 20 July 1944 were executed after the failure of their plot against Hitler’s life. Once again, like Hitler’s bunker, the location looked like nothing. But I knew what had happened there. I knew that the sluice in the middle of the stone floor was where the blood had gone after victims were guillotined, and that the rail high up at one end of the room was where the hooks had been from which the July conspirators had been hanged to strangle slowly in nooses of thin wire. Martin got the point, and okayed the extended static shots which would give me the space to tell the story when we got home. I was already writing the commentary in my head, though, while we were filming in the execution chamber. I never wrote anything more carefully in my life. The brightest of the conspirators had known that they would probably fail. But they went ahead anyway, because they thought it was a ceremony. I respected that ceremony. To understand, and to express, why their practical failure was a spiritual triumph – that would be my contribution. Increasingly I was becoming aware that such understanding was all I was good for. But I never belittled the privilege of being able to express it in a mass medium. I though it was one of the things television should do, and precisely because the audience had not read all the books. Ideally, I thought, an entertainment programme of any kind should bring the human world in, not shut it out: and history was the supreme example of the human world. This conviction, however, was on a collision course with the oncoming celebrity culture, which would have no concern with the past, and exist only in the present. But I was slow to accept that. Like a hedgehog on the highway, bathed in the lights of an oncoming truck, I persisted in believing there might be room for both of us. The Postcard programmes meant a lot to me. Readers today might wonder why. Later on the format became a staple, with every known comedian sent off to be astonished by a City of Contrasts. But it was less usual then, and I thought it my best chance to say something se
rious in a entertaining way. I still have critics who suppose that I can have no reason for doing that except to show off. But I never struck myself as an egotist: more as someone with a sense of duty who might fail to fulfil it if his concentration lapsed. Although there again, I suppose, only an egotist would think that. Quicker to plead guilty.
25. IN THIS VALLEY OF DYING STARS
Most of the stars of Postcard from Berlin had been a long time dead. Our leading lady was Marlene Dietrich, represented by her gravestone, and her voice over the closing titles as she sang ‘In den Ruinen von Berlin’. In Los Angeles most of our stars were alive, although some of them were teetering on the brink. The movie pullulated with famous faces but that fact in itself was enough to remind me that it was a step sideways, if not downwards, because I wanted by then to treat harder subjects more closely. Avowedly to treat a shallow one, though that was a theme in itself, had no significance except in the broader context of what a free society might aspire to if only it could get over its obsessions with celebrity and spoon its brains back into its empty head. One day I would have to write about that, but in Los Angeles the pace was too hot to think. The best thing I did there was ask for a tour of the domestic architecture, with selected shots of all the demented houses, so that I could compose a syncopated scene-setting paragraph which I still count among my plums in writing for film. (‘The neo-colonial baronial pagoda . . .’ etc.) The rest of the movie, however, was famous faces, and some of them looked strained.
Charity events were the best place to catch them out of school. Richard Dreyfuss made himself available as long as he could plug his charity. I had only a few seconds to convince him that I admired his work – I was telling the truth, which always helps –and he was quick and funny, but you could tell that all kinds of uproar were going on in his head, perhaps because he had never got over the fact that it was not far enough from the ground. There are plenty of short men who can make any tall man feel awkward just by the confidence they radiate, but Richard Dreyfuss seemed to have no such assurance left. I had never seen a pair of elevator shoes quite like his. In most cases, men who wear elevator shoes must get used to standing on their toes. The front of the shoe looks quite normal and it’s only when you spot what’s going on at the back that you realize something’s up, as it were. But Richard Dreyfuss had a whole thick platform under each foot, like the Mikado. Why? Who knows. You see how perfectly, wonderfully, he can incarnate a sensitive, self-critical human being in a minor movie like Stake-Out, and you assume that a man like that would be equally in command of every other aspect of his life. But then you discover that in real life he clumps around on a pair of kabuki shoes. You don’t stare, though. In Hollywood, nobody notices. If Larry Longstaff, erstwhile romantic leading man of the 1950s, turns up at a party with most of his head replaced by a piece of machinery, people will tell him he’s looking good. People will slap him on the back and say, ‘Same old Larry,’ even though the only part of the old Larry still in existence is his left eyeball.
In Hollywood, the intention is always taken for the deed. If your capped teeth look like the assembled tombstones of a graveyard in the snow, they will still be universally regarded as your own teeth, and not as a piece of engineering. The veteran television star Milton Berle smiled into our camera, his head from a vanished era, his mouth from beyond tomorrow. For anyone in my generation, Kirk Douglas would have looked like our greatest catch, but my generation was passing, and Kirk was well aware that his fame had passed to his son Michael. To get to Michael, we would have needed a congressional order. Kirk, however, was available, at the kind of charity event where they passed out caviar on a cardboard plate. His face was a challenge to credibility. I should say straight away that this encounter took place years before he had a stroke, after which he coped very bravely with impaired speech, a condition that would undoubtedly reduce me to tears of self-pity. But at this charity event, where everyone including me was dressed for the Wild West, Kirk was still in a condition where everything that had happened to his face recently had been a matter of choice. Once, Kirk’s face had been recognizable even if extreme. I think Barry Humphries was the first to say that the dimple in Kirk’s chin had originally been his navel, but in fact he had looked like that even before his first facelift. The first facelift, however, was now far in the past. Fifty-seven varieties of facelift had happened since, including that drastic intervention by which the flapping wattle below the jaw is not only removed, but the line under the jaw is lifted to conform with the line of the jawbone, so that in profile the victim looks as if his throat has been torn out by a wolf. Around his eyes, all the wrinkles had been removed, reducing the whole area to a glassy surface, from which the eyeballs popped like penguin’s eggs from sheet ice. The missing wrinkles had been bunched together and added to the edge of his face as a crêpe ruff. All of this is less fun to say than it sounds, but I have to record it because Kirk Douglas was a hero of mine for his realistic approach to show business. The author of an unusually sane autobiography, he was the man who had made the great analysis of fame, an analysis which can be paraphrased more or less like this: ‘Fame doesn’t change the way you behave, it changes the way other people behave towards you.’ It’s true. That is indeed fame’s most savage effect. Unless you keep your family close, you will hardly ever hear a trustworthy word from anyone. Kirk left out, though, the further fact that when a famous person tries to stay that way too long, all the changed behaviour of others will eventually change his behaviour as well. If the famous person is smart enough, he will try to take his name out of the sky at the right time. But Kirk wanted to go on being Kirk: hence the facial roadworks. At least the hair on top of his head looked like his own, even if some of it had not started its life on that part of his body. With other male stars, the hairpiece was widely in use. Most of the hairpieces were so improbable that they defied you not to burst out laughing. But some of them were convincing, and we decided that, rather than going for the obvious gag and kitting me out with a stupid wig, we should go through the process of having an upmarket version custom-made for me by the celebrated hair stylist José Eber. In his white silk suit, high-heeled boots and cowboy hat with feathers, José was better company than the plastic surgeon we had met the previous day. The plastic surgeon had shown me, on his computer, how my profile could be improved by taking a piece off the end of my nose and adding it to my chin. He also suggested that I should have my eyes lifted. This was good dialogue but he spoiled it by saying that he wanted to get into comedy and could I give him some tips. José was more confident in his mission. With many a sweeping gesture, he explained that I would need four copies of the piece: one for the day, one for the open car, one for the pool and one in the garage for repairs. ‘The one for the car you wear anywhere there is wind there. If there is a party you don’t want the piece flying off your head and ending up in the avocado dip there.’ He gestured with his scissors to indicate a flying rug. This he did while he was cutting the raw piece as it sat in situ on my bare skull. He was a master. Steadily the thing looked more normal. José had earned an Academy Award for his work on the back of Tom Cruise’s head in Rain Man and he was giving me the works. The results were stunning. Suddenly I saw the point. I had lost twenty years. I would also have lost twenty thousand dollars if José had built me the whole kit of pieces, but he was giving us one for free just to be in the movie.
To try the effect of José’s masterpiece of a piece on someone who had known me in days gone by, we enlisted the services of Dudley Moore, who at that stage of his life was spending more time running his Santa Monica restaurant than in the movie studios. His time as a Hollywood headliner was over and he wasn’t taking it well: too many pills and too many of the wrong women, all of them twice as tall as he was and most of them with half his intelligence. But somewhere in the depths of his racial memory he was still Dudley, and he took a visit by a crew from the old country as a chance to step back into his original persona as the sharp British wit while momentari
ly abandoning his Californian quest for spiritual fulfilment assisted by chemicals and a six-foot blonde sitting on his face. I explained the number to him and as an old revue hand he saw immediately where the sketch was going. I would walk in, complete with piece, and take up my position at the bar. In his role as proprietor, he would walk into shot, start a conversation and gradually become fixated on what was taking place on top of my head. He had his line ready first time. ‘Bought, or rented?’ We did a single shot on him and he added, ‘I know it isn’t yours, because the last time we met you had the same hairstyle as Telly Savalas. It’s a great job, though. I can’t see the join.’ In the editing room we had to trim the scene back for time, but there was enough left to show him in all his elfin charm, the Cuddly Dudley of old, brimming with talent and quick as light, still sparkling even as he drove the extra mile on the road to destruction. He was still a star.
Except for Chuck Pick of Pick’s Parking, the star faces were the story in Los Angeles. I remembered Chuck Pick from the night I saw him shouting hysterical orders to his team of drivers while they parked the vehicles of the arriving guests at a gala dinner for the visiting Queen in 1983. When the Postcard programme came up I said we had to get Chuck. When they saw Chuck in action, my crew realized why I had insisted. He and his team of Top Gun car-parkers were parking the cars at a party thrown by Cubby Broccoli. In the front drive of the house, Chuck jumped around shrieking to his drivers, telling them which car was to be parked where, screaming, ‘Go, go, go!’ and ‘Yeah, man, park that car!’ Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett, still together in those days, stepped out of a Bentley and were greeted by Chuck as personal friends. It looked like a surprise to them but it was great on film. Chuck carried on like a celebrity but he well knew that the movie stars outranked him, even though very few of them would know how to park a car under pressure.