Night Film(122)

“Someone living there,” I said.

She nodded but didn’t elaborate.

“Who? A servant?”

“Every paradise has its viper.” She smiled. “If Stanny had one weakness it was his belief that personality was fluid. He didn’t believe people could be evil, not in some pure form. He always liked a lot of people around him. Hangers-on, groupies, you’d call them, though he called them his allies. He hadn’t been living at The Peak a month when he met in town, quite by accident, a handsome young priest who’d also just moved to Crowthorpe to set up his parish. Stanny needed a religious adviser for a script he was working on, Thumbscrew, and the two men became friends. Within weeks, the priest was shacked up at The Peak. Genevra was furious. She loathed the man. He was hot as hell, a brawny Tyrone Power type with gold hair, blue eyes. Probably had one hell of a der Schwanz, if you catch my drift. He claimed to have been raised in the Iowan cornfields. But something was rancid about the man. Genevra tried to convince Stanny he was dangerous. An impostor. A leech. She was Italian, a staunch Catholic, and had noticed rather gaping holes in the man’s knowledge of the Church. She also believed he was unnaturally obsessed with her husband. Stanny told her to relax, that the man was fascinating, an inspiration.”

Marlowe took another long drink.

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I suspect one night Stanny went down to the crossroads to confront these townspeople and ended up hiding, watching them. By the time he returned to the mansion at dawn, he had a wildly different perspective on the entire business. I don’t know what he saw or what they did. Nothing was proven, but Genevra always believed that the priest had everything to do with it. That he’d made some kind of deal with these people, was perhaps even one of them.”

She sighed.

“So Stanny began his life there. Creatively, he came into his own. Certainly, his previous pictures were electrifying, but this new body of work he was producing at The Peak, it was a different dimension. He began to craft his night films. He explained it once. ‘Huey,’ he said to me. ‘I love to put my characters in the dark. It’s only then that I can see exactly who they are.’ ”

She fumbled with her long satin sleeves, smoothing the fabric over her knees. I didn’t say anything, mesmerized by what she was telling us about Cordova, and also by Marlowe herself. She’d grown so lucid and animated, she seemed entirely different from the woman we’d encountered before.

“Eventually there was no need for him ever to leave that property,” she continued. “Everything, everyone, came to him. He had three hundred acres. He built his sets there, edited his films there. When he had to leave, it was because he’d found a shooting location close to Crowthorpe. It was as if he’d come to believe his power could only be harnessed when he was on those grounds. And it was true. The quality of performances he was able to capture was astounding. His energy had no bounds. He was Poseidon, his actors his school of minnows. When you were working with Stanny on a picture you stayed at The Peak. You ate your meals there, you never left, were allowed no contact with the outside world. You turned your life over to him, handed him the keys to your kingdom. That meant your mind as much as your body. It was all agreed to beforehand. You showed up on the first day of production, ignorant and blind. You knew nothing about the film, or who your character was, or really anything at all except that your life as you’d known it was over. You were setting off on a new journey down a wormhole into something unknown. When you finally emerged three or four months later and returned home, you were changed. You realized before, you’d been asleep.”

“Why would anyone agree to such a thing?” Hopper asked, as she took another drink. “Signing away your life, your mind and body, to one man? He sounds like Charles Manson.”

She looked amused by his vehemence, narrowing her eyes at him.

“There’s the human desire to exert free will, yes. But there’s an equally strong desire to be tied up, gagged, and bound. Naturally, there was the glory that came with appearing in a Cordova picture. You were made. You would get the best roles after working with him. Even when he went underground. It gave you cachet. You were a warrior. Yet the true value of working with Stanny was not money or acclaim, it was the afterward. All us actors spoke of it. When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if all of the colors had been turned way up in your eyes. The reds were redder. Blacks blacker. You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen. You dreamed. And what dreams. Working with that irascible man was the most grueling time of my life. I accessed the deepest, most tormented parts of myself, parts I was petrified of opening because I doubted I’d ever get them closed again. Perhaps I never have. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. You were making a film. Something that would outlast you. Something wild. A powerful piece of art that wasn’t a commercial concoction, but something to slice into people, make them bleed. Living at The Peak, you were as underground as any resistance, working for the last true rebel. You were also learning how far you could go—in love and fear, in resilience and sex, in euphoria. To throw off what you’d been taught by society and make it all up for yourself. To live from scratch. Can you imagine the intoxication of such a thing? You come back from this and you realize the rest of the world is asleep, in a coma, and they don’t even know.”