Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(56)
On the strength of this initial success, Lane and I formed a company and made documentaries—ten or twelve of them, scraped together, some of them eloquent. We travelled over the country, flying, driving, checking into motels, the mindless joy of America, beer bottles lying by the roadside, empty cans tumbling like paper. It is his curious charm that I remember, and how quickly he could make himself liked.
Our final film was on American painters: Warhol before his real recognition, Rauschenberg, Stuart Davis, a dozen others. Then Lane’s older son was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and died a few days afterward. We had already begun gradually to separate. Perhaps we had lost the power to amuse each other.
In 1963, about the time that Lane and I stopped working together, a friend introduced me to Peter Glenville, an Englishman who had directed Rashomon on the stage and the film Becket, and had an undeniable gift. I was invited to dinner—there were four of us, all men, in his New York town house—the meal served by a uniformed maid. Toward the end of the meal, Glenville asked if I would be interested in writing a script, a story he wanted to make in Italy. The mere proposal seemed a reward. He was showing his faith in me; he had tapped me, as it were.
I was sent a typewritten outline and felt, upon reading it, disappointment. It was trash: a young man in Rome, a lawyer, meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl who is strangely evasive about her personal life. She is either uncertain and innocent or—the evidence is flimsy, but his suspicions mount—a call girl. He marries her anyway, but incidents recur that are disturbing. I have forgotten the cliché climactic moment: Does she attempt suicide? Is there a final reconciliation amid the white sheets of the ospedale?
It was called “The Appointment.” I told Glenville frankly that it would never possess the least merit. He understood my misgivings, but still the theme of jealousy was interesting and the locale . . .
The film’s producer called from California. He had talked at length to Glenville. They were confident that I was the one to write the film. Forgetting everything, I inhaled.
I arrived in Rome with the name of a Count Crespi, Glenville had supplied it. The Count was cool on the telephone. I had to wait several days for an appointment.
He came out of his office to introduce himself, tan, handsome face, ears close to his head, shattering smile. “I am Crespi,” he said, taking me into a small, plain room, where he sat down across from me.
I told him the story of the film, and he began without hesitation to suggest things. The girl, instead of being a model, which was rather commonplace, might work at Vogue, where his wife’s former secretary, a very clever girl who spoke four or five languages . . . but Vogue is already a little too fancy, perhaps, he decided. A salesgirl in a boutique, he thought, or perhaps, yes, even better, a mannequin in one of the couture houses—Fourquet on Via dei Condotti, for example. “She may earn only eighty thousand lire a month, but it’s interesting work, she meets people, a certain kind of person with money, taste. If she has something to attend, Fourquet will probably lend her one of his expensive dresses.”
With heroic charm he began to describe the man in the film, the somewhat proper lawyer. He has a good car, he goes dancing, to the beach. He loves sport, like all Italians, though not as a participant, of course, and there is also something traditional about him—he still goes home every day at noon to eat with his mother.
Crespi’s enthusiasm and his willingness to provide details increased my confidence. There might be a tone, I began to feel, a manner of presenting the film, that would redeem it. As we talked on, Crespi began to shift his view, to see the lawyer as less sophisticated, not from Fellini’s Rome, where people had seen everything, but from a place in a more provincial town, Piacenza or Verona. Yes, he said, he saw it as a really romantic story.
At a dinner in the country a week or so later, I tried to follow the conversation and the bursts of laughter at the table. It was all wicked and in Italian. We were in a garden, grouped around an animated woman named Laura Betti. She was a singer and an actress. Pasolini and Moravia had written lyrics for her songs, and she performed all the Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht repertory in Italian. She talked constantly, a cigarette between her fingers. Her laugh was irresistible. Smoke poured from her mouth. She was blond, a bit heavy, perhaps thirty years old, the sort of woman who proudly wore a sadness.
We were in the ancient world, it seemed, in the cool air, the darkness beneath the vines. There were six or seven of us. They were eating from one another’s plates and talking about everyone: about the famous actress who liked to make love in two ways at the same time—you could always recognize such women, Laura Betti said, by the way they looked over their shoulder with a knowing smile; or about the madwoman who walked the streets singing about a little boy’s dove that she had touched with her tongue. It was all about love, or, more truly, desire. Rome was a village that had no secrets. They knew everything, even the names of the four countesses who had picked up an eleven-year-old Gypsy girl one night and brought her to a noted journalist to watch him have his pleasure with her.
The script I was writing, they asked, what was its nature? Though feeling that it sounded naive, I described it. Perhaps it should not take place in Rome, I suggested—someone had mentioned Piacenza.
“Bologna,” Laura Betti said. “That’s where it could take place. It is famous for three things. Its learning—it has the oldest university in Italy; its food; and, lastly, its . . .” Here she used the most common word describing fellatio.