Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(59)

“Which prize?”

“I don’t know. Darling, I can’t believe it,” she said.

At last there was a telegram—I had felt that I might not see her again—“Coming Monday Rapido 5. Afternoon,” and signed with her name. It was sent from Ljubljana—Yugoslavia.

I met the train. It was thrilling to see her coming along the platform, a porter behind her with her bags. Some things are only good the first time but seeing her was like the first time. I knew she would say “darling.” I knew I would say, “I adore you.”

The film festival had left a glow. At a reception there, among scores of faces, she had seen a young man in a silk foulard with a brilliant unwavering smile, a wide smile, “like a killer’s.” She was wearing a white beaded dress. Her arms were bare. Fifteen or twenty minutes later she saw him again. The second barrel, as the lawyers say, was fatal. She said only, “Let’s leave.” Without a word he offered her his arm.

I listened with some unhappiness but without anger. Faithfulness was not what I expected.

“You’ll get to the top,” I told her, almost reluctantly, “but you shouldn’t . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“If I don’t become too much of a whore,” she said.

We drove to Paris, coming up through the Rh?ne Valley. Past Dijon we were on a back road along a canal and came to a wide dam where fishermen’s lines dropped forty or fifty feet into clear green water. The dark shapes of fish—I took them to be pike—were coasting lazily about. We watched the biggest ones approach, ignore the bait, and move off to lie motionless. “Like sultans,” she commented. I felt she knew.

In some mysterious way that I accepted without wonder, the film I had been writing with little conviction went into production in 1968. At Cannes, the following year, its screening was less than a triumph. The audience, at a moment when it should have felt fulfillment, broke into loud laughter. On the terrace of the Carlton afterward, I could not help overhearing the acid remarks. There was some brief pleasure in having my doubts confirmed.

Movies are like passion, brilliant and definitive. They end and there is an emptiness. “The vulgar falsehoods of the cinema,” as someone has put it. They are narcotic; they allow one to forget—to imagine and forget. Looking back, I suppose I have always rejected the idea of actors as heroes, and no intimacy with any of them has changed this. Actors are idols. Heroes are those with something at stake.

During the war, I remembered, we went to movies almost nightly. We laughed at them as the men and women in evening dress at Cannes had laughed at mine.

Nevertheless, filled with ambition, I had wanted to direct a film of my own. I had a story by Irwin Shaw, and a star—Charlotte Rampling—who had agreed to be in it. Then she changed her mind. At the last minute, after we flew all night to Rome, where she was shooting something else, she was persuaded to be in the film again. Visconti, she said—he was just then directing her—was a true genius. I tried not to be disheartened. I was judging her unfairly, by her conversation and personality, while there she was, flesh and blood and willing to perform. She refused dinner—to get back to a boyfriend, I was sure—and after twenty or thirty minutes raced off in a car. Her agreement to be in the film, however, enabled us to get the money to make it.

I was to learn many things about her: that she chewed wads of gum, had dirty hair, and, according to the costume woman, wore clothes that smelled. Also that she was frequently late, never apologized, and was short-tempered and mean. The boyfriend, a blond highwayman, was a vegetarian. He prescribed their food. “Meat,” he murmured in a restaurant, looking at the menu. “That’ll kill you.” In the morning sometimes they danced maniacally in the street, like two people who had just had an enormous piece of luck. During the day, after every scene, she flew into his arms like a child while he kissed and consoled her.

Midway through shooting—we were near Avignon—she refused to continue unless her salary was doubled and her boyfriend took over as director. She got the money, but the producer refused to back the mutiny. When I heard what had happened, I found it hard to suppress my loathing, although in retrospect I wonder if it might not have been a good thing. The boyfriend might have gotten some unimagined quality from her and made of the well-behaved film something crude but poignant—something compelling.

The truth is, the temperament and impossible behavior of stars are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties—these are the stuff of the myths. Modern deities should be no different.

In the end the film we made, Three, was decorous and mildly attractive. It was popular at Cannes and had some flattering reviews in America. A young women’s magazine voted it the selection of the month and critics had it on their ten-best lists, but they were alone in this. Audiences thought otherwise.

There were opportunities to direct again, but I remembered lying on the stone beach at Nice late one day, when we were close to finishing, wearing a pair of Battistoni shoes, and feeling utterly spent. I felt like an alcoholic, like Malcolm Lowry. It seemed the morning after. I looked down and saw the white legs of my father. All of it had demanded more than I was willing to give again.

For its real adherents the life never ended. I liked the stories of producers driving down to Cap d’Antibes in convertibles with two or three carefree girls. I had had notes placed in my hand by the wives of leading men, bored and unattended to, that said in one way or another, “Call me,” and had seen actors emerging from the Danieli in Venice, wrapped against the fall weather in expensive coats, fur-lined within and cloth without. The fur was the luxury in which they lived, the cloth a symbol of the ordinary world from which they were removed. Off to Torcello for lunch, jolting across the wide lagoon, the wind blowing the dark green water to whiteness, past San Michele with its brick walls, the island on which Stravinsky and Diaghilev lay buried—the real and the false glory, one moving past the other, though there are times when one cannot tell which is which.