2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (27 page)

Eventually Spiegel borrowed the money from a sound equipment company. Meanwhile, James Agee (the novelist and film critic who also wrote the text for
Let Us Praise Famous Men
, Walker Evans’s classic photographic record of the Deep South) was working away on the screenplay. Before it was finished, Agee (a heavy smoker) had a heart attack. Huston roughed out the film’s conclusion before leaving America, then finished it off at Entebbe in Uganda. Huston continues:

C. S. Forester had told me that he had never been satisfied with the way
The African Queen
ended. He had written two different endings for the novel; one was used in the American edition, the other in the English. Neither one, he felt, was satisfactory. I thought the film should have a happy ending. Since Agee’s health never permitted him to come to Africa, I asked Peter Viertel to work on the final scenes with me. He and Gige joined us in Entebbe before we started shooting, and together we wrote my ending—the ending we later filmed.

Huston’s triple-decked solution to the finale is clever. At first the film ending, like the English edition of the novel, appears to be an indictment of foolhardy heroism. Charlie Allnutt (Humphrey Bogart) and Rosie Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) are captured by the Germans after the
African Queen
has sunk in the storm. They are condemned to death by hanging for spying. A bittersweet taste is then induced when the German captain agrees to marry them, even though the nooses are round their necks. The final twist comes when the hull of the
African Queen
rises to the surface with a pair of Charlie’s homemade torpedoes clearly visible.

After a wonderful long shot dramatising imminent collision (filmed from the point of view of the
African Queen
itself), the
Königin Luise
sails smack into the risen hull. The impact sets off one of the percussive detonators Allnutt has constructed from revolver cartridges, nails and blocks of wood—and the torpedo explodes. Covered in flames, the German ship tips over and the newly married couple are catapulted clear. There is no mention of any British motor boats like the
Mimi
and
Toutou
clones in the novel, nor does a Spicer-Simson character appear.

Yet there is a vestigial connection to the Naval Africa Expedition whose exploits gave rise to Forester’s story. Much of
The African Queen
was filmed in the Upper Congo—on a tributary of the Lualaba, the same river that Spicer and his men went up. Huston established a camp at Biondo on the Ruiki. As he wrote: ‘A narrow winding river with trees and heavy vines arching overhead, it was ideal for our purposes.’ The site, near Ponthierville (now Ubundu), was about 300 miles north of where Spicer’s men were operating on the Lukuga and about 50 miles south of Stanley Falls. This was where Conrad was heading on his 1890 river journey, which he fictionally transmuted into the Inner Station in
Heart of Darkness
—where Marlow finds shrunken heads on the poles outside Kurtz’s house and has to come to terms with the imperial enterprise on which he is engaged.

The ending of Huston’s movie was filmed near another great waterfall: Murchison Falls at the source of the Nile in Uganda. There was also some filming at Butiaba on the shores of Lake Albert. It was at Butiaba in 1951 that Huston (who had been flying all over Central Africa scouting for locations) had found the half-wrecked hull of the boat that would become the
African Queen
. It was almost certainly the former
Kema
, a 40-foot steam-launch ‘manned by a crew of jolly Swahili tars smartly dressed in white breeches and blue jerseys’, upon which a young Winston Churchill had sailed before the First World War (see
My African Journey
, 1908).

After crossing to the Congo side of Lake Albert, the
African Queen
was brought down to Ponthierville by lorry and thence to Biondo under her own power. Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall arrived by train from Stanleyville, along with Hepburn and Spiegel. Much of the filming would be done on a mock-up of the
African Queen
that had been built on a raft. There were about 50 people in the crew.

Huston writes that at the Ruiki site they had ‘what must certainly have been the strangest flotilla African waterways had ever seen’. But then, he didn’t know about Spicer—unless the use of that navy word ‘flotilla’ (which would eventually supply the title of Shankland’s account) is a sign that someone had told him the story behind Forester’s novel. Whatever the case, there were certainly echoes of Spicer’s adventure during the shoot:

The
African Queen
would furnish the power to pull four rafts—we hoped. On the first raft—and this was my idea—we built a replica of the
Queen
. That raft itself became our stage. We could put cameras and equipment on it and move around, photographing Katie and Bogie in the mock-up with as much facility as we’d have on a studio floor. The second raft carried all of the equipment, light and props. The third was for the generator. The fourth was Katie’s, equipped with a privy, a full-length mirror and a private dressing-room. This turned out to be one too many for the little
Queen
to tow, so we had to drop Katie’s raft. Katie had to use the jungle toilet like the rest of us. Her full-length mirror got broken very quickly; those two halves were broken again, and finally she was reduced to using hand-held pieces of mirror while she did her make-up.

Huston and Bogart—whom Hepburn would characterise as ‘jerks…two over-male men’ in her own book on the experience—used to write suggestive words in soap on the mirror. Huston’s nickname was ‘the Monster’, because of the way he treated cast members and crew, all of whom were already suffering from dysentery and insect bites and other illnesses (Jack Cardiff, the film’s brilliant first cameraman, went down with malaria). Huston says he and Bogart escaped illness by always drinking Scotch with their water; Hepburn says they just drank Scotch.

The business of shooting film of the moving boat was somewhat reminiscent of the Naval Africa Expedition’s journey up the Lualaba. As Hepburn recalls:

John would scream—Bogie and I would jump—and the boiler would be tipped over, or nearly. The canopy would be torn off. The camera or lamps or whatever was caught by the overhanging shrubbery on the banks. Or we would be going along nicely—hit a submerged log and catch on it. Or the sun would go in. Or it would rain. The hysteria of each shot was a nightmare. And there was always the uncertain factor of Bogie and me and whether John thought we’d done a scene well. Or the engine on the
Queen
would stop. Or one of the propellers would be fouled by the dragging rope. Or we would be attacked by hornets. Or a stray pirogue would suddenly appear in the shot.

Another difficulty was soldier ants, whose nightly forays into the camp were prevented by lighting trenches of kerosene. The biggest potential disaster was when the
Queen
sank.

‘We got her up eventually by sheer manpower,’ wrote Huston, ‘patched the holes in her, and she continued to function.’ In the film, when the
Queen
goes over a waterfall, wooden models were used at half-scale. These boats were carved by monks in Ponthierville; nuns had the responsibility of making miniature Hepburns and Bogarts to fit inside the boats. The nuns and monks were presumably chosen because they had skill in carving religious statues.

When about half the filming was done, they moved back to Butiaba on Lake Albert. This journey was made on an East African Railways and Harbours paddle-steamer called the
Lugard II
, whose Captain Phimister had methods similar to those employed on the Lualaba by Blaes (the choleric Walloon with whom Spicer fell out). ‘We got to the edge of Lake Albert,’ wrote Hepburn, ‘and seemingly there was nothing ahead but a huge field—swamp—high reeds. Phimister would back us up, then ram into the reeds at full tilt. After a few rams we pushed forward into open water.’

The crew lived on the
Lugard
when it got to Lake Albert, and it also played the
Konigin Luise
in the film. The exact details of which ship performed this role have always been something of a mystery, despite
The African Queen
being one of the most studied location shoots ever (along with
Apocalypse Now
and
Fitzcarraldo
, for not unrelated reasons). According to an interview with the still photographer on the shoot, Arthur Lemon: ‘We lived on an old paddle-steamer called the
Lugard II
which had been art directed to look like a German gunboat—the one that eventually gets blown up in the film.’

The
kungu
seem to have put in an appearance, too.

As Lemon explained in an interview for
Better Photography
magazine: ‘Each evening, as the sun went down, lake flies would hatch out and swarm everywhere. Everything on the boat had to be shut up tight. They only survived thirty minutes or so and then died and fell back onto the surface of the water. Great for the Nile perch who would swim along like vacuum cleaners and scoop them up for dinner. Some of these fish were huge.’↓

≡ There is one moment in the film when Bogart is enveloped by a swarm of insects, but these seem to be mosquitoes rather than
su
.

Dinner was not something the cast thought much of while living on the
Lugard
. Everyone save Bogart and Huston (who both ‘came to the table well fortified’, according to Hepburn) went down with amoebic dysentery and diarrhoea. It was discovered that the boat’s water-filters weren’t functioning properly. There was always a queue for the toilet, where the runs turned out not to be the only problem, as Huston recalls:

One day Kevin McClory [the film’s boom boy, later a Hollywood producer] came out of it headlong with his pants down his ankles, shouting ‘Black mamba! Black mamba!’ He had been sitting there when he looked up and saw a black cylinder moving above his head. The black mamba is one of the few really aggressive snakes around, and quite deadly. We all got a glimpse of it as it slid down out of the toilet into the elephant grass…From that moment all symptoms of diarrhoea in camp disappeared.

A large motor boat called the
Murchison
ferried the cast and crew around during this period and was also used to transport supplies between the filming location and the village of Butiaba. The
Murchison
had another moment of fame three years later when it was waved down by Ernest Hemingway after his plane crashed during an African safari. The pilot had clipped a telegraph wire after swerving to avoid a flock of sacred ibis.↓

≡ The
Murchison
was chartered by a Scottish surgeon called Ian McAdam (later Sir Ian McAdam) who, after training a generation of East African doctors, was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972. McAdam picked up Hemingway and his wife and took them to Butiaba—where they caught another bush plane and promptly crashed again. Hemingway, who ruptured his liver and one of his kidneys and suffered paralysis of the sphincter muscle as a result of the second crash, was reported worldwide as having died. He was a great admirer of the author of
The African Queen
(‘I recommend Forester…’).

It wasn’t the only vessel to have a curious afterlife: the boat that played the role of the
African Queen
is now berthed outside the Holiday Inn, Key Largo, Florida, as a tourist attraction. But the strangest survival of all was one much more intimately connected with Spicer-Simson’s quest to be a hero…

D
eo Gratias stood on the deck of the
Liemba
, his prisoners at his feet. I leaned on the rail, studiously casual. Nobody spoke. I was trying to ignore the handcuffed men and the way they were kneeling and shivering. We were in the tropics, it was hot, but they were huddling together. It was fear, of course, that permanent trembling motion, and the deep furrows in their brows were marks of dread.

I had fallen silent wondering why these heavily scored lines in the men’s foreheads were more disturbing to me than the more obvious knife-gash across the throat of the one with tufty hair and up-staring eyes. The edges of his wound had been sewn together with spiky stitches—recently and roughly, too, by the look of it.

The engine churned as the slow grey surface of Lake Tanganyika rolled beneath us. We could still see the Tanzanian shore, but the Congolese side to the west was lost in a haze of mist. Finally I asked Deo Gratias what crimes were most commonly committed on the
Liemba
. Mainly stealing, he told me, lisping like a schoolgirl.

‘And
lape
, ‘ he added, grinning now, spittle flying excitedly from his lips. ‘You know
lape
’? It is when you go inside.’

He made a sign with his hand, sighing gleefully.

His full name was Deo Gratias Webiro. He was 27. Wearing a red baseball cap and a linen suit and carrying a leather satchel, he was employed by the Tanzanian Ministry of the Interior. He was to be distinguished from the khaki-clad
askaris
on board. They were just ordinary policemen. Uneducated men, as he described them to me.
Uneducated men
, I wrote in my notebook.

Deo Gratias’s two charges were crouched with their backs against a capstan. One was grizzled and had a stricken expression that reminded me of sinners in Renaissance paintings. The other one—with the sewn-up throat—was wild-haired, trampish, like a reggae star fallen on hard times.

Deo Gratias pointed to him. ‘This one, he keeps trying to cut his own throat.’ Then he pointed at the grizzled sinner: ‘He murdered a friend, beating him with sticks. This one will be hanged, I think.’

Nearby, a man in a skullcap had unrolled his that and begun to pray. Above him I spotted some graffiti written in black felt-tip on the ship’s white paintwork. The Swahili words read
Wapi Mama Shakira?
(‘Where’s Mama Shakira?’), apparently a reference to the
Liemba
’s, most famous prostitute, now dead. Also scrawled on the wall were the words
Good Lucky Kajembe
and, in a different hand,
Al Qaeda
.