Flicker (33 page)

As she spoke, I discovered she was maneuvering me into a particularly athletic sexual contortion. As always, I went along dutifully and found I was being offered a delicate and highly privileged avenue of access which I'd never have been bold enough to attempt without much urging. By this time, after three years of innovative lovemaking, I assumed our repertoire of postures and pleasures had gone as far
as it ever could; for it had indeed achieved an astonishing variety. But I was wrong. With a combination of embarrassment, curiosity, and delight, I followed where Clare guided, though hesitantly.

“What's the matter, lover?” she asked, sensing my uncertainty. “Afraid of entering new territory?” She laughed and coaxed me further along. And, as I toiled away, she began a languid disquisition on the artistic virtues of Val Lewton, the filmmaker she most closely associated with Castle. “Sure, we're getting into the down and dirty side of things,” she gasped between rapid and accelerating breaths. “But, believe me, some really interesting things happen in the lower depths. Relax and enjoy.”

Very possibly, even in the permissive early morning of the Pop Art sixties, a dissertation on the work of Max Castle, given the reputation he then held, wouldn't have passed muster in the academy. But when I hesitantly mentioned the possibility to my adviser, he was at least curious. “Castle … ?” he asked. “You mean
The Martyr …
that Castle? Came to a bad end, didn't he? What could you do with him?”

The American career of a once notable German director. That was how I described the project, decking it out with some general remarks about the influence of European talent and techniques during the period. “Sounds more like a historical than an aesthetic effort,” he suggested, mulling the idea over. “Maybe, maybe. But how much of his work can you still find?”

“I've got a line on a small private collection of his later films. About a dozen or so, the uncut versions, which are actually a lot better than you might expect.”

My adviser perked up at that. I seemed to be suggesting a work of some scholarly value. “I suppose you could come up with some interesting results. A critical commentary on the studio system, something like that. Why not give it a shot and see what you turn up?”

I had the distinct sense that the man was grateful for the chance I was offering to strike out after something new, perhaps even a bit daring. I knew for a fact that he had six students already working on
auteur
theory. (When I reported that to Clare, her comment was: “What a strange hell he must be living through.”) As I rose to leave his office, he observed, “You know, there seems to be a growing interest in this sort of thing. Pop culture, all that. I don't think we should be too stuffy about such matters. What the hell, Tom Pittman over in English tells me he's got a student working on Dashiell Hammett. Dashiell Hammett!”

I was launched. And I was never forced to look back. By the time I'd finished my dissertation two years further along, my adviser was guiding (or following) other students through graduate studies of Dick Powell musicals and the comedies of Harold Lloyd—and feeling gleefully liberated. But I was his star pupil. Because my dissertation was submitted with a personal contribution to the UCLA Film Archives of seventeen uncut thirty-five-millimeter Max Castle originals. By then, the films had twice been exhibited in special and exclusive festivals at The Classic, which (I so specified in my bequest) would retain in perpetuity the right to show Castle's works rent-free.

If I spend little time here on the two years of my graduate research, it's because these years did indeed race by like the wind. And that was mainly thanks to Clare. Her help came so generously and abundantly that it was all I could do to keep up with the flow of her thought. At points, I was really little more than her amanuensis taking down lecture notes—in fact, plagiarizing from my mentor. Of course, as long as I was only working at early drafts of the thesis, I could tell myself that everything I took from Clare would finally be reformulated in my own words, filtered through my own thoughts. But swept forward by the pressure Clare placed me under to get the job done, the rough drafts rapidly slid forward into finished chapters that were at best a loose paraphrase of her words. Occasionally, if I dared to introduce a few of my own still embryonic ideas about Castle, Clare would have none of it. She insisted, at times despotically, on recasting all I said and scrapping whatever she couldn't accept.

There was only one point at which I succeeded in making a personal imprint upon my thesis, though it was a minor one. The interviews. Though Clare saw no need for me to do it, I took it upon myself to chase down some of Castle's surviving friends and co-workers. I'd learned a great deal from Zip in our several conversations, points of fact, insights, more than a few mysteries that I was certain belonged in a full account of Castle's work. But I didn't want to base conclusions wholly on Zip's unconfirmed, often wayward, recollection. So I went hunting for others who might supplement what he had told me of Castle's Hollywood years. Though I didn't expect to find many, I made an ambitious start. Using an address supplied by my old pal Geoff Reuben, I sent off a long, flattering, wheedling letter to Louise Brooks. And then a second, and then a third. Rumor had it that she'd retired into hermetical seclusion after jumping off (or being dumped from) the Hollywood roller coaster. When last seen in public during
the war years, she was working behind a cosmetics counter in New York. Since then, a small cult had grown up around her early movies. I tried to use that as leverage in approaching her, playing the appreciative scholar to the hilt. Eight letters, no answer.

I had more luck closer to home, beginning with V. V. Valentine, head of Three Vs Studio, an independent filmmaker who had begun producing grade Z movies along the fringes of the troubled and tottering studios during the late forties. Valentine was universally regarded as one of the industry's most carnivorous schlockmeisters. He survived by waylaying greedy young talent as soon as it arrived in town and giving it the chance to make movies at slave wages. The result was a steady, high-earning stream of exploitation films produced at the rate of as many as a dozen a year. My interest in Valentine arose from a few remarks about him Zip had dropped in passing. At some point in the later thirties, the young Valentine, himself an eager greenhorn at the time, had begged his way aboard some of Castle's productions, beginning as a go-for, then as a minor grip. I checked back and, sure enough, there was his name (once as Walter Valentine, once as Virgil Valentine) buried among the lesser credits of Castle's last two films. Zip remembered Valentine as a pushy young pest who was constantly buttonholing Castle, trying to move in close and milk him for filmmaking tips. “Do you think he got much out of Castle?” I had asked.

“Ha!” Zip had scoffed. “All he ever learned was how to make 'em cheap. That guy once made a hot-rod movie in two days. It looked it too. What a louse he was. Tried to cut me out with Max, went around acting like he was number-two man on the set. Max used to string him along just for laughs.”

Reportedly, Valentine was a hard man to see, and even harder to like once you saw him. I got to him through a secretary who, as I would soon learn, had screwed up my message in transit. She apparently heard me say I was doing a study of Valentine's films. This, I gather, flattered him sufficiently to gain me an hour's interview in his garish North Hollywood office. Before I met the man his furnishings proclaimed financial success wholly unrelated to taste.

Valentine turned out to be a slovenly, sourpussed little man with a pot belly and a blubbery fish mouth. He was wearing the worst toupee I'd ever seen—and wearing it slightly askew. He bustled in forty minutes late, giving the impression of intense busy-ness.

“A Ph.D. dissertation, huh?” he began, savoring the words like an
unfamiliar delicacy as he eased back into a plush chair behind a cluttered desk. His voice was a deep, phlegm-laden growl. “Well, it's about time. I thought they did those just on European types. Rossellini, Bergman. Snob stuff like that.”

“Oh no,” I assured him. “We're branching out into popular American work.”

“Popular!”
Valentine beamed, punctuating the word with a slap on the desk. “That's the ticket. I mean after all we're talking movies, correct? You know how hard it is to be popular? Plenty hard. Any amateur schnook can make a movie isn't gonna be liked except by a couple hundred stuck-up critics. What's that to do? Ninety-six movies I made here. You know how many tickets I sold? Over five billion worldwide. That's
worldwide,
you heard me? In Hong Kong they show my stuff without any subtitles. Don't need 'em. A good story tells itself. Who needs a script, eh?” Swelling with self-satisfaction, he parked one foot on his desk. “Ask away, professor.”

I asked—starting with what he had learned from Castle.

“Castle? Max?” Valentine responded, taken by surprise. “Hey, that's going way back. Ancient history. What did I learn from Max? Well, a thing or two, a thing or two.” He fixed me with a defensive gaze. “Listen, it wasn't patented. What the hell. In this business everybody steals from everybody. Mostly what Max did for me was he gave me a start. That's important. I'll always be grateful. Just like, right here, I'm giving lots of kids their start. I got some talent working for me you wouldn't believe how talented it is. And what they're willing to work for—shows how grateful they are I'm giving them a break.”

“I mean,” I continued, pressing the point, “did you learn any technique from Castle. Special, unusual things.”

“If you wanna know, you couldn't trust that foxy son of a bitch. These tricks of his he was always using—he'd tell you one thing, it didn't work like that. You could go broke trying to do what he told you. Split lighting. Ha! I musta burned up a million bucks on that one. Buncha baloney.”

“What about the flicker? Did you ever talk with him about that?” I tried to put the question as casually as possible, as if I might be asking about common knowledge.

All I got back was a blank stare and a gruff “Huh?”

“Or the underhold?” I hastened to get the word in, hoping it might ring a bell. “Did Castle ever mention something like that?”

Now the stare turned suspicious. “Am I supposed to know what you're talkin' about here, sonny?” he asked back with distinct impatience.

I moved on rapidly. “What was Castle like—as a person, as a friend?”

Valentine gave me a shifty-eyed squint. “A spy. That's what I think he was. Don't quote me.”

“A spy?”

“A kraut spy, yeah.”

“Why do you say that?”

“All these shady types around the place he worked with, all talking kraut, you know.
Jawohl, jawohl, ach du lieber, gesundheit.
Fifth columnists. Don't quote me.”

“You're sure of that?”

He sniffed knowingly. “He told me.”

“Castle told you? What?”

He dropped into a husky whisper. “Secret messages. In the movies. Like, you know, code. 'Val,' he said to me (we were very close, very close), 'Val, you could conquer the world with the movies. You just gotta know how to stick the messages in there.' That's Nazi talk, am I right?”

I started to ask further about his conversations with Castle when Valentine cut me off, his face suddenly darkening with distrust. “Hey, what the fuck is this? Are we talking about Castle or are we talking about me?”

“Castle,” I answered, admitting, before I could think better of it, that we were at cross-purposes. Three minutes later I was on my way out of Valentine's office, washed along on a stream of abuse.

“You think I got time to waste on crap like this? Castle's a dead doornail, for God's sake. What's to talk about? He never taught shit, if you wanna know. Nobody does nobody any favors in this business. I got eight pictures in production right now. I'm a busy man. Go peddle your papers someplace else, sonny.”

My second interview was less abrasive but not much more informative. I was able to run down one Leroy Pusey, who had been a studio executive at Universal in the years Castle worked there. His name appeared as an associate producer on one of the Count Lazarus films. He was now well along into his seventies, surviving on one lung in a Pasadena rest home. He proved to be a pleasant, cooperative man, though he spent a long while catching his breath between sentences.
He clearly enjoyed having my company. Unfortunately, his recollection of Castle was dim and unreliable. “Arrogant,” he recalled, “very arrogant. They were like that, those German directors. Von Sternberg, Von Stroheim. Max wasn't in that league, but he could be just as arrogant. Never enough money. Complaining, complaining. Let's see, there was some picture we made about airplanes. What was it?
Dive Bomber, Crash Dive …
something like that.”

“I don't think Castle ever worked on any aviation pictures,” I corrected. I knew he hadn't.

“Test Dive
… I think. Something of that sort. With Robert Armstrong. We had a pretty good budget for that. But Max—listen to this—he wanted us to buy him three real airplanes. Just to crash them. No models, you see. Realism. We rented one plane for him finally, but not to crash. He crashed it anyway.”

“I don't think that was Castle,” I tactfully insisted, absolutely certain there was no such film in Castle's repertory.

“Sure, that was Max. He thought of himself as expensive talent. An MGM budget, that's what he expected. That's when we fired him—after he crashed the airplane. That finished him at Universal. To tell you the truth, I always believed he did it just to get himself fired. Airplanes—that wasn't his kind of movie. We replaced him with … I can't remember. Was it Otis Garrett?”

Now I wasn't sure if I should believe him or not. Perhaps Castle had sabotaged his way out of a contract at Universal. I tried to move the conversation toward more familiar ground. “What about
Count Lazarus?
Do you remember that?”