Flicker (90 page)

“Everything gets studied now,” I told him. “All the classics.”

“But my things, such nonsense they were. People like them?”

“You're what is called a cult phenomenon. First you're a cult, then you're a classic.”

He chuckled dryly. “Cult!”

“Along with Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Fred Astaire.”

“Hoot Gibson,” he added, his soundless laughter deepening.

“You didn't know about all this? Film culture?”

“A little, a little. They send me books, our friends. Sometimes magazines. After a while, one loses interest. What is the point, after all? There was something a long time ago … Nouvelle Vague. By now, no doubt, Vieille Vague.”

“Yes. Late fifties.”

“About that time I stopped keeping track.
Mise en scène,
montage … it seemed such nonsense, especially from this distance. Brother Eduardo sent me your brochure from the Museum of Modern Art. My retrospective. I remember that.”

“It was your rediscovery.”

“You found so many of my things! I thought they would be scrapped.”

“Many were.”

He cocked his head inquisitively. “There was something in the brochure. At the back. An announcement. Another series. Hitchcock. They study Hitchcock?”

“He's very highly regarded.”

He rasped out his dry little laugh. “Amazing. Hitchcock.”

“A definite classic.”

“Amazing. Such a boor he was, that man. Quite deranged. The thing about the blond women. Very sad. If I had been given just half the money he …” Then, catching himself, he fell silent. “That's the first time in years I've thought such a thing. I had hoped all that was behind me.” He wagged his finger at me in a half-serious reprimand. “You are a bad influence on me.”

That night we talked late, rambling on and on in the tropic darkness, following wherever his curiosity and ragged attention took us. He was fascinated to know how I'd reconstructed so much of his career, the shreds and fragments I'd collected here and there over the years. The story of his
Judas Everyman,
its hairbreadth escape from obliteration, amazed him, though he remembered the film only dimly as a flawed and abandoned effort. As for his later B-movies, he showed some embarrassment at their mention. He regarded them all as gravely compromised works done only to keep him financially afloat. I told him how Zip Lipsky had tried to burn them on his funeral pyre; he told me he wished the little man had succeeded. “So much better for you if he had done it. I would have gone up in a puff of smoke. And you could now be safely at the university studying … Hitchcock.” We talked at length about Zip. “A great natural talent. A perfect eye.” Sadly, he confessed, “I didn't always treat him well. Still, I gave him his chance, didn't I?” He lit up to hear about Olga Tell, pleased to know she remembered him fondly. “And she kept the film I gave her! For so many years. She was the most beautiful girl.”

In the course of the early evening, he managed to assemble a modest repast for us. Cheese, fruit, berries, nuts, a creamy coconut pudding, a highly spiced vegetable broth. I gathered it was the diet he lived on. Meager fare. Still he was, for his age, agile enough to meet his own needs and tend his garden: all in all, a wiry vital old guy. We ate from a single plate, sharing the tin cup, a fork, a spoon, a knife. One of everything, including a single wineglass from which we sipped our brandy, he quite a bit more than I. He seemed well supplied with drink. I caught sight of a couple of still unopened bottles in a cabinet. There was but one dope pipe as well. That came out toward midnight, with a small canister of hashish. I wasn't yet in the market for the habit; I let him puff away alone.

I did most of the talking that evening, though with less and less certainty that I was getting through to him as the liquor and hash began to take effect. His attention would come and go like clouds blowing across the sky. At times, I had the disturbing sense that I was in the presence of incipient senility, a growing mental vacuum where my words sank into uncomprehending blackness. But then, he would brighten, smile gently, make some remarkably sharp observation. I could only conclude that much of what I had to say bored
him, things he'd lived beyond caring about. Finally, sometime well past midnight as I judged, he slipped into a deep, snoring snooze. Outside, in the silence, the strange night birds I never managed to see took over the conversation, chattering and warbling into the wee hours.

Still wakeful myself, I crossed the room to check his bookcase. There were three shelves of books on horticulture, natural history, geography. These seemed the most used of his books, the bindings cracked, the pages dog-eared. Beyond that, there was a collection of German literary classics, Grimm's fairy tales, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Old editions, dust-covered. There was exactly one book on film: Kracauer's
From Caligari to Hitler.
But then what did one of the century's greatest directors need with film studies? There were some Gnostic gospels and Cathar tracts. Like his German literature, these volumes were well along the way to acquiring a patina of dust and mold. The only English works I could see were anthologies of Verne and Conrad, W. H. Hudson's
A Crystal Age,
Bulwer-Lytton's
Zanoni,
a few Raymond Chandler paperbacks … and mercifully, a collection of S. J. Perelman which I decided at once to borrow. The only comic relief in sight from here to eternity.

On the pillow of his bed lay an open book face down. The works of Poe, copiously annotated. The volume was stuffed with scribbled sheets of paper. I couldn't make out the German chicken scratching, but I could tell what I was looking at. A collection of pencil-drawn movie-screen squares, each filled with an exquisitely delicate little sketch. A storyboard in the making. Mental movies. The best the old boy could manage with pencil and paper in his solitary confinement. Sad, sad.

I dropped down on the bed and, having nothing better to do, began to read where he'd left off. The last stanza of a poem.

Out—out are the lights—out all!

And over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

And the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy “Man,”

And the hero the Conqueror Worm.

I'd never been able to take Poe seriously; as horror fiction, time had brought his work to the borders of campiness. But that night, lost as I was up some blind alley of the universe never to be found, his Gothic elegy turned the tropic night cold about me. The shadows of the room closed in like a fist of bone. I listened, chilled, to my host's labored snore, an old, old man struggling to suck the thick air into his frail and failing lungs. So this was how he read himself to sleep, doting on images of death and decay. He was an Orphan of the Storm all right, even in his exile and disgrace.

Suddenly feeling claustrophobic, I wandered onto the porch, snatching up the bottle of brandy that stood open on the table as I passed. The air, though warm and heavy, was fragrant with the flowering of the old man's garden. The pungent odors of fertility momentarily chased away the morbid images of the poem. I plumped down on the steps and took a few swigs from the bottle. Studying the stars at the horizon, I picked out the Southern Cross where he said it would be. So that was south. I'd learned that much today. Not the way to go, if I ever got the chance to sail away. Next stop in that direction was—my God!—Antarctica. My heart gave a tremor. I was staring out over the edge of the earth. I took another mouthful of brandy and stretched out on the floorboards, my thoughts filled with the contemplation of cold stars, glacial landscapes. Dante believed that the core of hell is ice. As far as you can get from the fire of divine love.

When I woke, the dawn was a thin veil of light across the sky. A familiar chatter—hungry and pugnacious birds—cluttered the morning with song here as it did at my end of the island. A bit stiff but sufficiently rested, I rose and looked back into the bungalow. My host was still snoring away where I'd left him, slumped in his chair. I decided to let him enjoy his lingering dope dreams. But before departing, I gathered up the scattered remnants of my manuscript to take away. It was
my
work, after all. Probably there were dozens of pages missing, but what difference did that make? I used my belt to package the manuscript and set off for home.

I decided to let several days pass before I visited again. There was no rush. The company of my aged cellmate was hardly exhilarating. In fact, it was spooky—to be accepting the hospitality of a dead man. Something to be taken in small doses, especially if I had another ten, twenty, thirty years to spend with him. (“Them orphans,” I remembered Zip Lipsky saying, “they live forever.”) What a thought! Besides,
I had something to busy myself with: my manuscript. I reassembled it, discovering there were only fifteen pages missing—probably lying around his bungalow—and began to comb through his notes. His handwriting was almost a code—and in German yet. Even if it had been English, I doubt I could have deciphered more than half of what he'd written. But I could understand enough to learn how much I'd overlooked or gotten wrong.

There was a ton of commentary on the inside politics of the early German movie studios and their many hidden connections with the orphans. What he had to say on that topic alone would have been a revelation of the highest order—if the tale could ever be told to the outside world. Most of it had to do with
Judas Everyman;
there was more behind the film than I'd realized. It was begun by all concerned with high hopes. Even after the failure of
Simon the Magician,
UFA gamely went ahead with
Judas,
fully intending to make it the great expressionist epic of the era. Quite a vote of confidence in its young director. The film was to be the orphans' supreme bid for mass influence. The poet Rilke was to write the titles—in verse; Alban Berg was commissioned to produce a special orchestral score for the premiere. As for the sets and lighting—I'd always wondered who was responsible for designing this grisly little masterpiece; now I found out. It was the celebrated sick-Gothic fantasist Alfred Kubin. Offhand, I couldn't recall when a comparable collection of talent had been put to work on a movie. And to think the project was entrusted to a youth not yet twenty-five years old. But then the orphans, at that early stage of film history, expected their director to do little more than play traffic cop on the set. And take orders from his elders in the church. That wasn't what happened.

Instead, their star pupil turned out to be a spoiled-brat-genius who wanted to make his own movie in his own way. The result was two years of aesthetic warfare over every detail of the film. He remembered the episode now as his first serious clash with the orphans, who found the movie too purely “artistic” for their tastes, too short on doctrinal teachings. They demanded changes he wouldn't make. Finally, they quashed the project and served notice that he was expected to return to the cheap sensationalism of his Grave Robber period, formula films that could be more easily freighted with approved themes and imagery. It was a prophetic encounter, his earliest realization that the orphans, who had trained him and who dominated
so much of the film industry around him, had no essential interest in art, much less in autocratic directors who wanted to set their own priorities. More than anything else, this falling out over the
Judas
made him decide to leave for America, where he hoped to find more latitude for his talents.

The same grievance ran through his comments on
The Martyr,
which filled the backs of eight pages of my manuscript. I couldn't make out more than every third word of what he'd written, but the slash and thrust of his handwriting on the page would have been enough to make his feelings clear. Anger, outrage, insult. The old wound still bled beneath the scab. He claimed any number of innovations for the film, remembering it as the only movie spectacle that could be said to possess artistic merit. Of course he was free to attribute all the excellence he could imagine to footage that had been destroyed a half century before.

It was interesting to me to learn that the orphans had done more to scuttle the movie than MGM; their influence in the American studios could be that great. The issue was the same: a demand for changes he wouldn't agree to make even when the orphans threatened to disown him. Which they soon did, providing less and less support as he slid into the shadow zone of Hollywood. The relationship remained cruelly ambiguous for the next several years, the orphans offering minor stipends, marginal connections, always seeming to promise that, in return for good behavior and submissive cooperation, they might rehabilitate his dwindling reputation.

Meanwhile, he carried on as best he could, smuggling small measures of quality into the shoestringers he found himself directing. He admitted to taking some pride in a few of these efforts. There were lengthy comments attached to my analysis of the
Count Lazarus
films; they detailed all that I'd missed, in some cases referring to scenes or shots I couldn't remember seeing. Perhaps he was making it up or his memory had, over the years, embroidered this distant work with fantasies that never found their way into film. Most intriguing of all, I came across mention of several films he claimed to have directed under other names: not his own, not Maurice Roche. And others still on which he assisted without credit. A few of these—Karl Freund's
Mummy,
Paul Leni's
The Cat and the Canary,
Edgar Ulmer's
Black Cat
—I already knew about. They were minor classics of their genre—“trash classics,” as Sharkey would have called them. Others—
Casino
Lady, Swamp Creature, Murder Thumbs a Ride
—couldn't claim that much distinction. What hell it must have been for him to sink his talents in such wretched stuff.