Lost at Sea (11 page)

“Did he look at them all?” I ask.

“All!” he says. “With tremendous excitement! One time he wanted me to do the whole of Commercial Road. But he didn’t want the buildings tilting back or forward in the photographs. So I had to take a ladder. I’d climb the ladder, take the picture, get down, move the ladder twelve feet, and on and on. Commercial Road is a very long road. Stanley was constantly on the phone going, ‘Have you finished yet? How fast can you get here?’”

Manuel says once he reached the end of Commercial Road, he hurried straight to the St. Albans branch of Snappy Snaps to get the pictures developed. Then he assiduously taped them together to form a perfect panorama of the whole of Commercial Road. Back at the Kubrick house he carefully laid the panorama out—like a homemade Google street view years before Google had conceived of such a thing—down a long corridor. Kubrick emerged from his room, looked at it, and said: “Well. It sure beats going there.”

So was it all worth it? Was the hooker doorway eventually picked for
Eyes Wide Shut
the quintessential hooker doorway? Back at home I watch
Eyes Wide Shut
again on DVD. The hooker doorway looks exactly like any doorway you would find in Lower Manhattan—maybe on Canal Street or in the East Village. It is a red door, up some brownstone steps, with the number 265 painted on the glass at the top. Tom Cruise is pulled through the door by the hooker. The scene is over in a few seconds. It was eventually shot on a set at Pinewood.

I remember the Napoleon archive, the years it took Kubrick and some assistants to compile it, and I suggest to Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s executive producer and brother-in-law (and Manuel’s father), that had there not been all those years of attention to detail during the early planning of the movie, perhaps
Napoleon
would have actually been made.

“That’s a completely theoretical and obsolete observation!” replies Jan. “That’s like saying if Vermeer had painted in a different style he’d have done a hundred more paintings.”

“OK,” I say.

“Why don’t you just accept that this was how he worked?” says Jan.

“But if he hadn’t allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he’d have made more films,” I say. “For instance, the ‘Space: 1999’ lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial.”

“Of course I wish he had made more films,” says Jan.

Jan and I are having this conversation inside the stable block, surrounded by hundreds of boxes. For the past few days I have been reading the contents of those marked “Fan Letters” and “Résumés.”

They are filled with pleas from hundreds of strangers, written over the decades. They say much the same thing: “I know I have the talent to be a big star. I know it’s going to happen to me one day. I just need a break. Will you give me that break?”

All these letters are—every single one of them—written by people I have never heard of. Many of these young actors and actresses will be middle-aged by now. I want to go back in time and say to them, “You’re not going to make it! It’s best you know now rather than face years of having your dreams slowly erode.” They are heartbreaking boxes.

“Stanley never wrote back to the fans,” says Jan. “He never, never responded. It would have been too much. It would have driven him crazy. He didn’t like to get engaged with strangers.”

(Actually, Kubrick did write back to fans, on random, rare occasions. I find two replies in total. Maybe he only ever wrote back twice. One reads, “Your letter of 4th May was overwhelming. What can I say in reply? Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.” The other reads, “Dear Mr. William. Thank you for writing. No comment about
A Clockwork Orange
. You will have to decide for yourself. Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.”)

“One time, in 1998,” Jan says, “I was in the kitchen with Stanley and I mentioned that I’d just been to the opticians in St. Albans to get a new pair of glasses. Stanley looked shocked. He said, ‘Where
exactly
did you go?’ I told him and he said, ‘Oh, thank God! I was just in the other opticians in town getting some glasses and I used your name!’”

Jan laughs. “He used my name in the opticians, in Waitrose, everywhere.”

“But even if he didn’t reply to the fan letters,” I say, “they’ve all been so scrupulously read and filed.”

The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps fifty orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front—Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California; and so on—and is in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F—P” on the positive ones and “F—N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F—C.”

“Look at this,” I say to Jan.

I hand him a letter written by a fan and addressed to Arthur C. Clarke. He forwarded it on to Kubrick and wrote on the top, “Stanley. See P3!! Arthur.”

Jan turns to page 3, where Arthur C. Clarke marked, with exclamation points, the following paragraph:

What is the meaning behind the epidemic? Does the pink furniture reveal anything about the 3rd monolith and it’s emitting a pink color when it first approaches the ship? Does this have anything to do with a shy expression? Does the alcohol offered by the Russians have anything to do with French kissing and saliva?

“Why do you think Arthur C. Clarke marked that particular paragraph for Kubrick to read?” I ask Jan.

“Because it is so bizarre and absurd,” he says.

“I thought so,” I say. “I just wanted to make sure.”

In the back of my mind I wondered whether this paragraph was marked because the writer of the fan letter—Mr. Sam Laks of Alhambra, California—had actually worked out the secret of the monolith in
2001
. I find myself empathizing with Sam Laks. I am also looking for answers to the mysteries. So many conspiracy theories and wild rumors surrounded Kubrick—the one about him being responsible for faking the moon landings (untrue), the one about his terror of germs (this one can’t be true, either—there’s a lot of dust around here), the ones about him refusing to fly and drive over 30 mph. (The flying one is true—Tony says he wasn’t scared of planes, he was scared of air-traffic controllers—but the one about the 30 mph is “bullshit,” says Tony. “He had a Porsche.”)

This is why my happiest times looking through the boxes are when things turn weird. For instance, at the end of one shelf inside the stable block is a box marked “Sniper head—scary.” Inside, wrapped in newspaper, is an extremely lifelike and completely disgusting disembodied head of a young Vietnamese girl, the veins in her neck protruding horribly, her eyes staring out, her lips slightly open, her tongue just visible. I feel physically sick looking at it. As I hold it up by its blood-matted hair, Christiane, Kubrick’s widow, walks past the window.

“I found a head!” I say.

“It’s probably Ryan O’Neal’s head,” she replies.

Christiane has no idea who I am, or what I’m doing in her house, but she accepts the moment with admirable calm.

“No,” I say. “It’s the head of the sniper from
Full Metal Jacket
.”

“
But she wasn’t beheaded,” calls back Christiane. “She was shot.”

“I know!” I say.

Christiane shrugs and she walks on.

“I was just talking to Tony about typefaces,” I say to Jan.

“Ah yes,” says Jan. “Stanley loved typefaces.” Jan pauses. “I tell you what else he loved.”

“What?” I ask.

“Stationery,” says Jan.

I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan.

“His great hobby was stationery,” he says. “One time a package arrived with a hundred bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, ‘What are you going to do with all that ink?’ He said, ‘I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.’ Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink. He loved stationery, pads, everything like that.”

Tony Frewin wanders into the stable block.

“How’s it going?” he asks.

“Still looking for Rosebud,” I say.

“The closest I ever got to Rosebud,” says Tony, “was finding a Daisy gun that he had when he was a child.”

Tony and I leaf through some memos Kubrick wrote in 1968:

Please see that there is a supply of melons kept in the house at all times. Do not let the number go below three without buying some more. Thanks, Stanley.

“By their memos you shall know them,” Tony says.

And another:

Please check with the weather bureau and find out what the barometric pressure in London was last Friday 11th October between 6pm and 4am in the morning. Also find out what the average barometric pressure is on most days of the year, what is considered extremely high and what is considered extremely low and how they would describe the pressure on Friday, 11th October during the times I mentioned. Thanks, Stanley.

“God knows what that was about,” says Tony.

Right from the beginning I had mentally noted how well constructed the boxes were, and now Tony tells me that this is because Kubrick designed them himself. He wasn’t happy with the boxes that were on the market—their restrictive dimensions and the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the tops off—so he set about designing a whole new type of box. He instructed a company of box manufacturers, G. Ryder & Co., of Milton Keynes, to construct four hundred of them to his specifications.

“When one batch arrived,” says Tony, “we opened them up and found a note, written by someone at G. Ryder & Co. The note said, ‘Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off.’”

Tony laughs. I half expect him to say, “I suppose we
were
a bit fussy.”

But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “As opposed to non-fussy customers who don’t care if they struggle all day to get the tops off.”

•   •   •

I HAVE DINNER
with Christiane. They met when Kubrick gave her the part of a bar singer in
Paths of Glory
. They married and barely left each other’s side for the next forty-two years. They raised three children: Anya and Vivian, plus Katharina, her daughter from an earlier marriage. I’ve got to know her well but there are some things I’ve always felt awkward asking her about, like anything to do with her uncle Veit Harlan. But tonight over dinner she brings the subject up herself.

“Stanley and I came from such different, such grotesquely opposite backgrounds,” she says. “I think it gave us an extra something. I had an appalling, catastrophic background for someone like Stanley.” She pauses. “For me, my uncle was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown’s world. Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so intimately—and yet not know.”

It turned out that when Harlan wasn’t clowning around with Christiane, he was writing and directing propaganda films for Goebbels, including
Jud Süss
, in which venal, immoral Jews take over and ruin a German city, stealing riches, defiling Aryan women, etc. The film was shown to SS units before they were sent out to attack Jews. Harlan was tried twice for war crimes, and exonerated, proving that Goebbels had interfered with
Jud Süss
, forcing him to reedit and inject more anti-Semitism.

“Where my uncle was an enormous fool, as many talented people are, was that he mistook his gift for intelligence,” says Christiane. “He was a great big famous film person. He looked better and talked better and had enormous charm. So he thought he was also far more intelligent than Mr. Goebbels. Goebbels was ten thousand times smarter than my uncle.” She pauses. “Film people, actors, are puppets. We are silly. We are silly folk.” She says her uncle’s story reinforced for Stanley and her their great principle in life: Always be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power.

“All Stanley’s life he said, ‘Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.’ We both were very nervous on journeys when you have to show your passport. He did not like that moment. We always had to go through separate entrances, he with [our] two American daughters upstairs, and me with my German daughter downstairs. The foreigners downstairs! He’d be looking for us nervously. Would he ever get us back?”

Christiane laughs. Of course they were always reunited. They spent a lifetime together inside Childwick, where Stanley created his self-governing mini-studio. I never meet their youngest daughter, Vivian. There was mention of her being in Los Angeles. Vivian had once been a big presence in the family. When she was nineteen she directed a brilliant documentary,
The Making of
The Shining. When she was twenty-six she composed the score for
Full Metal Jacket
. She shot eighteen hours of behind-the-scenes footage for that film, too, but it was never edited or released. It just sits in film cans in the stable block.

I watch some one day. Here’s Kubrick sitting in a chair on an old airstrip during a break from filming. Crew members stand around him. Vivian has caught a tense moment.

STANLEY KUBRICK
: We fucked around for an hour and twenty minutes. . . .

CREW MEMBER
: I know it seems like a lot of tea breaks but we had the tea break that was up at . . .

KUBRICK
: You had a tea break at four o’clock? And you had a tea break at six o’clock? If you had a tea break at four, you don’t need to break for this tea break. This must be a complimentary tea break. So figure it out.

TERRY NEEDHAM (FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR)
: I’d prefer to do away with them all. Because it gives me more fucking headaches, poxy tea breaks, I’d like to sling them right down their fucking piss holes.

KUBRICK
: Right, Terry.

TERRY NEEDHAM
: I’m the sort of man we need, eh, Stanley?