12

End of an Era

In the summer of 1730, Mme. de Warens quit Annecy temporarily for Paris, leaving Jean Jacques behind. He had a pleasant time in her absence, dallying with young women, several of whom, or so he claimed in his Confessions, were in love with him. On one particularly beautiful day he went for a walk in the country. In a green valley beside a stream he came across two girls who were having difficulty leading their horses across. Rousseau had met one of the girls before—a Mlle. de Graffenried—and was introduced to her by the other—Mile. Galley. They were both pretty, especially Mlle. Galley, who was “both small and well developed at an age when a girl is most beautiful.” Rousseau helped them both across the stream and the girls insisted on his accompanying them for the rest of the day. They were going to the Château de la Tour at Thônes, a large farmhouse that belonged to Mlle. Galley’s family.

They duly arrived at the château and enjoyed a late lunch in the kitchen. Saving their coffee and cream cakes for later, they decided to round off their meal by going into the chateau’s cherry orchard to pick the ripe fruit. Rousseau climbed the trees and threw down cherries to the girls, who teasingly threw the pits back up at him. A flirtatious game ensued. Then “Mlle. Galley, with her apron held forward and her head thrown back, presented such a good target and I threw so well, that a bunch of cherries fell between her breasts. What laughter! I said to myself, ‘If only my lips were cherries I would gladly throw them there.’ ”

But nothing happened. It was an idyll, vibrant with sexual intimations and unrealized potential. As you can imagine, this particular episode had burned itself into my mind when I read it in my barren cell at Weilburg. And remember I read it as a virgin (my two girls were Huguette and Dagmar) and at the time it actually occurred Jean Jacques had been a virgin too. He never forgot that day in the cherry orchard. For him it was a moment, he realized later, which proved that the erotic sensuality of innocence is often more powerful than the carnal pleasures of adulthood.

I filmed the entire day just as Rousseau had related it. I cast the two girls locally, searching touring theater groups and music halls in Grenoble, Nice and Lyons. It was their appearance that was important, not their acting ability—I had no need for sophisticated, worldly actresses. All they had to do was look right, giggle and flirt. Karl-Heinz was a gauche monster of ardent frustration, positively deformed with the competing pressures of desire and shyness. In our orchard we cut out the center of one tree and mounted a camera platform there. We used embossed film for the moment Mlle. Galley’s breasts “catch” the bunch of cherries. It was during this week that I saw a further potential in the Tri-Kamera. I realized that it need not be employed solely for creating one single long, stretched image—it could just as easily make three separate ones. Throughout one exhausting evening Horst and I worked out with the aid of diagrams a sequence of massive close-ups using the embossed film. The actors were baffled as we thrust the cameras to within inches of their faces from every possible angle, pausing between shots to consult sheaves of notes and scribbled drawings. The resulting sequence is breathtaking in its latent erotic power, as those who saw it on the three screens testified. Let me take you through it.

Everything in the episode, in terms of filming, proceeds orthodoxly. The encounter at the stream, the ride to the château, the meal in the kitchen. Then, as the trio walk to the cherry orchard, the curtains in the cinema draw back to reveal the two angled screens adjacent to the main one. The two auxiliary projectors start up and suddenly we have three separate images. Three heads in view: Jean Jacques, flanked by Mlles. Graffenried and Galley. We see covert glances pass among them. The two girls look up on either side as Jean Jacques climbs the tree in the center screen. Then the contours shift and firm as the embossed film runs through the projector. The hanging clump of cherries seems to take on the form of three-dimensional fruit. The perfect pallor of the girls’ faces and shoulders seems cast in plaster relief against the leafy background. We look down with Jean Jacques at the two delightful lasses gazing up at him. The girls eat the cherries, spit the stones into their hands and throw them back at Jean Jacques, who ducks the gentle hail.

Then the center screen is filled by Mlle. Galley looking up, apron held out to catch more fruit. Jean Jacques’s face is on one side screen as he plots his revenge; on the other, his hand plucking a bunch of cherries. Center screen: we move in slowly on Mlle. Galley’s breasts, the low cut of her gown, the pressure, on either side, of her arms forcing them ever so slightly together, the swell and subsidence of her excited breathing, the soft deep shadow of her cleavage. Jean Jacques’s hand throws. Center screen, the cherries land. Lips, cherries, lips. Eyes, cherries, eyes. Then three laughing mouths. We pull back. In the center Jean Jacques’s laughter disguises his agonized face. The side screens dim; the curtains roll back to cover them.

It works magnificently. At the premiere the audience was in an uproar. The planning of it all was painstakingly difficult. (I must pay tribute to Mlle. Sadrine Storri, a burlesque dancer from Lyons who disappeared back into obscurity after the film, who played Mlle. Galley. She showed admirable patience and good humor as I, standing on a chair above her, dropped dozens of cherry bunches onto her bosom, Horst’s camera whirring twelve inches away.) Of course my delight and pride in this scene was delayed. We were working blind. I had to wait many months before I saw the sequence run on three full-sized screens. For myself, and I speak with total honesty and objectivity, I think it represents the most complete and effective blend of technique and content in the entire movie. Embossed film and the Tri-Kamera were the perfect devices to reincarnate the tender eroticism of that warm afternoon near Annecy. Add to that the audacious use of massive close-ups of lips and eyes, dark glossy cherries and pale heaving breasts … overpowering images. My close-ups in The Confessions: Part I were the largest ever witnessed on the screen up to that time (larger than Eisenstein’s for sure) and—this is what makes me particularly proud—not a caption in sight.

And so we continued working throughout the summer beset by more than the usual delays and technical hitches. The embossed film stock was notoriously fragile and the Tri-Kamera presented us with understandable teething troubles. The list of problems was endless and of little interest now, but it will give you some idea of the conditions under which we had to work if I tell you that, after a day’s filming, Horst, Leo and I drove to Geneva—where the nearest lab that could develop the embossed film was to be found—to examine the prints of the previous day’s shooting. More often than not we discovered some defect, some bubbling or flaking in a negative, that necessitated reshooting. The entire cherry-tree sequence, some two and a half minutes in length, took us most of July to film. By the end of that month I realized we were in serious difficulties. I received an angry cable from Eddie pointing out that the ratio of film shot to film used was running at approximately eighty to one. In other words I was shooting eighty minutes of film to produce one minute of screen time. A ratio of thirty to one is regarded as generous. Fifteen to one is not impossible. Somehow this news leaked out and it is from around this time that vicious stories began to circulate about profligacy, extravagance, and manic perfectionism. After a particularly scurrilous and savage attack in the trashy Das Grosse Bilderbuch des Films, I even traveled back to Berlin to reassure Eddie, and calm him down.

We were now over budget. We were behind schedule. But what was being produced was extraordinary. It is true to say—and it is one of film’s bizarre strengths—that the last category can always overrule the first two. There is no contest in the struggle between real Art and Accountancy. Audiences are indifferent to balance sheets. Eddie knew this, but our other investors were less happy. Julie had been released in 1926. We were now approaching the last quarter of 1928 and no film was in sight. Unbeknownst to me, Eddie had been obliged to buy out Goldfilm’s interest and was renegotiating his deal with Pathé. The Confessions was fast becoming a Realismus project, pure and simple.

Delays meant we had to postpone our Les Charmettes filming yet again, and we traveled to Grex in Switzerland to shoot the Geneva scenes. The huge set—the city walls of Geneva—had been standing unused for two months and Leo was contractually obliged to dismande it by the end of September.

Doon had been with me all through this exciting but exhausting summer. I was immensely grateful. I think she sensed my grief over Hereford’s death was deeper than I showed and, indeed, I doubt if I could have carried on if each evening I had not been able to return to her. At Annecy she was called upon to work from time to time (we spent a frustrating week trying to reshoot her first encounter with Jean Jacques but the Tri-Kamera kept breaking down); however, at Grex there was nothing for her to do and I sensed boredom settling in. Curiously, I seemed to calm down once we reached Switzerland even though our problems in no way diminished. Perhaps it was the countryside. What I liked about the landscape was the way every possible bit of arable land was cultivated—some vineyards looked no more than twelve feet square, tucked in odd corners made by the angle between a barn and a cliff face, or set on a largish edge on a mountainside. It was this immaculate husbandry rather than the grandeur of the views that reassured me. It indicated, I thought, a determination and sense of purpose consonant with my own and I began to relax.

In this mood it was easier for me to take a weekend off when part of the Geneva city wall collapsed and filming had to be suspended while it was rebuilt. Grex was not far from Montreux, so I suggested to Doon that we spend a couple of nights there. But she wanted to go up to the mountains, so we drove up one of the valleys, ascending steadily from the lakeshore, zigzagging through the woods up into the thin air of the mountain plateaus. We spent the night in a small village (I forget the name) in a hotel made, it seemed, entirely from elaborately carved, densely knotted wood. We were even served a meal of ham, gherkins and potatoes on carved wooden plates. We both found it somewhat oppressive. Doon said it was like living in a sinister fairy tale. We decided to leave on the Saturday morning and return to the lake for lunch.

It was a sunny morning but cool. A level bank of cloud obscured the lake completely, as if we were shut off from the world below. We were happy as we motored easily down the tight bends, laughing about the monstrous wooden hotel.

Rounding one corner we passed a broken-down car and a man—the driver—tried to flag us down, but we were by him too quickly to pull up in time.

“He looks so cold,” Doon said. “Stop for him.”

I braked, came to a halt some fifty yards farther on and got out. I waved the man on down to us. A smallish fellow, he started jogging thankfully towards us. Then, suddenly, he stopped, glanced back at his car and then leaped off the road and began to run down through a meadow towards a copse of fir trees. It was then that I recognized him. To Doon’s astonishment I took off in pursuit.

I ran speedily down the slope through the thick dewy grass, arms windmilling backwards to keep my balance. I soon gained on my quarry, whose city shoes seemed to give him no purchase on the slippery ground. He fell several times and I caught up with him sprawled face down at the edge of the trees.

Eugen P. Eugen was soaked through and shivering. He stood up and plucked leaf mold and pine needles from his natty suit.

“Mr. Todd,” he said. “How pleasant to see you again.”

“Why are you following me, Eugen?” I asked. I was calm. I knew I could deal easily with whatever doltish blackmail was coming.

“Your wife hired me,” he said, with a mild grin. He looked down. “My shoes are ruined.”

“But you can’t work for her,” I said angrily. “I hired you.”

“Herr Todd”—he spread his hands apologetically—“a fellow has to make a living.”

He told me that Sonia had contacted him a fortnight earlier (I have no idea what alerted her: it could have been any of a dozen inept cover-ups); he had come down to Annecy and followed us to Switzerland. He had already sent two long reports back to Sonia detailing her husband’s infidelity. Eugen told me all this with perverse pride, as if it were evidence of his efficiency—a talent, so the implication seemed to run, to which I could also testify. As he elaborated on the contents of his reports, I closed my eyes. Some kind of bird was singing noisily in the trees. I could feel the dew seeping up through the soles of my shoes as if searching for the sensation of fatigue and random remorse that was spreading downwards through my body, its source—seemingly—some gland located in the crown of my head. Sonia had known for almost two weeks. What was waiting for me in Berlin?

I was roused by Doon’s call from the road. Eugen and I looked round.

“Ah, Miss Bogan. Magnificent actress,” he said.

I thought I should feel more animosity than I did for Eugen. I tried to summon up a rage—unsuccessfully.

“Shut up, you little bastard,” I said with no conviction. Then I shouted “Coming!” to Doon and set off back up through the damp lucent meadow towards the road.

“Herr Todd.” Eugen slipped and slithered behind me. “Could you possibly … ? I’d be extremely grateful for a lift back down to the lake. These hired motors—”

“Sorry.” I strode on.

“Don’t worry, Herr Todd. I quite understand.”

Sonia waited until I returned to Berlin in October. In the interim we did not communicate. The sun was shining and there were still some bright autumnal leaves on the birches in the garden at Charlottenburg. I got out of the car, a full cargo of guilt slowing my steps. The house was partially cleared. The carpets were gone but the pictures still hung upon the wall.

Sonia wore black. I suppose she was still in mourning for Hereford, but the effect was suitably menacing and doom laden. For some reason she suddenly seemed much older than me, and when I saw her face, pale but immaculately made up, I felt childishly frightened of her. I had done wrong. Even I could not rally any bravado. I had to face my punishment. Sonia confined herself to only one rebuke, but it was enough.

“Hereford dies. And then you do this to me.”

Lies and excuses filled my mouth but I ignored them. “Sonia, I … Where are the children?”

“In a hotel. We’re going back to London tomorrow.”

I rubbed my face, as if I were washing it. I could see the long avenue of resentment and acrimony stretching ahead of me.

“I love Doon,” I said. “I’ve loved her for years. I want to marry her.”

It was a mistake. My impulsive honesty ruined things for me again. I should have done nothing but apologize that day. I saw tears bulge in Sonia’s hitherto conspicuously dry eyes.

“Oh, really,” she said with venomous cynicism. “Well, you’ll get no divorce from me.”

She took a letter from her handbag and gave it to me, said good-bye and left. I sat down and read the letter, from her lawyer, about the financial arrangements I was to provide for my wife and family; so much a month to be paid into this or that account, a trust fund to be established for the children, arrangements to be subject to an annual review, etc., etc.

I shed a few predictable tears of self-pity, and allowed my mind to travel back to those days just after the war at Superb-Imperial, days of Raymond Maude, the Wee MacGregors, beer and chops at the grill in Islington. Then, Sonia had been everything I desired; it was hardly her fault that I had fallen in love with Doon. I had been a late developer. In 1920 I had been barely half-formed, now that I came to think about it. I had survived the Salient and prison camp but emotionally I was no more advanced than I had been at Minto Academy. I wandered around our house, revisiting chapters of my past. But the ghost of little Hereford seemed to haunt the rooms and passageways: I could hear echoes of his pratfalls and collisions at every step and corner, and soon the shawl of misery and regret that hung heavily over my shoulders drove me out of doors.

I never went back to that house. I had the contents packed up and sold it eventually for a small loss. I sent all the money to Sonia, as it was going to take some time to get the funds I had deposited in Switzerland to London. Our separation proved a tedious, depressing business; Sonia’s lawyer was a particularly aggressive, solemn man and I used to dread the regular summonses I received to his office to iron out this or that hitch or petty grievance.

We were still filming, of course, throughout all this, and at a punishing pace too, in an attempt to make up for lost time. To my dismay, the rough cut of the film was now over seven hours long and we still had to shoot the departure from Les Charmettes and the arrival in Paris.

I asked Doon if I could move in with her, but she said no. It was a perfectly reasonable refusal: she said we should wait a while. I was too disoriented to remonstrate for long, and while I was waiting moved to Eddie’s glum house on Kronenstrasse. Eddie was sympathetic, but he was more concerned about my professional rather than personal life.

“I told you not to get involved with actresses,” he said. “Look at you now: money problems, no house, no family …”

“I’m not ‘involved,’ ” I said earnestly. “I love her, can’t you understand that? I’m free now. I couldn’t be happier. Really. Sonia’ll give me a divorce eventually and then Doon and I will marry.”

“Has she said so? Doon?”

“Actually, she says she doesn’t want to get married.”

“Wonderful.”

“But she will.”

“She’ll never marry you, John. She knows herself. If she says she won’t, she won’t.”

“She’ll change her mind.”

“She’s tough.”

“I’m tougher.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend.”

He was right. I saw Doon a lot, we worked together, we spent most nights together, but once or twice a week I would spend a night or two away. It just seemed to happen. I would be working late, messages would miss one or the other person, meetings and appointments got in the way. When I rebuked her or acted petulantly, she employed a brand of clear-minded logic I could not defeat.

“Will I see you tonight?” I would ask.

“I’ve got a meeting, till late.”

“I’ll stay up.”

“When do you start work tomorrow morning?”

“Six.”

“I’ll be back around three.”

“Ah.”

“Wouldn’t you rather get a good night’s sleep? I’ll come by at lunch time.”

What could I say? It made perfect sense. But there are times in your life when the sensible approach is exactly the one you do not require. I wanted to be irresponsible, as if that could somehow underline my love for her, erode my guilt over Hereford and Sonia. I wanted signs of grand passion. I wanted us both to declare that a moment apart was agony, that three hours’ sleep and a bleary-eyed start in the morning were a real proof of undying devotion. But I never got it.

Emotionally, I was in something of a bad way after Sonia had left me, but at least the work was going well for once. The Tri-Kamera was behaving impeccably on the reshoots and the first run-throughs of the cherry-picking sequence were a revelation.

We showed it to Eddie early in the New Year, with an orchestral accompaniment. He was overwhelmed and embraced me, kissing me on both cheeks, the Lodokian in him breaking the Simmonette veneer for an instant. On his insistence we showed it again to some financiers to the same ecstatic effect; more funding came through. Rumors began to spread through the industry about the film, its revolutionary techniques, of a scale and size matched only by the ambition of its director. I suppose early 1929 saw me at the very apex of my fame. Impressive achievements behind me, limitless potential ahead. I was feted, courted, flattered. Lubitsch wrote to me from Hollywood, inviting me over. I gave interviews to newspapers from France, Italy, Britain, the U.S.A. In Germany, in Berlin, I was for a few months a household name. I was approached in the street by strangers, was offered drinks in bars, signed menus in restaurants. All the heady trappings of temporary renown. A publisher wanted to publish my autobiography. A newspaper article about my war experiences was mooted as a possible movie. The whole world, it seemed, was agog with anticipation. The Confessions, as one newspaper put it, would be the film to end all films.

Was I happy? Yes and no. I find it hard to think of myself as I was then. I was thirty years old and on the brink of achieving everything I had dreamed of and more.… But I was unsettled as well, and as some sort of exculpation I used to draw up rough profit-and-loss columns of my life. True, I was a rich and famous man—but my baby son had died. True, The Confessions was about to astonish the world—but my marriage was over, my wife and children estranged. True, I was in love with a celebrated and beautiful film actress—but she refused to marry me. And so on. Whenever I was alone, this curious schizoid litany would enter my head to forestall any hasty conclusions about my good fortune.

I mention this because it is the only explanation I can find for what I did next. Or else I must have been a little mad.… But I think I unconsciously wanted to make life difficult for myself, simply to bolster the loss column. Does that seem perverse? I think we are inclined to do this more often than we realize.

Two aspects of The Confessions fatefully coincided in March 1929 to set me on this course of action.

In 1738 Rousseau had come into his inheritance and for the first time in his life was in the possession of a fair sum of money. However, he was not feeling well—“fading away,” as he put it—and had diagnosed himself as suffering from a polyp on the heart. A certain doctor in Montpellier was reputed to have successfully treated such a case and Jean Jacques went there to consult him.

This departure, significantly, coincided with the entry of his rival Witzenreid into Mme. de Warens’s household. The great love affair was nearing its end: things were no longer as they once had been between Rousseau and his beloved Maman.

On his way to Montpellier, Rousseau encountered and fell in with a party of genteel travelers who included one Mme. de Larnage and a Marquis de Taulignon. Mme. de Larnage was attractive, heavily rouged, forty-four years old and mother of ten children, and the appearance of young Jean Jacques on the scene proved much more enticing than her ostensible suitor, the old marquis. For some reason—and this is what drew me to the episode—Rousseau seemed ashamed of his lowly background in this company and, quite astonishingly, claimed to be an Englishman called Dudding. By extreme good fortune no one asked “Mr. Dudding” to speak in his native language—of which he knew not one word. Mme. de Larnage made her feelings evident, and at one of their nightly stops in a coaching inn Jean Jacques surrendered himself to this “sensual and voluptuous” woman. They parted before they reached Montpellier, Jean Jacques—physically exhausted—promising a rendezvous a few weeks hence. This never occurred. Rousseau, having learned a few English phrases in Montpellier to sustain the Mr. Dudding disguise, and having regained some of his health, set off to meet with Mme. de Larnage at Bourg-St.-Andéol. On his way there, however, his guilt at betraying Maman was so intense that he broke off his journey and returned immediately to Chambéry to rejoin her. He was received coolly. Witzenreid was still there. Jean Jacques’s place had been taken.

We filmed the coach journey in the state forest near Spandau and I cast Monika Alt as Mme. de Larnage. I scrutinized the episode in The Confessions, trying to understand Rousseau’s motives in dallying with Mme. de Larnage. Was it a preemptive revenge because he knew Witzenreid would edge him out of the nest? Or was there something in Mme. de Larnage that he could not find in Maman? In the book he goes as far as to contrast the two experiences of sex. With Maman, he says, sex was always accompanied by melancholy, but with Mme. de Larnage, he says, “I was always proud to be a man. I surrendered myself to my senses with joy and with confidence.” What did he mean? What went on?

The Confessions is remarkable in its candor, not least about its author’s sexual nature. From his earliest days Jean Jacques liked to be dominated. When he was a child, the sister of his guardian at Bossey, Mlle. Lambercier, had to stop spanking him for his misdemeanors when she saw how much he was enjoying it. Later, in Nyon, a young girl—Mlle. Goton—was to act out a fantasy of a strict governess and whip him. It was the only moment in his life, he implies, when a member of the opposite sex actually discerned and satisfied his deepest sexual cravings. Had Mme. de Larnage, I wondered, done the same?

I must admit I was happy to see Monika again, We based ourselves up the road from Spandau in Falkenhagen for three or four days while we went out with the coaches and horses filming traveling scenes. Monika knew about Doon and me and was provocatively discreet about our past. “It’s all forgotten, Johnny,” she said on more than one occasion, miming sealed lips, which of course made me remember all the more vividly.

The last evening in the little Gasthaus in Falkenhagen we had a ribald discussion about Rousseau and flagellation. Karl-Heinz said he found it very easy to sympathize with. Günter Koll (he played the marquis) said he thought it was depraved. Monika claimed to understand the feeling—even though she had no inclinations in that direction herself. She said that if a man asked her to beat him and it gave him real pleasure, she would not refuse.

I said, “So if I asked you, ‘Monika, I want you to beat me,’ you wouldn’t be shocked?”

“Not at all.”

We talked on. Karl-Heinz told us about a man he used to sleep with who liked having the juice of citrus fruit squeezed over his body. “For some reason grapefruit was his favorite,” Karl-Heinz said. The tone of the evening’s conversation degenerated further as we called for more drink.

Later, I came out of the Gasthaus’s sole bathroom to find Monika waiting her turn.

“Ah, Monika,” I said stupidly. We were standing rather close together. I was wearing pajamas and dressing gown. She looked at me, smiling.

“You want to try it?” she asked.

“I’ll come along in half an hour.”

She was still dressed when I went into her room. She seemed incapable of removing a knowing smile from her lips.

“Look, Monica …” I began cautiously.

“This is just an experiment. Yes?”

“Yes.” I enjoyed the lie. “Purely in the interests of research.” The pretense made my breathing quicken with excitement.

“What do you want me to use?” she asked. “I’ve got a newspaper. My father used to beat me with a rolled-up newspaper. Or a brush.”

“What about a shoe? A slipper?”

We selected a fine suede slipper and stood and looked at each other.

“Do you think I should be naked?” I asked.

“Oh yes, I think so.”

I took my clothes off.

“See, you’re excited already. Do you want me—”

“No, I think you should be clothed.” I could hear my blood like surf in my ears.

She sat down on the bed. I knelt beside her then bent over her knees. Her hands ran over my back and buttocks.

“Monika, please!”

“Sorry. I forgot. This is simply literary criticism. Shall I start?”

She gave me a good severe spanking. My buttocks reddened, then stung. The erection I had had subsided utterly.

“Harder?”

“No. Stop, stop,” I said weakly. I stood up. “Ouch,” I said rubbing my smarting arse. “That’s bloody agony!”

“And look, it’s not working.” She got to her feet. “Perhaps I should be naked too.”

I looked at her. She dropped the slipper and began unbuttoning her dress.

“Yes,” I said. “Might be a good idea.”

I wrote that entry as we sat in a small tented village to one side of the farmhouse, listening to the rain rumble on the stretched canvas overhead. The Tri-Kamera was set up and ready to roll. The beehives were in position and Georg Pfau had five thousand bees ready to be loosed on the grassy meadows and orchard blossoms whenever the sun broke through the clouds. We had been waiting for sun—which the meteorological office in Grenoble had been assuring us was on its way—for four days. Everyone was numb with boredom. We had one scene left to shoot and The Confessions: Part I would be over.

I did not care what the weather was like for Rousseau’s departure from Les Charmettes, and had already shot it in a dismal drizzle, but it was absolutely essential that when he arrived the gorgeous sunshine should, in the best traditions of the pathetic fallacy, reflect his mood. Remember, he has only recently betrayed Maman with Mme. de Larnage, and conscience has now redirected his steps to Les Charmettes—his arrival unannounced and unexpected. I had changed things somewhat from the book. There, Jean Jacques encounters Mme. de Warens in her dressing room. In the film I wanted him to walk up the country road lined with bulging flowery hedgerows, his face animated with joyous expectation. He knocks at the farmhouse door. No reply. He hears a distant peal of female laughter. Slowly he walks down towards the orchard (we should recall the idyll of the cherry-picking sequence here) and comes across Maman and Witzenreid picnicking, Witzenreid stretched out on the grass, his head in Maman’s lap. (Witzenreid was dismissed by Rousseau as “a hairdresser … tall, pale, with a flat face and dull wits, whose conversation betrayed all the affectation and bad taste of the hairdresser’s trade”!) Jean Jacques approaches them. We go to three screens—the three faces in close-up, all trying to disguise their respective emotions. It is the end of the affair. I wanted it to be a moment of bitter poignancy set in a scene of fragrant summer beauty. But all we had was rain.

I was prepared to wait it out. I had not let the weather spoil my film thus far and was not about to make compromises now. Doon sat in a deck chair beside me, in costume and makeup, reading a book. I glanced at her strong profile and felt a pleasant pang of love for her. My one night with Monika Alt at Falkenhagen had been a momentary aberration, a mere matter of circumstance and mood (and Monika) conspiring against me. I had no guilt about it because it had made no difference. Doon and I still saw each other virtually every day. I spent most nights at her apartment. I kept many of my clothes and possessions there. I talked from time to time of buying a new larger apartment for us both—Doon did not object and the implication was that we would both be living together before too long. My only worry was to do with future filming. Mme. de Warens, at the end of Part I, disappears completely from the story of The Confessions. We would be often separated over the coming three years as I filmed Part II and Part III.

Doon reached into her handbag and removed a cigarette case. I smiled, enjoying the oddly exciting anachronism of an eighteenth-century noblewoman smoking a Lucky Strike. She looked round and caught my eye.

“Bloody rain,” I said.

“Jamie, I was thinking, wouldn’t the scene be better in rain? I mean, it’s a low moment.”

“Absolutely not.” I reiterated my reasons. She was bored, idle. She knew she would never get me to compromise.

“Well, could I go down to the hotel? I’ve got some stuff to sort out.”

I looked up at the massed, packed gray clouds. If the sun appeared we would only have time to do Jean Jacques’s walk to the front door. I said yes. She went off with understandable relief.

What took me back down the valley early? What made me leave in advance of the cast and crew? I cannot remember. I think Leo brought a cable from Eddie querying some expense and I think I wanted to check my production notes before I dictated a reply. Anyway, whatever it was, I had myself driven down to the Hôtel de France on the Quai Nezia (I can recommend it, if ever you find yourself in Chambéry). It was an agreeable drive, even in the rain. I remember that because my mood was so placid and settled. I had one scene left to film; The Confessions: Part I was everything I had dreamed it to be. I felt the benign confidence of a great artist—a da Vinci, a Rembrandt, a Monet—staring at his completed canvas, wondering only where to inscribe his signature.

Did I stop at my room before I went to Doon’s suite? (The hotel had only one, rather poky, on the top floor under the eaves, converted from servants’ quarters.) I think so. I think I confirmed or refuted Eddie’s inquiry. Then I sauntered along the corridor and up the steep stairs, and walked into Doon’s sitting room.

Alexander Mavrocordato sat there, smoking, reading a script, my script. A briefcase rested against his chair leg. He was dressed casually—à l’anglaise—sports coat, twills, a cream shirt and a cravat. He looked up as I came in. There was no surprise, no guilt, no welcome.

“Ah, Todd,” he said. “I hear the weather is causing you problems.”

I thought for an instant I was going to have a heart attack, so intense was the pain that seemed to zigzag transversely across my chest from my left armpit. But it passed with gratifying suddenness. (Did I tell you Mavrocordato was Russian? Or so he claimed to be. He spoke English with a clotted central European accent. I am sure his name was assumed. Someone once told me his real name was Otto Blâc—the c pronounced ch.)

“Yes,” I managed to say, forcing my head to stay still and not swivel round to Doon’s bedroom door. “Minor problems. Minor. Very minor.… Yes, entirely minor.”

He threw the script on the table. “That’s some film you’re making.”

“Thank you.” I stood like a major domo, unnaturally rigid in the middle of the room, canted forward ever so slightly, as if waiting to receive an order. I felt that if Doon did not come in soon I would shatter, so tensely was I holding myself.

She came through the door brushing her hair. I saw the bed for a second—flat, unrumpled. I relaxed, marginally.

“Hi, darling,” she said to me. “Look who’s here,” she said, indicating Mavrocordato.

“Yes,” I said, turning to him. “What exactly do you want?”

“He’s making a film,” Doon said. “He wants me to be in it.”

“No,” I said.

“No what?” Mavrocordato asked.

“No, she will not be in your film.”

“Jamie? Are you all right?”

Mavrocordato smiled wearily. “I don’t think that’s your decision, Todd, with great respect.”

“Forget it,” I said. “With great respect.”

Doon fixed me with a wide-eyed angry look. She turned to Mavrocordato. “We’ll talk later.”

He got up, picked up his briefcase, opened it and placed a script on the table. I picked it up and handed it to him. I smelled the sour reek of his cheroot.

“I leave you script, Doon,” he said, setting it down again. I picked it up and handed it to him. We did this three times.

“Take it, Blâc,” I said.

He swore expansively at me in his tiny improvised language, mangled munching sounds.

“Fuck off, cunt,” I said. Proud Anglo-Saxon brevity.

“Stop it, Jamie!” Doon was furious but I did not care. I felt cool, as if all my arteries and veins were ventilated suddenly with clear Alpine air. He stood there with his hands on his hips as if I were some irritating mendicant who would not take no for an answer.

“Is he always such a child?” he asked Doon.

It was the look he gave her that did it. Familiar, possessive, knowing.

Spontaneously I said to Doon, “Have you ever slept with him? Since we—”

I left it unfinished. Her face was taut, stretched.

A hooting laugh from Mavrocordato. “Ah, yes! Now we are there. So English!”

“Well?”

“Yes,” she said. “Once or twice.”

“For old time sake,” Mavrocordato said.

I hit him with all my strength, a curved high right hook, catching him in front of his left ear. I heard, before I felt the pain, my knuckles break. He went crashing down and got up staggering almost at once. I swung two more wild hits at his face, a left and a right. The left squashed his nose, the right slammed into his shoulder. I bellowed in agony as my broken knuckles ground bone on bone.

Mavrocordato was swaying, snorting blood and mucus—nose-jam—onto the carpet like a dying bull in a bullfight. Doon was cursing and yelling at us to stop. My right hand felt as if it had been plunged in a bucket of sharp knives. The hot pain had a jangling metallic quality to it.

His first punch caught me a glancing blow high on the head. Then he tried to knee me in the groin but, doubled over as I was, his knee drove into my ribs, blasting the air out of my lungs. I felt myself going down slowly and his second punch landed more like a club on the back of my head. He grabbed my collar, opened the door and dragged me through. I could see nothing but light meteors swarming like a shoal of darting fish in front of my eyes. I reached to grab something—I thought there was a wall in front of me—and I clutched air. Then I was launched into space with the vicious force of his boot in my arse. I took a header down the stairs.

I finished filming the final scene of The Confessions ten days later with two broken knuckles, a severe compound fracture of my right arm, three broken ribs and massive body-wide contusions. My torso was heavily strapped, my right arm and hand set in plaster and my brain fuddled with analgesics.

Doon could not stop laughing and we were obliged to shoot many takes. But it worked and was finally done exactly as I wanted.

I forgave Doon, with guilty magnanimity, when she apologized for not telling me about Mavrocordato. She was not ashamed, she said, using arguments identical to those I myself employed to ease my conscience about Monika. And she was going to appear in his film. Somehow that did not bother me so much now. But she was sweet to me while I convalesced for a week. She looked after me with merry, genuine care.

Eddie Simmonette came for the last days’ filming. He seemed strangely subdued. He did not join in the great cheer that went up from the entire crew when I said for the last time, “Cut! Print it!” My own elation was brief. I was exhausted from almost two years of creative struggle, yet was fully aware that the entire project was only one-third complete.

We were jolly enough in the Hôtel de France that night. Garrulous mutually admiring speeches were made, tokens were exchanged, much champagne was drunk. When the singing started, Eddie came over and asked if he could have a word with me outside.

We went out and strolled along the banks of the river Leysse towards the jardin public. It was a calm, balmy night with a clear sky. We talked inconsequentially about this or that. Eddie asked how my broken arm and ribs were. Eventually, I said, “What’s wrong, Eddie? Money problems?”

He chuckled. “There are always money problems.”

“What is it then?”

He paused under a streetlamp. Across the river I could see the gravel paths of the public gardens and the knobbled leprous boughs of the pollarded limes, grotesque in the darkness.

“Whatever happens, John,” he began slowly, “I want you to know that I will never be as proud of anything as I am of The Confessions. It’s a masterpiece. A wonderful film.”

“Thank you, Eddie.” I felt my heart clog with affection for this neat dark man. “But what do you mean, ‘whatever happens’?”

He looked at me. I could not swear to it—his voice gave nothing away—but I think his eyes were luminous with tears. He took a folded newspaper from his pocket. It was a trade paper, Kino-Magazin. Large-type headlines dominated the front page:

I had drunk too much. I was weary.

“What’s it all about?” I asked.

“I think we’re too late,” he said softly, desperately. “The Confessions, it’s too late.”

“Late? Too late for what?”

“For sound.”

VILLA LUXE, June 24, 1972

Sound. Sound.… I had never worried about sound. I knew about it but it seemed to me then to be a fad. Moreover, it was a device that would take film back to its theatrical and literary origins, which it had managed to shake off. I regarded it rather as a painter might take note of new developments in drypoint engraving. It seemed to have nothing to do with the purity of moving pictures. I, who despised captions so much, who had even invented the superimposed caption so that the screen never had to resemble a blackboard, what did I want—what did any film artist want—with dialogue, with the “talkies”? How could words play any part in a purely visual medium?

Well, history proved me wrong. But we have lost as much as we gained. With sound it is too easy to explain, too easy to be precise. That dangerous edge of ambiguity has gone forever. The potent, multifarious suggestions of the visual image were subjugated to prattle. Articulate reasoning took over from the freedom the image had to operate below the level of conscious thought.… I can go on. Technology stifled an art in 1927—or whenever it was that ghastly quacking blacked-up singer first articulated on film—and today, decades later, we are still fighting to regain that marvelous subversive quality of the mature silent film.

Anyway, I rehearse all these old arguments with Ulrike one evening at her parents’ villa. She is a good audience—she agrees with every word I say.

Herr Günther is tall and ruddy. He has red cheeks, as if he’s spent the day striding through a chill gusty countryside. He looks like an English farmer. His entire family is gathered on the pool terrace and there are numerous other guests—strangers to me—from the new villas being erected around our bay. Most of the adults have forsaken the pool but the children still scream and shout in and around it. Ulrike has asked me if I want to swim, but I declined, saying I am not feeling too well. In fact I’m reluctant to display my old man’s body among all this tanned youth and concupiscence. My flesh is slack and folded now. My flat chest has transformed itself into two soft dropping breasts. The virile furze that covered my body has grown long and mysteriously silky. My legs are thin, my buttocks half-deflated. All the usual signs. I might have swum with two or three present but not this loud, vital assembly.

Ulrike tells me her boyfriend is arriving tomorrow and that he’s greatly looking forward to meeting me. She says he has requests from one or two film magazines to do interviews. Do I have any objections?

“No photographs,” I say quickly, thinking of the man on the bus. “And he mustn’t publish my address.”

“Of course not.”

We talk on. She is a keen student of film and I find I enjoy airing my views.

“But what about color, Mr. Todd? You can’t object to that.”

“Oh yes, I do, but not as strongly as sound.”

I tell her that color makes the cinema film banal. It becomes exactly the same as seeing. We view the world in color; black and white makes film quite different, an essential veil of artifice, like the two dimensions of an artist’s canvas pretending to be three. With moving pictures—the great art form of the twentieth century—the addition of sound and the arrival of color robbed them of their uniqueness.

“And besides,” I go on, warming up—Anneliese has arrived—“color is modern, so black and white becomes the past, the color of history. Think of the Great War. You only know it in black and white. There are no color photographs of the Great War, yet I can assure you it was a very colorful event. Imagine it in color—you’d have an entirely different impression of it. When I see newsreels I hardly recognize it—all that monochrome!”

Herr Günther approaches and starts asking me about my First War experiences. I tell him something of them. People gather round, fascinated by an old man’s memories. The sun dips below the crocodile headland and the first bats begin to dart between the pines.