Close-Up. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ you, no lettuce. Every day!’

      It wasn’t really unexpected. I was fighting a desperate rearguard action to protect my script against a ‘creative producer’. That’s always a mistake, but in 1949 it was a fatal one.

      ‘McCann, the cop on Gate Three, told me. There’s an envelope waiting for you when you check out. The girl from accounts told him what was in it.’ Things were tough all over: the mayor was being held down on Baxter’s chest by three cowboys, and when Baxter moved they rippled.

      I ate only the meat out of the sandwich. I put the thick-shake under my seat and got up. It was a bright idea to put fascist-style arguments into the mouths of my heavies, but like so many of my ideas it was sadly mistimed.

      Baxter said, ‘It was a great gesture, Peter. And on your kind of salary an unmarried guy can afford a gesture now and again.’ I nodded. He said, ‘You could talk to the Guild, but you’ll be grabbed by Warner’s, or Paramount, you see. You’ll maybe double your take-home pay. It’s the best thing that’s happened to you.’ He had a big smile fixed on his face and for a moment I was tempted to see how long he could hold it, but I remembered the good times.

      ‘OK. I’ll phone Jim tomorrow and tell him you are some kind of genius. He’ll probably find you some other hack.’

      ‘He will if you ask him, Peter. He respects you.’

      ‘Sure.’ I didn’t turn the lights up. I groped along the seat backs and out of the double-doors of viewing theatre number eight without saying another word. I suppose Baxter told the projectionist to stop showing Last Vaquero, or maybe it’s still running. Anyway, it was a lousy script. Maybe the first draft I’d written would have made a decent film but the rewrite had got too much stuff about hard work and truth bringing success. That took care of any irony that I’d tried to bring to it. Koolman Studios had a standing order about ‘values’ and I’d been crazy to try to get by it, let alone to add a few ideas of my own.

      I didn’t realize that it was going to be the last time I walked through the Koolman Studios for over fifteen years. I blinked in the daylight and went past the big sound stages to the writers’ building.

      A tractor train with pieces of a Hawaiian village rumbled past. The kid driving it shouted something to me and I waved. A group of men in heavy make-up and silk dressing-gowns were standing outside the door of Number Two stage, smoking desperately. They looked up when the kid shouted and they looked at me. Already I felt a twinge of the paranoia that an investigating subcommittee had brought to Hollywood.

      It was still only 8.45 A.M. on a February morning but the sun was bright enough to burn your eyes out. I called into my office to collect a couple of shirts and a half-completed short story. The typewriter and the ten-dollar fan belonged to the management.

      From my window I could see the empty lot where walls and stairs were stored. Beyond it there was the block that housed the accountants and the lawyers. Significantly, theirs was a two-storey brick building with fitted carpets and air conditioning; the writers’ ‘block’ was two timber sheds linked by a dimly lit corridor that was part of film storage.

      Around the Koolman layout there was a high white stucco wall surmounted with rows of barbed wire and broken glass, but the executive building faced inwards to bright green lawns above which hovered white sprinkler mist. I took the forbidden short-cut to the main gate. It was time I lived dangerously. I passed Leo Koolman – the Studio’s whizz-kid – and my producer Kagan Bookbinder. They were sitting in Bookbinder’s brand-new convertible. It was bright red, with a grinning chromium front that people who were still on the waiting-list for new cars called ‘Japanese Admirals’. The car radio was singing quietly.

      Bookbinder was trying to remember how to look embarrassed, but then decided I’d not had my news yet. He was a tough-looking bastard, like an extra for the desert island set that had been in constant use since Pearl Harbor day.

      Leo Koolman was a vain kid with a perfect suntan and a Hawaiian shirt with red and orange flowers on it. In those days he was tipped as the only person with the youth, drive and experience to get the studio out of the jam it was in. As one of his first victims I still find it difficult to admire his judgement.

      Koolman said, ‘Do you know the nominees?’

      ‘The Academy Awards,’ Bookbinder explained. ‘They weren’t on the early bulletin. We’re waiting for the nine o’clock.’

      ‘Hamlet,’ I said, ‘Laurence Olivier.’

      ‘You’re guessing,’ Koolman accused. He was hoping that I wasn’t just guessing. A British winner would automatically mean a rise in the Stone stakes.

      ‘Who else?’ I said cockily. ‘Dan Dailey, Clifton Webb?’

      ‘You could be right,’ admitted Bookbinder, smiling and bull-shitting to the end.

      Koolman wasn’t so admiring. ‘All writers are supposed to use Gate Three.’

      I smiled to both of them and kept walking.

      ‘You think Olivier for best actor?’ Koolman called.

      ‘And Shakespeare will get “story and screenplay”.’

      The nine A.M. newscast gave the nominations as I’d predicted: Dan Dailey, Clifton Webb, Lew Ayres and Montgomery Clift. Seven weeks later Olivier got his Oscar. Leo Koolman was heard to describe me as psychic but he didn’t come offering me a seer’s job. Perhaps because Shakespeare lost out to John Huston.

      Olivier was an easy guess. The previous year – in a tussle with Colman, Peck, Garfield, Powell and Redgrave – he might have been given a tougher run for his money but there was a growing feeling that Hollywood had been kissing its own backside for too long. Hamlet was a fine opportunity to break the tradition that only US productions got the award.

      In spite of their accents, at least these limeys spoke some kind of English, and no one could say that the bard was a commie. The ‘best actor’ was foreign, but at least he was a ‘sir’ with three previous nominations behind him. It was on this ripple of reckless xenophilia that Leo Koolman launched Marshall Stone to his place in cinema history.

      News of neither my genius nor my prescience had spread to script departments of the other studios. Whether I was blacklisted or merely redundant I never found out, but after nearly three months of explaining my screen credits and the ones that got away, I nursed my old Ford back to New York in easy stages.

      I hadn’t liked New York in 1944 and I didn’t like it all over again in 1949. I wrote indifferent advertising in the copy department of a Madison Avenue agency for three months until my air conditioner went out of action in late August. A decision I had been deferring for several weeks was made easier when the agency merged and I was the ‘last in’ that a management agreement had promised would be ‘first out’.

      It was only after I got back to London that my luck changed. I wrote a biography – Stanislavsky: A Man and His Method. It was a labour of love financed by a job as a bartender. It was a book-club selection. I followed it the following year with a history of Italian opera that was little more than a compendious reference book. Then, after two years hard work, I had a lucky success with my biography of Caruso. Soft-cover rights enabled me to pay off the mortgage on my small house in Islington, and serial rights put something into the bank and got me a contract as entertainment editor on a posh Sunday newspaper.

      Many many years ago, my wife had been married to СКАЧАТЬ