Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Read online

  I met him first at Wolfy Seaman’s where the lugubrious Swede had invited him for professional reasons. Seaman had to assure himself of our captain’s familiarity with the East. And it was important to him, he said, that we had a captain sensitive to our specific artistic needs. Delayed by Esmé, too ill to come but not wishing to say anything until the last minute, I arrived in time to hear the weathered tar talking with some nostalgia of Tangier and Port Said. He had captained vessels in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf before trying his luck in Rio de Janeiro, where he had cousins. In Rio he had found himself in command of the Hope Dempsey, ostensibly the property of a Panamian company but actually owned by Presidenti Bertorelli, whose brief rule of, I think, Paraguay, had earned him enough to retire to the South of France and take a villa next door to a number of his fellow advocates. ‘His mistake was going into the movie business,’ Quelch was saying, ‘it isn’t a traditional line of work for a South American dictator. But he was so enamoured of the screen he saw it, I think, as the new ultium ratio regum. But we were his only loss. Ultra vires, you know.’ He gave a slight insouciant shrug.

  Quelch was a tall, Anglo-Saxon type, very thin, with the lantern jaw and heavy eyebrows that distinguished his class, his long nose veined and lined from exposure to the elements, his cheeks ruddy from the winds and waters of the Seven Seas. He dressed with casual good taste and spoke that languid, almost sluggish, English I had learned to recognise as the best. Again I heard the pure literary accents of my Pearson’s, Londons and Strands! How I loved to listen to it. Even his Latin sounded exotic, authoritative. When he offered me a glass of claret from the bottle he had brought with him, it was, of course, first-class. I had not enjoyed such good wine, I said, since leaving Paris. I began to remember what it was to be an educated, cosmopolitan European; it was as if half my being were coming alive again.

  ‘Paris?’ Quelch was dismissive. ‘Is she not completely vieux jeu, these days? With all those Americans!’

  We sat in the candlelit semi-darkness Seaman favoured, a trademark of his pictures, which had to be underlit to pass any code of decency. Mrs Cornelius tuned in to the radio, the headphones almost perfect decoration on the twin rolls of hair she had arranged in Oriental style. With her loose silk gown, she acknowledged the occasion. We smoked cigars and enjoyed a cognac from another bottle Quelch had brought. I told the elegant old seadog that I recognised one with the true undemonstrative taste of an English gentleman and he smiled modestly. ‘The taste but not the pocket, unfortunately, old chum. A taste for champagne and foie gras was always my downfall in the end. Never women.’

  Wolfy asked about his background and he revealed a twin brother in England. ‘Not an identical twin, I fear. There are three of us in all. Our mother was blessed with my younger brother exactly a year after we were born, Horace is now a very successful academic. He’s my twin. Our family motto, you see, Aut non tentaris aut perfice! It’s Malcolm who’d interest you, sir, I’d guess.’

  ‘The Egyptologist?’ Seaman’s voice was somewhat thickened by the cognac. He was not entirely sure if he had pronounced the word correctly, and repeated himself less successfully, but Quelch understood.

  ‘That’s the chap. Brainiest fellow in the family. Avito vivet honore! For some reason he prefers it out East. It’s his temperament, like mine, really. As soon as I know our plans I’ll write him in Alexandria and tell him when we’re arriving. He’s a stalwart sort, Malcolm, and just the lad to give you all the gen on Egypt “A” as well as “M”. Primus inter pares, they will tell you at the British Museum. There’s nobody with Malcolm’s contacts West or East of Suez.’

  All this served to further fuel Wolf Seaman’s enthusiasm. Clearly comforted by Quelch’s sophistication and education, he had, in his awkward way, begun to relax. This meant he slapped Quelch and myself on our shoulders quite a bit. When Mrs Cornelius removed the headphones with a grumbled complaint that it didn’t sound so much like a band as a bunch of flatulent krauts after a heavy night on the beer and sausages, Captain Quelch suggested they must therefore be playing Mostfart and we all collapsed with laughter. Then Mrs Cornelius told me to bring out my cocaine since we were all friends. After sampling it the experienced old salt told me that my ‘snow’ was on the same level as his ‘sangue de vie’ and congratulated me, in my turn, on my taste. There was a bond very quickly established between Quelch and myself, though I remained instinctively wary of Seaman. Since he had identified his siblings, I asked Quelch what his Christian name was. After some hesitation he admitted it was Maurice and this set Mrs Cornelius to giggling. Eventually she asked, between gasps, ‘Yore Maurice, yore twin’s ‘Orace and yore ower brower’s Malcolm! Yer’d fink yore ma an’ pa would ave corled ‘im Boris, at least!’

  Over his glass Captain Quelch’s expression was both mournful and serious. He was only a little more sober than Wolf Seaman or myself. ‘It’s my belief that they lost heart,’ the seadog told her sadly. ‘You see, Miss Cornish, I rather think they’d set their hearts on a Doris . . .’

  We were to learn no more for at that point Mrs Cornelius began to choke and was forced to speed in unstable panic for the bathroom.

  And so, in an atmosphere of jolly expectation, looking forward to good company and with a marvellous artistic edifice to create, as it were, out of the sands of the desert, I prepared for my brief leave from the United States. Captain Quelch had a poor opinion of the Egyptians and a worse one of the generality of races and religions in that part of the world. He pointed out that there is really no longer an Egyptian race as such. Instead it is a mongrel mixture of all races, a living example of the disaster that occurs when white, brown, yellow, black and olive intermarry, especially where Negro and Semitic strains predominate. ‘Omar Sharif Bradley’ is no advertisement, I think, for the future! My estimate of Julie Christie certainly went a very long way down after I saw her embrace first an American Jew pretending to be a Russian and then an Egyptian Copt posing, of all things, as a Slav! I would say that Slavic blood was the only blood not spilled during that particular piece of cinematographic nonsense. It was the work of Lean, the communist, who made his reputation with the novels of Charles Dickens and Graham Greene before he accepted millions to produce a distorting and ignoble version of the Lawrence story. I met Lawrence more than once. He was a quiet man, a visionary like myself whose warnings had been ignored. He told me that if it had not been for the jealousy of the British High Command he would neither have been forced back to work in the pits as a common miner, nor had to produce pornography for a living. Of course he picked up those particular habits in Port Said, that sink of filth.

  In spite of all these considerations I will admit that some of the romantic expectations which filled the others also touched me. I found myself succumbing to the Lure of the East, at least in my imagination. In one’s imagination, of course, there is no harm in the Lure of the East. But the dusty realities are another matter. Hadol el-’arab haramiye.

  I was spending more time than I wished in Seaman’s company, chiefly because I hoped to convince him that Esmé would be an ideal supporting actress and that Mr Mix, my servant and assistant, was absolutely essential to me wherever I went. Of course no one understood the desperate urgency of our situation, so on one hand I had to pretend to casualness and on the other to professional pride. Once or twice I came in danger of parting company either with Seaman or, more importantly, with Goldfish or with MGM, for whom I had just completed the gigantic mechanical revolve so remarked on when The Show was eventually released. My revolve was to help make Browning’s reputation long before he offered his obscene Freaks to a thrill-greedy public. As ‘Tom Peters’, I also had a small part in the picture, in the famous Salome’s Dance sequence where I was the clown who plays Herod. My other large parts at that time were as Rasputin in Last Days of the Romanofs, Cardinal Richelieu in Seaman’s The Queen of Sin and John Oakhurst in Ingrams’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat, from which Ford stole his ideas for Stagecoach. I was never to see
most of my Hollywood films in the city of their origin. Instead, I saw them in the most disgusting conditions, in the worst possible prints, in various run-down cinemas which continued to show silent films before the talkers completely drove them to ruin. So many fine films are now gone forever, including many of my own, the brown, brittle celluloid cracking and crumbling to dust within their canisters. It is as if certain seminal books in the history of literature had been tossed on a bonfire, never to be read again. I sometimes wonder if there is some heaven where these films still live, where their stars and their crews murmur of the trials and triumphs of their glory days. Stalin, in his war upon the word, was never as successful as Time, who let the old, volatile film stock powder into nothing. I read only reviews of The Show, for instance, for not a single print still exists. Someone came to me from the National Film Theatre after I had written about my involvement with Hollywood in The Kensington Times. As usual they milked my brains for information and gave me nothing in return, hardly a mention in the programme. Why should I have trusted a man called Brownshirt? But I got to see some of the pictures Mrs Cornelius and myself had worked in. We went together to watch Ben Hur. Like our Egyptian pictures it had been filmed partly on original location, until politics forced them to complete it in America. Some of the sketches credited to Mastrocinque are in fact mine. And Mrs Cornelius appeared only briefly as a priestess in the final cut.

  I am always astonished by the assumptions of these young experts who explain to me how such-and-such a scene was shot by so-and-so, designed by so-and-so, featuring so-and-so! When I tell them who was who and what was what they say I am wrong! It is the same with ethics. It seems experience is good for nothing! They view me as an old boltun, making some sort of personal case, when all I am describing is what I actually saw. Equally with Egypt and Nasser. Those same children who took his part in 1956 are the ones who call me a Nazi! Yet Nasser was not merely a good friend to Hitler, he looked up to him as an admired role model! This is also true of Sadat, whose support of the National Socialists is a matter of record and whose talk of peace with Israel is a very different line to the one he took in the forties and fifties! But that is how it is, these days. I must say nothing in favour of the Third Reich but I am supposed to think of the pro-Nazi Third World as brothers. I remind them that ‘socialism’ is not a synonym for ‘humanism’. Just because some swarthy power-seeker chooses to call himself a socialist makes him no more or less credible than a dictator who claims that God has called him to office, or Hugh Hefner declaring himself a feminist. I point this out in relation to Vietnam, but I am always shouted down. I have never quite been able to see why a ‘Left’ dictatorship is morally superior to any other kind. But simplicity is what these children demand and they are determined to make the world simple, even if the facts refuse to accord with their theories. Why does youth so often reject the delights of complexity and variety? Only the wilder Cornelius boy seems to take after his mother in that respect, and I would guess his mind is now permanently influenced by drugs. Today’s children do not even know how to use drugs properly. For that I do not entirely blame them. The quality is so poor. As with air-travel, once you make something available to the masses, you immediately observe the decline of quality. The cocaine I occasionally buy these days is so adulterated I might as well be putting Vim and Lemsip up my nose! This is one criticism I would never make of Egypt, at least in 1926.

  Goldfish’s interest in our film was given extra fire by his desire to see the Hope Dempsey and her captain swiftly gone from US waters, while Mrs Goldfish, for her part, was hoping to see the back of Gloria Cornish.

  The ship, its cargo, crew and passengers, were well insured. If we all went to the bottom everyone who survived ashore would actually benefit. In spite of the experience of Ben Hur Goldfish felt our picture could be a considerable success. Interest in Tutenkhamun had awakened again with more stories and curses and treasure and he saw considerable public interest, so he gave us his blessing but still on condition that the film be shot so Valentino could be substituted for me if he thought the footage we brought back merited it. When I demurred, he took me aside, man to man, speaking quietly in Yiddish. ‘Listen, Max. This could be your biggest chance yet to get everything you want. Do you follow me?’

  Perhaps, I said, but I saw no reason for Valentino substituting for me.

  ‘Max. You’re a professional. Must I say more?’

  I admitted I had let the problem get out of perspective and we shook hands. Goldfish could always charm me. At the end of the meeting he announced that he was allowing us a budget large enough to finance the whole venture which was adequate but not generous. It would be extended if we needed to build interiors on our return. I would get to play some important scenes with Mrs Cornelius and, even if that Italian sweetboy were to replace me, my time with her would make the experience worthwhile. There was also some talk of taking Valentino to Egypt once we had sufficient material ‘in the can’ and he’d completed The Son of the Sheik. Needless to say, Mrs Cornelius was more excited by this prospect than I. We had a brief meeting with the off-handed little gonsel, in which he smoked a great many perfumed cigarettes and constantly referred to himself in the third person. He seemed sickly, even then, still a posturing braggart, full of boasts and false claims. We had nothing in common and hated one another on sight! I was not flattered by Goldfish’s assertion that I was a good substitute for Valentino, who looked twice my age. He had already ruined himself with over-indulgence. But the producer’s brief enthusiasm enabled me to get the papers I needed for Esmé and Jacob Mix. It was not everything I hoped for but it was the best Goldfish could offer me. Officially Esmé would be Mrs Cornelius’s dresser until we reached Alexandria, then, if Seaman so desired, she would be used in an acting role. Mr Mix, at present my valet, was on the manifest as the second projectionist, for which he had had some occasional training. I would entrust him with the cans of film I had removed from the abandoned DeLuxe Studio. He would show them on board. I had not yet had a proper chance to see any of them and planned to watch them to while away my leisure time at sea. I returned to our little house full of my success and was disappointed by their responses. Neither Esmé nor Mr Mix seemed as pleased with their positions as I expected and eventually the negro admitted he, too, had more professional ambitions in the direction of acting. I found this amusing and patted him on his broad shoulder. ‘Well, well, old fellow, I’m sure there’ll be an opening for a Nubian or two once we begin shooting!’

  The rest of our crew - cameraman, technicians and an elderly male make-up artist known as ‘Grace’ - was to be a relatively small one. In those days the Unions had not imposed their ridiculous quotas, so we would be able to recruit local labour when we needed it. Seaman preferred to work with a small unit. The chief cameraman, a small, saturnine Serbian with a huge nose, known as ‘O.K.’ Radonic because for years that was the only English he had ever been known to speak, had worked on many prestigious pictures and was recognised in Yugoslavia as a pioneer of documentary film. Radonic and Seaman had already made A Princess Confesses and Siege together but were unhappy with their Hollywood work. ‘The camera,’ said Radonic to me, ‘is an instrument of sensuality and subtle narrative. These dogs make of it no more than a showman’s toy. They are unfair to their own people.’ To which he added in English, ‘OK?’ I could not entirely agree with him but sympathised, for they too sought something which would stretch their creative talents. I knew what it was to grow bored with easy success. Queen of the Nile, as it was now called, would be my chance to emulate my hero Griffith. The story was still mine and the choice of backgrounds would largely be my responsibility. I felt that if I never made another picture, this one must stand as my masterpiece! I would be designer and writer, carving a milestone in my own career and in the history of motion pictures themselves. With that ambition accomplished, I could turn my attention to directing and from there to my true vocation again, dedicating myself to the engineering achievements necessary t
o ensure the New Millennium.

  Was it any wonder I knew a surge of optimism, like wonderful fire through my system? While I took Hever’s threats seriously, I knew in the end I should be vindicated. I had no need to be gone long from my new home. My affairs were in order. They would run themselves until I returned. I had never known such a solid sense of security. But History was never much of a friend to me. Over the ensuing months all I had won would vanish. Only now, in the tranquillity and wisdom of age, do I understand how God had certain plans for me. Die Fledermausen in der Turm? Der Dampf in der Darm? Das Haupt is Hauen! Sie brechen ihr Wort. Is that my fault?

  ¡Tengo fiebre! ¡Estoy mareado! ¡De’jeme tranquila!

  * * * *

  SEVEN

  HISTORY RARELY REPEATS ITSELF and usually offers us no more than an occasional metaphor; but events will, I think, somehow find an echoed chord. Such echoes help us reach a better understanding of the world. Gradually a significance sometimes emerges. I saw the Goat. I saw Him in Odessa. I saw Him again in Oregon where the dead live in caves hidden amongst the crags. I saw Him in Death Valley where I pursued the badmen. I saw the Goat and He tempted me. He put a piece of metal in my stomach. He showed me His sister Esmé. He told me she was my daughter. He said He would make her my wife. He promised me power over them all. He assured me that He welcomed and celebrated the rise of Science. Why should He fear Science? Why should He care if we disputed His existence?