Authors: Michael Korda
I told him that I thought Pamela Churchill was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen—a thought that had occurred, as I was to discover, to a lot of men already.
Graham stared at her. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “one can see that it would be possible for a young man to think that. She looks rather like an expensive tart, and there’s a certain attraction to that. But the main thing is to have a
lot
of women, then you’ll discover that looks aren’t even the half of it.”
I don’t remember what my ambitions had been before that moment, but I decided on the spot that I wanted to be a writer. Any lingering doubts I might have had were dispelled the next morning, when Graham allowed me to observe at a distance the writer at work. An early riser, he appeared on deck fully dressed at first light, placed himself in the shade of an awning, and took from his pocket a small black leather pocket notebook, of the kind sold in expensive English stationery shops, and a black fountain pen, the top of which he unscrewed carefully. Slowly, word by word, without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked like an attempt to write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, he wrote over the next hour or so exactly five hundred words.
He counted each word according to some system of his own, and when he reached exactly five hundred, he stopped, screwed the cap back
on his pen tightly, stood up, and stretched. “That’s it, then,” he said. “Shall we have breakfast?”
I was later to discover that Graham’s self-discipline was such that he stopped at five hundred words even if that left him in the middle of a sentence—it was as if he brought to writing the skill of a watchmaker or a miniaturist, or perhaps it was that in a life full of moral uncertainties and confusion, Graham simply needed one area in which the rules, even though they were self-imposed, were absolute. Whatever else was going on, his writing, like a daily religious devotional, was at once sacred and completely in his control. Once the daily penance of five hundred words was achieved, he put the notebook away and did not think about it until the next morning. It seemed to me then the ideal way to live, far better than my father’s, which required him to work from dawn until late at night at the studio—and he brought his work home with him as well.
Graham and I breakfasted together companionably at a small café at the far end of the port of Antibes not far from where he would later have a small, spare apartment, almost monastic in its simplicity. From time to time, he would look suspiciously at people who passed us by, or sat down nearby for coffee and a croissant. Spies and informers were on his mind at the time. Much to his annoyance, he had recently been denied a visa to enter the United States, he informed me, because the FBI had revealed the fact that he’d joined the Communist Party briefly while he was an Oxford undergraduate. That he had done so as a student prank cut no ice with the U.S. government. The FBI, he said, had a dossier on him, and were now adding to it at every opportunity. He had no doubt that his telephone calls and mail were being monitored. Needless to say, this aura of political persecution made him even more glamorous in my eyes.
After breakfast, I stopped at a stationer and bought a small notebook and a fountain pen. I followed him everywhere, like a faithful dog, and as long as I was quiet, he didn’t seem to mind being shadowed by a teenaged companion. It was the same relationship, I later realized, that young Bobby Henrey had with Ralph Richardson, the philandering butler in
The Fallen Idol
. Despite the difference in our ages, we became friends—though it was Graham whose spirit was that of a mischievous, daring schoolboy, not me. It was Graham who took me to a lushly furnished brothel in Nice, just off the Promenade des Anglais, on the grounds that this was a side of life to which every young man should be
exposed as early as possible. It was Graham who encouraged me to drive Alexa’s little Simca sports car and act as his chauffeur, despite the fact that I didn’t have a license. I took to smoking English cigarettes in imitation of him and soon got used to a martini before lunch.
Of the private side of his life, I knew nothing. Youthful, even childish, as his behavior sometimes seemed, I was at the age when I still thought of all grown-ups as old, even ancient. Of the fact that he had left his wife and embarked on a long affair with a married woman, Catherine Walston, whom he had encouraged to join the Catholic Church, I was as yet unaware, though I was later to meet her. In the absence of his mistress—Catherine was unable to leave her complaisant husband for the summer—Graham visited brothels and flirted gently with Alexa, apparently content.
Even at the age of fifteen, I could tell that he was attractive to women, both because he genuinely enjoyed their company—rare for an Englishman of his age and class—and because there was, beneath the charm and wit and superb intelligence, a feline love of gossip and an unmistakable, unapologetic interest in sex. Graham was fascinating on the subject of sex, as a matter of fact, in that respect rather resembling the great British explorer and erotic adventurer Sir Richard Burton, whom he much admired. Like Burton, Graham was a mine of lore about the brothels and geisha houses and opium dens of the East, and also like Burton, he did not take a romantic view of women. Besides, he made no secret of the fact that he was a Catholic, living apart from his wife and involved with a married woman, which gave him a certain daredevil-damned quality, as if he believed in the fires of hell and was perfectly willing to risk them for, as he would have put it, “one good fuck.” Since this was exactly what made Don Juan himself attractive to so many women, it is hardly surprising that it worked for Graham: Few women can resist a man who is willing to risk damnation for them.
During the course of the summer, Graham took over the role of sex adviser where I was concerned, having rightly concluded that my father was unwilling to bring the subject up at all. If I wanted to go to bed with a woman, I should ask her directly, he told me, and not beat about the bush—“Just tell her you want to fuck her. It’s usually the best way.”
While I was grateful for his advice, I was not yet in a position to try it out. Years later, I was to see it oddly echoed in a passage in
The Quiet American
, where the journalist Fowler, modeled after Graham himself, is talking to Pyle, the American whose childlike innocence and good intentions
cause so much trouble. Pyle is in love with Phuong, Fowler’s mistress, whom he intends to make an honest woman. After comparing Pyle’s innocence to leprosy, Fowler savagely dismisses Pyle’s claim to have Phuong’s best interests at heart: “ ‘If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she’d rather have a good …’ The crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-Saxon word.” The Anglo-Saxon “f word” was one that Graham used rarely, but precisely and with pleasure when he did.
Gradually, with an ever-changing guest list, our yachting party made its way slowly down the coastline. In Genoa, where we put in to take on fuel and supplies, Graham, who loved low dives, took me to a rough sailors’ bar that was full of men in drag. A cruise-ship purser, dressed in a blond wig, a clinging red gown, and a feather boa, gave a convincing rendition of Sophie Tucker singing “Some of These Days,” except for his five-o’clock shadow under the pancake makeup.
The journey was not all pleasure, of course. Alex was anxious for Carol Reed and Graham to repeat their successful collaboration on
The Fallen Idol
. The three of them often sat together on the bridge in the afternoons, Alex smoking a cigar and playing solitaire, while Graham smoked a cigarette and suggested ideas and Carol appeared to doze. Most of the time Alex shook his head wearily. One day, Graham read aloud a few lines he had written on the back of an envelope:
“I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”
At this (which was, of course, the genesis of
The Third Man
), Alex smiled, but gloom soon settled back on his face when Graham explained that he hadn’t a clue where the story went from there. Despite pleadings from Alex and Carol, despite offers of unprecedented amounts of money, the story seemed destined never to get beyond the first four lines.
We arrived at Capri just in time to see the sun set over Anacapri. Graham was in a reflective mood as he sipped his drink. “I should give anything to own a villa there,” he said, not exactly
to
Alex, but in Alex’s hearing.
We dined onboard that night, eating on deck, and Alex retired early, pleading fatigue (which was unusual for him), while his guests played
chemin de fer. In the morning, when we sat down to breakfast, Alex joined us instead of taking his breakfast in bed, as was his habit.
Graham unfolded his napkin, and out dropped an old-fashioned, rusty iron key that looked suitable for a dungeon. “What on earth is this?” Graham asked.
Alex smiled. “It’s the key to a villa in Anacapri,” he said. “Quite a nice one. I had myself taken ashore late last night in the motor launch. I bought a villa. It’s in your name, dear boy. Now I want the rest of my story, please.” Even Graham was startled and impressed by this instant generosity. He pocketed the key, and within a few days he and Carol and Alex had worked out the story of
The Third Man
, which became one of the most successful movies ever made and which Graham turned into not a bad thriller novel as well. For the rest of Alex’s life, the zither theme from
The Third Man
—a tune he hated—was played in his honor, while to Graham’s great annoyance the story Alex had coerced out of him became more famous than any of his more ambitious books.
As for me, it merely increased my admiration for Graham, with whom I continued to correspond during the many years in which I finished school, served in the Royal Air Force, went to Oxford, fought in the Hungarian Revolution, and eventually emerged in New York as an editor at Simon and Schuster. The first letter I wrote on S&S stationery, in 1958, was to Graham, announcing my new job to him (he had been a publisher and an editor himself, at one time), and expressing the hope that one day, in the far future perhaps, I would have the honor of publishing
him
. He wrote back to say that he hoped so too, and wished me well, and there the matter rested until late in 1971.
Graham had been published for many years by Viking Press. They did well for him, and there seemed no reason that he would ever move. I was therefore surprised to receive a telephone call from Monica McCall, his agent, asking whether I would like to become Graham’s publisher. Of course I would, I replied. Graham was both commerce
and
literature, a serious writer of international stature whose books sold in best-seller quantities. It could be argued that he was, in fact, the most eminent of living writers in the English language, and had only failed to receive the Nobel Prize—much to his private chagrin, though in public he put a good face on the matter—because one member of the Swedish Academy, offended by Graham’s combination of Catholicism and reputed left-wing sympathies, blackballed him every year.
I was astonished and delighted at the prospect of adding Greene’s name to the S&S list, but of course I wondered what had caused him to change. “It’s quite a story,” Monica said. She was an elderly Englishwoman whose formidably starchy appearance concealed a heart as soft as a marshmallow, as well as left-wing opinions that had gotten her into hot water in the McCarthy era and earned her Graham’s loyalty. Graham, it appeared, had recently delivered to Viking Press the manuscript of his latest novel,
Travels with My Aunt
, one of his rare ventures into comedy. Viking had sent the manuscript to
Playboy
, hoping to sell the first-serial rights, and
Playboy
had called back to say that while they loved the book, they didn’t like the title much—it seemed too prissy. Tom Guinzburg, the head of Viking, decided on reflection that he didn’t like the title much either, so he sent Graham a cable advising him to change the title for the U.S. edition of the book. He also suggested a number of titles dreamed up by the editors of Viking at a brainstorming session. Had Guinzburg gone to the trouble of getting to know his eminent but irascible author, he might have spared himself and his editors the trouble. Instead, he received in reply a terse cable from Graham in Paris that read:
EASIER TO CHANGE PUBLISHER THAN TITLE
.
GRAHAM GREENE
.
I
T WAS
thus that I became Graham’s publisher and editor at last, and for the next sixteen years we corresponded constantly, and saw each other whenever I was in Europe, often in the company of my father, Vincent, who had been the art director on
The Fallen Idol
and
The Third Man
, and of whom Graham was genuinely fond. My father was famous on three continents for his taciturnity, but Graham, normally the most talkative of men, seemed to enjoy endless dinners with him, in Antibes, or London, during which the two men sat facing each other for hours across a table laden with food and drink, never saying a word, apparently quite content with each other’s silent company. Once, after a dinner during which neither one of them had spoken more than a few words, and those about the weather and the food, Graham whispered to me as I took him to his waiting taxi, “Your father is the cleverest man I know!” As for Vincent, he maintained stoutly that “Gray-ham,” as he pronounced it, was the only Englishman he knew whose conversation was worth listening to.
Since Graham hardly needed editing in the conventional meaning of the word, much of my work consisted in pouring oil on troubled waters. Here was an author who knew his own mind and did not take suggestions lightly. I was not spared the occasional sharp rap on the knuckles to remind me of Tom Guinzburg’s fate. A cable about flap copy read:
I HATE THE WORD “STUNNING.”
I ALSO DISLIKE VERY MUCH THE TITLE “BEST
-
SELLING AUTHOR”
WHICH IS MORE APPLICABLE TO MR
.
HAROLD ROBBINS
. Or, about the grandiose plans for a glitzy mass-market paperback advertising campaign:
THEY FILLED ME WITH DISMAY
,
THANK GOD I DON
’
T LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES
. Or, refusing a proposed interview:
SORRY
,
BUT SAVE ME FROM MICHIKO KAKUTANI!
A fairly harmless list of questions after a libel reading by the S&S house counsel produced the comment,
COMPLETE NONSENSE!
, together with the suggestion that if we at S&S were afraid to publish the book we should let his agent know so that she could find another, more courageous American publisher. My relationship with Graham, while deeply affectionate on both sides, at first remained that of a pupil to a master, and I found myself reverting to adolescent status.