Authors: James Salter
I was eager to hear and ready to embrace Adolphus Mekas’s views, especially regarding scripts. There was a then current idea that one should work without them, improvise, allow the actors freely to create a story. Plot was the curse of serious drama, as Bernard Shaw had said.
Was he, I asked cautiously, working from … did he have a script? Yes. He had scripts, but he kept them locked up, Mekas said, not to keep them from falling into possibly rival hands but to prevent the actors from reading them—that was the way they formed preconceptions, he explained. When the time came for the scene, he gave them the necessary lines and those only. He said all this with assurance and European calm. I have no idea what the movie he made was like.
My own script was a sentimental bouquet laid, as it were, at the feet of a young, irresistibly cynical New York girl, the flower of every generation, in this particular case nurtured in such bygone hothouses as El Morocco and the Stork Club. She was seen through the eyes of an infatuated but unforceful man who is put off by certain incidents she expects will endear her, and in the end they part. She disappears into the swift currents of Manhattan. His voice perhaps offers an elegy.
The story, which was called “Goodbye, Bear,” had no barb. It was merely a history and would have been better as a poem; it had some aching lines. It also had a kind of lonely dignity, which produced an unexpected result, in the manner of the Chinese fable of the mandarin who for years stood along the river fishing with, instead of a hook, a straight pin. The word of this curious behavior spread until it finally reached the emperor himself, who came to see. What could anyone hope to catch with such a hook? the emperor asked the mandarin. For what was he fishing?
The answer was serene. “For you, my emperor,” the mandarin said.
The emperor, uncrowned then, was an actor just becoming known on the New York stage, Robert Redford. Somehow he had gotten hold of the script and we met for lunch, two naïfs in the sunlit city.
There come back to me many images of Redford when he was new and his aura that of purest youth. One morning in London at the entrance of the Savoy, three or four women came up asking for an autograph. As he signed he gave me a sort of embarrassed smile. “You
hired
them,” I said to him afterwards. He broke out in a wonderful laugh, no, no, he hadn’t. The car that was driving us to the airport that day broke down in the tunnel just before Heathrow, and we got out and ran for the plane, carrying our bags. That was how easy and unattended his life was then. He was very likable and straightforward.
Together we went to the winter Olympics at Grenoble in 1968, slept in corridors as rooms were unavailable, and rode on buses. I had been hired to write a film about a ski racer, which he would star in, and we traveled for weeks with the U.S. team.
At dinner one night I remarked that I saw for the main character, the role Redford would play, Billy Kidd, more or less, tough, in all likelihood from a poor part of town, honed by years on the icy runs of the East. Kidd was the dominant skier on the U.S. team at
the time, and in the manner of champions somewhat arrogant and aloof—there may have been an element of shyness.
Redford shook his head, no. The racer he was interested in was at another table. Over there. I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself, which of course should have marked him from the first, sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times. He was from California, however, and Redford was also, from Van Nuys, one of those vaguely appealing names of the Coast.
“Him?” I said, “Sabich?”
Yes, Redford said; when he was that age he had been just like him.
The film was meant from the beginning to be about someone who was the opposite of that nearly vanished figure, the athlete who was supremely talented yet modest, who had the virtues of both strength and humility. Paavo Nurmi, the Finnish runner, a legendary champion—I have mentioned him—had always been an idol of mine. I pictured an older Nurmi, though knowing nothing about his personality, as a coach who had worked for years to have one of his racers win a gold in the Olympics, and who finally found the chance but with an individual he disliked, even despised, a crude, self-centered Redford. Athletes like this existed, but perhaps not coaches like Nurmi.
I thought the film would be about something which, in fact, survived in one line of casual dialogue, “the justice of sport.” The final moments were to show an exultant Redford at the bottom of the course, arms raised in acknowledgment of triumph, as meanwhile a little-known competitor, last in the seeding, is coming down, beating the successive interval times one by one, and as the faces of the crowd begin to turn in a great final tropism towards the mountain and the cheers ominously rise, he streaks across the
finish line at the last moment to win. This was to be the greater justice, perhaps inachievable in life.
So easy, all of it, such play. To go into New York restaurants with him and his wife, in the beautiful filthy city, the autumn air in the streets outside, eyes turned to watch as we cross the room. The glory seems to be yours as well. There was a dreamlike quality also, perhaps because Redford seemed to be just passing through, not really involved. It was washing over him, like a casual love affair. There was, even for a long time after he had gained it, something in him that disdained stardom. He wore black silk shirts and drove a Porsche, disliked being called Bobby by eager agents, and more than once said, “I hate being a movie star.” Nevertheless he became one, with the life of evasion that went with it, of trying not to be recognized and approached, a life of friends only, of sitting at the very front of the plane, the last to board, like a wanted man.
At forty, some years later, he looked better than when we had first known one another. The handsome, somewhat shallow college boy had disappeared and a lean, perceptive man stood in his place. From a kind of casual amusement and a natural caution he had made an astonishing success. His days had a form, he accomplished something during them. Everyone wanted to see or talk to him. As if glancing at a menu he was able to choose his life.
One night on a plane, crossing the continent, he showed me a letter he had received. It was typewritten, from a small town in Kansas or Nebraska—a young wife, separated from her husband, having arranged for a baby-sitter, had driven forty miles to see a film of his. I forget which it was—
Ordinary People,
perhaps—but it had moved her profoundly, made her weep, and revealed to her in a new way the path her life should take. The voice of the writer, who was down somewhere in the darkness over which we were flying, was there on the page, truthful and lonely. Unlike thousands of other letters, boxes of them, he had carried this one around for
months, meaning to reply but never able to.
I’m still here,
he wanted to say,
I still have your letter.
The longing, I thought, is so vast that barely a part of it can be acknowledged. An unmeasurable sum comprises it, like the sea.
Our lives drifted apart. I wrote another film for him but it was never made. “My presence in something,” I remember him saying, perhaps in apology, “is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” He knew his limits.
The last time, I saw him at a premiere. A mob was waiting, many with readied cameras to capture the scene. Inside the theater every seat was filled. Then in the near gloom a murmur went across the crowd. People began to stand. There was a virtual rain of light as everywhere flashbulbs went off, and amid a small group moving down the aisle the blond head of the star could be seen. I was far off—years, in fact—but felt a certain sickening pull. There came to me the part about Falstaff and the coronation.
I shall be sent for in private,
I thought, consoling myself.
I shall be sent for soon at night.
——
As I think of early days, an inseparable part of them appears: the thrilling city—New York was that—in which they began, and there seems to be, over everything, a kind of Athenian brilliance, which is really the light coming through the tall glass archways of Lincoln Center, where, in the fall, the Film Festival was held. It drew what I felt to be the elite, the great European directors—Antonioni, Truffaut, Fellini, and Godard—presenting a new kind of film, more imaginative and penetrating than our own.
The theater at Lincoln Center was spacious and elegant, unlike the dreary, cramped ones where the first Buñuel or Brakhage—an amazing minor figure—might be seen. The screen was immaculate, the faces that appeared on it tremendously large and bright. They had a lunar intensity, powerful and pure. The patina of art lay upon everything, and we were part of it, elevated by it.
The city seemed to be leaping with films, schools of them, of every variety, daring films that were breaking into something vast and uncharted as an icebreaker crushes its way to open sea. I was living in the suburbs and I had only recently met, just down the road, by chance, Lane Slate. He was irreverent and well-read, with a handsome face and a mouth that never opened in a smile, his teeth were so bad. When he laughed he would stuff his necktie in his mouth to conceal them. He was the talented companion I longed for. There were two or three old automobiles, ruined classics, a LaSalle and a Delage among them, stranded in the yard outside his small white house. Inside was a piece or two of eyecatching furniture amid junk, a wife, an Old English sheepdog, and two well-loved little boys, indifferently clothed.
He had been divorced, from an Italian woman he described as beautiful, whom I never saw. She had garnisheed his salary. Driving into the city together we would often stop at an out-of-the-way New Jersey bank where he was obliged to shelter his always strained assets. He worked for a television network in a division called Public Affairs. We helped ourselves to the rich supplies of notebooks and stationery and planned movies we would make together.
There is a language within language, a kind of code, and it was the joy of this that drew us close. I liked the way he spoke, the speed of his conclusions, the breadth of his scorn, the exactness of his references. Also his aplomb. He had not been to college—he had read his way up and somehow knew everything. Though I could not quite picture it, he had been in the navy. He retained none of its lore except for a belief that one could always make out with girls who wore little gold crucifixes.
We formed a company and began to make a documentary on New York called
Daily Life in Ancient Rome,
with a narrative taken from Livy and Sallust. Early morning. Shooting on Fifth Avenue. A car pulls up at the corner and a girl in an Air France uniform with
a trim, tailored skirt gets out. The car has diplomatic plates, and a pale, spent driver leans across to bid goodbye and close the door behind her. She runs, hobbled by the skirt, towards the broad glass front:
AIR FRANCE.
The night has ended.
We sat on stools in the dark looking at the rushes, weighing cuts. Into the bright sunlight of West Fifty-fifth Street in the afternoon, to the Brittany for lunch. The film will have faces, illicit couples emerging from the “21” club, dizzying shots up sleek façades towards dark skies, while beneath it in calm tones the prophetic description, centuries old, of decay.
This was the New York of Balanchine, Motherwell, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as Jack Smith, Yoko Ono, and George Kleinsinger, performers whom the years had yet to deplume. Kleinsinger was a composer. In his rooms at the Chelsea Hotel he had a tropical rainforest, uncaged birds hopping from branch to branch, fish in pools, fountains. Nearby was a gleaming black piano at which he was writing the music for an opera called
Archy and Mehitabel.
His daughter stood beside him and sang parts of it in a great, passionate voice, then returned to stretch out on the daybed beside another young woman, Kleinsinger’s fiancée.
Yoko Ono was married to an acquaintance of mine who acted as her manager and dedicated himself to her career. She had been married before. He was somewhat ingenuous; she was not. They lived in one place and another, always struggling for money, and had a little daughter to whom he was devoted. I would see him in the Village with the baby in his arms and her bottle in a musette bag over his shoulder. His wife was above this. A performance artist, she radiated ambition. She was determined to have her chance, and in the end, in a very unexpected way, she found it.
Daily Life in Ancient Rome
was never completed. We did make ten or twelve other films, documentaries, scraped together, some of them eloquent. We traveled over the country together, flying, driving, checking into motels, in the mindless joy of America, beer
bottles lying by the roadside, empty cans tumbling light as paper. I can see his hands moving in small, inviting circles as he explains himself and his requests to someone. He sketched broadly and only lightly filled things in. He could so quickly make himself liked. It is his curious charm that I am remembering, the pockets with money crumpled in them, some of which often fell to the floor, the migraine headaches, which eventually came in clusters, the familiarity with names of all kinds, the cars in need of repair, the essential loneliness.
His older son, named for him, was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and died a few days later. It was at a time when we had already begun gradually to separate. Perhaps we had lost the power to amuse each other. We made one final film, on American painters: Warhol before his real recognition, Rauschenburg, Stuart Davis, a dozen others. From the small, asbestos-shingled house in Piermont he moved to Sneden’s Landing, an exclusive enclave where the houses, though passing through the hands of various owners, had their own traditional names. Disasters followed, principal among them the death of his wife.
On envelopes addressed in his beautiful handwriting the postmarks moved west, to California, where, if it was to happen, he would at last become a director. He lived for a time in a house owned once by Greta Garbo, came back East for a third, unsuccessful marriage, and then retreated to Arizona and a ranch with the unlikely name of X-9. There the trail came to an end.