Authors: C. W. Gortner
“I WANT A CHANCE TO REALLY SEE A BIT OF LIFE BEFORE I DIE.”
F
rance surrendered to Hitler in June 1940. The fall of Paris sent shock waves throughout Europe and into America, bringing a new tide of refugees, now escaping the Nazis marching down the Champs-Élysées. I closed up my bungalow and rented a house in Brentwood, where I cooked after work and welcomed exiles. Soon, my house was full of wild-eyed French talent, stunned over their country’s collapse. When the director Jean Renoir arrived with Gabin, both looking as if they hadn’t slept in weeks, I nearly dropped my tray of roast beef and potatoes.
Gabin wept that night—angry, crunched-up tears—after everyone ate their fill, sang a rousing chorus of “La Marseillaise,” and departed for their various beds on other people’s sofas or floors. I offered him my spare bedroom, saying Heidede could sleep with me; he had a cheap hotel room he shared with Renoir and they were negotiating with the studios to make a picture here, but he didn’t speak English well at all, and he was despondent. Making a movie seemed to be the last thing on his mind.
“Cowards,” he said, his hand-rolled cigarette staining his fingers as he sat brooding, staring into the emptiness where the echo of the French anthem of independence lingered. “They gave in to Hitler. They let the monsters march right in. There’s a new provisional government in Vichy,
agreeing to whatever they demand, dividing us up like a fucking quiche.” His cigarette ash trickled onto my carpet. “I wanted to stay and fight. But Renoir said we had to leave, otherwise we’d be forced to make films for them or end up arrested. I told him I’d come here but only to make money. Once I do, I’m going back to kill Nazis.”
“I’m so sorry.” I touched his hunched shoulder, heartbroken for him. “I know how it feels. I know how it is to lose one’s country—”
He snorted. “You didn’t lose Germany. You walked away to become an American movie star. And Germany isn’t being invaded. Everyone else is being invaded by them.”
I recoiled from him. “Don’t be cruel. I
did
lose Germany. I’m losing it more every day.”
He frowned. Then his anger shifted into remorse. “I’m sorry, my Grande. I am a beast. Pay no attention to what I say. I’m not myself.”
He certainly was not, but I found that I liked him even more for it—washed up on a foreign shore, alone and desperate, he needed my comfort.
“I could help you,” I said. “Look over your contract, refer you to my agent. Introduce you to people. Teach you English.”
“With your German accent?” he said, but a smile teased the corners of his craggy mouth. He contemplated me. “You would do it, wouldn’t you?” He spoke as if generosity from someone else was a revelation. “You would do anything for me if I asked you.”
I nodded. “Of course. Why shouldn’t I? I also know what it is like to be a European who comes to America and doesn’t know anything about—”
I didn’t have time to finish. He seized me, and finally did exactly what I wanted. As his mouth crushed mine, he said, “Germany and France in bed together.
À
propos
.”
He was a rough lover, disinterested in refinements, but strong as a ram and hungry for me, so hungry I imagined him ripping my flesh with his teeth. I wanted to remain in control, but he refused to let me, hoisting himself on top of me, blocking my sight so that all I could see was his face, looming, leonine, as he whispered, “Show me who you are. Not her. I want
you
.”
He unlocked me like a safe, dilating my pores with his tongue, his urgent thrust, his raw desire. Afterward, as I lay in a heap with our sweat still wet on my skin, he lit a cigarette and grinned. “That is how Frenchmen conquer,” he said, and I gave a brittle laugh, the heat of his touch so thick, it felt tattooed like ink on my skin.
I knew then that he had breached something within me, a secret place that I had not let any man, not even Rudi, reach: that raw place where I’d hidden my vulnerability after my affair with Reitz in Weimar, all those years ago. Gabin had somehow, without even trying, sneaked past my defenses to show me how helpless falling in love could really be.
I asked him to stay. He sent for his few belongings; when I eyed a leather cylinder among his battered valises and an accordion case, of all things, he said, “Open it.”
It held paintings, ripped from their frames: a Vlaminck, a Sisley, a Renoir, and a Matisse. Their pastel beauty, as iridescent as sunlit reflections on the Seine, glistened under my fingertips.
“Don’t touch them,” he said. “You’ll taint the varnish. Just keep them here for me. I wasn’t going to let the Nazis burn or steal them.”
I had them reframed and hung in our bedroom. He began to learn English with a coach I hired for him, gaining enough of the language to start work in a picture called
Moontide
. To celebrate, I took him out, dressed in white tie, to the latest hot spot, the Mocambo, so we could be seen together and generate publicity for him. He hated the pretension of Hollywood nightlife; he preferred soda fountains and seedy diners, the Negro jazz clubs in back alleys where no one famous ever went. He was not interested in preparing for stardom, playing his accordion by the pool, where he often swam nude, or bicycling about Brentwood, marveling at what he called “
la
putain
America,” where people put out too much trash and no one seemed to care about the war raging in Europe.
I was shooting
Seven Sinners
with John Wayne. Gabin took an immediate dislike to him, glaring at John when he arrived in my Cadillac at the studio to pick me up and muttering under his breath, “Is that mule in your pants?”
“Not at the moment,” I said, but I ended my dalliance with Wayne all the same, because Gabin had a black look in his eye that made me think he’d start a brawl. He didn’t seem to mind about Remarque, however, who still toiled desultorily on his novel in the bungalow I’d rented for him. Perhaps because Remarque was an exile, like him, or, more likely, because I’d shared enough about Remarque’s troubles in bed for Gabin to deem him not much of a threat.
One day I returned from the studio early to find Gabin pacing the garden in his undershorts, peering past the shrubbery and low brick wall that separated my house from the one beside it. “
Elle
est folle,
” he whispered to me as I came up beside him. “That woman next door, she’s crazy. She watches me. Every afternoon at around four, I see her through the bushes. In a big hat and sunglasses. She stares at me.”
“Does it surprise you?” I laughed. “You sit around naked, playing an accordion.”
He gripped my arm. “No. I tell you, she knows something. What if she’s a German spy?”
I hadn’t bothered to find out who my neighbors were—the area was full of Hollywood people—so I telephoned my agent to inquire. It took him a few days but when Eddie called back, he said in a troubled voice, “That crazy lady next door, it’s Garbo. That’s one of her homes.”
“Impossible,” I exclaimed, but that very weekend at the appointed hour, I took a naked dip in the pool myself with Gabin and waited. To my disappointment, our peeping MGM queen, whom I’d not yet seen in person, failed to make an appearance. The following week, moving vans rolled up and away. The house next door was rented to someone else.
My infatuation with Gabin began to unnerve me. Gossip ran rife that we were lovers, which didn’t bother me nearly as much as it did Eddie, who kept reminding me that everyone knew I was married. I was more disturbed by my own imperviousness, when I’d tried in the past to keep my liaisons, if not covert, at least discreet. It was a new sensation, this need for someone else and my willingness to indulge it. I’d been infatuated before, with Rudi before we married, and later, with von Sternberg as he crafted
my ascent. But with Gabin, it was different, as though he’d mined a liquid force inside me that I couldn’t contain, so that my insides quailed whenever he entered the room. I thought he must be my match, that twin soul that made movie fantasy so potent—the companion I could never dominate, as strong-willed as me yet also as vulnerable as an orphan. He roused in me imaginings of what it might be like to grow old together, when I’d never considered permanency with anyone but Rudi. And when I imagined telling Gabin that I longed to bear his child, I was appalled by my own delusion. It was the oldest trick in the world to hold on to a man, and I was past the age to become a mother again, even if it was possible—which, I told myself sternly, it was not. Not for me. One child was enough, considering how poorly I’d done with Heidede.
My husband sensed it when he called me from New York and I told him Gabin was living with me. There was a long silence before Rudi asked, “Are you in love with him?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” I said, hesitant to admit to the turmoil within me. “I might be. Or I could be, if I let myself.”
Rudi sighed. “You will let me know if you do let yourself?” He sounded so resigned that I forced out a chuckle. “What? And give up my parachute?” I teased. “Besides, he wants to go fight the Nazis. Who knows how long we’ll even last?”
Although I couldn’t say it aloud, I wanted it to last. By day, Gabin was a thundercloud, storming off to the studio to work on a picture he detested; at night, he clung to me as if he sought to lose himself inside my ribs. I made him steak tartare and onion soup; I filled the house with fresh-cut gladioli and sang French songs so he could feel as though we were in Paris, that a little piece of his country was here, with us. I invited over his compatriots for dinner—Charles Boyer, the director René Clair, and gentle Renoir. We played cards, told dirty jokes, danced, and drank anisette. I showed off my talent on the musical saw, which made Gabin grimace. Boyer borrowed a violin, badly out of tune, from some movie set. I fixed it and regaled them with a fumbling rendition of Bach, which made Gabin smile.
Yet beneath my protective mantle, which I wrapped about us to shelter
him from pain, Gabin seethed with fury—against the Nazis and his own cowardice for leaving his nation, for which he couldn’t forgive himself; for the humiliation of France and his own humiliation, working for Hollywood in a role he did not want, in a country he found apathetic. His picture flopped, while my
Seven Seas
was successful, not as much as
Destry,
but enough to get me cast in
Manpower
as a hard-talking gun moll.
“What are we doing here?” he demanded, after he’d drunk more than he should and our guests had departed. “Playing silly games and making idiotic pictures when people are dying. We are cowards, too. All of us. We should be fighting, not filling the fat American wallet.”
It was his litany. He railed against it but then he did the same, signing himself on for another picture, because, he said, he was saving up to join the cause. I had tried to convince myself that he’d never actually forsake the plenty of America for the terror of Europe and the war, but these rants of his were becoming more frequent, and though we lived together, he rarely shared the costs, so I had to wonder if perhaps I was deluding myself into thinking he cared about his personal safety more than he did.
“What else can we do?” I said. “We’re not soldiers. I don’t know how to shoot a gun.”
“Neither does anyone who joins the resistance,” he replied. “You don’t need to be a soldier to learn to use a gun or stand up for what is right.”
“Perhaps you don’t, but I have a husband and daughter to support, and my family in Germany—”
“Bah.” He cut me off with a snarl. “Your family in Germany are all Nazis by now, shouting ‘
Heil Hitler
’ and watching the Jews be deported.” He gulped down his whiskey; he liked Johnnie Walker. Too much, I thought. “I thought you were an American citizen now,” he went on in a snide tone of voice. “Yet every time I bring up the war, you act as though you were forced out of Germany yesterday.”
“I am an American citizen,” I said, too tired from work and cooking for our friends to argue with him. He could be deliberately obtuse about the fact that I could consider myself both an American and a German and needn’t choose one over the other. “America is not at war.”
“Not yet.” He banged his glass on the table. “But not for much longer. Go, then. Be a slut for Hollywood. But nothing will stop me.” He went to the sofa and threw himself upon it. He’d stay out here tonight, drinking himself into a stupor. I was relieved. I found him exasperating at times like this, so I retreated to the bedroom, not wanting to argue, as Heidede could hear everything from her room. Lying awake, his snores reaching me from down the hall, I asked myself why I persisted. He was contrary and bellicose; he detested everything. He was turning my life upside down. How long would it take before he started hating me?
Or I started hating him?
The possibility terrified me. In the morning before I left for the studio, I made him breakfast and tidied up his clothes, which he habitually shed wherever he happened to be. He was asleep, exuding the stench of whiskey. He had finished off the Johnnie Walker. I resolved to not buy another bottle, as he might never manage to accomplish anything if he kept drinking at this rate. I had to shake him awake. Grumbling and with a hangover, he ignored my murmured endearments and plate of scrambled eggs to stagger off to the shower.
That night, I came home later than usual after visiting with Remarque, who was sunk in yet another depression. Gabin greeted me in a rage. “
Putain,
” he yelled, flinging the contents of his glass at me. “All night I’ve been waiting, and you were—where? With that miserable German writer, I suppose. Or that American mule, Wayne, or God knows who else!
Assez!
I’ve had enough. Them or me. You decide.”
I was so stunned by his assault, his alcohol soaking my cashmere coat, I didn’t consider at the time that this had nothing to do with Wayne or Remarque. Infuriated by his boorishness, I shot back with the first thing that came to mind: “It’s my house and my life. I’ll see whomever I want.”