This god is Set, who is also Sekhet, the goddess. Sekhet is called ‘the Eye of Ra’ and is the instrument of mankind’s destruction.
Sometimes I go to the Polish Club in Exhibition Road, just up from the Science Museum. It is still possible to get a good, cheap meal there and meet a few like-minded souls. They know I am not really Polish, but are prepared to turn a blind eye. They recognise suffering. All Slavs are welcome. The rooms of the club are tall and cool, even in summer, and there is a garden. I once took Mrs Cornelius with me as my guest. Nobody was rude to her. That cannot be said for everywhere one goes in London today. She found the atmosphere a little depressing, I think.
She still lives for the present. Though she is proud of her past and enjoys her memories she does not dwell on them. I became too morbid at the club, she said. I explained the difference between the spiritual contemplation of history and mere self-pity but she did not really listen. She, too, has had excessive pain in her life. Perhaps she, like me, cannot afford to dwell overmuch on certain aspects of the past. But she enjoys our reminiscences. Sometimes we sit together in her flat in Colville Terrace and talk. If the sound of the steel bands rehearsing and the prostitutes quarrelling with their pimps is not too loud we often continue well into the night. Mrs Cornelius recalls her successes, the times when she was a great star of the stage as well as the screen, but she has kept relatively little personal memorabilia. She reminds me of my own fame. Indeed, I have more recorded about her in my scrapbooks than I have of myself. She enjoys leafing through these glue-crusted heavy pages, screaming with laughter at her make-up, her dresses, her more outrageous stage-names. I suppose it is healthy, this response, but I find it a little disconcerting. My friend puts too little value on her talents. Always, she has done this. That is why I want to tell the world what she was. My own future was stolen from me but she, careless goddess that she was, threw hers away as casually as she tossed a cigarette over a ship’s rail. Yet she has never said she regretted it. Her regrets are of a different order, usually concerning some gentleman she failed to attract for a night’s passing pleasure. She has been loved by some of the greatest men in modern history, been the mistress of the most influential financiers and politicians, and if she were not discreet, she could fill the tabloids daily with her memories. Yet she seems to have little respect or nostalgia for them. ‘Blokes’re fer yer ‘olidays, like icecream and drinkin’ yerself silly. Too much of ‘em and it makes yer sick.’ She has as much and as little to say about the Persian playboy who first took her out of Whitechapel and abandoned her in Odessa as she does about Trotsky, whose paramour she became. ‘They corl it I-ran now, an’ well named it is, too. ‘Oo fuckin’ wouldn’t run if they ‘ad the chance? But ‘e ‘ad some fuckin’ gelt, the bastard. An’ ‘e never whinged on like Leo, ‘oo couldn’t bloody stop. Especially after ‘e got ter France. Remember Cassis, Ivan?’
E partito il treno? C’é tempo per scendere? Attraversiamo la frontiera? She was no yachna. And I live because of her. She is, I say, the actual keeper of my life. She laughs when I try to explain. She slaps my shoulder and calls me her sentimental little Russki. She has always been my friend.
We travelled towards Fastov through avenues of lime trees with a red flag flying from the mast of our Mercedes. She smelled of summer, of the roses, though she was wrapped in the finest fur. Later, you could inhale the bloody stink of dead horses piled into ditches by the side of the road and sometimes there were festering human corpses among them, those poor ignorant followers of Petlyura. He said he would give them land, but he was a friend of the rich. He gave them snow. His promises were insubstantial and melted away with the spring sunshine. If he had listened, if he had genuinely loved our Ukraine, as I loved her, I would have saved him so easily! He abandoned my Violet Ray. They were all greedy for our wheat and steel, those Moscow Jews. They are greedy still. But she says I am morbid and lets me talk only of the good times, the best of which were in Hollywood when I became a prince, a star, a man of substance and influence to rival all the other great aristocrats of Hollywood whom I admired, especially Griffith. Once I was his peer I invited the great director to my home, but even then he had become reclusive and suspicious. I should have taken a lesson from him. You are a king in Hollywood only while your work is popular, while you obey the studio’s power. Take some action in the name of art, idealism or even social conscience and make money and you are still celebrated for your virtues. But follow your conscience and fail to make money and you are destroyed overnight. You become a villain. This was the bitter truth Griffith had learned. But I was happy, perhaps because the future faded and the past became less painful, no more than a record of my triumphs. I learned from the great myth-makers of Hollywood how to present my curriculum vitae in the best and most dramatic light. Tom Mix was from Peoria and Greta Garbo from Detroit, but the world was told otherwise, not because they were liars but because they knew this was the only means by which they could maintain their authority with the public and, ultimately, the studio. But the studio, of course, could create other, less beneficial myths if it felt so disposed, so one always had to be a myth or two ahead of them. I had accounts in stores. I had my car. I had my little house in Venice. I had admirers. My social standing rose so high that I was sought after at dinner-parties. Frequently I attended these with Mrs Cornelius, also a star, and occasionally I saw my Esmé!
My success had come about largely through good fortune, through my natural gregariousness and through a certain talent for acting, part of which had been developed during my periods of hardship and captivity and which was, since one was so frequently in the power of those who did not speak your language, highly dependent on mime. By early 1925, while on the set assisting Poldark, I had been ‘roped in’ for Ben Hur both as a galley slave and as a Christian. This led to me serving for a while as a stand-in. There are parts of The Dark Angel, Beau Geste, The Master Singer and Tricks which owe their special vibrancy to the fact that my back and half-face were used in place of a star too drunk, drugged or hung-over to perform as his public expected. I was already appearing in small parts by April 1925 when Goldfish had returned and commissioned a draft script of White King, Red Queen with a view to putting me on the strength. I visited him at the new offices which he shared with Cecil B. De Mille - a great white marble ‘colonial’ mansion which stood on Washington Boulevard not far from MGM and was, by coincidence, the old Thomas Ince Studio, sold to settle the dead director’s debts. He was in a fatherly mood. ‘Pleasure is pleasure and business is business.’ He spoke the idiomatic Yiddish of the Warsaw gutter. ‘You’ve got to divide up professional and amateur. I used to be taught the rule - the amateur you screw, the professional you hire. Me, I preferred to screw the professionals and let the others waste their time with amateurs. Two birds in one bath. You are not, I believe, whatever else, an amateur, Max, I hope.’
I assured him I was a pro’s pro of the old school.
‘Anyway I thought that was a better use of the time and time was money. Now, I’ve learned moderation. I married an amateur and now I don’t have to screw the professionals!’