“When one batch arrived,” says Tony, “we opened them up and found a note, written by someone at G. Ryder & Co. The note said, ‘Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off.’”
Tony laughs. I half expect him to say, “I suppose we were a bit fussy.”
But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “As opposed to non-fussy customers who don’t care if they struggle all day to get the tops off.”
• • •
I HAVE DINNER with Christiane. They met when Kubrick gave her the part of a bar singer in Paths of Glory. They married and barely left each other’s side for the next forty-two years. They raised three children: Anya and Vivian, plus Katharina, her daughter from an earlier marriage. I’ve got to know her well but there are some things I’ve always felt awkward asking her about, like anything to do with her uncle Veit Harlan. But tonight over dinner she brings the subject up herself.
“Stanley and I came from such different, such grotesquely opposite backgrounds,” she says. “I think it gave us an extra something. I had an appalling, catastrophic background for someone like Stanley.” She pauses. “For me, my uncle was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown’s world. Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so intimately—and yet not know.”
It turned out that when Harlan wasn’t clowning around with Christiane, he was writing and directing propaganda films for Goebbels, including Jud Süss, in which venal, immoral Jews take over and ruin a German city, stealing riches, defiling Aryan women, etc. The film was shown to SS units before they were sent out to attack Jews. Harlan was tried twice for war crimes, and exonerated, proving that Goebbels had interfered with Jud Süss, forcing him to reedit and inject more anti-Semitism.
“Where my uncle was an enormous fool, as many talented people are, was that he mistook his gift for intelligence,” says Christiane. “He was a great big famous film person. He looked better and talked better and had enormous charm. So he thought he was also far more intelligent than Mr. Goebbels. Goebbels was ten thousand times smarter than my uncle.” She pauses. “Film people, actors, are puppets. We are silly. We are silly folk.” She says her uncle’s story reinforced for Stanley and her their great principle in life: Always be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power.
“All Stanley’s life he said, ‘Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.’ We both were very nervous on journeys when you have to show your passport. He did not like that moment. We always had to go through separate entrances, he with [our] two American daughters upstairs, and me with my German daughter downstairs. The foreigners downstairs! He’d be looking for us nervously. Would he ever get us back?”
Christiane laughs. Of course they were always reunited. They spent a lifetime together inside Childwick, where Stanley created his self-governing mini-studio. I never meet their youngest daughter, Vivian. There was mention of her being in Los Angeles. Vivian had once been a big presence in the family. When she was nineteen she directed a brilliant documentary, The Making of The Shining. When she was twenty-six she composed the score for Full Metal Jacket. She shot eighteen hours of behind-the-scenes footage for that film, too, but it was never edited or released. It just sits in film cans in the stable block.
I watch some one day. Here’s Kubrick sitting in a chair on an old airstrip during a break from filming. Crew members stand around him. Vivian has caught a tense moment.
STANLEY KUBRICK: We fucked around for an hour and twenty minutes. . . .
CREW MEMBER: I know it seems like a lot of tea breaks but we had the tea break that was up at . . .
KUBRICK: You had a tea break at four o’clock? And you had a tea break at six o’clock? If you had a tea break at four, you don’t need to break for this tea break. This must be a complimentary tea break. So figure it out.
TERRY NEEDHAM (FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR): I’d prefer to do away with them all. Because it gives me more fucking headaches, poxy tea breaks, I’d like to sling them right down their fucking piss holes.
KUBRICK: Right, Terry.
TERRY NEEDHAM: I’m the sort of man we need, eh, Stanley?
KUBRICK: That’s right.
You catch glimpses of Vivian in the rushes. She looks beautiful, effervescent.
“She is a fabulous person,” says Christiane. “Beautiful, very witty, enormously talented in all sorts of directions, very musical, a great mimic, she could play instruments easily, she could sing, she could dance, she could act, there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. We had fights. But she was hugely loved. And now I’ve lost her.” She pauses. “You know that? I used to keep all this a secret, as I was hoping it would go away. But now I’ve lost hope. So. She’s gone.”
It all began, she says, while Stanley was editing Eyes Wide Shut, which starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Stanley asked Vivian to compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn’t. Instead, she disappeared into San Francisco and Los Angeles. “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy. He wrote her a forty-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”
On the day of Stanley’s funeral, Christiane says, Vivian arrived with a woman nobody recognized. “She just sat in Vivian’s room. Never said hello to us. Just sat. We were all spooked. Who was this person? Turns out she was a Scientology something-or-other, don’t know what.”
“Did Vivian give a reason why she joined the Scientologists?” I ask.
“It’s her new religion.” Christiane shrugs. “It had absolutely nothing to do with Tom Cruise, by the way. Absolutely not.”
“Maybe it was her way of dealing with her father’s death?”
“I think she must have been very upset,” Christiane says, “but, again, I wouldn’t know. I know nothing. That is the truth. I can’t reach her at all. I’ve had two conversations with her since Stanley died. The last one was eight years ago. She became a Scientologist and didn’t want to talk to us anymore and didn’t see her dying sister, didn’t come to her funeral. [Her sister Anya died of cancer, aged fifty.] And these were children that had been joined at the hip.”
I tell her that she seems to have handled all her tragedies with remarkable resilience. “I daresay I have, yes,” she says. “But I’ve also been very sad. I was helped by my children. Anya, in particular.”
She says that when Stanley was alive, he kept her and their daughters cosseted from stress, from life’s legal and financial arrangements, allowing them to float through Childwick without worries. But he died long before anyone expected he would, and Christiane has been left with burdens she never anticipated. So she’s forever finding herself second-guessing him. Would he have handled the Vivian situation differently? Would he have approved of letting me look though the boxes? She has bigger plans for the archive. She wants to donate them to a university. Would he have approved of that?
“I am very self-conscious and surrounded by his ghost,” she says. “I’m always having these conversations with him, as I am not terribly secure. And I try to live like I think he would want me to go on, because of the grandchildren and everything.”
At the end of our dinner I tell her, with some embarrassment, that I find her quite inspiring. She thinks about this for a moment. “I’m very pleased that Stanley liked me,” she replies.
• • •
FOR MONTHS, as I look through the boxes, I don’t bother opening the two that read Shadow on the Sun. But, one evening just before last Christmas, I decide to take a look.