February 21: “Went to work at Warner’s.1 Lunch with Matthew
Huxley. Supper with Sam.” Matthew Huxley had a job in the
readers’ department at Warner Brothers; he had to read novels and make reports on them, so producers could decide if they were
suitable for filming. Matthew scorned this work and made apologetic jokes about it. He was full of fun and very popular with his colleagues––his pinkness and freshness and his British accent appealed to a lot of the girls. Christopher went to visit him sometimes in the 1 I see from the day-to-day diary that Christopher was earning six hundred dollars a week.
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Lost Years
office and they played what Christopher refers to as “the category game.” I don’t remember what this was.
Sam was Sam From.1
February 22: “Cycled to and from Warner’s. Talk with Edelman.”
I think Christopher usually hitchhiked to work at that time;
cycling took longer and car drivers were mostly very cooperative––
picking up riders was regarded as part of the war effort. Christopher soon found himself taking these rides for granted, as a form of public transportation; once, he heard himself saying curtly to a driver, “Be as quick as you can, I’m late!”
He must have been working alone on The Woman in White––if he
had had a collaborator, I should remember. Edelman was a pleasant, easily pleased producer, but I don’t think he was much help.
Christopher greatly enjoyed working at Warner’s. The writers
welcomed him warmly. The Writers’ Building was very much a
club; very conscious of its importance and very ready to defend its rights. It was said that Jack Warner and the other front office executives were afraid to venture into the building. When James Geller got into a fight with the front office, because he was supporting the writers’ point of view, and resigned from his job, the writers signed a strongly worded letter approving his action and pinned a copy of it on their bulletin board.
When a writer left Warner’s at the end of his assignment, he would give a party to his fellow writers and their secretaries, during office hours, complete with liquor (which was officially forbidden) and dancing. There would be a party almost every week.
Christopher’s particular friend at Warner’s was John Collier. (I think maybe they had met sometime before this––perhaps at Salka Viertel’s.) Everyone who tried to describe John ended by using the same image: a toby jug. He was small and square, with close-cropped 1 Sam and Eddie From were twins, but they didn’t look much alike, because Eddie had kept a huge Jewish nose and Sam had had his bobbed. Both of them were little and skinny and lively. Christopher had met Eddie first, I think, sometime in 1944.
Sam was in business and had made a lot of money. Eddie was inclined to sneer at him for this. Eddie’s role was that of the outspoken brother who preferred poverty to selling out; later he became an amateur psychiatrist. (For all I know, he now has a degree.)
Sam and Eddie had friends in common––Charles Aufderheide, who worked at Technicolor, and Sam’s lover, George [Bill], and Evelyn Hooker, and an older woman called Fauna(?) [probably Fern Maher], and David Sachs, the baby-faced professor of philosophy. They sometimes called themselves The Benton Way Group, because Sam owned a house there in which most of them lived, on and off.
¾ 1945 ¾
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hair, a bright red face and round bulging blue eyes. His expression was humorous and yet oddly ferocious; in his youth he had been a boxer. He was British, through and through.1
Here are some items from the before-mentioned notebook:
At Warner’s Studio: Gordon Kahn (one of the writers) very
erect and dapper, with his air of an implacable little district attorney. His stories of the executions he witnessed as a newspaper man.
His barter: He owns a valuable statuette which he got in trade for a telescope which he got in exchange for a pig costing four or five dollars.
I lose my shoe and can’t find it for ten minutes. We hunt
everywhere. “Did you notice if I had it on at lunch?” Collier said:
“This is the way men laugh in concentration camps.”
Kahn, seeing me with my weekend bag: “There goes
Isherwood with his dunnage.” Collier: “Oh, valuable Kahn!”
I think Collier was then working on a screenplay of Wilkie
Collins’s The Moonstone. Later, he switched to a picture which was called Deception. Christopher used to consult him whenever he had a problem with his own script. One of Collier’s favorite techniques was to fill up his scripts with absurdly detailed and beautifully written stage directions (which charmed and awed his producer), all leading up to a couple of lines of the flattest dialogue: “Where is he?” “I don’t know.”
Collier said that he did all his script writing at night; he couldn’t work in the daytime. Since the writers were required to keep office hours (Monday through Friday, and half-day Saturday) Collier passed the time in gossip and occasional drinking. This made him a per-petual temptation to Christopher, to drop work and join him. Collier said that he never worried when his producer required “a new angle”
on the story; he relied absolutely on spur-of-the-moment inspiration and would only begin to think about the problem after he had started walking from his office to the producer’s.
Collier believed that one should never economize; if you found that you were spending more money than you earned, you must find a way of earning more. Collier lived expensively, and he was paying 1 His view of England and English politics was thoroughly realistic, however.
After the English elections of July 1945, he won hundreds of dollars because he had bet that Labour would get in. His American colleagues were all so sentimental about Churchill that they refused to believe he could lose.
Christopher also refused to believe it but for a different reason––he wanted Churchill’s defeat so badly that he didn’t dare think it was possible.
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Lost Years
a great deal of alimony to his ex-wife; although she had a good job as an agent and [. . .] was young, healthy and very attractive. Collier didn’t seem to begrudge her the money at all. They met often and were on the best of terms. Collier told Christopher that he wanted to get married again. (Later, he did.) And he added, “I propose to breed extensively.”
Collier was modest. He almost never mentioned his own work––
as opposed to his movie writing. His favorite author was Proust. He used to say jokingly that he wanted to rewrite the ending of the Recherche so as to give the story an entirely different slant. After having been led to believe that Charlus, Saint-Loup, Jupien and the rest of them were homosexuals, the reader would discover that he had been deceived––their real guilty secret was that they were all in show business. They could never admit to this because, in their social world, show business was regarded as the vilest possible way of life.
Therefore they pretended to be homosexuals––since homosexuality was tolerated as a harmless eccentricity. When Charlus took a handsome young man into another room at a party, he would want the other guests to believe that this was the beginning of a seduction. But the disgusting truth was that Charlus was offering the young man a part in a Hollywood Western. . . . Fantasies like this one never sound very amusing when they are described in brief. But Collier and Christopher had a great deal of fun with it, and kept inventing new scenes and telling them to each other.1