Viertel died on September 24, 1953.
On July 9, Christopher and Caskey sailed on the Queen Elizabeth for New York. They landed on July 14. Caskey had decided to stay in the East for a while before returning to California. He was going to visit his mother in Kentucky. Christopher left next day for Chicago on the Twentieth Century.
The eight hours you had to spend in Chicago between trains were always a challenge to adventure. This time, Christopher determined not to waste them wandering around the Art Institute. So he looked up steam baths in the phone book, chose one whose name, printed in extra black letters, suggested that it would be big and busy, and called a cab to take him there. The cab driver, a fatherly type, asked him if he wasn’t a stranger in town. Christopher said yes, he was. The driver said that was what he’d guessed––because the bath
Christopher had mentioned wasn’t the kind of place he’d care for; all manner of bad characters hung out there. “I’ll take you to a nice quiet place,” he added, “where you’ll be comfortable.”
To Christopher, the driver’s meaning seemed obvious; the bath Christopher had picked was queer. So he hadn’t the courage to insist on going there. Cursing his luck, he let himself be taken to the nice respectable quiet place the driver recommended. It was called The Lincoln Baths and was in the midst of a residential district. When Christopher entered, he was a little surprised to find a very obvious (black) queen who took his money, grinned archly and told him to
“have a good time.” But far bigger surprises followed. The “bath”
could hardly be described as a bath at all––for there was no steam in the steam room. It was just a shabby dirty warren of cubicles, nearly pitch dark and quite crowded; everybody was cruising. Christopher didn’t have much of a good time because the clients were mostly his own age. But this, at least, was an adventure––and an utterly mysterious one. What had been in the taxi driver’s mind?
At six that evening ( July 16) Christopher left on the Super Chief, after having seen and fallen for Montgomery Clift in The Search. On July 18 he arrived back in Los Angeles. I think Hayden Lewis and/or Rod Owens must have met him at the depot downtown. They were
now living in the Santa Monica–Ocean Park area, which was
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probably why Christopher decided to take a room at a tiny hotel called the El Kanan, on Ocean Avenue, quite near them.1 Relations between Hayden and Christopher were much better now that
Caskey was absent. But Hayden couldn’t resist making put-down personal remarks. “You’re fat as a pig!” he exclaimed, on first seeing Christopher. A couple of weeks later, when Christopher was feeling proud of having lost weight, Hayden told him, “My dear, you look like a scarecrow!” Rod Owens was always friendly.
Christopher’s room at the El Kanan was dark and small––all the smaller because Christopher had to keep his bicycle in it; there was no other safe storage place. He used it only for going to bed in.
Christopher reported to MGM for work the morning after his
arrival; it happened to be a Monday. It was delightful to have Gottfried Reinhardt as his producer again. (Looking back, I can still say that Gottfried has been my favorite boss––leaving Tony Richardson out of the running, because the relation between a writer and his director is different.)
The Great Sinner2 is listed in its credits as having been based on an original story by Ladislas Fodor and René Fueloep-Miller. I’m pretty sure that Christopher never saw this story, if indeed it ever existed in writing. What he was required to start working on was an already-completed first-draft script which had been put together by
Reinhardt and Fodor. (René Fueloep-Miller never appeared––for all I know, he was in Europe or dead.)
The story idea was basically nothing more than an adaptation of The Gambler––putting Dostoevsky himself in place of the story’s narrator.3
1 Caskey had the Lincoln Zephyr convertible with him in the East, if he hadn’t already sold it and bought the station wagon in which he later drove back to Los Angeles. Did Christopher rent a car until his return? I don’t think he did.
So maybe Hayden and Rod let him use the old Packard. Their business was already doing well, and no doubt they now had at least one other car of their own. Aside from this, Christopher could get to MGM on the trolley car which, in those days, ran right past the El Kanan and along Venice Boulevard. And there was a bus which shuttled between MGM and Hollywood. Two days after his arrival, he bought a bicycle. This was useful for getting around Santa Monica and sometimes he rode to the studio on it.
2 This title was later to provoke sneering smiles from many of Christopher’s acquaintances; they all assumed, when they first heard it, that this was a typical piece of Hollywood vulgarity. Actually, The Life of a Great Sinner was Dostoevsky’s own title for a series of autobiographical novels––a project which he never carried out.
3 In The Gambler he is called “Alexey Ivanovitch.” In the screenplay the name Dostoevsky is almost never mentioned; he is called “Fedor” or “Fedja.” Polina is called “Pauline.”
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Thus it is Dostoevsky who falls in love with Polina and becomes a gambling addict through her influence. Finally, after descending to the lowest depths of addiction and even (this was Gottfried’s addition) planning––though not actually committing––the murder of the old woman pawnbroker out of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky cures himself by writing a story about his experiences, which is presumably The Gambler.
It’s possible that Christopher wouldn’t have accepted this assignment so lightly if he had had time to find out more about it and think it over. But the glamor of a job offer by long distance phone was powerful in itself. And then there was the salary, and the free transportation home––and the immense satisfaction of having been remembered and wanted and asked for.
The reunion with Gottfried was like being welcomed back into a cozy Jewish-Viennese club; Christopher felt absolutely at his ease.
Ladislas Fodor also belonged to the club, he was a Hungarian Jew who had spent much of his youth in Vienna. But Gottfried and
Fodor were very different. Gottfried was intelligent, sad-humorous, idealistic, basically honest and capable of frankness. Fodor was full of smiles and schmaltz, smoothly witty, crafty and capable of ruthlessness. Sometimes, with his slanting, almost oriental eyes and heavy sleek mustache, he looked like a comic Stalin. Christopher didn’t trust him for one instant, but that was unimportant. They skated gaily together on the thick ice of professional politeness.
Christopher was given to understand by Gottfried that he was free to rewrite the dialogue of the first-draft script and to reconstruct its story line in any way he wanted. Gottfried also told Christopher that Fodor wouldn’t interfere with him, and indeed Christopher was left alone when he was working in his office. But Fodor was meanwhile in conference with Gottfried, unpicking Christopher’s work of the previous day and restoring the script more or less to its original form.
Fodor even fought to preserve his creaky foreign-sounding dialogue; Christopher was merely allowed to polish it. All this was done tactfully and smilingly and with charm; there were never any quarrels.
Christopher argued sometimes, but he usually had to agree that this rewriting of his rewrite was necessary, under the circumstances. They were short of time––the picture was due to start shooting early in October––and the first-draft script was at least shootable; it was corny and slick but it made cinematic sense.1
If Christopher had had several months and complete freedom to handle this story idea in his own way, he would have tried to create 1 Fodor got first credit on the completed film, and justly so.