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a more lifelike Dostoevsky character––a role for a character actor, not a romantic lead––eccentric, ugly, violent, shameless, farcical. He would have tried to make the love affair with Polina an enslave-ment, a bizarre addiction, instead of a cool-blooded pretty Viennese romance. He would have thrown out the neat little Fodor–
Reinhardt triangle with the casino director, who ends up behaving like an English gentleman. But, alas, he knew already that the Dostoevsky character was to be played by Gregory Peck!
Christopher had always been a model employee. He despised
amateurs like Brecht who, when they condescended to work at a film studio, whined and sneered and called themselves whores or slaves. Christopher prided himself on his adaptability. Writing a movie was a game, and each game had a different set of rules. Having learned the rules, Christopher could play along with enjoyment––
especially if he had a fellow player like Gottfried Reinhardt who was enjoying himself too. Once Christopher had accepted the fact that this game was to be played according to the Viennese code, he became almost as Viennese as Gottfried and Fodor. I have no doubt that some of the script’s most Viennese touches were contributed by him, though I can’t remember which they were.[*]
[* Isherwood left the following note nearby but unnumbered:] On July 20, 1948, a well-known herpetologist named Mrs. Grace Wiley was being interviewed by a photographer (from Life magazine?), at her home, which was somewhere in the Los Angeles area. She was showing him her pet cobras. One of them, newly arrived from Sumatra, became annoyed by the clicking of the camera. Mrs. Wiley decided to put it back in its box. As she reached out to do this, the cobra bit her in the hand. She remained calm, forced the snake to release its hold, put it into its box and told the photographer where he could find the serum which she kept in the house. But the photographer was so nervous that he dropped the vial containing the serum and broke it. He then took Mrs. Wiley to a hospital in Long Beach. However, the only snake-bite serum available at the hospital was rattlesnake serum. Rattlesnake venom destroys the red blood cells; cobra venom attacks the nerve centers. So this serum couldn’t help Mrs. Wiley. She died, ninety minutes after being bitten.
This tragedy made a strong impression on Christopher, because of the fascination–aversion he felt toward snakes and because he had once met Mrs.
Wiley, at a snake show to which Vernon Old had taken him, several years earlier. He remembered that she had exhibited two black cobras in a cage, which also contained her purse. Wanting to take something out of the purse, she had put her hand into the cage and casually pushed the cobras aside, giving them light smacks on their noses.
Gerald Heard had known Mrs. Wiley quite well and had visited her at her house where, with his usual sangfroid, he had sat drinking tea while the cobras crawled freely about the room. Gerald reported to Christopher that Mrs. Wiley had assured him she never had any trouble with her snakes because, “You see, ¾ 1948 ¾
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Christopher’s first four weeks on The Great Sinner were busy but uneventful. He worked all day at the studio, Mondays through
Fridays, and sometimes stayed on there with Gottfried and Fodor till nearly midnight. Gottfried would get food sent up from the commissary and they would drink and talk in his office or watch films in the projection room. (One evening, they ran two costume pictures, because both were set more or less in the same period as The Great Sinner. During the Vivien Leigh version of Anna
Karenina, Christopher closed his eyes for what seemed like a couple of seconds. When he opened them again, he was shocked to
discover what liberties the director had taken with Tolstoy’s story; there seemed to be several unfamiliar characters. . . . He had slept right through into the middle of Max Ophuls’s Letter from an
Unknown Woman!)
In the evenings, Christopher had supper with Hayden and Rod
more often than with any of his other friends. They were his nearest neighbors, their company was relaxing and their interest in studio gossip was unfailing. (Like most people who are in the midst of a project, Christopher found it easier to talk about The Great Sinner than about anything else; all other topics required extra concentration.) Christopher also saw Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, Salka Viertel, Lesser Samuels, Vernon Old, Klaus Mann, Chris Wood, van
Druten, Tito Renaldo,1 Carlos McClendon, Jay de Laval and a
they know I won’t hurt them.” Much earlier in her life, as a teacher of natural history, she had been afraid of all snakes. To overcome her fear, she had made pets of the nonvenomous species and had later begun to handle rattlesnakes and cobras. She had been bitten several times. Gerald rightly praised her as a great exponent of nonviolence. But it must be admitted that she was sometimes unprofessionally careless. A lady who works at the Santa Monica Public Library has just told me ( January 12, 1973) that Mrs. Wiley got fired from a job in the East because she let some venomous snakes out of their cages in a laboratory, with the result that they escaped from the building and terrified the neighbors.
1 I don’t remember when Christopher first met Tito––but it was before he left California in January 1947. From now on, they saw each other fairly often.
Caskey had known Tito longer than Christopher had––in New York, before Caskey went into the navy. Tito, when young, had a well-made exciting brown body and dark Mexican good looks. In those days his air of sadness––the sadness of the Indio triste [sad Indian]––was charming; later it turned to obstinate pathological melancholy [. . .]. Tito, when Caskey met him, was going around with Cole Porter––perhaps as a sex mate but more probably as one of the decorative nonsexmaking attendants with whom Porter liked to surround himself. Caskey told Christopher that once, one rainy afternoon when there was nothing else to do, he and Tito had gone to bed together and 154
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few others. Peggy––like Berthold Viertel––already belonged to Christopher’s past, but she didn’t realize this yet, and neither did Christopher, altogether. So she still had a certain power over him.
Even while Christopher was entertaining Peggy with anecdotes
about his South American trip, he felt himself becoming in-
voluntarily apologetic. He hated this but he couldn’t help it. What was he apologizing for? His defection from the Vedanta Center, and his life with Caskey. He wasn’t really apologizing to Peggy, though.
He knew very well that she disapproved of Caskey and of all his other boyfriends, past and to come. But that was neither here nor there, for she also disapproved of the Vedanta Center––and for the same reason. Christopher’s sexual and religious associates embarrassed her equally; both groups, from her point of view, were shoddy, second-rate, not to be mentioned in nice society. . . .
Christopher rejected Peggy’s moral judgements in advance, yet he perversely went on seeing her and telling her about himself. Because his life made him feel guilty, he needed disapproval of it by a dogmatically stupid woman, a woman whose disapproval would
reassure him. Poor Peggy! Christopher had given her an ungrateful role to play––a role which was very bad for her own character, for it brought out all her self-righteousness. When Christopher got cured of his guilt, several years later, he stopped seeing her altogether. She was well rid of him, and he of her. They were both of them remarkable and even admirable people, but their
relationship had been founded on falseness from the start; they could only have acted sincerely as declared enemies. I must blame
Christopher far more than Peggy. For years, he had been using her made sex for several hours with great enjoyment.