The next weekend, Saturday the 18th and Sunday the 19th, was the last that Christopher and Jim spent together. They didn’t leave town.
On Monday the 20th, Bill Caskey arrived. He had bought a station wagon (secondhand) in the East and had driven it out to California.
The station wagon had been christened “The Blue Bird” by its
former owner, and its name was painted on it. (Later, when people asked Caskey what “The Blue Bird” meant, Caskey would answer
with his southern grin and drawl, “Honey, we bring happiness!”) Caskey had found a driving partner to come with him, a boy
named Les Strang.[*] In his first enthusiasm, Caskey had written to Christopher that Les was “like a blond German discus thrower.”
Whereupon, Christopher had become jealous and had written back to Caskey that he didn’t want to meet Les, if Les and Caskey were still having an affair by the time they arrived in Los Angeles.
Christopher’s jealousy seems quite sick, considering his own
involvement with Jim––even now, I’m at a loss to explain it.
However, Caskey replied reassuringly––from some town on their route––that he had already lost his romantic interest in Les, who was
“behaving like a mad queen.” I seem to remember that one
demonstration of Les’s mad queenishness was that he had [shat] in the corner of a motel bedroom!
Christopher took a larger room at the El Kanan for Caskey and himself, until they had chosen a house to rent. Their first night together, Christopher found that he couldn’t make love to Caskey at all; his memories of sex with Jim were still so powerful. Caskey took
[* Not his real name.]
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this very calmly. Either he minded but was determined not to show it, or he knew instinctively that Jim wasn’t a real rival. If the latter, he was absolutely right. When he and Jim met, a few days later, they became friends at once. Indeed, it was as if Caskey had established, there and then, a ménage à trois agreement with Jim. That winter, whenever Caskey wanted to go out for the night, or to bring in someone to sleep with, he would say to Christopher, “Why don’t you spend the night with Jim?” I don’t think that he and Jim had sex together––at least not often. Jim wasn’t his type. As for Caskey and Christopher, their sex life was resumed almost immediately, without any further hang-ups.
The house which Caskey and Christopher decided to rent was 333
East Rustic Road,1 down in the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon. It belonged to Lee Strasberg, the director, and his wife Paula, and was fairly adequately furnished. I don’t remember how much the rent was, but undoubtedly Paula Strasberg drove a hard bargain; she was a real Jewish landlady––who, at the same time, kept protesting that she was an artist and didn’t understand business. There was a sagging bridge over the creek; it was the only entrance to the house and Caskey and Christopher were obliged to get it repaired. Mrs.
Strasberg avoided paying for this by ignoring the letters Christopher wrote her about it. She also ignored the problem of a rust-eaten old car which a young actor friend of hers had abandoned on the creek bank beside the house. Christopher had to pester him for months before he bothered to find its pink slip, and then someone had to be persuaded to tow it away. (A teenager finally did and then proceeded to spend several hundred dollars, making it driveable.)
Caskey and Christopher moved into the house on September 28,
and at once started receiving visitors. That same night, they had Jim Charlton, Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens to supper. Caskey was
happy to be cooking and entertaining again.
Next day, Lesser Samuels came down, to discuss an idea he had had for another film story. The day-to-day diary doesn’t give a title, but I think this must have been The Easiest Thing in the World. More about it later. Christopher was still working on the script of The Great Sinner but only intermittently; it needed just a few finishing touches.
On October 1, the day-to-day diary says vaguely that Christopher went “to see [a friend], with Phil Curry.” I think Phil Curry was a lawyer and that this must have been a visit to the downtown jail, where [the friend] was under arrest. He had got into trouble because 1 The house is described in A Single Man; Rustic Road is called “Camphor Tree Lane.”
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a teenager he had had sex with had later denounced him. The
teenager was, in fact, no innocent rosebud but an experienced hustler who had been picked up by the police and had got himself off the hook by naming names. Frau Mann rose magnificently to this
occasion. She too went downtown to see [the friend], and declared to all and sundry that she found the idea that he ought to be punished absolutely ridiculous. “Absolutely ridiculous!”––I can still hear the brisk indignant tone in which she said it––this famous and highly respectable old lady defiantly heckling the Los Angeles police on behalf of her son’s [. . .] friend. However, despite her efforts, [the] poor [man]
got sent to a prison camp. Christopher and Klaus Mann visited him there on December 19. He was released on February 12.
On October 6, shooting began on The Great Sinner. On the 9th, Christopher temporarily finished work at MGM. Stephen Spender stayed that night with Christopher and Caskey, so this may have been the day when he came out to the studio to watch the shooting. It was a scene in Gregory Peck’s attic room. He is lying asleep, exhausted after an epileptic fit. Ava Gardner (Pauline) enters, rearranges his bedclothes, then becomes aware that the desk is piled with pages of manuscript. To quote from the screenplay: “In happy surprise she whispers under her breath: ‘Fedja . . . you’ve written.’ ”1
Admittedly, Ava Gardner’s diction left something to be desired.
Stephen bitchily pretended that he thought she said: “Fedja . . .
you’re rotten.”
During the early days of the shooting, Christopher spent a lot of time on the set. At first, he and Gottfried both had high hopes of Robert Siodmak, a director they greatly admired. But it soon became evident that Siodmak felt somehow ill at ease making this costume picture. He didn’t seem to understand the style of the period or the kind of acting that should go with it. Even his lighting was wrong, it suggested one of his modern thrillers. When the doctor came into Peck’s attic, the set was so dark that you couldn’t see it. And then the doctor spoke his line, “I need more light”––which made everyone who watched the rushes roar with laughter. The scene had to be reshot.
1 Some of the stage directions in the screenplay have obviously been written by Fodor. Here are three samples: “These are the 1860s, an age when gaslight is young, as is the melody that brightly fills the scene. The fashions are charming, the décolletés daring, but the shape of a feminine leg is still a secret.”
“And once more his whole army of gold is thrown into battle. . . . The silence is ghostly. The whirling ivory ball carries destiny.” “Near the windows is the Baccarat table. . . . Surrounded by a wreath of empty chairs, it looks expectant
––as though waiting to welcome the return of its nightly guest.”
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Christopher had had such misgivings about Peck before the film started shooting that he now reacted in the opposite direction, simply because Peck didn’t immediately disgrace himself in his first scenes.
Christopher tried for a while to believe that Peck was going to be very good, and he said so to all his friends. Ivan Moffat had soon perfected a fiendish imitation of Christopher describing Peck’s performance: “It’s really wonderful, you know, because he does it so simply. He opens his eyes and he says, ‘I’ve seen Christ’––just like that.”