It was a long night. In the end I survived and the horses ended on the cutting-room floor. Some months later I was summoned to a studio to dub my voice. On a large screen there was my scene. Fred looked contented. Since he had lost the soundtrack of the original scene, nothing but odd noises could be heard on the screen. I asked, “Don’t you have a transcript of what was said?” Fred winked. “No, Gorino. We just make up something else.” For two hours I sat trying to match words to my own lips on the screen. Fred was quietly triumphant at this victory in his war against direct sound. Finally I cobbled together three sets of words in English, French, and Italian. Then we started to record. There was a white ball that bounced along the top of the screen and when it stopped you stopped speaking, your dialogue presumably in place. I got through the French and the English easily, but Italian is longer than English and after the ball had stopped I was still speaking—outside the scene. Fred was gazing beatifically out the window as I struggled to keep up with the ball. After the third ruined take, I said, “You are considered the greatest living film director, so give me some direction. How do I end this speech with the bouncing ball?”
“Oh, is there trouble?” His eyes were wide with innocent concern. “Oh, is so easy. Before you talk, you take deep breath.” I did and the shot was perfect, concluding my career as a screen actor in Italy.
The logo of the novel Myra Breckinridge was a giant statue of a Las Vegas showgirl, which twirled in front of the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Jim Moran, a publicist who once hid a needle in a haystack, drove the statue across America presenting it to a dozen governors who each saw fit not to accept.
A researcher notes that I began writing Myra Breckinridge in June 1965. I didn’t remember the date but I recall the day vividly. Howard and I had pretty much finished fixing up our Rome flat. I had a pile of lined yellow legal pads on my writing table which was opposite my bed. Across from the table a French door opened onto the terrace that overlooked the Largo Argentina—a great square with several Roman temples beneath the pavement’s level as well as a large colony of cats that flourished until the Rome city government complained that they were sick and spreading disease. The fact that they spread diseases that only they were subject to cut no ice with the city fathers and so, to the rage of a number of old Roman ladies who regularly fed the cats, they would be carted away. I did state, publicly, that as the cat was sacred to the goddess Isis whose temple had been here, to harm them was sacrilege. Of course, in time another cat generation settled into the ruins. Meanwhile, the grateful Isis smiled upon me. The day I started Myra Breckinridge there was a new silver moon just risen over the Vatican to the west of the apartment, a sign for me of good luck; the moon not the Vatican. Curiously, when I finished the first longhand draft, there was again a new moon. One month had passed. Also, as I was writing just now about the cats of Isis, I got a call from Italy that our thirteen-year-old cat has just died of a liver problem; only his tortoiseshell kid brother survives of all those dogs and cats that for half a century accompanied Howard and me down the years. R.I.P.
Although when I set a novel in history I do a great deal of note-taking from the necessary records, when I start an entirely invented book like Myra I seldom start with anything more than a sentence that has taken possession of me. In this case “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man may possess; clad only in garter belt and one dress shield…” The voice roared on. Who was she? I could only find out if I kept on writing. She was obsessed by Hollywood movies. That was soon clear. No matter how kitsch a film she could swiftly penetrate its mystical magical marshmallow core. Even so, it was not until I was halfway through the story that I realized she had been a male film critic who had changed his sex; Myron had become Myra. Why? I wrote on, laughing.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Politics now interrupts my return in memory to that happy time in Rome. So I must leave Myra Breckinridge, all aroar on her lined yellow pages, while I ponder the film that I saw last night; The Deal stars David Morrissey as the real-life British labor politician Gordon Brown, currently chancellor of the exchequer. The deal is the one allegedly made between him and Tony Blair—two ambitious young politicians—before the election of 1997 that would make one of them prime minister with the understanding that after one or two terms he would step aside and let the other take his place. Though British journalists discuss “the deal” as though they themselves had been witnesses to it, the film looks to be accurate, unlike most American attempts at political dramas of this sort. In the matter of the deal itself, the film shows the studied ambivalence of Tony Blair as he sets forth from Glamis, armed only with a toothy rictus smile and bright vulpine stare; in a telling scene with Brown, he does not quite admit that there ever was such an agreement other than he had felt that Brown was their party’s natural leader: unfortunately, too many others preferred Blair’s easy managerial style to Brown’s old-fashioned seriousness, so he had no choice…At the time of the late election which won Labour a third term, a unique event in that party’s history, Brown was not only the party’s favorite but was also admired for the contribution his chancellorship had made to the United Kingdom’s economic prosperity; while the prime minister, thanks to his passion for the Bushite illegal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, had appalled many Britons who thought Blair should have stepped aside for the less tarnished Brown; also, Blair was generally believed to have lied to the nation when he maintained that his own attorney general had assured him that his decision to join Bush in the preemptive war on Iraq was legally sound when it was plainly not, according to the attorney general’s actual memo as finally revealed.
Back in 1997 when the BBC invited me to the United Kingdom to cover the election, I went, first, to each party’s initial announcement that it would fight the coming election for control of the House of Commons. The Labour Party met in a handsome eighteenth-century hall. TV cameras were everywhere; print journalists, too. We were led into a sort of back room where on a low dais, faced by rows of folding chairs, sat Tony Blair and his Shadow Cabinet. I sat at the center of the first row a yard away from the Shadow Home Secretary David Blunkett, a blind man with a large black seeing-eye dog. The dog and I made immediate eye contact. The dog was an old hand at political meetings. He was also bored, chin resting on outstretched front paws; he gave me a friendly yawn. I yawned back. He shut his eyes. Almost directly across from me was Blair, looking smaller than life. According to the press his handlers had ordered him to ration his tic-like smile. So, solemnly, tight-lipped, he stared, one by one, at the TV cameras all around the room. But, apparently, my yawn to the dog had set off a Pavlovian response in Blair who managed three yawns in a row with mouth firmly shut, forcing air uncomfortably through his nose and suggesting to me that he has a deviated septum. Back of him, to his right, was Gordon Brown darkly morose as he endured the first phase of the deaclass="underline" the party leadership of Tony Blair and Labour’s almost certain majority in the next Parliament followed, presumably, by the premiership of the other dealer.
As I recall, Blair took questions from the journalists, who raised their hands; I raised mine, too, but he only took questions from parliamentary journalists whom he already knew. The questions were perhaps more interesting to a foreigner than the answers which were intricately banal. Yet when a mildly sharp question was asked, the ghost of the rictus smile, like a negative undergoing slow exposure, would appear and Blair would say, gently, “Trust me!” That was that. But interesting, even dramatic changes were being made that day. If I had inquired more deeply, I might have unearthed the deal; in itself of no particular interest except to the dealers; yet, politically, Blair versus Brown represented the end of the old class-based party and the rise of a new managerial apparatus that represents administrative numbers rather than any specific class interest.