“Oh, all right,” she said. “My mother said I should try. She likes you — much better than Major Arbogast.”
“Who the hell’s he?”
“He’s my other man who comes here.”
I felt hurt, then foolish. “You’ll be all right,” I said reassuringly. I’m sure she was.
I left the city on a mild June day; the usual cocktail of emotions bubbled in my brain. This was the city that had made my career and reputation. It had brought me Doon. It had also undone me, in a way, too. And now it was undone itself. I had a funny feeling I would be seeing it again, so I didn’t bother to look out of the window when the USAF DC-3 took off from Tempelhof. I was wrong. It was a shame. I never came back.
VILLA LUXE, June 28, 1972
A gorgeous, stifling, unbearably hot day. I wonder if I might try the path down to the beach today. I can get down there not too badly; it’s the coming back that does for me. There is a small row of stone sheds in the cove where the fishermen keep their boats. I watch these old codgers as they come back up the path after a day’s work. They certainly don’t stride, but their plod never falters. A couple of them look even older than me. How come they can do it and I can’t? Perhaps I should ask Ulrike to take me round by boat.…
It was a hot day in 1946 when Karl-Heinz and I traveled up by train to Scotland. We sat in the thick warm air of the compartment, looking at the English countryside bright in its summer clichés. We stopped, inexplicably, for two hours outside Doncaster — or was it Peterborough? I remember vaguely that Karl-Heinz and I talked about the war and its terrible consequences. I recall one thing he said. “Why did you let him, it, happen?” I had asked him. “Couldn’t you see?”
“Well, I tell you, John,” he said. “One thing about the German people — we’re very like the British in this — we have no social courage. That’s why we make good soldiers and bad citizens.”
“Haven’t you? Haven’t we?”
“No. Not really. Don’t you think it’s true? We never complain. Neither do you. It’s always a bad sign in a population.”
We spent a couple of days in Edinburgh in a hotel in Princes Street. I took Karl-Heinz to meet my father, an encounter I’d long relished the thought of. Innes — Dad — had sold his home and now lived in an old folks’ home in Peebles, twenty miles from Edinburgh in the Tweed Valley and not far from Minto Academy. My father was eighty-four. I can see him now, his big arthritic knuckles trembling ever so slightly on his two walking sticks. We took tea with him on the terrace of the rather grand house he lived in (it’s a hotel now) on a hill overlooking the town and the fresh green park beside the fast brown river. We talked about this and that.
“So, what’re you going to do now, John?”
“Well, I’m going back to America. Karl-Heinz and I are going to finish a film we started a while ago.”
“God Almighty!” He had grown more profane as he had aged. “Finish? When did you start it?”
“Nineteen twenty-six.”
He shook his head sadly.
“Your son is a great artist, Mr. Todd,” Karl-Heinz said. “Truly.”
My father looked at Karl-Heinz as if to say, “Him? That joker?”
“He is,” Karl-Heinz said.
“There’s no need to be polite on my account, Mr. Kornfeld. I know my son well enough. Full of daft schemes from the day he was born.” His face darkened a moment. I knew he was thinking about my mother — my birth and her death inseparable. “I knew he’d never amount to much.”
We laughed politely.
Then he took one of his hands off a stick and patted me on the knee. He left his hand there, lightly, light as a napkin.
“Not like his brother, now. Done very well for himself, has Thompson. Rich man, successful, lovely family. Grandmaster of the lodge.”
I wasn’t upset. I looked at the old man. He wouldn’t give an inch. Eighty-four and as intractable as ever.
“You’re a difficult bugger, aren’t you, Innes?” I said. “Here, have another cup of tea and shut up.”
He laughed. Quite long and hard. Then he took his hand off my knee.
It was only after we left him that I realized his touch on my knee had been the only affectionate physical contact between us since I was a child. It brings tears to my eyes as I sit here and think about it now. That gesture carries a heavy cargo.
I never saw my father again. He died peacefully in his sleep one night in the winter of 1948.
19 The Hollywood One
I was back in Los Angeles when I got the news of my father’s death, wrangling with Eddie Simmonette over the start of preproduction on what I regarded as The Confessions: Part III—but which was known to everyone else as Father of Liberty. I was dreadfully upset by the news, much more than I had ever expected to be. In the midst of all the grief, the guilt and remorse for things unsaid and undone, one obsession came to dominate my mind — perhaps, I can now see, as a way of allowing myself to cope. What distressed me most was the sudden realization that my father might have died without ever seeing one of my films. I telegraphed Thompson immediately: DID FATHER EVER SEE MY FILMS STOP URGENT I KNOW SOONEST JOHN.
Thompson himself replied: YOUR QUESTION IN WORST POSSIBLE TASTE STOP SUGGEST YOU SEEK PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL ADVICE STOP THOMPSON TODD.
I wrote to Oonagh, then a very old lady living in Musselburgh, with the same inquiry, and received a shaky scrawl in reply, written by a neighbor.
Dear Johnny,
Terrible sad news about your father. He was a fine good man and we will all miss him “something dreadful.” I do not know if he ever saw your “films” (I have seen them many times), but I do remember him saying on frequent occasions that he “abominated the kinema.” But I am sure he would have changed his mind if only he had seen your own “pictures.” I do know he was very proud of those “photos” you took when you were a “wee laddie.” …
And so on for another breathless couple of pages clotted with arch “colloquialisms” all about the “funeral” and the “family.”
I think it was that finality in her message (I could hear quite clearly, as if from beyond the grave, the sound of his voice “abominating,” and could sense his intense pleasure in the archaic pronunciation of “cinema”). Even if he had been an avid cinemagoer I was sure that he would have contrived to ignore my own work. I told myself to forget it. Why was it so important that one cantankerous old man had seen my films? I felt ashamed of my abject filial needs — as if all sons worked only for paternal approbation. Grotesque idea!
Father of Liberty was on the surface little more than a conventional biopic of the sort manufactured by any Hollywood studio — usual subjects being kings and queens, philanthropists and bandleaders. You will be familiar with the genre. Eddie had insisted we follow this format if Lone Star were to finance it. Consequently I had rewritten the 1934 script with this stricture in mind. His second condition was that I must make the Jesse James Western afterwards. The Equalizer had been Lone Star’s top-grossing film of 1944 and ‘45. Eddie was hungry for more. There was also the now-pressing problem of Karl-Heinz’s age. I decided that convention would allow us to use him from the affair with Mme. de Warens onwards, although even that was straining credibility somewhat. I bent the truth slightly by allowing the implication to surface that the affair began later in his life than it really had. The much-vaunted verisimilitude of Part I was being compromised, but under the circumstances what else could I do? I expanded the adolescent and childhood years considerably. Then heavy makeup, a thick wig and careful lighting should just about see us through, or so I argued to Eddie, who was keen not to employ Karl-Heinz.