Muriel was generally good-humoured, when he wasn’t in one of his dark moods, to which all of us are prey sometimes, or in one of his melancholic, misanthropic phases. He would listen discreetly (alone, although I would come and go and was always nearby, alert to what was happening) to whoever came to him with a request or problem, and there were quite a number in those uncertain times; he would listen to them, their odd appeals amused him and he took an interest in all of them, even those I would have thought he would find boring; he was curious to hear other people’s stories, I suppose, even when they seemed somewhat sordid. I observed him lending or giving small or large amounts of money to friends in trouble or to technicians or actors who had worked with him on some film and were having a tough time of it — or even to one or two of their widows, whom he had never met before; but then the world produces widows at a giddying pace and, for most, no financial aid is too small. He did this almost secretly (when they said goodbye, he would slip a cheque or a few notes into their hand, or send them a banker’s order the next day), but I was often a witness to those scenes too. He always assumed that any loans he made would never be repaid. One night, when we were having a drink together in Bar Chicote, he said: ‘You should never lend more money than you would be prepared to give as a gift to the person asking for a loan. So it’s best to gauge quantities carefully and judge how much each person wants or how much pity they inspire, so that you don’t feel resentful later on. If they pay it back, so much the better; if they don’t, well, that’s what you were expecting anyway.’
I believe that modesty and tact led him to cover up his natural generosity (and which, contrary to what happens nowadays, one should never boast about), as well as his extreme sensitivity, which he thought was hidden away, and of which he was probably embarrassed and which, with undeniable skill and talent, but little conviction, he would sometimes try to disguise by being brusque or sarcastic; it was as if he were suddenly aware of how he should behave and had to press a button to set that behaviour in motion, as if he decided to act, but only after an almost imperceptible pause; as if any intemperate or impertinent outbursts always required a minimum of willpower — a little play-acting, a little fabrication. Perhaps the only person with whom there was no such transition — not always, but at least most of the time — the only one who regularly bore the brunt of those harsh, unpleasant, cold outbursts, was his poor wife, Beatriz Noguera, or so she seemed to me, a poor, unhappy woman, sad and affectionate. Poor soul, poor wretch.
That’s why I was so astonished by those words: ‘That, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low. Do you understand? That’s as low as one can go’, the words with which he had brought the conversation — his lament — to a close for that day and for several more to come. It was the idea that Van Vechten had behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman, ‘or possibly more than one’, that had provoked these drastically negative statements and prevented Muriel from choosing to forget the troubling thing he had been told about Van Vechten. Knowing Muriel’s ideas and having observed his habits and seen some of his films — especially those he had made in the days of censorship, with one version intended for the home market and another for abroad, or made solely for the foreign market — it seemed to me impossible that he would use the word ‘indecent’ when applied to sexual behaviour, to disapprove of or condemn any such activity from a moral or religious perspective (the latter was quite simply unimaginable). Despite the intrinsically ambiguous nature of the term, when I heard him say it, I understood him to mean ‘vile’, ‘despicable’ or ‘base’, and certainly not ‘sinful’ or ‘obscene’. And it struck me as both paradoxical and shocking that he should find such behaviour so execrable — I noticed that he laid special emphasis on the fact that the victim was a woman, possibly more than one — when he, who could often be utterly charming and indeed was so with almost everyone, as long as he didn’t instantly judge them to be either pompous or imbecilic, made one exception, his own wife, Beatriz Noguera, the person who was and had been closest to him for much of his life, regardless of how much time he spent, and always had spent, filming and on location, on occasional pilgrimages in search of funds, and on visits to actors and actresses whom he had to flatter into taking a role in his films, although there was a time when they were the ones to flatter him and were eager to be involved in his projects, at least among Spaniards and the occasional other European national, and even among certain Americans, nonconformist or arty types (everything that came out of Europe at the time was considered to be arty). This period had lasted for only five or six years, because the period during which a film-maker is deemed fashionable can be very brief, a gentle breeze that almost never returns.
By the time I got to know him and his wife, he was no longer going away quite so often and was working less than he had in the past. He still enjoyed a certain prestige, and the fact that he’d made a couple of feature films in the States, with American money and some fairly big names, conferred on him an almost mythical aura in a country as easily impressed as ours. He capitalized on this as best he could — as well as on his image as a slightly mysterious, elusive figure — but he had no illusions about his position. ‘I’m a bit like Sara Montiel,’ he would say, ‘she dined out for years on her three or four Hollywood appearances, one of which meant sharing the screen with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. She wasn’t so lucky with the others: Rod Steiger, despite his Oscar and all that, wasn’t much help to her, because he was too unpleasant, too histrionic and unpopular, and poor Mario Lanza was no use at all, because he died soon afterwards and who now has heard of him or remembers him? You don’t even hear his famous voice any more. So I depend in large measure not only on what I do from now on, like anyone else, but also on the future careers, stretching far ahead, of the people who worked for me, no, more than that, on how long they survive in filmgoers’ fickle memories. In my world, and, indeed, in all worlds, you never know who will be remembered, not just in five or ten years’ time, but the day after tomorrow, or even tomorrow. Or who will leave not the slightest trace, however glittering their career, as they say on TV and in the magazines. In a few years’ time, the stars that shine brightest now might as well never have existed. And any real hate-objects are guaranteed oblivion, unless they truly were evil and people enjoy hating them retrospectively, even after they’ve left the stage or died.’