Liberation (70 page)

Today is Dostoevsky's birthday. So I decided to restart my autobiography—the version I call
Wanderings
. I went down to the beach and went in the cold but bracing water, biggish waves, and dozed in the sun, feeling so thankful that this book is in my mind and ready to be coaxed out of it onto paper. Then, sitting on the deck in the hot midafternoon sunshine, I wrote the first two pages with the gold ballpoint pen Don gave me. Of course it will be weeks before I'm really sure that this
is
the right approach. But I'm very optimistic.

 

November 2.
Of course it isn't as simple as all that. I still don't know how to narrate the book. Today I'm going to try beginning in the present tense and the third person singular, to tell how I met up again with Francis Turville-Petre in Berlin. But isn't this third-person present tense a stunt? Shouldn't I be better off just telling the whole thing from my point of view? And admitting that I don't remember very much?

The whole project does excite me, though. It seems to contain everything I want to say—far too much perhaps for one book. And my chief worry is that I may be unequal to the job. When I reread my earlier work, I feel that perhaps my style may have lost its ease and brightness and become ponderous. Well, so it's ponderous. At least I still have matter, if not manner.

Don called this morning from New York; he's probably going to stay until the end of next week. Problem: shall he stay on at the Chelsea and spend money or shall he stay with Mario Amaya (as invited) where there may be tiresome leather parties? Since Amaya is the boss of the gallery, Don feels that it would be unwise to refuse his invitation.

Don has drawn Bette Davis and feels that they have become friends;
¹¹⁶
but he doesn't like his drawings.

The night of the 30th, the fire in Topanga Canyon got really big and there were flames a hundred feet high, jumping up the hillside. A huge crowd of onlookers gathered along Adelaide Drive, which made me nervous because a lot of them were smoking, and our bushes would burn like fire bombs. I find I am much more inclined to paranoia when living here alone.

Jim Bridges seems to like our new draft of the
Meeting
screen-play. He is worried because several lymph glands have become swollen in his armpit. He goes to the doctor today to hear if they have to be cut out or not.

Betty Harford and Alex [de] Naszody were evacuated from their house during the fire; they went to the evacuation center but only stayed half an hour. The astounding thing is that no house was actually destroyed, despite the huge range of the fire. Betty is greatly relieved. The tumor they took out of her uterus had been found to be malignant, but now they feel fairly sure that it was completely eradicated. They aren't even giving her cobalt treatment.

The night before last, getting home from Vedanta Place, I had worked myself up into a state of acute tension about all the letters I had to answer—twenty-five at least. So I tore up nearly all of them.

Paul Anderson went to see Jack Fontan about his horoscope, not long ago. This is what Paul told me on the phone about their meeting. Jack said that Paul shouldn't try to hurry but “poke along at the rate you're going”; that Paul has a personal magnetism which draws people of power and influence to him; that Paul would be drawn into writing, but that that didn't mean he shouldn't go on with his singing; that Paul “is a show-off but it's very deep inside”; that Paul has always had to have people support him, first his grandmother, then his aunts, and now Roddy; that Paul should never refuse any gift because “no one will ever give you anything which you haven't earned.” When I repeated this last remark to Don, he said he thought it was very good. I told Don that I have just the faintest suspicion that Jack and Paul went to bed together or came near to doing so.

 

November 6.
I got up at 5:30 this morning—not deliberately but because I happened to wake then; while Don is away, I don't use The Bee, I sleep as long or as little as my body decides.
¹¹⁷
Did my sit—I'm ashamed to call it meditation—for the best part of an hour. I have less concentration than ever, it seems. The only thought I can anchor onto at all is of Swami. Occasionally I can get something by imagining myself in front of the shrine, but I can't hold it. I keep reminding myself how soon I may have to face death. (But my expectation of life is ten more years; I just looked it up!) I feel dull headed but fairly healthy. Well, I say to myself, at least I am making this act of recollection, and isn't that what really matters? I think of Bob Adjemian and Jim Gates doing the worship in their rooms up at the Hollywood monastery. Perhaps they're thinking of me, and sending me helpful thoughts.

A beautiful day, but cold. The hills opposite are burned elephant gray by the fire.

All yesterday and again this morning I have been looking through Wystan's letters and manuscripts—that tiny writing which I find I can, almost incredibly, decipher. He is so much in my thoughts. I seem to see the whole of his life, and it is so honest, so full of love and so dedicated, all of a piece. What surprises me is the unhesitating way he declared, to the BBC interviewers, that he came to the U.S. not intending to return to England. Unless my memory deceives me altogether, he was very doubtful what he should do when the war broke out. He loved me very much and I behaved rather badly to him, a lot of the time. Again and again, in the later letters, he begs me to come and spend some time alone with him. Why didn't I? Because I was involved with some lover or film job or whatnot. Maybe this is why he said—perhaps with more bitterness than I realized—that he couldn't understand my capacity for making friends with my inferiors!

Yesterday I did quite a lot of work on
Wanderings
. Now I'm going to take a look at it.

 

November 11 [Sunday]
. Yesterday I worked all day long, from about nine to seven, in my bathrobe like Balzac, eating nothing but one orange with several cups of Sanka, and I finished the first chapter of
Wanderings
. What a great grace it is, to have so much work to do! I was hurrying to finish so I could show it to my darling when he got home today—but, just as I was getting up from the typewriter, he called and there's another postponement, because he
may
be able to catch Alice Faye today. He says of her, “We're like two bulls—both Taurus—and now it's right down to the line”; because, on Monday Faye starts rehearsals for her show.
¹¹⁸
I say I think Don and she are like Sherlock and Dr. Moriarty when they face each other at the Reichenbach Falls!
¹¹⁹

So Don's returning on Tuesday, not tomorrow because I have to go to USC in the morning and talk to a class there.

After eating so little during the day yesterday, I had supper with Gavin, with the result that my weight is up again, 153 and ½. On November 3—after supper with Gavin right after his return from Morocco—I hit a ghastly high, 155!

Gavin is delighted with Tangier, doesn't want to live anywhere else, doesn't regret leaving this place. He went to see Didion and Dunne and thinks they've gone Hollywood—at least he has and she is going along with it. They plan to make a new version of
A Star Is Born
, with Elvis Presley as the male star who is setting. Gavin also told me that he loved Clinton Kimbrough more than any of the others. He's working on a book about thriller writers, including Conan Doyle, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler.

Now I'm going to UCLA to research Dr. Hirschfeld and his institute, because my next chapter will be about them.

 

November 17.
Kitty got back safe and sound—although he took such a long time leaving the plane that I thought someone must have frightened him and driven him to hide under one of the seats, so I went on board to look.

He did catch Alice Faye! The drawing was kind of a token, done in haste. But she has seen his catalogue and been greatly impressed so probably another sitting can be arranged much more easily. (Since he got back here, Don drew Jane Powell
¹²⁰
and she told him she thinks Faye may crack up and leave the show before they open, because she's so terribly scared. Powell had been shocked by Faye's appearance when they met again, but Don wasn't.)

Now it's dripping from moist fog, very saddening, if Dobbin didn't have Kitty to cheer him. Also, I have the following ailments. A nasty circular red rash on the left thigh, up against the scrotum, about the size of a quarter and apparently growing. (I showed this to dear Dr. Wolff who said it was either herpes or something else and probably due to something I ate, and not to worry and to rub it with Cetaphil lotion
¹²¹
and it will go away in about two weeks.) The toe next to my right big toe is very sore, as though I'd banged, even perhaps broken it, which I don't remember doing. I have the usual lump on the ball of my left foot—it seemed better for a while, now it's back. I have sharp arthritic pain in my right thumb. I have a painful sore lump in my mouth, lower jaw, right side, perhaps caused by my bridgework; can't see Dr. Kurtzman about this as he's away till the 27th.

Don likes my first chapter of
Wanderings
very much, I think. I shall try to get on with this in a rough draft, although I need to do much more research on Hirschfeld. All I could find so far is a journalistic book of interviews of G.S. Viereck with one chapter in it on Hirschfeld calling him “the Einstein of Sex”!

Gore is in town, with Howard. And, at the end of this coming week, Truman will be arriving. Gore says he's ready for a confrontation! “By that time,” he said, “
Burr
will be at the top of the bestseller list.”

We got the proofs of our “Frankenstein” screenplay from Avon and it really is a more or less adequate version, although Hunt cut out the episode of Byron wanting to kill the butterfly and Shelley saving it, from the prologue. They can't put this back into the first printing, as the book has gone to press, but it can probably be added later, also the scene between Polidori and the captain, when the schooner is being chased by a British coastguard cutter and Polidori says, “God bless America!”—which now seems amusingly topical, because it sounds like that other crook, Nixon, in his first statement about Watergate.

 

November 21.
I forgot to mention that, when I went to the UCLA library to see what they had on Hirschfeld—not much, no biography—I ran into Marion Hargrove who told me that two of his sons have become disciples of the Maharishi, in Switzerland, and have consequently given up beer and pot, and taken to meditation. One of them had described himself as having become “a bliss ninny.”

On the 18th, Gore, Howard and Gavin came to supper. Gore is very fat (for him) at the moment; he has been travelling around promoting
Burr
, and Howard has come out to join him. They brought a tiresome little dog “Rat,” which was distracting. It seems to me that Gavin and Gore don't go well together. Not that there was the least friction but the combination of them made for low-level conversation; Gore was alternately dogmatic (Nixon is
certain
to be forced out) and career conscious (talking about a new attempt to vote him into the Institute,
¹²²
and getting me to read him a list of its writer-members and concluding from it that they represent Jewish, East-coast, Wasp influences and prejudices—predominantly Jewish).

We have told Mark Andrews that we will not go to his wedding or the reception afterwards. I suppose I am being a bit cantankerous, or worse, pretending to be cantankerous because the simple truth is that I loathe all such gatherings, even slightly preferring funerals. But I do honestly feel that for Mark and Lydia
¹²³
to pretend that they are pledging their troth in the solemn sacred sense is a rather blasphemous farce. Instead of going off and having a five-minute civil ceremony they are camping through some kind of Zen ritual or whatnot. How
dare
they—when Mark was actually offering to run off with Gavin, right up to the last moment. But then, Mark is an irresponsible baby. As for Gavin, he has told Mark that he never wants to see him again. It seems that Gavin is particularly furious because Mark has been trying to window-dress the party by inviting people like Merle Oberon. Don observes that it's all very well for Gavin to be furious now, but that he never restrained Mark's indiscretions as long as they were living together.

The day before yesterday, we both saw Irving Lazar and decided to have him for our agent. Yesterday I wrote to Perry Knowlton at Curtis Brown and told him I don't want Curtis Brown as my U.S. agent any more. I imagine there will be a stink about this.

We are being threatened with gas rationing and/or the closing of gas stations at weekends.

About the ailments I listed on the 17th: the rash on the thigh has not disappeared by any means—Dr. Wolff predicted it would go in two weeks, today it's just one week—but it does look paler and much less “angry.” The toe seems quite recovered. The lump on the ball of my foot is slightly less evident. My thumb is almost okay. (These two symptoms probably respond to the weather; we've been having cold and rain and high wind, but today is beautiful.) I have relieved the lump in my jaw by not wearing my lower bit of bridgework.

Irving Lazar is certainly no asslicker. He didn't say one word of praise—or blame either—for our
Meeting by the River
script. He just told us that he was sure one couldn't raise the money for it. And he also said that Cukor won't be able to raise any money to do his pictures, because he isn't box office any more. People think he's had it. Don likes Lazar's frankness. So do I, at present.

 

December 6.
A long lapse and a lot to report.