Lost Years (58 page)

The Sadler's Wells Ballet was then in town. Christopher went to see it on October 19, with Iris Tree and Ivan and Natasha Moffat. On the 23rd, Moira Shearer, Freddy Ashton, Alexis Rassine and
Moira's husband, Ludovic Kennedy, came to see Christopher, and then they all went to a party given for the ballet by the van Leydens. I think this was the season the ballet did
The Sleeping Beauty,
in which Freddy played the Wicked Fairy in marvellous drag. He was carried onto the stage in a sedan chair, by two dancers dressed as mice. Freddy told Christopher that it never mattered how drunk he was—as soon as the mice had helped him out of the chair and onto his feet, he could always get through his dance. If he fell down, the audience loved it and laughed all the harder. And, if he showed signs of passing out altogether, the mice would simply bundle him back into the chair and remove him. Freddy was a wonderfully happy person. He loved his life.

On October 27, Caskey was released from the Santa Ana jail. Christopher drove down there and brought him home.

Two days later, Christopher became ill. He was sick in bed for seven days—from October 30 through November 5 (when Swami visited him). At that period of his life, prolonged illness was very unusual for Christopher—so unusual that I suspect a psychosomatic cause. Was Christopher trying either to punish Caskey for his past behavior or to appeal for sympathy to Caskey's nanny persona? Maybe both. I can't now even remember what his physical symptoms were, but I think one of them was a numbness in the legs. John van Druten had suffered from a similar numbness and had been told by his doctor that he had “senile polio”—that is to say, a variety of polio which only afflicts elderly people and is never severe enough to cause paralysis. Christopher was a copycat with regard to his friends' ailments. Later on, he used to reproduce Jo Masselink's.

Before taking to his bed, Christopher had seen Dr. Kolisch on October 24, and Kolisch came to see him again on November 1. It may have been on one of these occasions that Kolisch gave Christopher the most memorable piece of medical advice he has ever received: “You have the kind of constitution which is capable of simulating every species of pathological condition. So I would urge you, never consult a doctor again, as long as you live. It will only be necessary once—and then it will be too late.”

On November 7 and again on November 10—after spending another day in bed in between—Christopher went househunting with Caskey. I suppose that Mrs. Strasberg had refused to renew the lease of 333 East Rustic Road. Evidently they didn't like any of the houses they saw in the Santa Monica area. I can't remember how it came about that they decided, later that same month, to leave Los
Angeles altogether and settle in Laguna Beach. On November 25, they drove down to Laguna and were shown houses by Alan Walker, a friend of theirs, who was a real estate agent. I think they must have made up their minds about one of them, that same day—for they signed a lease on it three days later.

On November 30, Speed Lamkin and Gus Field came to talk about their Sally Bowles play. Later, Speed took Christopher and Caskey to have dinner with Marion Davies. This visit is described in the journal. Christopher was impressed by the prisonlike atmosphere of the house—your drinks were served to you by uniformed, armed cops; by the gold plate on the sideboard; by the heavily felt presence of nonpresent Hearst, now bedridden and referred to as “the Man Upstairs”; by the paranoid-fascist conversation of two men from the New York headquarters of some Hearst publication; by the little office dominated by a portrait of General MacArthur—from which, according to Speed, the whole Hearst empire was controlled; and also, most of all by Davies herself.
³⁹

After supper, when the New Yorkers had been called upstairs to see Hearst, Davies took Christopher, Speed and Caskey into the office. She was very drunk now and wanted to dance. She did the splits, over and over again, to the music of “Baby, It's Cold Outside.” Her legs parted without effort, like an open banana skin, but, once down on her sacrum, she was helpless and had to be hauled giggling to her feet by her partners. They kept this up until 3:30 a.m., when her nurse, who had been reading, all this while, in a dressing room adjoining one of the downstair toilets, appeared and led Davies off to bed.

Speed revelled in all this. Christopher says in the journal:

On December 5, Caskey and Christopher drove to Laguna and spent their first night in the new house. It was in South Laguna, actually—number 31152 on Monterey Street, which wound around
the hillside above the Coast Highway, looking down on Camel Point and the beach below it. You could get to the beach much more directly on foot, by a narrow downhill trail. High above was the modernistic house built for Richard Halliburton, the madcap explorer, shortly before his death. This part of Laguna was sleepy and sparsely inhabited in those days especially during the winter months.

Number 31152, like its neighbors, was built in country-cottage style, with a disproportionately long garden sloping down rather steeply to the road. (The houses on the opposite side of Monterey Street stood so much lower that you could see right over them, out to the ocean horizon.) During World War II, several whores had lived at 31152 and had entertained service men there. Caskey felt that this had given the place “a party atmosphere.”
⁴⁰

The rest of December was spent in moving into the Monterey Street house. This required several trips back and forth. On December 15, they brought Christopher's books down to Laguna in the station wagon; the books were so heavy that a tire blew out, near Newport Beach. On the 22nd, they rented a truck and brought down the furniture. (This was chiefly furniture given to Caskey by his mother. 31152 was partially furnished by its owner, as 333 had been.) After this, Caskey made two more trips to Santa Monica, on the 27th and the 29th, to collect the last of their belongings from 333. So they weren't completely established at 31152 until just before New Year's Eve. Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens came down to spend it and New Year's Day with them.
⁴¹

¹
If Mailer had been at the party on December 10, the day-to-day diary would surely have mentioned him. On March 10, 1950, Mailer visited Christopher with his wife but nothing is said about any other guests.

²
These negative impressions are all that remain now. But maybe Christopher liked the acting at the time when he saw it. Either that, or he was being very polite when he gave a quote which
The Los Angeles Times
printed: “The best acting I have ever seen this unusually talented group do.” (Betty Harford showed me the clipping, October 1973.)

³
The word “hypnotist” always sounds slightly derogatory. Aldous, who greatly respected and liked LeCron, refers to LeCron in his letters as a psychotherapist.

⁴
Speed was then twenty-two.

[
⁵
See
D1
, pp. 458–63.]

⁶
In this dialogue, Emlyn Williams very slightly accented the
misters
and the
miss
. The effect was mocking, but the mockery was so subtle that Chaplin would only have made himself ridiculous if he had taken offense at it.

⁷
Since writing this, I discovered from the day-to-day diary for 1951 that Christopher and Caskey went to a party at the Chaplins' on March 24. This seems to prove that the alleged peeing incident took place then, and not on May 13, 1950. Still, it should be noticed that ten months elapsed between the two meetings. So it could be argued that the alleged peeing
did
take place (seemingly or actually) on May 13, 1950, that the Chaplins were angry with Christopher for a long while but then decided to give him another chance, that he was invited on March 24, 1951 but behaved badly, and that therefore they struck him off their guest list forever. In any case, March 24, 1951
does
seem to have been their last meeting.

[
⁸
Fritz Field, Whitfield Connor, Eileen Erskine, Ramsay Hill; adapted by Richard E. Davis, directed by Andrew Clore. The one-hour broadcast was on May 14 with Don Rickles announcing and a commentary by Irwin Edman.]

[
⁹
The screenplay was first called
Below the Equator
and later retitled
Below the Horizon
.]

¹⁰
Here is an outline of Hubbard's theory, taken from
Inside Scientology
by Robert Kaufman, published in 1972. Kaufman is admittedly hostile but probably not too unfair:

 

The single source of our grief here on earth is found to lie in
engrams
, recordings of overwhelmingly painful events which, unbeknownst to us, were imprinted on our reactive minds over the years whenever the analytical mind
shorted-out
due to stress.

    . . . One has only to locate these incidents on the patient's time track and have him
relive
them in all their grisly detail. Several
relivings
are generally sufficient to
erase
an engram and its harmful effect. A person who gets rid of all his engrams in this manner is called a
Clear
. He is then completely free from neuroses and psychosomatic symptoms, gifted with total recall, and possessed of an almost superhuman I.Q. . . .

 

    However, I don't believe that Christopher's refusal to try Dianetics was simply due to skepticism. Christopher had—and I still have—a deep-seated reluctance to try tinkering with his own psychological mechanism. When Christopher was young, he would have explained this reluctance by saying that he was afraid of inhibiting his creative process; while at Cambridge, he had been told of a young Georgian poet who was unable to write a single line after having been “successfully” psychoanalyzed. Nowadays, I would say I believe that the unconscious must by its nature remain unconscious. It doesn't belong to me. It is my means of communication with what is nonpersonal and eternal. All attempts to meddle with it are therefore attempts to impose my will and my ideas of what is good for me upon the infinitely greater wisdom of the nonself. As such they can only be self-damaging and anyhow doomed to failure. (To do Ron Hubbard justice, it must be said that he can have had no such qualms—for, in those days at any rate, he didn't believe that there is any such thing as the unconscious. According to him, man has only a conscious
analytical mind
and a
reactive mind
which is, to quote from Robert Kaufman, “a stimulus—response mechanism, a moronic, miasmal carryover from caveman days”—utterly inferior to the conscious mind, in other words, and an obstacle to our development as human beings.)

¹¹
“The great effort I [must] make is to realize that this fighting is actually taking place, that people are being killed, that the fighting may spread into a general war . . . even that Los Angeles and other cities may be bombed—perhaps with atom bombs. It is very hard to realize the horror of all this—precisely because I have already spent most of one war right here in this city and so the prospect seems deceptively familiar and scarcely more than depressing. The danger of taking the war unseriously is a truly hideous spiritual danger. If I give way to it, I shall relapse into the smugness of the middle aged, who have nothing much to fear because they won't be drafted, or the animal imbecility of queens who look forward to an increase in the number of sailors around town.

    “To see Jo and Ben Masselink this morning. Both are worried. . . . Told Ben how much I liked his travel-book manuscript, which delighted Jo; she embraced me several times. In this time of anxiety, one sees how motherly she is. Her Baby may be taken away from her. And this is really heartbreaking, because they so deserve to be happy. They have built up such a charming, yet modest life together. Jo is so industrious, and clever, making swimming suits for her customers. Ben works so hard at his writing. They are gay and bright-eyed and grateful for every instant of pleasure, and yet they demand so little in order to enjoy it.

    “With their example, I ought to be unfailingly kind and thoughtful in my dealings with Billy (Caskey). How can I ever be otherwise? Especially at a time like this.” [
D1,
pp. 423–4.]

¹²
“The slant-eyed Yma and her cousin, balancing so lightly on their little feet, and uttering sudden wails of mimic despair. And the boy behind them, very close, and thrusting forward with his guitar; so that they seemed to be continually advancing upon us with the compactness and drive of a little military formation. . . . The dances had an airy uncanny birdlike authority: you got the feeling of the uncanny jungle and the discontinuous, abrupt movements of the birds. . . .” [
D1
, p. 425]

[
¹³
Not his real name.]

¹⁴
Shortly before they entered the Sequoia park, Christopher told Igor—who had never been there before—that he would find the landscape strangely out of perspective, because at first you are surrounded by very small trees, birches, while at the same time you look up and see the giant trees on the skyline, thousands of feet above you. Igor seemed to understand what Christopher meant. He answered promptly: “Just like Shostakovich at the Hollywood Bowl.”

    Later they visited the General Sherman Tree, which is supposed to be the largest living thing on earth—274 feet tall, 101 feet around at the base, and between three and four thousand years old. When Igor stood looking up at it, Christopher didn't feel that it made him seem smaller, as it does most people. This was a confrontation of two great stars. Igor said of the tree: “That's very serious.”