The Best Australian Stories (36 page)

We had to shoot the big dogfight scene with forty-five airplanes. Nothing like this had ever been done before. There were many contingencies bubbling. There were weather delays, mechanical difficulties. But the amphetamines helped me to understand that all would unfold correctly and in sequence and that indeed correctness was the deep state of the world.

Even when I realised, three months later, that the talkies really were here to stay and that for
Hell's Angels
to survive and compete we would need to completely reshoot and rebuild it (another two million), my decisions emerged from my throat with the ease and authority of a god, and I marvelled at their majesty. Do this, do that. Cancel this, buy that. Greta Nissen was wonderful to look at but her English was terrible and she had a voice like a hacksaw. We'd wasted a year of shooting but there was nothing we could do about that: we had to find a replacement who spoke English.

In the cattle calls I discovered Carole Lombard. It is unbelievable just how long you can fuck for, blood, head and body that hallucinatory trilogy, amphetamine coursing through you like a river in flood. By this time I was getting better. Sex with Ella had never been great, but Billie Dove had taught me a lot, though I was still something of a skittish colt, all bones and angles and too much self-consciousness. And now with Carole we'd fuck all night. I don't mean many different fucks; I mean the one fuck seemed to go on forever. Of course I was off my noggin, but that's more the power of hindsight. In any case it was all a tremendous boost to my confidence. More to the point it was something of a test run in relation to Jean Harlow. I didn't think much of poor Jean the day she first walked into a casting session. I thought she looked too cheap. I didn't think she had the sophistication to portray the girl in love with my two flying aces. But her agent, Art Landau, convinced me that in fact she was just the right kind of girl who would put out for airmen, selflessly, knowing they might soon die, whereas in fact Carole Lombard might come across a little too virginal and clean in this regard. There was something to what he said. Besides, the more I thought about her and the more I watched her in the test rushes, the more I saw there was something about her. A golden slut of sorts. The girl who said, If you would like to fuck me I have absolutely no problem with that, I don't need to know your motives, I don't need to know the future or the past. Whatever happens, I don't mind. I am completely open, completely pliant, to all your wishes, Mr Hughes. Jean Harlow was the night of shooting stars, of roaring winds and waterfalls, and a clinging, a desperation soft and sweet beyond imagining.

If stamina was good with Carole Lombard, there was something incredible with my blonde, my blow-queen, my first great star creation. Jean gave that extra something. Jean went that extra mile. Like the best kind of witch – and witches know their sex above all else – Jean literally elasticised one's sense of time until the bed was nothing but the expansion of space in the compression of a heartbeat; nothing but swirling. Because Jean had the Knowledge. Knew what to do with every finger-tip, every stroke of the palm of her hand on the nape of your neck or the small of your back; every hot-breathed kiss. She was only nineteen. But I gathered she'd been spreading wide for a good long time by now.

And I was sailing. I was soaring. I was well and truly pumping little Jean.

There wasn't a call sheet invented yet I couldn't deal with. Sleep was for the other people. I could shoot all day from six, I could eat at Saltieri's or Maxim's or the Oasis, go out to all the clubs, the Montmartre or the Cocoanut Grove, till dawn. And somewhere in there fuck little Jean all night.

Of course I was still ‘officially' with Billie Dove at this point. And I was most in love with her. I helped her through her divorce with Irwin Willat. She helped me through mine with Ella. I really did intend to spend my life with her. All those other girls: spur-of-the-moment things, with a sprinkling of momentum thrown in. Also clearly for a man it is quite difficult to have sex just the once. First you have to get the awkwardness and newness out of the way. Twice is much better. Three times is better than twice. I am talking about ‘occasions', full nights, nights bleeding into days, sequences of events, rather than single fucks. A couple of weeks' worth is best of all. You just get on a roll. You owe it to yourself to explore all the way to the end of the river, as long as the river stays interesting enough. Jean was never really my type. It was never going to be more than a quick and dirty fling. Sometimes that's exactly what makes it so damned good: the fact of the necessity of imminent cessation. ‘We really shouldn't be doing this.' It's like a chorus down through the ages, like bells pealing out the secret history of infidelity. Jean was never really my type but how I loved, so truly loved, to lie with her. And I swear, bewitched in the midst of that frantic tussle with Jean, I never felt a moment's guilt, not a second, not a microsecond, about Billie. The guilt always came later and usually, though surely this is no surprise, in the day.

But where was I? Ah, the Ritalin. Back in '61. I tried to live with Jean (Peters, not Harlow) for a while, as man and wife, in the house at Cardiff-by-the-Sea. It almost worked, for several weeks the signs were good. Oh she was a breath of fresh air, that little sparrow. That annoying tweetie bird. Flinging open the blinds, plumping up the bed. My own airline was suing me for mismanagement! For five hundred million in damages! I needed the Ritalin to work out my strategies. There were forces out to get me! The other stuff, the Codeine, all that was just the underlay, the fabric of existence. I had to keep the wolves at bay. And Jean was so irredeemably
up.
And I was sinking and sinking, after the initial rush of the first few weeks, after the energy and excitement of
new perspectives
had worn off. She thought the salt air was so
great.
Wasn't the view of the rolling hills so
great
? Wasn't the green so
intense
? Wasn't the air so
wonderfully crisp
? Wasn't it
marvellous,
Howard? Didn't she realise how contagion was all around us, how cleverly it travelled through the air? So I ordered the blinds taped shut again, and banished her to another bedroom. The problem was not the dust, which is inevitable, it was the disturbing of dust. So I had to ban the cleaners too.

If I Tell You I Had Sucked on Jane Greer's Delicate Nipple

On certain nights when endlessly the ticker tape,
Chk-chk, tat-a-tat, chk-chk
, defines the shape
Of memory descending
And every bend unbending:
I'd give it all away for the sheer
Pleasure of revisiting Jane Greer.

This is the great problem with the passage of time, which is supposedly, or on the surface at least, merely the measure of motion with respect to before and after. Our central tragedy lies therefore in the logical outcome of that fact: to wit, that every sexual act (I include here of course the truly marvellous and indeed the transcendent) happens separately and sequentially. When I would want it all at once, eternally. And someone once said, Time is merely Nature's way of making sure Everything doesn't Happen At Once. Yet if you had taken Jane Greer to Pacific Ocean Park, the fairgrounds that ran along the Santa Monica Pier, on a summer night pungent with sea-salt some time in the mid-forties, and played the carny games, and shot the ducks, and taken her home and made love, you would want it all to happen, again and again, all the time, forever. After I first contracted her to RKO there was a hiccup, a frosty false start, when I heard she'd started seeing Rudee Vallee. (Later she married him but it didn't last long.) What right had she to see other men? I made her, I owned her, for now. I found her in
Life.
I housed her. I would call her when ready. So I was not happy to learn she was impatient, had hit the nightspots without my knowledge, albeit with her mother in tow. I was not happy with her insubordination. I think she married Vallee just to get at me.

Luckily, she was only one of my many problems. Otherwise I might have caused real havoc. In any case the Vallee vector blipped off the radar very quickly. At around the same time, watching Jane Greer in test rushes, I began to realise just how extraordinarily beautiful she was, and I found myself falling in love. Night after night I would watch her on the screen. Her sleepy, puffy eyes seemed haunted with desire. For a time it was clear I had never seen anyone as beautiful as Bettejane Greer. She became a matter of urgency. I sent her vanloads of flowers. In the ghost train on the midway she shrieked, we laughed, she held me tight, while unseen and unheard – the real horror – the sea fog eroded the boardwalk beneath us, patiently, inexorably, with geological cunning. For some reason, twenty years after the deaths of my parents, this was a time when my mind was having trouble and the past was flooding back. I was trying to relax. It was very difficult. A lot of the time my head hurt. There was a sharp pain, a throbbing behind my left eye. I was trying to hold it all together. It helped to be methodical. I was finding that lists were an asset. Whatever I wrote, it would get done. A starlet's name on a sheet of yellow paper meant a whole lot of planning and preparation. I was in love with Jane Greer. I was cracking up. I was trying to do things in sequence. There is only so much you can get done in one day.

Arm in arm with Jane at Pacific Ocean Park I thought I could feel, enveloping us like that sea-mist, tendrils and wisps of contentment. I thought of a future. My mind opened out into sunlight, slants of sunlight in a room filled with baby's toys, Jane happy, the infant happy, myself beside myself with happiness. All things are possible. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, tender and delicate and so filled with yearning. Solicitous and compassionate. She would understand everything there is to understand about me. At Pacific Ocean Park I hugged her tight. I forgot for a while my fear of women's greed, my awareness that all understood that with me there came undoubtedly a wealth beyond accountability. We embraced. Her lips grazed my ear. ‘I could grow to love you,' she said.

I needed only to remember back to that night several weeks earlier, when we had first made love in my suite at the Town House Hotel. After swimming in the pool I suggested she shower in my room. Who wants the chlorine to cling there longer than necessary? Everybody knows what's happening at these kinds of junctures, everybody's got the eyes wide open and the systems on go, but so often I lived in the anxiety and the anticipation, because it was every woman's right to take things so far and then say no. I just wanted to be fucking them; deal with the other stuff later, the implications and the complications. But after a late-night swim at the Town House we took the lift to my suite, wrapped in the hotel bathrobes. I passed her some towels. She went into the bathroom. The shower started running. I waited by the window. She emerged, towelled torso and head. I went inside and showered. Our bathrobes crumpled together on the floor like soldiers haphazardly dead. I came out, towel around my waist, ready, if she were already dressed, to go into my dressing room. But Jane sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed, her towels still around her. Her eyes were grey and empty like a Sphinx. I sat beside her, leaned, put my hand to the back of her neck. Her skin was hot and moist. She pulled the towel from her head. Her damp hair fell free. We kissed. You would need to watch her closely in
Out of the Past
(with Robert Mitchum) to know from what I tell you here that I have indeed been one of the lucky men in history. You would need to get from that movie an idea of her sublime sadness. Did I say sadness? I must have meant softness. In her lips was all the ineffable essence of welcoming. Perhaps, on the other hand, if you watch that movie it will merely make you resent me. Or further add to your list of Hughes-related resentments. For Mitchum was play-acting and I, my friends, was not. Her hair fell free and we kissed. We hoisted ourselves more fully onto the bed. The towel had barely covered her thighs and now no longer did. If I tell you I had sucked on Jane Greer's delicate nipple, if I tell you that at the entrance to her so precise cunt she had smelled, so neutrally, so abstractly, of nothing but shower and heat, and that down there my tongue had grazed until I had – within minutes, miraculously, it seemed – drawn from within her a more pungent feast, acidic and metallic, tasting somehow distantly of blood-tinged plum, of honey and licorice, if I tell you she spread her legs so wide and arched her back and that her ten sharp nails dug deliciously into my scalp and that she held me there and ground me there but not for long since I rose up and entered her, outside and inside carrying now in such a flood of urgency only the loosest of meanings, before she had even once touched with her fingers my cock and my balls, could you grasp just how beautiful this was? You could only stumble in the dark. You could bring to bear perhaps your own experience. It would be the most unsatisfactory of analogies.

If I show you all of this, if I could swap my life with yours for just an instant would you finally understand why I would want it all at once, eternally? Why time is so much more than a gauging of activity with respect to before and after? Because there is a wheel of glory and wherever you are you are tracing out glorious circles. And you live each thing a million times. More than just the happening. And more than then the second happening in memory.

Oh, but if you could.

Now that I'm old and grey and full of Empirin, it doesn't matter. Everything unfolds.

The Latter Day Shits spool up for me
Out of the Past.
This was shot in the winter of '46 and I probably wasn't fucking Jane any more by then, since I was beginning to fixate on Faith Domergue, or maybe Yvonne de Carlo, but perhaps de Carlo was a couple of years earlier. None of which is relevant. By then I was very nervous, or exhausted, or suffering perhaps on a regular or semi-regular basis from nervous exhaustion or semi-regular nervous exhaustion, and I just wanted a woman, a little girl rather, who wouldn't answer back. Hepburn and Rogers had taken their toll. Faith Domergue seemed just the ticket. But everyone wanted too much from me and no one knew how to leave me alone.