Waiting for Orders (14 page)

All I did on the Friday morning was change the usual weekend shopping list a bit and ask her to buy some smoked salmon at the good delicatessen on Beverly Drive. She asked whether I wanted the champagne and smoked salmon for Saturday or Sunday? Sunday, I told her, when I got back from San Francisco. Santa Glen market was the best for champagne; did I want the best? Indeed I did. That was all. Within an hour Joan had Louella Parsons calling her at the studio. Louella wanted the exclusive story on the wedding. If she had the exclusive she would see that we had an easy ride; if not, presumably, she would see that we had a rough one. Joan agreed at once to the exclusivity; she had always believed that Louella was less bitchy than Hedda Hopper.

I found Louella’s easy ride fairly bumpy. Hitch, who with Alma was to be a witness of the wedding, had organized it with an eye to its potential entertainment value as shrewd as if we had been Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. What Joan and I had
not realized was that the City Hall in San Francisco, the place of our wedding, was normally closed for business on Saturdays and that its handsome steps and massive portico became the weekend rendezvous for all the red-eye winos, hop-heads, drunks and deadbeats in the city. Red-eye was a syrupy Californian muscatel heavily fortified with cheap grain alcohol and it had a distinctive smell. The judge, already sullen because of his lost golf, was in a bad temper by the time he reached us. He cheered up, though, when he recognized Hitch and saw all the photographers. By the time he had married us he had mellowed considerably and even offered to run through the ceremony again for the benefit of those photographers who still had film left. It was I who rejected this offer and I was supported by Hitch who had brought his own Leica and planned shots of the happy couple standing among the supine drunks on the steps outside. By the time we reached our suite at the Mark Hopkins and the friends who had flown up from Los Angeles to help us celebrate, we needed strong drink. So did the judge and one or two photographers. The judge became tipsy and telephoned his wife to invite her to join the party. Mercifully she didn’t; but he was the last to leave. It had been a long day.

At three o’clock in the morning the telephone woke me. It was the
Daily Express
in London calling. The Louella Parsons report had reached them; was it true that I had married again? I complained that it was three o’clock on Sunday morning. They said that it was early Sunday evening there and that Express newspapers had always been very nice to me. About Joan Harrison, hadn’t she been married to Clark Gable? No, I was her first husband. Yes, she had sometimes partnered Charlie Chaplin at tennis; she was a good doubles player and he liked to win.

A few days later the newspaper cuttings arrived from England. The
Daily Express
had a big picture of Joan in Clark Gable’s arms: she in a ball gown, he in white tie and tails. Before it was televised the annual Academy Awards dinner used to be a dressier and altogether more attractive affair. The picture of Joan was a good one, and she was not displeased by its reappearance.

When the lease on the Camden Drive house ran out we brought a small house in Bel Air. Joan had some furniture in
store from a house she had owned in the Holmby Hills. I sent to England for my books and writing table.

Everybody who has ever been to the cinema knows what Los Angeles looks like; they have all seen it in Hollywood films; they’ve seen the scruffy palm trees and perhaps known enough to realize that they were not date or coconut palms; but they have also seen the Bermuda grass lawns, the oleanders in flower and the bush bougainvillaeas; they’ve seen the tall fern trees, the orange groves and the freshwater swimming pools. It looks like the picture postcards of some sub-tropical paradise. The postcards lie; some of the plants may be sub-tropical, but this was never a paradise; it was and remains a desert. Until 1939, when the Los Angeles aqueduct, all three hundred miles of it, was completed and water diverted from the Owens river lake and the Colorado river could flow into the LA reservoirs, fresh water came only from a few artesian wells, sunk by the oil companies and the big citrus growers. Modern Los Angeles is a product of its aqueduct, the Owens river water, and a distribution system that meters the supply to every building and household in the city. Hosepipes are used instead of brooms to clear leaves and other rubbish away. To water the garden you turn on the sprinkler system. Water gets expensive only when you first fill the swimming pool; the real cost of the pool is in the maintenance of it afterwards.

Our house was at the top of a steep cul-de-sac off Stone Canyon Road a mile past the Bel Air Hotel. It had been built in 1940 when every house in the area was different from its neighbours, domestic architects were landscape designers first and labour was cheap. Before the house was built the canyon wall above it had been completely terraced and secured with properly made paths and fieldstone retaining walls. Then it had been planted with fern trees and massed camellias. There was no swimming pool but the house was in the attractive two-storey Monterey style which had evolved on the littoral north and south of the Monterey peninsula. It suited that area better than the Spanish hacienda and adobe mission variations that had come from Mexico. In a Los Angeles canyon, though, it had its disadvantages.

Weather men in California used to complain that they had no weather to forecast, only a climate on which to report. Weather
reporting was, indeed, monotonous; but the climate could play tricks. Winter did not always come when it was due, in the first quarter of the year, when Pacific storm fronts brought a few inches of rain. Sometimes the storms missed by going north or south; occasionally they hit with a combined force and the usual few inches became a drenching tropical storm causing disastrous landslides and flooding which would turn the floors of the canyon into rivers again. On the other hand, winter sometimes did not come at all. The first Christmas we spent in our Bel Air house was like that. In LA November is often the hottest month of the year with day temperatures in the high nineties. In December it usually cools off and Christmas decorations on the Wilshire Boulevard shopping strips are allowed to look less ridiculous. That December, though, day temperatures stayed in the nineties and seemed inclined to stay there. The usual twenty-degree fall as the sun went down and the cold night air slid down the canyon walls did not happen; a parching santana wind from the mountains inland kept the temperature up. On New Year’s eve we were going to a party at the Lederers. It was the party to be at and all our friends would be there. Black tie was obligatory. However, I had brought my dinner jacket from England and it had been made with the English climate in mind. I drove us to the party in my shirt sleeves. On the flat land of Beverly Hills, it was slightly cooler, but only slight. At the end of January there were a few sprinkles of rain, nothing much; after that there was no rain for ten months.

The year after that was a busy one for both of us. Joan had been producing two television shows, the one-hour versions of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ and ‘Suspicion’. I had abandoned the disaster of Marlon Brando’s
Mutiny on the Bounty
in time to stay sane and had started a novel called
The Light of Day.
I had also realized that in the canyons of Los Angeles there was always a danger of fire. The year before there had been a brush fire in Laurel Canyon near West Hollywood and Aldous Huxley whose house there was damaged lost some valuable papers. I still wrote by hand and used a copy typist for first drafts. Someone advised me to buy a fireproof safe to keep the manuscript in until it was typed. I did so and felt able to forget about fire risks.

Monday the 6th of November 1961 began as a beautiful day. It was hot but it was dry and the air was so clear that you could see for miles. Just after eight Joan left, as usual, to drive across to the San Fernando Valley and the Universal Studios in what was becoming known as North Hollywood. I went to my workroom on the first floor and began to write. Shortly afterwards a woman arrived to do some copy typing. I had been editing a book of pieces for my London publisher and the finished typescript was in work. She wheeled the typewriter into the shade of the patio. The santana wind was blowing in gusts now and the temperature was already in the nineties and rising.

The santana is a desert wind and seasonal like the mistral and the sirocco, and it resembles them, too, in its effects on human behaviour. People become irritable and emotionally unstable; blood pressure and pulse rates rise; arguments and fights break out more easily. I was not surprised when the typist said she had called a friend in Laurel Canyon who said there was a brush fire over in the valley. The friend, she said, was frightened because she had no car that day and needed company. I told her to go if she wanted to and to take the typescript with her; she could finish the work at home if she liked. She was off immediately.

I went back to work, but almost immediately had to break off again. Nellie, our housekeeper, came upstairs to tell me that the local CBS radio station was reporting a serious brush fire. It had been started somewhere near Sherman Oaks by a spark from a bulldozer blade striking a rock. The fire was eight miles away, but the santana was now blowing at gale force. I asked Nellie if she was worried. She said ‘no’, but thought that it might be a good idea to turn on the sprinkler system. It wasn’t the gardener’s day to come to us but she knew how to do it. She would also get the garden hose out, just in case.

I said fine and went back to work. That was just after nine o’clock. At about half past nine Nellie came up again to tell me that the roof of the house was on fire.

The Monterey house was a two-storey building, the ground floor built of brick, often reinforced with steel against earthquake movement, and the upper floor a lath-and-plaster structure with clapboard sidings and a handsome balcony
shaded from the sun by a broad pitched roof. The roof tiles, though, were shingles; that is to say they were not of inexpensive red earthenware but of a costly hardwood, usually seasoned oak.

The roof itself was not in fact yet on fire. What had happened was that the santana, now gusting at sixty or more, was carrying with it large pieces of flaming debris. What was on fire on our roof was a large tree branch which had been borne by the wind from the garden of a burning house a quarter of a mile away along the canyon. We were by now in the path of a fire storm.

Neither Nellie Williams nor I yet understood this, however. Nellie, who had been born and raised in Stepney and learned to cook as a below-stairs servant in a big house, had lived through the London blitz and knew how to face danger without fuss; you collected all the valuables you could carry and took them to the nearest shelter. I tried to extinguish the fire on the roof with water from the hose. When I started there was still enough pressure in the system for me to reach the burning branch, but that did not last. Before long the water from the hose had become a useless trickle. A neighbour lower down the hill had a flat asphalt roof to stand on but with no water he was having to use a broom to sweep the burning bits off. Our pitched roof was burning in several places by then. It was time to go.

The only bits of our place that did not burn were the garages. They were on a forecourt thirty feet or so below the house and below the fiery air stream that was taking the fire towards the Pacific coast. It was moving across the wild brush on the hill above us, the radio said, at the rate of thirteen acres a minute. One acre of dry sumac brush is as combustible as four hundred gallons of spilled petrol and the updraught it created turned the singing noise of the santana wind into a howl. But it howled over our garages. Nellie and I sat there between our cars watching the house burn. We were both suffering quite unpleasantly from smoke inhalation. Among the things brought out by Nellie was half a bottle of vodka. She wasn’t a drinker but on that occasion she made an exception; and it was she who reminded me that I had things to do.

‘I’ve got Mrs Ambler’s fur coat and jewellery,’ she said, ‘and there was one of her nighties in the washing machine, but you’d better start thinking about a hotel. If you’re waiting for the fire
department to come and put it out, forget it. If they were coming they’d have been here an hour ago. Besides, what could they do? They’ve got no water. Don’t worry about me. I’ll move in with Rose.’

Rose was her sister, a skilled lady’s maid and dinner party waitress, who had an apartment and who would certainly iron the rescued nightie before Joan had need of it. I walked down the hill to the man with the flat roof and asked if his phone was still working. He told me to help myself, but that it did no good calling the fire department. I had no address book but knew the Universal Studio number too well to need one by then. Joan knew, of course, all about the fire but not that we were among the victims. I asked her to get us into the Bel Air Hotel because that was the nearest. She called back five minutes later to say that the Bel Air had evacuated their staff but that she had secured the last available bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I said that I would be with her there as soon as possible; almost as an afterthought I asked her to call our business manager and report our situation. She said the number was in our address books. I had to break the news that unless Nellie had thought to save one, we had no address books. None of the people who mattered to us was in the telephone directory.

The man with the flat roof had come down now. He offered me a beer, which I drank gratefully, and a peanut butter sandwich which my smoke-dried saliva glands refused to accept. A voice over the radio warned those of us still in Bel Air not to leave our properties unattended. There were already reports coming in of looters. And the fire was reported to have jumped the Sepulveda freeway and to be in Brentwood. I rejoined Nellie in the garage.

The whole of our house was on fire now and I was in time to see the upper storey collapse into the lower. The heat was appalling. Luckily there was a stand pipe on the garage level which was still delivering a trickle of water clean enough to drink and to cool our faces. The wind and the updraught from the fires were doing strange things now and with a whoosh the whole hillside above us burst into flames. There were no buildings up there at that time; it was wild and brush-covered with a few stunted trees. We had known there was wild life there because we could hear the coyotes at night and deer
would damage the chain link fence which was there to keep them out, but mostly the animals had remained unseen. Now, suddenly they were all running for their lives down towards the floor of the canyon. The deer came first; but the rabbits soon followed and there were animals I did not recognize, stoat-like creatures, feral cats and tree rats. Many of those with long hair were on fire as they ran and where they went fresh fires were started. I began to worry about the garage roof. We had a short hose there, the one the gardener used for sweeping leaves off the forecourt, but there was not enough water pressure to deal with any more airborne fire bombs. We could only wait and hope now.