Parisian Lives Page 8
My daily visits to the palazzo for the next week overflowed with booze, so I was relieved not to have to rely on memory or notes, as Peggy let me tape all our conversations. She was pleasant that first afternoon, even if she did natter haphazardly, roaming unfocused through the details of her affair with Beckett. With every other sentence she would interject something about “what an Oblomov he was,” comparing his passivity and her relentless pursuit to the hero’s lethargy in Ivan Goncharov’s novel. She produced three photos taken during the height of her affair with Beckett, at Yew Tree Cottage, her country house in England, and she told me to come back the next day, when she would have more photos, letters, and, most important of all, scrapbooks filled with everything from menus and playbills to love letters (mostly from her). I could not help but think of a warning I had received from Kay Boyle during my spring research, when she had insisted that “Peggy will try to take over your book.” But so far Peggy had produced documentation that corroborated everything she told me. Even so, I did remain cautious on each of the afternoons when we met to talk.
On my penultimate day in Venice, Peggy invited me to a very special dinner that night. I was in a quandary, because she had two houseguests, two gay American expatriates, who told me they always dressed for dinner at the Palazzo Guggenheim, which was their way of telling me that I had been seriously underdressed all week. The closest thing I had to evening wear was a polyester dress, an imitation of Diane von Furstenberg’s ubiquitous wraparound. It would have to do, as there was no time to shop and I had no money anyway.
When I returned to the palazzo that evening, I knew that something exciting was about to happen. Peggy was in a gold lamé Fortuny, one of those magnificent pleated dresses that had been all the rage in the 1930s. This one had seen better days, because it had been her favorite during the years of her affair with Beckett, and she had quite a few photos of them together while she was wearing it. Nearly forty years later it had become a museum-quality garment, and I was horrified to see her gaggle of pug dogs rubbing against it, snorting, drooling, and leaving traces of their scabrous skin diseases all over its beautiful fabric.
She had instructed me to get there early, before her other (unnamed) dinner guests arrived, as she wanted to show me the bed with the silver headboard that Alexander Calder had made for her. We were accompanied by the two houseguests, the wealthy American John Goodwin, who told me he lived in Ireland for “estate purposes,” and another man I knew only as Hornsby, who lived in Rome and advised her on her art collection. As we walked to the bedroom, the two men squabbled in low voices that only I could hear over who would occupy the Calder bed with Peggy that night. Because she had bad dreams and fitful sleep if left alone, one of the duties of houseguests was to take turns sleeping there, too—no euphemisms meant here, or as one of my favorite Beckett sayings has it, “no symbols where none intended.” Everything so far was Alice in Wonderland territory for me, and the evening became even more surreal when we returned to the living room and the other guests arrived.
In walked playwright Lillian Hellman, escorted by the young poet David Kalstone. I had read enough about Hellman to know that she could be bitingly cruel, and from one of my friends who thought he might write her biography I knew that at dinner parties she liked to pick on one person to ridicule, especially a young woman. As I was the only one, I expected the worst. Hellman was dressed in something long and formal that I thought looked like a bathrobe. It was half open down the front, revealing a hideously wrinkled décolletage made especially noticeable because of the collection of impressively large sapphire stones in the tight choker she wore.
When introductions were made and drinks served, I sat quietly as close to a corner as I could find in that grand salon. I tried to let the conversation flow over and around me, but there was not very much of it, because the hostess and her primary guest were meeting for the first time, and after sizing up one another, they seemed to find each other boring. Peggy paid attention to her dogs and Hellman spoke only to Kalstone. The two houseguests continued their grumpy squabbling about the Calder bed, and I just sat there grinning and probably looking foolish. Second drinks were not offered, Peggy seemed to have fallen asleep, and everyone else had fallen silent. The only noise came from the snorting pugs until we heard shuffling footsteps echoing along the marble floors of the hallway. It was such an eerie sound that we all sat there listening in mesmerized silence until in came a very old and stooped man, wearing what looked like broken-heeled bedroom slippers, telling us to adjourn to the Braque dining room for dinner.
Although I had seen most of the palazzo’s rooms on previous visits, I had somehow missed this one. I was stunned by it. A sixteenth-century refectory table set with hand-painted pottery dishes representing the months of the year gleamed in the soft candlelight that lit the magnificent paintings on the walls. We were about to take our seats, me in the middle on one side of the table, Hellman directly opposite, when Hellman beckoned me to come over to her side. I feared that my session of verbal torture was about to begin, but all she did was whisper, “My mother’s sapphires are choking me. Would you kindly take this damned thing off me?” And so, with shaking hands, I removed her choker before quickly returning to the other side of the table.
The little man came shuffling back into the room, this time carrying a huge black cast-iron pot tucked under his arm. With a wooden ladle, he reached in and plopped something down on each dinner plate. In retrospect, I think it must have been some version of tomato-beef stew, but what I remember most about the glop on our plates was Hellmann leaning over and whispering to me, “Now I know how the rich stay rich: look at the slop they eat.”
* * *
—
I saw Peggy one last time the next day and returned to Paris loaded down with the papers and photos she had given me, my head reeling as I relived the bizarre and magical week in Venice. Once I was back, practical concerns reasserted themselves and the apartment search continued. I was fortunate to find one belonging to a British professor who taught at the Sorbonne and was returning to England for the summer. It was in a traditional turn-of-the-century building, formerly grand and now slightly shabby, on the rue d’Alésia in Montparnasse. With six spacious rooms, parquet floors, gracious moldings, and wide windows overlooking the trees that lined the street, it was perfect for us. I moved in on July 1 and prepared for my family’s arrival the next day.
That night I had the fright of my life when the concierge brought a letter from my husband, Von. “Don’t be alarmed when you see Katney,” he wrote, without elaboration. So naturally I was worrying so much that I hardly slept. When the family stepped through customs at Orly the next morning, I saw Katney, then twelve, with a plastic mask covering most of her face, and I nearly fainted until she told me, sheepishly, why she was wearing it. She had been pestering her brother (almost fourteen) with a water pistol and he had swung his arm to avoid getting wet, accidentally hitting her nose and breaking it. Fortunately, she was well enough healed that she needed to wear the mask only for another week or so, and then just when doing something that might compromise her recovery.
The Alésia neighborhood was a family-friendly area, and ours settled in quite seamlessly. Because we all spoke French in varying degrees, we found warm welcomes everywhere. Both children were studying French at school, and Von knew enough of the language that they could all navigate quite well on their own while I was working. Vonn Scott went out every morning to bring back fresh croissants, along with the neighborhood news from Madame, who ran the local bakery and apologized for having to increase the price a few centimes every time the price of butter went up. Katney forgot to put a cake of soap in her basket one day when she did the shopping at the little grocery store across the street. When the clerks saw me coming home from an interview, they ran out with much chatter and arm-waving to give it to me, saying they had saved it until they saw one of us, their neighbors. All in all, we could not
have been better situated.
It was good that the others could manage on their own, because my days were fully booked. Besides meeting with Beckett, I was lining up interviews with everyone I could think of who had ever known him, from his publisher, to people he had worked with in the theater, to his friends, and even to some relatives passing through on their way to Ireland or England. I had enough work to keep me busy for the rest of the year, let alone the summer. But first I had to determine how I would proceed with Beckett, and the most immediate decision I had to make was how to broach the subject of his meeting my family.
He was still in Ussy when they arrived, and so I decided to write a letter, for after all, a letter had worked when I had proposed writing his biography. It was a brief note, asking if he would like to come to the rue d’Alésia for tea, or perhaps to meet us for coffee at the large Café Zeyer on the corner by the Métro station. His reply was not unexpected: he declined, saying that he and I must stick strictly to the “business of his life” (his quotation marks). Frankly, it was a relief. Even though I wanted my children to be able to say in years to come that they had met Samuel Beckett, I was glad not to have to worry about where or how that meeting would take place. When he and I met the following week, in a café on the boulevard Raspail near his apartment building, he tried to offer an excuse about being “too busy” and not being good with “small children” (even though he knew mine were teenagers), and I responded at once to say that I quite understood. After that we never spoke of it, even though he came perilously close—literally—to running into them one week later.
Both children were excellent runners—Vonn Scott was a New England prep school champion long-distance runner, while Katney was managing the school’s team and doing well in her own races. My husband ran marathons in Boston and New York, among other prestigious races. All three ran every day in the glorious Parc Montsouris near our apartment, and whenever possible I jogged along way behind them, after which, thoroughly winded, I plopped down with books or newspapers while they did their serious workouts.
I generally sat among all the old men who took their afternoon leisure in chairs along the running path. I called it my daily giggle as I watched them nod approvingly when the kids roared past, then ask each other concernedly, “Où est le papa?” until my slower husband appeared several minutes later. I was deep into a Le Monde article about the unfolding Watergate break-in when I looked up and saw the long thin figure of Samuel Beckett, who also liked to walk in the park, sway into view. In a moment of confusion followed by panic, I slouched down in my chair and held up the paper to hide my face. Beckett, lost in his own private world, crossed in front of my little group of old men without seeing me and continued on his way. When he was almost out of my sight, my children appeared from the other direction, not exactly crossing his path but close enough that they could see each other. Naturally there was no flash of recognition on either side. When I made a note of this near-encounter later that day, I could not help but use the trite expression of ships passing in the night.
* * *
—
As July continued the heat intensified, and as I ran around Paris every day, I sometimes thought I’d never survive it to chase down even one more interview. Theater people I saw ranged from the famed actress Madeleine Renaud and her actor-director husband, Jean-Louis Barrault, to the playwright-director Simone Benmussa, to two of Beckett’s favorite actors who had been in the original Godot, Roger Blin and Jean Martin. Publishing people included Mrs. Jenny Bradley, the legendary agent who seemed to have been in Paris forever as the representative of every possible literary light, and who had known Beckett since the 1930s. Von and I dined with Bill Hayter and Désirée Moorhead in their atelier on the rue de l’Observatoire. There I met the Irish poet John Montague, whom I interviewed shortly after on the rue Daguerre in the studio of his first wife, Madeleine Montague. She worked in publishing and she, too, was a friend of Beckett’s, so I interviewed her and the other people she led me to in publishing and journalism who played small but significant roles in Beckett’s life. One person eluded me, not because she wanted to but because she was not in Paris: Maria Jolas. Her daughter, the composer Betsy Jolas, told me that her mother was looking forward to meeting me when she returned from a week in London.
* * *
—
As I began to write this bio-memoir, I dug out a box of old calendars and appointment books, hoping to establish chronology and verify dates. Until I reread them, I did not remember how much more they contained, filled with detailed observations about all the people I interviewed. I called them the Daily Diaries, or the DD. And I did not appreciate how valuable they would be until I heard Margo Jefferson speak about the various techniques she used in her memoir, Negroland. Jefferson said she wanted “to show the makings of a particular self at a particular time, at a particular moment in history.” My DD permitted me to present myself as I was then, the young woman writer feeling her way toward a new kind of writing, even as the self who writes this now is using the perspective of time and distance. The older (and I hope wiser) me needed help to recall that brash young woman who became aware only gradually that she was upending a small slice of cultural history in a time of significant social change.
Madeleine Renaud was one of the first persons I wrote about in the DD. I noted that during our formal interview, “She sat up and performed into the tape recorder, and when she was finished—that was it. She turned off as if a curtain had gone down and the performance was over. I had the feeling that I was getting the top layer of French cordiality in what she said about SB while underneath there was a packet of worms.”
It was an accurate perception, because later that day, when I met Roger Blin, he confirmed how difficult Beckett found it to work with her: “How do you tell the grande dame of French theater that she has to read the lines the way you wrote them? Eventually he had to give up and let her do what she wanted. Nobody benefited from her performance, neither author nor audience.”
My typical mood in those days was one of overheated frustration, as when I first tried to contact Blin. After several attempts, I finally got the phone in a tabac to accept my jeton, the token that one purchased to make a call on a public telephone. Blin answered on the first ring and said that he had nothing to do, so why didn’t I come to his apartment right away, by 5 p.m.? He lived just off the rue de Rivoli in the heavily trafficked center of the city. It was then 4:30 and I was calling from far south, in the thirteenth arrondisement. Not knowing Blin and believing that everyone who knew Beckett was probably as great a stickler for punctuality as he was, I began a trek that started on the Métro, changed to a bus, and finally found me running as fast as I could to get there on time. As I approached Blin’s building I looked up and saw a fellow leaning on the iron barrier at the bottom of his window, smiling down on the street scene below. It was Blin, taking his afternoon ease.
I was dripping with perspiration when I climbed up to the fourth or fifth floor—I forget which—where he offered me a beer, warm because he did not have a refrigerator. He said it was good I had not come in the morning, because I would have had to take my coffee black, as he couldn’t keep milk or anything else that needed chilling, until winter came, when he could use the windowsill. I sipped the warm beer and sat for several hours while he enthralled me with stories of that first production of Waiting for Godot, often jumping up to act a particular scene or sequence, declaiming lines in such a magnificent voice that I was glad the tape recorder was purring away. To my horror, when I tried to play it back, I found that the purring was the result of the machine’s malfunctioning, and it had to be replaced. Nothing of that first conversation was recorded, but as was my custom, I had taken copious notes to ensure that I could re-create it.
Over time Roger Blin gave me illuminating stories of how he and the other actors, especially Jean Martin, who played Lucky, approached their roles, and how Beckett inte
racted with them. Other insights came from Simone Benmussa, who gave me the most accurately detailed description of how Beckett worked on the technical aspects of his plays. She was ostensibly the assistant to Jean-Louis Barrault, who was by then old and ill but unwilling to retire. In reality she was running the company, and it was she upon whom I relied for insights into everything from how Beckett directed to how women were treated in France, not only in theater but in all aspects of public intellectual life. She was a feminist whose insights I relied upon, then and later, during the years when I was writing Simone de Beauvoir’s biography. But it was Roger Blin to whom I turned time and again. In the beginning it was for every tale he could tell about staging the first production of Waiting for Godot, and then just because he became such good company for me and my family.
My first afternoon with Blin was on a Thursday, and on the following Sunday we were having a little dinner party on the rue d’Alésia to welcome Jean and George Reavey to Paris. Bill Hayter and Désirée Moorhead were coming, and they were bringing two of their friends, the Italian artist Lia Rondelli and her English partner, the artist Eddie Allen. Blin said he’d be delighted to come. He was not working, had not seen Beckett for quite a while, and seldom saw any of the old friends. And if I was a decent cook, he would be happy to eat my food.
That Sunday he was the first guest to arrive, looking spiffy in a blazing yellow Italian silk jacket and a black shirt with huge chartreuse polka dots—an outfit he was proud to say he had bought for the occasion at the Porte de Clignancourt flea market. That was when he told us he never wore underclothes and illustrated it with the story I included in the biography, of the ex-convict who violated parole to come to January rehearsals of Godot in thin summer prison garb and who asked Blin for some of his old clothes, particularly his underwear. When Beckett heard about it, he gave the man money to buy what he needed, especially the underwear. My children listened in wide-eyed wonder. The stories continued when the other guests arrived, and the party went on until 2:30 a.m. I think we were all dropping with exhaustion, but Blin kept going strong until he decided it was time to go home. He didn’t even say goodbye; he just got up and walked out of the apartment. The other guests staggered after him, and my husband and I left all the dinner’s detritus and fell into bed.