making a western for Warner. ‘Naturally,’ Walter Perry had said, ‘you’ll need some time to think it over. We’ll send you a synopsis, take a look at it, talk it over with Buzzy, then let me know. But I should tell you, Fredric, you’ll make Jack really happy if you say yes.’
The synopsis wasn’t bad, the money, by the time Buzzy got done with Paramount, would be something more than his usual $100,000 a picture, and so Fredric Stahl decided to make Jack really happy. Which, Walter Perry told Buzzy, who told Stahl, it did. So, good, go to Paris. Still, in all this there was something that wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t have said why, it simply felt — odd. When he told friends about it, there was a certain moment of hesitation before they congratulated him, so he wasn’t alone in wondering if there somehow wasn’t more to this, perhaps studio politics, perhaps…
It was Zolly who broke into the reverie. ‘Time for pipi,’ he announced, Jimmy stopped the Panhard and the three of them stood side by side at the edge of the road and watered a field.
Paris.
The night manager of the Claridge took Stahl’s passport — the police collected them late in the evening and returned them by morning — then personally led Zolly and Stahl up to the reserved suite. Abundant flowers and chocolates had been provided, as well as a bottle of Badoit, since American visitors feared European tap water. When the manager and Zolly left, Stahl stretched out on a chaise longue and had just closed his eyes when his luggage arrived, accompanied by a hall porter and a maid who opened his wardrobe trunks and began to unpack and put away his clothing. Stahl retrieved a sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers, then went out to find Paris.
His Paris. Which was found by crossing the Seine on the Pont d’Alma and, eventually, entering the maze of narrow streets of the Sixth Arrondissement, the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And if the damp earth of the French countryside had lifted his spirit, being back in his old quartier was as though a door to heaven had been left open. Walking slowly, looking at everything, he couldn’t get enough of the Parisian air: it smelled of a thousand years of rain dripping on stone, smelled of rough black tobacco and garlic and drains, of perfume, of potatoes frying in fat. It smelled as it had smelled when he was twenty-five.
A warm evening, people were out, the bistros crowded and noisy. On the wall of a newspaper kiosk, closed down for the night, the day’s front-page headlines were still posted: CZECHOSLOVAKIA DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY. And, below that, GERMAN DIVISIONS PREPARE TO MARCH. Two women walking arm in arm passed by and when Stahl looked back over his shoulder he caught one of them doing the same thing and she laughed and turned away. In a cafe at the corner of the rue du Four and the rue Mabillon, an old woman with red hair was playing a violin. Stahl went into the cafe, stood at the bar, ordered a cognac, saw his reflection in the mirror, and smiled. ‘A fine evening, no?’ said the bartender.
‘Yes it is,’ Stahl said.
In the morning, Stahl woke up suddenly, jolted into consciousness by a chorus of bleating taxi horns down on the street. Like a flock of crows, he thought, once disturbed they became violently loud and indignant. Now he needed coffee, reached for the telephone and in a few minutes a tray was brought up with coffee and a basket of croissants. He broke the tip off one of them, which produced a shower of pastry flakes, ate the tip, then ate the croissant, then ate all the others, then ate the flakes. As he finished up, a bellboy arrived with an envelope on a silver tray. Inside the envelope was a handwritten note from Zolly Louis, who said he had to be away for a day or two, please stop by the office at 7, rue Scribe, near the American Express office, where Mme Boulanger would be waiting for him.
Warner Bros. France was, according to the directory in the lobby, on the third floor. Stahl pressed the button to call the elevator and was about to take the stairs when he heard whirring and grinding above him, peered up through the wire cage and saw the cables on the bottom of the car, then, very slowly, the tiny elevator itself. Up on the third floor, searching through the gloom of a long corridor, he found the name of the company on a pebbled glass door, which opened to an office furnished with well-used desks — cigarette burns on the edges — black telephones, and Warner movie posters: 42nd Street, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood — showing Errol Flynn in green hat with feather and Olivia de Havilland in a sort of wimple — and The Life of Emile Zola, released a year earlier. It was, by way of the story of the Dreyfus affair, Warner’s, in fact Hollywood’s, first anti-fascist movie. And in prominent position, between two grimy windows, a poster of the actor who’d made a great deal of money for Warner, Porky Pig.
Stahl stood at the open door; a man was gesturing as he argued on the phone, a girl typing at great speed, eyes on a pencilled draft. Then: ‘Ah, voila! He arrives!’ A woman in a rather snug knit suit was rising from her swivel chair, evidently Mme Boulanger. Fiftyish and determined, with bright red lips and fingernails, she was one of those businesswomen who wore a hat in the office — a black pillbox with a bow on one side. Holding a cigarette in one hand, she brushed his cheeks with her lips. ‘Elsa Boulanger,’ she said.
‘Good morning, Madame Boulanger.’
‘Have a seat,’ she commanded, turning her swivel chair to face him. ‘I’m to do your publicity — the Warner star in Paris part. Paramount will work on the movie itself. Did you have a good voyage? Did your luggage arrive? Are you comfortable in your hotel? Have you seen Le Matin?’ She handed him a newspaper folded open to two photographs. There he was, with the Ile de France in the background, as he smiled and waved. The second photograph showed the young woman holding his arm, the caption below read, Fredric Stahl is welcomed to France by the film actress Colette Dulac.
‘Who is she?’ Stahl said. ‘She just… appeared.’
Mme Boulanger shrugged. ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘But she wants to change that, I’d say.’ She paused, and stubbed her cigarette out in a cafe ashtray that said SUZE. Stahl turned the newspaper to see what was above the fold and found a review of Le Quai des Brumes, a Marcel Carne film starring Jean Gabin. ‘I’d like to see this,’ Stahl said. ‘I knew Carne, at least to say hello to, when I worked here.’
Mme Boulanger leaned towards him and lowered her voice. ‘ Mon cher Monsieur Stahl,’ she said, the my dear not without affection, then hesitated as she took the paper away from him and ran her finger along the text below his photograph. ‘What is this all about? This line, “Monsieur Stahl told Le Matin that his new film, Apres la Guerre, will be about ‘the futility of war’.” Is there any special reason you said that?’
‘I didn’t say it. The Le Matin man put it in a question and I, well, I did no more than agree. I really didn’t know what to say.’
‘You will have to be more careful here, you know.’
‘Careful?’
‘Yes, these days, careful.’
Stahl tried to laugh it off. ‘Isn’t war always futile, Madame Boulanger?’
Mme Boulanger wasn’t amused. ‘ Le Matin, mon cher, is a very rightist newspaper.’
Stahl was puzzled and showed it. ‘Rightist?’ he said. ‘The French right is against war? Has turned pacifist?’
‘In its way. The press and politicians on the right try to persuade us that resistance to Hitler is futile. The German military is too large, too strong, their machines are new and efficient and deadly, and their passion for a fight unequalled. Poor France can never win against such a powerful and determined force. That’s what we’re being fed, over here.’
‘What do they want France to do?’
‘Negotiate, sign treaties, acknowledge Hitler’s supremacy, let him do whatever he wants in Europe as long as he leaves us alone.’
Stahl shook his head. ‘I had no idea.’
‘You are Austrian by birth, no?’
‘Viennese.’
‘What do you think about what goes on over there?’ She nodded her head in the general direction of France’s eastern border with Germany, a little more than two hundred miles from where they sat.
‘Sickening,’ he said. Mme Boulanger’s expression barely changed but Stahl could tell she was relieved. ‘And dangerous,’ he went on. ‘I can’t bear to watch Hitler in the newsreels.’
‘ Le Matin doesn’t know where you stand, but they offer you an opportunity, as an actor, as an artist, to speak out against European war.’
‘Perhaps I’ll let them know,’ he said. Then added, ‘Where I stand.’
‘Perhaps you’ll find a way to keep out of politics, Monsieur Stahl. For actors it’s much the best idea. Those of
