The Steinbecks had no servants, his wife did all the housework. It was a wonderful ménage and I was very fond of her.
We had many a discourse and in discussing Russia John said that one thing the Communists had done was to abolish prostitution. ‘That’s about the last of private enterprise,’ I said. ‘Too bad, it’s about the only profession that gives full value for your money, and a most honest one – why not unionize it?’
An attractive married lady, whose husband was flagrantly unfaithful, arranged a pas de deux with me at her large house. I went there with every adulterous intention. But when the lady confided tearfully that she had had no sexual relations with her husband in eight years and that she still loved him, her tears dampened my ardour, and I found myself giving her philosophical advice – the whole thing became cerebral. Later it was rumoured that she had turned Lesbian.
Robinson Jeffers, the poet, lived near Pebble Beach. The first time Tim and I met him was at a friend’s house. He was aloof and silent, and in my usual glib way I started to carp about the ills and evils of the day just to make the evening go. But Jeffers never said a word. I came away rather annoyed at myself for having monopolized the conversation. I felt that he disliked me, but I was wrong, for a week later he invited Tim and me to tea.
Robinson Jeffers and his wife lived in a small medieval stone castle called Tor, which he had built himself on a slab of rock on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. It looked rather boyishly indulgent, I thought. The largest room was not more than twelve feet square. A few feet away from the house was a medieval-looking round stone tower, eighteen feet high and four feet in diameter. Narrow stone steps led up to a little round dungeon with slits for windows. This was his study. It was here that Roan Stallion was written. Tim maintained that this sepulchral taste was a psychological desire for death. But I saw Robinson Jeffers walking with his dog at sunset, enjoying the evening, his face set in an ineffable expression of peace as though immersed in some far-off reverie. I feel sure that no such person as Robinson Jeffers desires death.
twenty-five
WAR was in the air again. The Nazis were on the march. How soon we forgot the First World War and its torturous four years of dying. How soon we forgot the appalling human debris: the basket cases – the armless, the legless, the sightless, the jawless, the twisted spastic cripples. Those that were not killed or wounded did not escape, for many were left with deformed minds. Like a minotaur war had gobbled up the youth, leaving cynical old men to survive. But we soon forget and glamorize war with popular Tin Pan Alley ditties:
How’re you going to keep them down on the farm,
After they’ve seen Paree –
and so forth. War in many ways was a good thing, some said. It expanded industry and advanced techniques and gave people new jobs. How could we think of the millions that lay dead when millions were being made on the stock market? At the height of the market Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst Examiner said: ‘U.S. Steel will jump up to five hundred dollars a share.’ Instead it was the speculators that jumped out of windows.
And now another war was brewing and I was trying to write a story for Paulette; but I could make no progress. How could I throw myself into feminine whimsy or think of romance or the problems of love when madness was being stirred up by a hideous grotesque, Adolf Hitler?
Alexander Korda in 1937 had suggested I should do a Hitler story based on mistaken identity, Hitler having the same moustache as the tramp: I could play both characters, he said. I did not think too much about the idea then, but now it was topical, and I was desperate to get working again. Then it suddenly struck me. Of course! As Hitler I could harangue the crowds in jargon and talk all I wanted to. And as the tramp I could remain more or less silent. A Hitler story was an opportunity for burlesque and pantomime. So with this enthusiasm I went hurrying back to Hollywood and set to work writing a script. The story took two years to develop.
I thought of the opening sequence, which would start with a battle scene of the First World War, showing Big Bertha, with its shooting range of seventy-five miles, with which the Germans intended to awe the Allies. It is supposed to destroy Rheims Cathedral – instead it misses its mark and destroys an outside water-closet.
Paulette was to be in the picture. In the last two years she had had quite a success with Paramount. Although we were somewhat estranged we were friends and still married. But Paulette was a creature of whims. One would have been quite amusing if it had not come at an inopportune time. One day she arrived in my dressing-room at the studio with a slim, well-tailored young man, who looked poured into his clothes. I had had a difficult day with the script and was rather surprised at this interruption. But Paulette said it was very important; then she sat down and invited the young man to pull up a chair and sit down beside her.
‘This is my agent,’ said Paulette.
Then she looked at
