It was a poignant day when we left for New York. While Oona was making final household arrangements I stood outside on the lawn viewing the house with ambivalent feelings. So much had happened to me in that house, so much happiness, so much anguish. Now the garden and the house looked so peaceful and friendly that I felt wistful about leaving it.
After bidding good-bye to Helen, the maid, and Henry, the butler, I brushed by into the kitchen and said good-bye to Anna, the cook. I am exceedingly shy on these occasions, and Anna, a rotund, heavy woman, was slightly deaf. ‘Good-bye,’ I said again and touched her on the arm. Oona was the last to leave; later she told me that she had found the cook and the maid in tears. Jerry Epstein, my assistant director, was at the station to see us off.
The journey across the country was relaxing. We spent a week in New York before sailing. Just as I was preparing to enjoy myself, my lawyer, Charles Schwartz, called up to say that an ex-employee of United Artists was suing the company for so many millions. ‘It’s nothing but a nuisance action, Charlie; all the same I want you to keep from being served a summons, as it could mean your being called back from your vacation.’ So for the last four days I was confined to my room and denied the enjoyment of seeing New York with Oona and the children. However, I intended to show up for the Press preview of Limelight – summons or no summons.
Crocker, now my publicity man, had arranged a lunch with the editorial staff of Time and Life magazines, an occasion of having to jump through the proverbial hoop for publicity. Their offices with their barren white plaster walls were a fit setting for the frigid atmosphere of that lunch, as I sat labouring to be friendly and amusing facing a row of solemn, cropped-headed space-men – the Time staff. And the food was just as frigid as the atmosphere, consisting of tasteless chicken with sallow, starchy gravy. But as far as gaining good publicity for Limelight, neither my presence, my attempts to be engaging, nor the food, did me any good; their magazine ruthlessly panned the picture.
Although at the Press preview unfriendliness was undoubtedly in the theatre, later I was agreeably surprised by the reviews in some of the important newspapers.
thirty
I BOARDED the Queen Elizabeth at five in the morning, a romantic hour but for the sordid reason of having to avoid a process-server. My lawyer’s instructions were to steal aboard, lock myself in my suite and not to appear on deck until the pilot disembarked. Being groomed for the last ten years to expect the worst, I obeyed.
I had been looking forward to standing on the top deck with my family, enjoying that stirring moment of a ship’s severance as it glides off and away into another life. Instead I was ignominiously locked in my cabin, peering through the porthole.
‘It’s me,’ said Oona, rapping on the door.
I opened it.
‘Jim Agee has just arrived to see us off. He is standing on the dock. I shouted that you were hiding from process-servers and that you’d wave to him from the porthole. There he is now at the end of the pier,’ she said.
I saw Jim a little apart from a group of people, standing in fierce sunlight scanning the boat. Quickly I took my fedora hat and put my arm through the porthole and waved, while Oona looked out of the second porthole. ‘No, he hasn’t seen you yet,’ she said.
And Jim never did see me; and that was the last I ever saw of Jim, standing alone as though apart from the world, peering and searching. Two years later he died of a heart-attack.
At last we were on our way and, before the pilot left, I unlocked the door and came out on deck a free man. There it was – the towering skyline of New York, aloof and magnanimous, racing away from me in sunlight, becoming ethereally more beautiful every moment… and as that vast continent disappeared into the mist it gave me a peculiar feeling.
Although excited with the anticipation of visiting England with my family, I was pleasantly relaxed. The wide expanse of the Atlantic is cleansing. I felt like another person. No longer was I a myth of the film world, or a target of acrimony, but a married man with a wife and family on a holiday. The children were on the top deck engrossed in play while Oona and I sat in a couple of deck-chairs. And in this mood I had a realization of perfect happiness – something very near to sadness.
We talked affectionately of friends we were leaving behind. We even talked of the friendliness of the Immigration Department. How easily one succumbs to a small courtesy – enmity is difficult to nourish.
Oona and I intended taking a long vacation and devoting ourselves to pleasure, and with the launching of Limelight our vacation would not be aimless. The knowledge of combining business with pleasure was exceedingly pleasant.
Lunch the next day could not have been gayer. Our guests were the Artur Rubinsteins and
