WHAT l'VE LEARNED

When you getto 80 you lose your short-term memory. You

can remember everything except where you put your glasses.
What makes a happy marriage? Equal partnership. My wife
isn't "the little woman". Before we met, I was disco dancing
and getting pissed. Then it became a whole different li fe.
Separate bathrooms are an absolute must, too. If you haven't
got enough money for t wo bathrooms, work out a schedule.
Socially, I am a communist. It's the only area where I am.
I regard everybody as equal. I'll talk to you as civilly as I expect
to be spoken to. If that doesn't happen then the trouble starts.
My three great achievements with which I had absolutely
nothing to do are that I was born an Englishman, a Londoner
and a Cockney.
I did two years' national service. In 1952, when I was 19,
they sent me to Korea. I was an infantry soldier. You become
a man quite quickly. We used to do night patrols in the paddy
fields. It was terrifying. The good thing about the Chinese
soldiers was they chewed garlic like we chew gum so you could
smell them long before they got near you. That meant when
you smelled garlic you practically shat your pants! I detested
garlic in cooking. It took me quite a while to get used to that.
Buy real estate. Accountants can't run off with it.
My dad was a Billingsgate fish market porter. When I told
him that I was going to be an actor he never said a word but
I saw his face and thought, he thinks I'm gay. The theatre
in those days was very gay. But I wasn't.
I was the shyest child. If strangers came into the house I'd hide
behind the curtains and wouldn't come out until they'd gone.
Don't get on the wrong side of Sean Connery. We were out one
evening and there were amateurs singing. Four drunks behind
us were shouting at a young girl to get off. Sean told them to
shut up. They said, "Who's going t o make us?" He smashed
the bleeding daylights out of them. I didn't have to help.
I grew up during the war so there wasn't any Christmas, really.
We'd make our own decorations but there was no stuff
We used to get one orange and one banana. Now I do the full
Christmas. It's almost psychotic with me.
Women love to laugh. I wasn't great looking so very early
on I realised that I needed to be funny and I worked on that.
"IF YOU' RE
GOING THROUGH
HELL, KEEP
GOING.
CHURCHILL
SAID THAT"
'
INTERVIEW BY
I
Ben M itche ll
Ifanybody does anything against me I don't seek revenge.
No, they are just dead to me and I neverthink of them or speak
to them again. That's how I am. You don't get two chances.
How did I avoid drugs in the Sixties? I was a stage actor and I'd
heard marijuana is a big memory buster. I couldn't afford that
because I had so much dialogue to remember. That scared me.
Also, with marijuana you'd just sit there saying, "Wow". LSD,
you think you're on an airplane and you want to jump
out of the window. Cocaine, you never stop talking bollocks
for hours on end. It's not exactly great company in a nightclub.
If you keep looking backwards you' ll trip over.
I made some dreadful film years ago and this reporter said
to me, "That was t errible". I said, "I bought a house for my
mother with that film. It's fantastic!"
Get a bottle of cheap wine - white or red - and make that
the basis of your gravy. And don't be afraid to use beef
or chicken cubes. That's alright.
I'm shortsighted. I can't see distances but you know those
little, tiny medicine bottles? I can read all the instructions
and the contents on those.
The Rolls-Royce always symbolised rich people and snobs.
I eventually bought one. I went out with a shopping list: razor
blades, aftershave, underpants ... Rolls-Royce. I was taking
the mickey, actually. I went into this showroom and got my
list out like I was looking to see what I'd come in for. I said to
the guy, "I want to buy a Rolls-Royce." He said, "How many do
you want?" I said, "Oh bugger you, I'll get it somewhere else."
If you're going through hell, keep going. Churchill said that.
He came to our youth club when I was a boy. I had tea with him.
I get bored of people saying, "not many people know that" and
phrases I'm supposed to have said. That was from Peter Sellers.
I always knew these facts. Sellers used to say, "Bloody hell!
I really like knowing that." I'd say, "Good, because not many
people know that." On his answering machine, in my voice, he
said, "My name is Michael Caine. Peter Sellers is not at home.
Not many people know that." So that's how it came about.
The movies retire you, sometimes after your first one if
you're not very lucky. You will sit at home and the phone
will not ring. That's it. You' re done. F
NowYouSeeMeisout5July
MICHAEL
A c t o r , 80
CAINE
10 1
"MY
DEFINITION
OF FREEDOM
IS SIMPLICITY.
ANONYMITY"
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
One time a guy told me that he brought his wife to see Pirates
of the Caribbean. She had lost her motor skills. I forget what
you call it. It's not autism. Jesus, they made a movie about it.
You know, where you recede and your functions start to go.
Anyway, they're watching the fi lm, and when Captain Jack
Sparrow came on the screen, she started to laugh. This guy
said he hadn't heard that laugh in years. And so he took her
back to see the film repeatedly. For some reason, Captain
Jack made her laugh every time. That's right up there.
My mother taught me a lot. The first thing that comes to mind
is: don't take any shit off anyone, ever. When I was a little kid,
we moved constantly. Bully picks on you in the new place?
Don't evertake any shit off anyone, ever. Eloquent and right.
My life is my life because of Tim. Definitely.
This is Tim Burton in a nutshell: we were doing Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory and I was on the set. We were shooting,
working, working, working. All great. Everything's cool.
One of my pals comes up and says, "Helena [Bonham Carter,
Burton's partner] just called. When you get a moment, she'd
like you t o give her a call back." "OK," I say. "As soon as I'm
done on set, I'll go back to my trailer and give her a call." So I go
back, call Helena, and say, "Hey, what's going on?" I thought
maybe Helena had a question about little boys because [her
son] Billy was a little baby then and I've got two kids. I say, "Is
everything a l right?" And she says, "Billy's fine. Everything's
fine. But, well, you know how Tim is. He wants to know if you'd
be ... he'd like for you to be Billy's godfather." I say, "But I was
just with Tim. I was with him three mi nutes ago. I had to leave
him to walk back to the trailertocall you."So she called me
to ask because Tim just couldn't. That was his way of asking.
I went back to the set and said thank you, t old him I was
honoured. It doesn't get heavier than saying I'd like you to be
the godfatherof my son. But he's not ever going to put himself
into a corny kind of situation with a pal. He's like, "Good,
yeah, yeah." Boom. "Let's get back into the work."
See this little carrot nearthe dip? Watch. I'll put it in my mouth
as if it were a cigarette holder. Now I'm Raoul Duke. I spent
so much time wit h Hunter Thompson, it just became second
nature. As soon as I put anything resembling a cigarette holder
in my mouth, he starts to come out. It's so natural and it's
so strange. It sounds kind of ridiculous to even say it.
The characters are always t here and, depending on the
"YOU DON'T GO
THROUGH THE
FRONT DOORS
OF HOTELS
ANYMORE, YOU
GO THROUGH
THE GARAGE"
'
INTERVIEW BY
I
Cal Fussman
situation, not far from the surface. They show up every now
and again. It can't be good for you. Then again, who knows?
I don'tthink anybody's necessaril y ready for death. You can
only hope when it approaches, you feel like you've said what
you wanted to say. Nobody wants to go out in mid-sentence.
I'm in a very privileged position_ And I'm certainly not going
to bite the hand that feeds me. I like doing the work. But I'm
not a great fan of al l the stuff that goes along with it. I don't
want to be a product. Of course you want the movies to do
well. But I don't want to have to think about that stuff. I don't
want to know who's hot now and who's not and who's making
this much dough and who's boffing this woman or that one.
I want to remain ignorant of all t his. I want to be totally
outside and far away from all of it.
One time I had done some television interview, and they
asked about my family life and kids. I talked about how I'm
a proud father, how much I love my kids, how they're fun, what
we do and how it's great. I was thinking ifin 25,3oyears my
kids watch old footage, I'd be proud fort hem to see their dad
saying how much he loves them. The show aired, and I get
a phone call. "What the fuck are you doing?" I said, "Marlon,
what are you tal king about?" He said, "That's none of thei r
business!" I tried to say, "Marlon, listen, man, I only wanted
my kids to ... " And it was like he gave me this sort of once-over.
"You don't do it, man. That's your world and it's nobody else's
business. It's not anybody's entertainment." And he was right.
There's no limit to the possibilit ies of what I could do to
the paparazzi if! catch them photographing my children.
You don't gothrough the front door ofhotels anymore, you
go through the garage. Or you go through the kitchen ofa
rest aurant. Some people want t o think that's cool, exciting.
But it'll definitely make you a little weird ifyou'reconstantly
being st ared at. Part of t he process that I've always enjoyed
is being the observer. You know, just watching people and
learni ng. At a certain point, the reversal took place. I was no
longer the observer- I was being observed. That's obviously
very dangerous because part of an actor's job is to observe.
My definition of freedom is simplicity. Anonymity. I' m sure
it will be a possibility some day again. Maybe when I get old.
They get tired of you.
"Didn'tyou use to be Johnny Depp?" That' ll be the clincher. fa
JOHNNY
Ac t o r , 49
DEPP
103
ESSAY
THE
GATSBY
MAGIC
HOW F SCOTT FITZGERALD
CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
By Andrew O' Hagan
I N
May 1922, F Scott
Fitzgerald, aged
27, was a ~ r i l l i a n t
youngwnter
on the turn. He
had blazed into fame with his debut
novel two years earlier and was close
to being a burnt-out case. If fame
is a mask that eats into the face, then
Fitzgerald was quite repulsive to
himself as the Jazz Age reached its
height. He'd drunk too much
champagne and told too many lies,
ruining both his constitution and
his innocence, and before he wrote
The Great Gatsby, he thought life was
a joke at his own expense.
At the height of his fame,
Fitzgerald made and spent over
$400,000. "He sallied forth onto the
streets of New York," writes Scott
Donaldson, his latest biographer,
"with $20, $50, $100 bills poking out
of his vest and coat pockets. For the
benefit of grateful bellhops, he kept
a plate of money on a table in his hotel
room. When at restaurants, he
sometimes tipped more than the bill.
In France, his pockets were always
full of 'damp little wads of hundred-
franc notes that he dribbled out
behind him the way some women
do Kleenex'." More than one witness
at the time said he was headed for
catastrophe, and they were right.
But not before Fitzgerald turned his
interest in money into the greatest
American novel of the 20th century.
T
he book appears so
inevitable now,
so complete, but there
was a time when he felt
it was beyond his grasp.
Anybody who writes novels knows
that period of secret vertigo, when
your book seems a long way down
and your head spins and your heart
races just to think of it. But the year
before Fitzgerald began The Great
Gatsby he believed he had dried up.
"I doubt I'll ever write anything
again worth putting in print," he said.
However, by June 1922, Fitzgerald
ESSAY
had overcome these insecurities and
begun to plan the novel. He initially
thought it would be set in the Midwest
in 1885 and would be short on what
he called "superlative beauties" but
with a Catholic element. That was
soon dropped when the world of rich
phonies engulfed his imagination.
He was living by then in Great Neck,
what would be fictionalised as the
nouveau riche West Egg in Gatsby, on
Long Island among the swells. Movie
mogul Samuel Goldwyn and writer
Ring Lardner were neighbours; the
silent screen star Mae Murray and
celebrated war hero General Pershing
could be found nearby walking their
dogs. "They have no mock-modesty,"
he wrote, "and all perform their
various stunts upon the faintest
request like a sustained concert."
There is no birthing plan for
masterpieces. A genius book arrives
not like a lottery win, out of good
fortune and the weird mechanics of
chance, but out of a bri lliant collision
between a writer's talent and the
period in which he or she happens to
be writing. Living on the Long Island
Sound, no matter how messily,
Fitzgerald still had the creative
readies. When he looked around him
at these rich people in their vast
carelessness on the brink of the
Depression, when he looked inside
himself and saw a people-pleasing
drunk in the era of Prohibition, he
realised a perfect storm had arrived
on the coast of his abilities. He knew,
in imaginative terms, he had a deep
connection with his own ferment and
the ferment of his times, and a book
began to emerge that couldn't have
been written by any other person in
any other time. That, I believe, is what
we mean by a literary masterpiece.
Fitzgerald started the book at
Great Neck. He was in a state while
writing it , both knowing how good it
could be and worrying he might flunk
it. "I feel I have an enormous power in
me now," he wrote in one of his letters,
"more than I've ever had in a way but
it works so fitfully and with so many
bogeys because I've talked so much
and not lived enough within myself to
develop the necessary selfreliance ...
I don't know anyone who has used up
so much personal experience as I have
at 27 ... So in my new novel I'm thrown
directly on purely creative work - not
trashy imaginings as in my stories but
the sustained imagination ofa sincere
and yet radiant world. So I tread
slowly and carefully and at times in
106
F Scott
Fitzgerald, wife
Zelda and
daughter Scottie
at their home in
Paris, 1925
Ca bove)
Robert Redford
as Jay Gatsby
in the 1974
f i l m The Great
Ga t sby
Ca bove rig ht)
considerable distress." For Fitzgerald,
writing, like living, could be a
delirious sickness, and the boozing
threatened to tear down everything
about him. Anita Loos, author of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, once had
to hide under a table at Great Neck to
get away from his rage. Mortal with
drink, he threw "two enormous
candelabras with lighted candles,"
she said, "a water carafe, a metal wine
cooler and a silver platter."
Fitzgerald ditched a lot of the
early Gatsby manuscript he produced
during that first summer and over
the following year and by April 1924
he had "a new angle". He and his
famously erratic wife Zelda moved
to the French Riviera, where,
despite drink, quarrels, and other
distractions, the work took on fresh
momentum. Every itch and pulse of
his idealism went into the book; he
knew he could make something new,
something pure. "I hope I don't see
a soul for six months," he wrote.
"My novel grows more and more
extraordinary; I feel absolutely
self-sufficient and I have a perfect
hollow craving for loneliness."
The name Gatsby might have been
stolen from the Gadsby that appears
in the work of Mark Twain, but it
seems more likely, given Fitzgerald's
immensely echoing style, thatthe
author formed the name from the
slang term for pistol, Gat. The house
- that unforgettable house, with its
lawn and blue gardens, where "men
and girls came and went like moths
among the whisperings and
champagne and the stars" - was
thought to be modelled on the
luxurious home of Herbert Bayard
Swope, editorofthe New York World.
Gatsby, the enigmatic bootlegger
ESSAY
IF FAME WAS A
MASK THAT EATS
INTO THE FACE,
THEN FITZGERALD
WAS QUITE
REPULSIVE TO
HIMSELF AS THE
JAZZ AGE REACHED
ITS HEIGHT
107
and new-monied dreamer, began
as a version of several shady Twenties
businessmen but ended up taking a
great deal from Fitzgerald himself. He
later acknowledged all his characters,
the women as well as the men, were
little Fitzgeralds. Someone once said
all good novelists are hermaphroditic:
Fitzgerald would have agreed. He said
there could never be a good biography
of a novelist because a novelist, if
he is any good, is too many people.
"Well, I shall write a novel better than
any novel ever written in America
and become, par excellence, the best
second-rater in the world," he said.
In November 1924, he finished the
novel in a flurry of revisions, but he
still wasn't happy with the title. It was
called Trimalchioin West Egg.
(Trimalchio, mentioned in the novel,
is the party-giving rich character in
The Satyricon by Petronius.) But
Fitzgerald had a lternative titles, each
of which was worse than the other:
On the Road to West Egg, Gold-Hatted
Gatsby, The High-Bouncing Lover,
Gatsby, Trima!chio. For Fitzgerald,
writing a novel was like trying to
grab the breeze or steal a halo: every
beautiful attempt was bound to be
laced with impossibility. He wrote
about failure and he lived with it,
too. "That's the whole burden of this
novel," he wrote to an old Princeton
classmate, "the loss of those illusions
that give such colour to the world
so that you don't care whether things
are true or false as long as they partake
of the magical glory."
The story is told by Nick Carraway,
one oflife's undecided bit-part players,
a model narrator, a Yale man and
former soldier who moves to a house
on Long Island next door to a
mysterious millionaire called Jay
Gatsby. Carraway is a bondsman,
impressionable, likable and lightly
romantic, and his second cousin
Daisy lives on the other side of the
Sound with her husband Tom, a
rich, two-timing Ivy Leaguer with
a heavy dose of brutality. Dressed in
white flannels, Nick goes to one of
Gatsby's extraordinary parties on that
extraordinary lawn. Although he is
distant and somewhat untouchable,
Gatsby befriends Nick and soon drafts
him into his plan to win the heart of
Daisy. We find that his whole
existence, the house, the money, the
shirts, and the giant parties, too, are
all an attempt to gain the love of the
rich girl who once rejected him. I won't
say more. It all unwinds in ways that
read as ifthe tragic muse had got
drunk on Chateau d'Yquem and sung
a sublime and moving aria from the
ornate balcony of a priceless house.
Writing the book - or writing the
book and boozing and trying to live
with Zelda - blew Fitzgerald's lamps.
He was never the same man again and
the novel's poor sales only fuell ed his
native feeling that failure was his
destiny. Not long ago, I was in Paris
and I went one evening to 14 rue de
Tilsitt, just off the Champs-Elysees,
where the beautiful orange sky above
the buildings gave me that feeling
(common to Paris) that life might be
as good as it's going to get. Fitzgerald
came to live in the rue du Tilsitt when
he finished Gatsby. He was out getting
drunk one night with the boys from
the Paris bureau ofan American
newspaper, and he returned here,
totally sozzled, to find Zelda
ESSAY
addressing him from the balcony at
number 14. "You' re drunk again, you
bastard," she shouted.
"Not at all, darling," he replied,
staggering up to push at the same
door I was looking at. "I'm as sober
as a polar bear."
H
owdoyoufilmthe
romanticism that lives
inside the prose of some
writers? How do you
adapt such fineness into
visible cues, speeches, routines, and
actions? The answer, in relation to
Scott Fitzgerald's best-known novel,
is that it probably can't be done, any
more than Joyce's most famous book
can be filmed. There have been four
attempts at The Great Gatsby, each
worse than the last, and the only hope
for Baz Luhrmann's new effort is that
it supplants the book's tender
mystique with a rowdy energy all of
its own. Watching the early versions,
the one starring Alan Ladd, or the
Seventies one directed by Jack
Clayton and starring Robert Redford,
you come away with a sense that
Fitzgerald's perfect sentences just get
in the way of what film-makers can
actually do when adapting the book
for the big screen. Sure, Fitzgerald
wrote in pictures, but it's not the
pictures we remember, it's not the
images or even the plot of The Great
Gatsby that sticks in the mind. It is
something beyond paraphrase, call it
sublime grace, call it existence music,
but however we describe it, the thing
that matters is like the beat of a
hummingbird's wings, so delicate
and so rapid that a camera struggles
to catch it.
And that might serve as a
description of Scott Fitzgerald's
talent overall. Nothing became it like
its fracturing. At the height of his
trouble, not long before his final slide
into death at the age of 44, he wrote a
series of articles for Esquire that will
mean something to every man setting
his feet for the first time on the terrain
beyond his youth. "Those indiscreet
108
WRITING THE BOOK
AND BOOZING
AND TRYING
TO LIVE WITH
ZELDA BLEW
FITZGERALD'S
LAMPS. HE WAS
NEVER THE SAME
MAN AGAIN
Esquire articles," as he later called
them, alarmed people with how
personal they were, speaking up
about the psychic trials of his
generation, and perhaps ours.
"I felt like the beady-eyed men
I used to see on the commuting train
from Great Neck is years back," he
wrote. "Men who didn't care whether
the world tumbled into chaos
tomorrow ifit spared their houses."
In the midst of financial and emotional
crisis, Fitzgerald had taken that same
look into his own clear Irish eyes.
"My own happiness in the past
often approached such an ecstasy
that I could not share it even with the
person dearest to me but had to walk
it away in the quiet streets .. . and
I think that my happiness, or talent
for self-delusion or what you will, was
an exception. It was not the natural
thing but the unnatural - unnatural
ESSAY
as the Boom; and my recent
experience parallels the wave of
despair that swept the nation when
the Boom was over." The Esquire
essays are little masterpieces of
self-awareness, and the book they
became, The Crack-Up, could still
serve as a guide to what can happen to
intelligent men at a certain time in
their lives, when all the fancy watches
have been bought and set, when love
is hard, when the good suits are in the
closet but life isn't what you ordered,
and when all around you the dream of
progress is mired in lies.
The season of Fitzgerald is upon
us. It has been coming for a few years
now: I t hought of him the first time
I heard people us ing the phrase "the
financial crisis". Any of us who spent
the Eighties and Nineties watching
the growth of money, the rise in
champagne sales and the explosion of
109
A BOOK BEGAN
TO EMERGE THAT
COULDN'T HAVE
BEEN WRITTEN
BY ANY OTHER
PERSON IN ANY
OTHER TIME
Tobey Maguire
as Nick Carraway
and Leonardo
DiCaprio as
Jay Gatsby in
the new film
adaptation of
The Great Gatsby,
out on 16 May
First edition of
the novel fr om
1925
spite, then the rapid uncoilingofthe
boys in red braces, knew that the man
who wrote The Great Gatsby and The
Crack-Up might come to serve as a
patron saint of our credit-crunching
era. In the last year, Gatsby has been
the subject of a stage play, Gatz,
where the whole text is read aloud in
a modern office. New editions of the
book are being prepared as we speak,
Northern Ballet has just put flappers
in pumps and floaty skirts, the timely
pas de deux of Gatsby and Daisy
performed under a green light. Baz
Luhrmann chose his moment well,
and let us remember, amid the glories
of costume and excess, choreography
and stardom, the fragile excellence of
Scott Fitzgerald's message to the
world of grown-ups.
He wrote it years after he and
Zelda and Scottie, their daughter,
left the apartment in the rue de Tilsitt,
that place he came to after finishing
the great American novel. The words
sang out to me the other day as
I looked up at the windows and felt
the chill of the present day. "We were
going to the Old World to find a new
rhythm for our lives," he wrote, "with
a true conviction that we had left our
old selves behind forever." For men in
the grasp of their youth, and for men
on the cusp of their changing lives,
the current season might distill that
most Fitzgeraldian of essences -
hope. It is there in the last lines of
his great novel. "Gatsby believed in
the green light, the orgastic future
that year by year recedes before us.
It eluded us then, but that's no matter
- tomorrow we will run faster,
stretch out our arms farther."
We are all Scott Fitzgerald's
children now. f
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
People say I'm the ultimate California girl, which is funny,
being that I'm Canadian.
Come on, people! It's never what it seems.
My grandfather was a healer from Finland. My real last
name is Hyytiainen. He changed it to Anderson when he
came to Canada. All of his brothers changed their names,
too, so I have a feeling that maybe something bad happened
in Finland.
My breasts have a career. I'm just tagging along.
I had kids to raise them myself.
I'm kind of proud of myself. I've been able to keep a certain
grace about me, even in the times of disgrace and craziness.
Baywatch was a great show. It was completely mindless.
You could turn it on in any language and still be entertained.
You could turn it on halfway through an episode and still
enjoy it. Now that's entertainment.
Are you kidding? Of course there was a red bathing suit
in my clothing line.
You'd think that my fans would be the guys who are too
drunk to turn the channel after football. But surprisingly,
from all the demographic research that people have done
on me, we've found out that I have a huge female following.
It's a girl-girl type thing.
Eventually, you just have to realise that you're living for an
audience of one. I'm not here for anyone else's approval.
In order for a man to feel whole, he needs someone to look
up to and someone to look up to him.
Natural beauty takes at least two hours in front of a mirror.
The best decisions you ever make are usually the ones you
make even when everyone else says not to do it.
Yes, Hef'ssleepingwith them all. For real! I've actually
walked in on him. See, one time I was over at the Mansion
with some friends. We were swimming in the grotto, and
I decided to walk around the house a bit. As I was walki ng
around, I ran into one of the girls. And she's li ke, "Come
upstairs." So I went upstairs, and there's Hef on the bed.
There's baby oil, there's toys flying every which way, there's
"NATURAL
BEAUTY TAKES
AT LEAST TWO
HOURS IN FRONT
OF A MIRROR"
'
Opposite: Anderson as
CJ Parker in Baywatch
(1992- 1997). Below,
from left : Baywatch;
Home Improvement
(1991-1997); Barb Wire
(1996); Stacked
(2005- 2006)
all these girls naked. It was like watching a movie. I was
standing in the doorway just looking- for a really long time.
And finally I realised they were all looking at me! I realised,
OK, this is reall y happening. And then I heard this voice
from downstairs. It was [photographer) David LaChapelle.
I heard him calling my name. And it kind of snapped me
back to reality. I ran back downstairs.
I'm not telling what I'm obsessed with.
My doctor says, "You have hepatitis C." I go, "OK, how do I get
rid of it?" And he's like, "You can't. This is what you're going
to die from." I was in the middle of shooting [late-Nineties TV
show] VIP; I didn't know what to do. This wash came over my
body. And then the doctor says, "Do you know how you got
it?" I said no. And he said, "Your husband never told you he
had it?" It kind of threw me for a while. Obviously, it's a hard
thing to tell someone, but I wish he could have had the nerve
to tell me. Obviously, his ego was more important than my life.
Sometimes sex gets in the way of a relationship.
My best friend has been my best friend for 25 years.
She works for the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles)
in Canada and has this very normal life. She's beautiful.
And she has the same problems I do; it's just all relative.
Like, she works in an office. Sometimes, if someone says
something about her, she's just devastated. And me, Im ight
be in a tabloid or something. But she goes through the same
feelings I do. She' ll be like, "This girl in the office did this
horrible t hi ng to me!" And I'll be like, "Did you see the
Enquirer?"
Love never goes away; it just changes form.
I don't know if you can call me an artist or not, but I feel li ke
I've created my life day by day. It wasn't, li ke, this whole plan:
I'm going to conquer the world. I've been blessed with
opportunities in Holl ywood. I've made a career out of it
somehow. I don't even reall y know how I did it.
Time passes, shit happens, you do the best you can. We put so
much drama into everything. You gotta rememberto breathe.
Rock stars are li ke prophets. There's something about
somebody who can get up on a stage and sing. And then
when they write you songs, forget it, OK?
You know when a prayer is answered. fl
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
With a suit, always wear big British shoes, the
ones with large welts. There's nothing worse than
dainty li ttle Italian jobs at the end of the leg line.
Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute
absence oflife is the most disturbing and
challenging confrontation you wil 1 ever have.
When I' m stuck for a closing t o a lyric, I will
drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.
Lester Bangs, the raging rock critic of the
Seventies, allegedly once paid his highest
compliment to a band by saying, "You make me
feel like a motherfucker from hell." I realised
then that we were on different planets.
I don't expect t he human race to progress in
too many areas. However, having a child with
an ear infection makes one hugely grateful
for antibiotics.
I' ve always regretted that I never was able to
talk openly wit h my parents, especially with my
fat her. I've heard and read so many t hings about
my family that I can no longer believe anything;
every relative I question has a completely
different story from the last. I seem to have
half a dozen fami ly histories.
Fame can take interesting men and thrust
mediocrity upon them.
l fl hadn't learned how to be a musician and
writer, it wouldn't have mattered what I did.
I never knew too many rock people. I would get
to a place, some nightclub or other, and see all
these famous rockers bonding. And I remember
feeling completely on the outside. I regret
that somet imes.
I'm in awe of t he universe, but I don't necessarily
believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it.
I do have a passion for the visual in religious
rituals, though, even though they may be
completely empty and bereft of substance.
The incense is powerful and provocat ive,
whether Buddhist or Catholic.
"YOU'RE NEVER WHO YOU
THINK YOU ARE. SOMETIME
IN THE EIGHTIES, AN OLD
LADY APPROACHED ME AND
ASKED, 'MR ELTON, MAY I HAVE
YOUR AUTOGRAPH?"'
'
PORTRAIT BY
I
Andr ew K en t
The depressing realisation in this age of dumbing
down is that the questions have moved from,
"Was Nietzsche right about God?" to, "How big
was his dick?"
Make the best of every moment. We're not
evolving. We're not going anywhere.
You're never who you think you are. Sometime
in the Eight ies, an old lady approached me a nd
asked, "Mr Elton, may I have your autograph?"
I told her that I wasn't Elton but David Bowie.
She replied, "Oh, thank goodness. I couldn' t
stand his red hair and all that makeup."
They're neverwhoyou think t hey are. When
I fi rst came to the US, around 1971, my New York
guide t old me one day that The Velvet
Underground were to play laterthat night at the
Electric Circus, which was about to close. I was
the biggest fan in the UK, I believe. I got to the gig
early and positioned myselfat the front by the lip
of t he stage. The performance was great, and
I made sure that Lou Reed could see that I was a
true fan by singing along to all the songs. Aft er the
show, I moved to the side of the stage to where the
door of the dressing room was located . I knocked,
and one of the band members answered. After a
few gushing compliments, I asked if! could have
a few words with Lou. He looked bemused but
told me to wait a second. After only moments,
Lou came out, and we sat and talked about
songwrit ing for 10 minutes or so. I left the club
floating on cloud nine - a teenage ambition
achieved. The next day, I t old my guide what a
blast it had been to see The Velvets live and meet
Lou Reed. He looked at me quizzically for a
second, then burst into laughter. "Lou left the
band some t ime ago," he said. "You were t alking
to his replacement, Doug Yule."
I've always felt bemused at being called the
chameleon of rock. Doesn't a chameleon exert
tremendous energy to become indistinguishable
from its environment?
Trust nothing but your own experience. fl
DAVID
Mu sician , 66
BOWIE
11 5
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
A best moment in music? Sometimes when I'm playing my
guitar, I get to a point where it gets very cold and icy inside
me. It's very refreshing. Every breath is like you're at the
North Pole. Your head starts to freeze. Your inhalations are
big - more air than you ever t hought there is starts pouring
in. There's something magical about it. Sometimes when it
happens, you wonder if you're gonna be OK. Can you handle it?
Yes, there was something good that came out of having
polio as a kid. Walking.
The sound ofa harmonica hits you directly. There's no
language barrier.
The wisest person I ever met had to be my companion in the
hospital a few years ago. I was recovering from complications
after an operation to remove an aneurism in my brain. She
was about 85 years old and maybe 5ft tall. An old black lady
from South Carolina. This young nurse wasn't really in touch
with what she was doing, and the old lady would tell her how
to do what she needed to do without telling her. She never
talked down t o her, just gave examples. I felt that this old
woman must be deeply religious, but there was nothing
forceful about her. I woke up one morning at a quarter to six
and looked out the window. Fog was on the bridge outside the
room, and I said, "Well, that's just beautiful." And she said:
"Yes, it is." She turned toward me with this 85-year-old face
that didn't have a line on it, no strain, nothing, and she said:
"So the master's not taking you. It's not your turn."
Courage is a mindless thing. People say, "Wow! How could
you do that?" And you say, "How could I not do that?"
It's like having two eyes. You either look through one eye or
you look through the other. Or you look through both of them.
Sex is sex. Love is love. Love and sex is clear vision.
Ther e's something peaceful about boxing. If you beat the
hell out of a bag or go agai nst a competitor, you and your
reflexes will be so at one that you won't have time t o think
about anythi ng else. You have to be totallyyourselfto box.
When I was six, I didn' t know what God was. I couldn't wait
to get out of Sunday school. God was secondary to the whole
t hing. As time went by, I kept getting angrier and angrier ...
until finally I wasn't angry anymore. I was peaceful, because
I thought: this is not fruitful for me. I rejected the whole thing
and found peace in paganism. Jesus didn't go t o church. I went
" IT' S LIKE
HAVING TWO
EYES.SEX IS
SEX. LOVE
IS LOVE. LOVE
AND SEX IS
CLEAR VISION"
'
INTERVIEW BY
I
Cal Fu ssman
way back before Jesus. Back to the forest, to the wheat fields,
to the river, the ocean. I go where the wind is. That's my church.
Epilepsy taught me that we're not in control of ourselves.
Most people think it's the other way around: that time is
going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to
be going faster because we're cramming so much into it.
Our education system basically strives for normal - which is
too bad. Sometimes the exceptional is classi lied as abnormal
and pushed aside.
One thing that has come out of having children with cerebral
palsy is strength. At first it made me very angry. I was almost
looking for a fight. I was always looking for someone to criticise
my son in my presence. I would envision different scenarios in
which I would become violent reacting to people's reactions
to my children - especially to my severely handicapped child.
Eventually, he taught me that was not necessary. Just by being
himself. By being a gift to us. He showed us how to have faith
and beliefand inner strength and to never give up. I look
around and see people hurting themselves for no reason.
Drinking too much. Taking drugs. Beating themselves up
in some psychological way. That really bothers me, knowing
that these people got everything they needed to succeed.
All they have to do is believe in themselves and in the gifts
they're wasting. And yet there are all these other people
on the planet who have none of the gifts that are apparent.
The best is approaching. I have a lot that I've accumulated
through my life experiences. It 's easier to communicate
through music t han it ever has been before. It's easier to play.
It's easier to sing. It's easier to write. Nothing is forced.
When my doctor discovered the aneuri sm in my brain,
he told me I'd had it for such a long time I shouldn't worry
about it. .. butthat we'd have to get rid of it immediately. Yeah,
that's Zen medicine. He's very wise. I trusted him completely,
though there was a complication, one that has a one-in-2,700
chance of happening in my type of operation. They go into
your brain through an artery in your thigh. Later, when I was
out of the hospital, my leg exploded. I was out on the st reet
and it just popped. My shoe was full of blood. I was in some
serious t rouble. I was about 50 yards from the hotel and I just
made it. The ambulance came about 10 minutes later. I don't
know ifthe event is important. But the result was. That's
what led me to that lady. The wisest person I've ever met. F
NEIL
Mu s i c ian, 67
YOUNG
11 6
FAME
STARDUST
MEMORIES
REMEMBER WHEN BEING A MOVIE
STAR MEANT SOMETHING?
By David Thomson
Illustration by Tavis Coburn
119
FAME
Above, from left: Humphrey Bogart (1941); Errol Flynn (1937);
Gary Cooper (1940) ; Clark Gable (1931)
M
ost stars have good hair. Yul Brynner
didn't, but he was only a star in one
picture, The Kingand I (1956), which he
was doomed to play all his life. Are you
old enough to remember when Bruce
Willis had hair?
As John McClane in Die Hard (1988), Bruce was just 33,
the cute smart-ass from TV's Moonlighting. His hair was
suspect even then (and over the years, few actors have
taken such shelter in colour jobs, adroit pieces, rugs and
cunning combing). But Bruce was a star, wasn't he? He
made $Sm on the original Die Hard and the picture grossed
$81m in the US. All told, Bruce's pictures have grossed well
over $2bn, and he's still here. He helped pioneer the bald
look and he has stuck by John McClane. Along the way,
there was Demi Moore, Planet Hollywood and now, with
Bruce at 58, he's back again for A Good Day to Die Hard.
We know it can't go on, but we're fond of him and his
willingness to do his own silly bombast with a grin.
No one, except Bruce, gets excited over his new films.
We accept them with good humour and we can see his
considerable instinct for comedy leading him closer to
playing cranky old men. He could be another Walter
Matthau or Robert Duvall. He might even revive those days
where he did smaller parts as a genuine actor: Billy Bathgate
(1991), Mortal Thoughts (1991), Nobody's Fool (1994) and even
Pulp Fiction (1994) where he achieved a weird nobility.
I like Bruce; you like Bruce; and we have always
guessed that among the cheerful rubbish he could find
The Sixth Sense (1999). He didn't get an Oscar nomination
for that, but he might have done. It was good work. One
day, he's going to receive an honorary Oscar and the
audience will stand for him. We don't know him, of course,
but we recognise someone who reckoned he'd be a movie
star. The hair's gone, but the confidence is still there,
even ifhe wears it like a wig.
Whereas, if you look at the other members of that
generation of stars who threw their male weight around,
the confidence has gone: Mel Gibson, Sly Stallone, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal (I had to look him up to
check the spelling). These guys are wrecks of their own
making. They did steroids with their imaginations,
when the chief drug of choice was ego. And now they are
hulks, tawdry celebrities who have to rub shoulders on
the internet with Lindsay Lohan, Justin Bieber and the
Kardashians, the balloons we are waiting to see burst.
Looked at charitably, they're figures of fun; in the cold
light of day, they are playing out their own farce. Like most
net celebrities, their familiarity has bred our contempt.
But Bruce has a dogged perseverance. He's like Clint
Eastwood, who says, "Look, I set out to be a star, and I know
the stories about the women and the kids and how cheap
I am, but I have always been the hero of my own mind.
And nobody does that now. I'm past 80 and I look it, but
I'm 'Clint' rhymes with 'flint', so don't mess with me." Clint
was never that much of an actor, but he is the last American
star. After him, it's trash all the way to Armageddon.
Clint set out in the Fifties, and he was one of the last
graduates of the acting, elocution and deportment school
run by Universal {it had had Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis
as alumni). He was raised to be a star at the moment when
a significant band of the original stars were passing:
Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn,
all dead around 60; the astute Cary Grant retired, always
a master oftiming; James Dean had crashed; and
Montgomery Clift cracked up. Above all those events,
Marlon Brando decided that to be a star was stupid and
demeaning. It was nearly as fraudulent as acting. So he
began to opt out, to sabotage his own pictures and to see
just how outrageous and insolent he could be. The idea
of Cooper or Bogart doing that was out of sight. They had
such respect for the movies and their own hard-won status.
But being 60 in 1960 was much tougher than it is now.
And those guys had other problems. Television was
assembling its own breed of"stars": they were smaller,
of course, less beautiful and far less possessed by self-
confidence. Television was a pioneer of the new inept hero,
the fraud figure, a satire on old-fashioned stardom: it
was a group that included Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jackie
Gleason and Lucille Ball (as well as abidingly stalwart
figures in Westerns and crime shows). Sure, Ball had done
movies, but she had never secured her place there. Then,
in the Fifties, she was a wild klutz, a domestic disaster,
endlessly horrifying her patient and fond husband (Desi
Arnaz, who in life was a business genius and a philanderer).
Ball and Arnaz formed Desilu Productions and became
business giants. But in the movies the money was
running away fast. A few of the old stars - James Stewart,
William Holden and John Wayne - hung on. But they
had to be independent producers and they found that both
exhausting and difficult. It aged them: self-regard needs
a lot of rest .
120
x
w
~
FAME
Above, from left: James Dean (1955); Cary Grant (1948);
Montgomery Cl ift (1953); Marlon Brando (1951)
CLINT EASTWOOD IS THE LAST
AMERICAN STAR. AFTER HIM, IT'S TRASH
ALL THE WAY TO ARMAGEDDON
The hated contract system (seven-year stretches at
your home studio) seemed suddenly appealing once it
was gone. Studios had looked after their contract players,
provided a diet of pictures and paychecks, assigned them
a parking space, and kept them out oft he public gaze
whenever their lives went astray. Some actor-producers
earned more but out there alone in the world they had
entourages to support as well as ex-wives - lawyers on top
of agents, advisers, shrinks, script-readers, soothsayers,
all those creatures who fasten on to loss of confidence.
I
n the Sixties and early Seventies, there arrived
a fresh generation of male stars. When one of
them, Jack Nicholson, beheld another, Warren
Beatty, he is supposed to have declared that's
what a movie star is meant to look like. But Beatty
preferred producing and being a power behind
the throne, rather than an actor. It's only lately he has
found his vocation, as a parent.
Nicholson was an exultant star, but the sourness and
disappointment are palpable now. Robert Redford has
a look on his face that seems to say how did I end up
looking like the wilderness I love? Al Paci no does "Al
Pacino" as often as he can, and he has had an authority,
and even the fun, that Robert De Niro has missed.
In the Seventies, De Niro was a great actor, but averse
to being popular, let alone liked. He then set out on a grim
career of hack projects, which were suddenly exposed
when he showed he could still act in last year's Silver
Linings Playbook. Then there is Dustin Hoffman, who
has given up being a virtuoso and turned into an amused
observer of the scene. But of that generation, only Paci no
and Nicholson were unquestioned stars, with enormous
public allegiance. They were the ones comics imitated. No
one ever imitated Redford. Yet once upon a t ime every kid
could do Cooper, Gable, Cagney and so on. In Some Like It
Hot (1959), Tony Curtis did Cary Grant to perfection.
Something else happened in the Sixties. A politician,
John F Kennedy, established that a president was the man
who went on television a lot. In the decades since, no
aspiring leader has been able to prosper without camera-
readiness. Nixon lacked it and it was a fatal flaw. Reagan
and Clinton had it when there was the possibility that they
had little else. Look back on Reagan's administrations and
there is disaster all around, but his amiability, his ease
and his ability to bring world politics down to the level of
a movie was breathtaking (and a hideous example).
Barack Obama had stardom, until about two weeks
into his presidency and then he succumbed to mounting
uneasiness. Was he unsuited to political infighting?
Was he an intellectual loner? Or was he a black man
anxious not to live up to the crudest stereotypes of being
black? Did he feel compelled to keep his cool?
The starriness of politicians, and the ongoing live
movie of the Kennedys, was a tough act for film people
to compete with. Television and music had their own
rivers of celebrity: Johnny Carson, the late-night talk
show host, was one of the most influential Americans of
the second half of the 20th century. Carson interviewed
famous people who seemed a touch dowdier than he was.
In Britain, David Frost, Michael Parkinson and, yes,
Jimmy Savile were similar figures. And when you think
about it, isn't it startling that Savile made such an impact
with so little? In music, The Beatles and Elvis were
everyone's emblems of fame, but there were The Rolling
Stones, Dylan, The Beach Boys and so many others.
Sport went from being a working-class pursuit to a chic
arena for everyone and so sporting figures became
121
FAME
Above, from left: Grace Kel ly (1953); Audrey Hepburn (1951);
Elizabeth Taylor (1955); Marilyn Monroe (1953)
international stars: Pele, Borg and McEnroe, Muhammad
Ali (as important as The Beatles and a transforming
engine for black America), to be followed by Magic and
Michael (you know who they are), Nadia Comaneci
and Olga Korbut, Cruyff, Maradona, Best, Renaldo,
Messi and don't forget Brian Clough and Mourinho.
More than that, sports celebrity had its disasters, and
stardom by the Seventies was a realm where some people
had to crash and burn to appease the jittery mythology.
George Best and Maradona were in that group, too,
along with an ex-American football player, OJ Simpson,
the PED (performance-enhanced drugs) generation of
baseball players - with Barry Bonds as their champion
-Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius.
With television and the internet, it was likely we spent more
time watching and thinking about those famous figures
than we had time or patience for movie stars. OJ Simpson's
trial became a southern Californian industry for a couple of
years and gave a huge boost to technicians and equipment
rental houses in what was adeclining film industry.
Stardom was also open to nonentities or to people who
did no more than take a pretty picture. Audiences were
ready to mock stardom; the self-respect of earlier ages
had turned toxic. And when Andy Warhol predicted that
soon everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, there was
an implicit disdain that accompanied the gay reverence.
Once, the audience had loved and fantasised over stars
in a mix of desire and innocence. But as the mechanism
became apparent, stardom itself was mistrusted and
despised. Fashion models were icons, and often more
beaut iful and better dressed than movie actresses. They
also seemed to care for their looks more cleverly. But that
was empty glory and any attempt to have them act showed
how little there was behind the image.
Fame for its own sake, or fame founded in
iconography, is a norm now. So the net is full of illustrated
features on "costume malfunction'', "side boob
revelations", and embarrassing moments. There are
women who seem designed to fall into these categories:
some act, some sing, but above all they are seen and
known. It's a Jong list and Kim Kardashian, Britney
Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lopez,
Emma Watson, Miley Cyrus are there all the time
- until they're not.
This is a woeful retreat after female stars of the
mid-20th century years edged into feminism: Grace Kelly,
Audrey Hepburn and above all Elizabeth Taylor. Liz was
a beauty and a scandal, as well as an icon for Warhol to set
beside Marilyn Monroe. But Taylor survived while her
men fell away like dry leaves. She could act. She could talk.
She could do business and work for charity. She was Liz.
Her career was surely an example to people like Jane
Fonda, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Vanessa
Redgrave, Julie Christie, Maggie Smith, Barbra Streisand,
Diane Keaton, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman and Julia
Roberts. And Meryl Streep, a key figure, and one I'll get to.
In the modern era, there have been several male stars,
but they Jacked stamina. For a few years, we all loved
Tom Hanks, but then his mischief gave way to solemnity.
He was a real actor and a nice guy, but no one quite
cared any more.
Tom Cruise was chronically dazzling and he's still
a phenomenon at 50, but his youthfulness and his narrow
range persist and his public persona has been clouded
by uneasy legends, many of them having to do with
Scientology. Leonardo DiCaprio was a star in Titanic
(1997), but quickly he resolved to become an actor.
He was maybe too smart, too modern or too insecure
simply to be himself.
Everyone still says they love Johnny Depp, but aren't
his roles flimsy and evasive, and isn't it increasingly clear
that his time has passed (he is 50 this year)? Brad Pitt and
Matt Damon are by nature professional and willing, but
they have become reliably star-like.
George Clooney is a star, because he is prepared
simply to do George Clooney. He has an old-fashioned,
amused handsomeness easily compared with Cary Grant.
He is a smart producer and an ambitious director; I think
ONCE UPON A TIME EVERY KID COULD
IMITATE COOPER, GABLE, CAGNEY AND SO ON
122
FAME
Above, from left: Tom Cruise (1983); George Clooney (1996);
Denzel Washington (1992); Mel Gibson (1990)
audiences like him as much as fellow-workers. But
Clooney is 52 this year and he needs to have a couple of
resounding big pictures in which he tries for the biggest
prizes. That's the only way he's going to match Denzel
Washington, our most essential and confident star.
I
mentioned Meryl Streep and she is a force that
hangs over stardom, along with Daniel Day-Lewis.
They are the ideal screen actors of the age, able
to work in a staggering range, with dedication
and inventiveness. It's worth recalling that
Streep was flat-out sexy in The Deer Hunter (1978)
and The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), while Day-Lewis
was a chump in A Room with a View (1985) and TheAge
of Innocence (1993).
But women swoon over Day-Lewis, just as men of
many ages look at Meryl Streep and wonder what a wife
she would be: attractive, smart, wealthy, generous,
good-natured and unstarry. She does not put on the
wonderful act just as Day-Lewis always regards acting
as difficult and self-effacing work. To back that up, she
appears to have had a fruitful life as wife and mother,
while working her head off. Most actors are in awe of
Streep and Day-Lewis, and guided by them.
If you're old enough to have lived in the empire of
movie stars, then you miss the glamour and the thrill.
You recall Burt Lancaster's smile and Kirk Douglas's
mounting anger - and Kirk is still here! You may be
nostalgic about the culture offully-dressed cheesecake
from the Fifties, when Liz and Marilyn and so many
others posed for rapturous stills. Like stardom, those
great stills hardly exist any longer; fashion models do
them so much better.
If that means greater modesty and better acting,
we are not really losers. Look at Daniel Craig. It's easy
to say he's one of the last stars. He has revived the Bond
franchi se. He did that great Olympic stunt with the
Queen. He has Rachel Weisz on his arm and he has made
a lot of money. But it doesn't goto his head.
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), he appeared
to understand that the movie was going to belong to
Rooney Mara and he was ready to stand aside and let that
happen. He has also worked as an actor in a fascinating
range of material: the rotten son in Road to Perdition
(2002), Perry Smith, one of the murderers, in Infamous
(2006), and a supporting part in Munich (2005).
The lesson to be learned from Craig is that we have a
rich generation of actors, leads and supports, who do not
seem to entertain any thought of being a star. Has the
mythology been outlived? Can it be left to sports people
and politicians, and murderers (they are moving up in
the standings)? But this is a time in which anyone looking
for a male lead can think of Philip Seymour Hoffman
(willfully shabby and unphotogenic), Sean Penn (who
might beat you up if you called him a star), Colin Firth
(been around and modest for too long to be a big shot),
Ed Harris (endlessly brilliant), Viggo Mortensen, Michael
Fass bender, Joaquin Phoenix, Gary Oldman, Stanley
Tucci, Bryan Cranston, Tommy Lee Jones, David
Strathairn, Jeremy Renner, Jeremy Northam, William
H Macy, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Shannon, Owen Wilson
and Alan Rickman (Bruce's first foe in Die Hard).
There are actresses of similar worth and good
humour: Frances McDormand, Rachel Weisz, Samantha
Morton, Felicity Huffman, Tilda Swinton, Helen Hunt
(in The Sessions), Jessica Chastain, Claire Danes, Gillian
Anderson, Carey Mulligan, Anne Heche, Anna Paquin,
Charlize Theron (who might slug you if you told her she's
beautiful), Rebecca Hall, Rosemarie DeWitt, Laura Dern,
Naomi Watts, Isabelle Huppert and Emmanuelle Riva.
I am sure both lists omit deserving people, for
which I apologise. Nor am I claiming that all those people
have always behaved well and not thrown tantrums.
They are often paid a lot of money and I can believe that
they have haggled to get more sometimes. I am sure they
have demanded a better hotel room, a limo, the chance
to keep the costumes, and more respectful attention
from the press.
Just because we admire actors, there is no reason to
sentimentalise them. That was always one of the defects
in the star system, that, and the overpowering need to
be liked. So acting in movies has come closer to acting
or behaving in real life. It's up and down, a mixed bag,
things to like and things to flinch from. Above all, it's a fit
art form for democratic times while stardom was suited
to the vanity of empires, cults and fascism. HI
123
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
In the first place, I was taller than most kids in my classes.
In the second, we were always moving. Redding.
Sacramento. Pacific Palisades. Back to Redding. Back to
Sacramento. Over to Hayward. Niles. Oakland. So we were
constantly on the road, and I was always the new guy in
school. The bullies always thought, here's this big gangly guy,
we gotta take him on. You know how kids are. We gotta test
him. I was ashy kid. But a lot of my childhood was spent
punching the bullies out.
I kind of had a feeling "make my day" would resonate, based
upon "do you feel lucky, punk?" in the first movie. I thought
that Smith & Wesson line might hang in there, too. But "make
my day" was just so simple.
I still get it a lot.
As you get older, you're not afraid of doubt. Doubt isn't
running the show. You t ake out all the self-agonising.
What can they do to you after you get into your seventies?
Even in grammar school they taught you to go with your first
impression. It's like multiple-choice questions. If you go back
and start dwelling, you'll talk yourselfout of it and make the
wrong pick. That's just a theory. I've never seen any studies
on it. But I believe it.
As Jerry Fielding [US band leader and composer] used to say,
"We've come this far, let's not ruin it by thinking."
My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the
Depression. There was not much employment. Not much
welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.
We live in more of a pussy generation now, where
everybody's become used to saying, "Well, how do we handle
it psychologically?" In those days, you just punched the bull y
back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could
push you around, at least you were respected for fighting
back, and you'd be left alone from then on.
The band guys were looked down upon when I was a kid.
I remember playing the flilgelhorn and everybody said,
"What t he ... ?"
"I DON'T KNOW
IF I CAN TELL
YOU WHEN THE
PUSSY
GENERATION
STARTED.
MAYBE WHEN
PEOPLE STARTED
ASKING
ABOUT THE
MEANING
OF LIFE"
'
INTERVIEW BY
I
Cal Fussman
I don't know ifl can tell you exactly when the pussy
generation started. Maybe when people started asking
about the meaning oflife.
Ifl'd had good discipline, I might have gone into music.
You wonder sometimes. What will we do if something really
big happens? Look how fast people have been able to forget
9/11. Maybe you remember if you lost a relative or a loved one.
But the public can get pretty blase about stuff like that.
Nobody got blase about Pearl Harbor.
I remember buying a very old hotel in Carmel. I went into an
upper attic room and saw that all the windows were painted
black. "What was going on here?" I asked the prior owners.
They said they t hought the Japanese were off the coast during
the war.
The Korean War was only a few years after the Second World
War. We all went. But you couldn't help but think, shit, what
the hell? What have we gained? One minute you're
unleashing the tremendous power of nuclear fission, and
then a few years later you're jockeying back and forth on the
38th parallel. It seemed so futile.
In Changeling, I tried to show something you'd never
see nowadays- a kid sitting and looking at the radio.
Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind
does the rest.
I remember going to a huge waterfall on a glacier in Iceland.
People were there on a rockplatform overlook to see it.
They had their kids. There was a place that wasn't sealed off,
but it had a cable that stopped anybody from going past
a certain point. I said to myself, you know, in the US they'd
have that hurricane-fenced off, because they're afraid
somebody's gonna fall and some lawyer's going to appear.
There, the mentality was like it was in America in the old
days: If you fall, you're stupid.
You should really get to know somebody, really be a friend.
I mean, my wife is my closest friend. Sure, I' m attracted to her
in every way possible, but that's not the answer. Because I've
been attracted to other people, and I couldn't stand 'em after
awhile.
CLINT
Actor, Director, 82
EASTWOOD
124
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
You can't stop everything from happening. But we've gotten
to a point where we're certainly trying. If a car doesn't have
4ooairbags in it, then it's no good.
My father died very suddenly at 63. Just dropped dead. For
a long time afterward, I'd ask myself, why didn't I ask him to
play golf more?Why didn't I spend more time with him?
But when you're off trying to get the brass ring, you forget
and overlook those little things. It gives you a certain amount
of regret later on, but there's nothing you can do about it.
So you just forge on.
Smaller details are less important. Let's get on with the
important stuff.
l'vegotagoodcrewthatis very famil iar with me. I don't have
to say a lot to 'em. We just set up the shot, and I depend on
everybody to do their parts. I just say, "OK ... "
What happened is I was going to college in 1950, LA
City College. A guy I knew was goi ng to an acting class on
Thursday nights. He started telling me about all the
good-lookin' chicks and said, "Why don't you go with me?"
So, I probably had some motivation beyond thoughts of being
an actor. And sure enough, he was right. There were a lot of
girls and not many guys. I said, "Yeah, they need me here."
I wound up at Universal as a contract player.
As you get older, you like kids a lot more.
People love westerns worldwide. There's something
fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements.
Or even bad guys and the elements. It's a simpler time.
There's no organised laws and stuff.
"BARACK OBAMA
WAS
UNIMAGINABLE
BACK WHEN
I WAS A KID"
'
The last one I did was in '92. Unforgiven. That was a
wonderful script. But it seemed like it was the end of the
road for me with the genre, because it sort of summarised
everything I felt about the western at that particular time.
I had an issue before the counci l. I remember getting up,
and there was a lady who sat and knitted the whole time,
never looked up. "No, no, no," she said. And I thought,
this can't be. When you're elected, you have to at least
pretend like you're interested in what people are there for.
How do you have the chutzpah to just sit there, not pay
attention, not interact at all? It needed to be corrected.
Winning the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of
thing. OK, now you're the mayor. The bad news is, now
you're the mayor.
It's making sure that the words "public servant" are not
forgotten. That's why I did it. 'Cos I thought, I don't need this.
The fact that I didn't need it made me think I could do more.
It's the people who need it that I'm suspect of.
Barack Obama was unimaginable back when I was a kid.
Count Basie and a lot of big bands would come through
Seattle when I was young. They could play at a club, but
they couldn't frequent the place.
When you listen to Ray Charles, there's never any doubt
whose voice that is.
No, I don't have to practice that grunt. You just do it.
Once you're in character, you're in character. You don't
sit there purposely thinking, well, I'll grunt here, or
I'll groan there.
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
That's why I don't rehearse a lot and why I shoot a lot
immediately. I have ideas of where I'd like to take the
character, but we both end up going together.
I'm past doing one chin-up more than I did the day before.
I just kind of do what I feel like.
I have children by other women. I gotta give Dina [nee Ruiz,
Eastwood's wife since 1996] the credit for bringing everyone
together. She never had the ego thing of the second wife.
The natural instinct might have been to kill off everybody
else. You know, t he cavewoman mentality. But she brought
everybody together. She's fr iendly with my first wife, friendly
to former girl friends. She went out of her way to unite
everybody. She's been extremely influential in my life.
I'm not one of those guys who's been terribly active in
organised religion. But I don't disrespect it. I'd never try
to impose any doubts that I might have on anyone else.
A good joke is a good joke whenever. But my kids make
me laugh now.
Children teach you that you can still be humbled by life,
that you learn something new all the time. That's the
secret to life, really- never stop learning. It's the secret
to career. I'm still working because I learn something new
all the time. It's the secret to relationships. Never think
you've got it all.
The innocence of childhood is like the innocence ofa lot
ofanimals.
You look at [Diego) Velazquez in his dark years and you
" SMALLER
DETAI LS ARE
LESS
I MPORTANT.
LET' S GET ON
WITH THE
IMPORTANT
STUFF"
'
Below. from left: The
Good, the Bad and
the Ugly (1966);
Dirty Harry (1971);
Joe Kidd (1972);
Gran Torino (2008)
wonder, how the hell did he get t hat way? I'm sure he didn't
say to himself, "I'm in my dark period right now, so I'm going
to paint this way." He just did it. That's when real art gets a
chance to come into play.
Kids piercing themselves, piercing their tongues -what
kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it?
We were doing In the Line of Fire, and John Malkovich was
on top of the building, and he has me in a real precarious
situation. My character is crazed and he pulls out a gun and
sticks it into John's face, and John puts his mouth over the
end of the gun. Now, I don't know what ki nd of crazy
symbol that was. We certainly didn't rehearse anything
like that. I'm sure he didn't think about it while we were
practicing it. I twas just there. Like Sir Edmund Hillary
t alking about why you do anything: because it's there.
That's why you climb Everest. It's like a little moment in
time, and as fast as it comes into your brain, you just
throw it out and discard it. Do itbefore you discard it,
you know?
It keeps coming back to, "We've come this far, let's not ruin
it by thinking."
Million Dollar Baby won the Academy Award. That was
nice, that was great. But you don't dwell on it. An awful lot of
good pictures haven't won Academy Awards, so it doesn't
have much bearing. Lettersfromi woJima was nominated for
an Academy Award. We didn't win it, but that picture was
still as good as I could do it. Did it deserve it less than some
other picture? No, not really. But there are other aspects that
come into it. In the end, you've just got to be happy with what
you've done. There you are. fl
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
If you're embarking around the world in a hot-air balloon,
don't forget the toilet paper. Once, we had to wait for
incoming faxes.
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently
unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
Once we get comfortable as a company, I like to push the boat
out again. My wife keeps saying, "Why? Why? Take it easy.
Let's enjoy it." But I'm in a fairly unique position. If! put all
my money in the bank and drink myself to death in the
Caribbean, I just think that would be a waste of the fantastic
position I've found myself in.
That first groping sex at 15or16? Nothing beats that.
When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae.
I feel that since I didn't have one myself, it would be a bit
presumptuous to ask to see anyone else's.
I' ll be the first one to make a fool of myself in any way if
I think it'll help the party.
The only thing I hate is cigarettes the day after.
What do I love most about my wife? Her children. She's not
likely to like that one, eh?
Children have the most fantastic binding effect on a
relationship. Obviously, there are downs in a relationship.
But for me, it just keeps getting stronger and stronger and
stronger. Love reall y does grow.
The best advice I got from my dad?Wear a condom.
If you look for the best in your employees, they' ll flourish.
If you criticise or look for the worst, they'll shrivel up. We all
need lots of watering.
Perhaps I have too many companies, too many possessions.
But it's better than the reverse.
Hire people who will treat the switchboard operator as
friendly as they'll treat the managing director.
When I graduated from Stowe, my headmaster's parting
words to me were: "Congratulations, Branson. I predict you
will either go to prison or become a millionaire."
Try to avoid fall ing out with people. The world is a very
small place.
"TRY TO AVOID
FALLI NG OUT
WITH PEOPLE.
THE WORLD
IS A VERY
SMALL PLACE"
'
INTERVIEW BY
I
Cal Fussman
If you have a record company, don't put out crap. Sign bands
that all of the staff believe in so that they'll work day and
night to make them successful.
There was a lot to learn about starting Virgin Atlantic, so
I asked Sir Freddie Laker whether he could help me. He
gave me advice and then said, "Another thing, Richard, is
the stress. I'm not kidding, you should have regular medical
check ups." He said, "You need to go to the doctor and ask
him to stick his fingerupyourbum. He'll be able to tell you
what's what." Later, as Freddie was leaving, he turned to me
and shouted, "One last word of advice, Richard: when you're
bent over and the doctor's got his finger up your bum, make
sure that he hasn't got both his hands on your shoulders!"
Create the best. The best hotels and clubs and airlines never
go bankrupt. The best always succeeds.
Generally, when you meet a hero in life, you're disappointed.
My impression of Nelson Mandela was enhanced.
Being circumcised at 24 is not a good idea, particularly ifthe
night after the operation you find yourself watching Jane
Fonda's erotic fi lm Barbarella. Before I could stop myself,
I had burst my stitches. Hearing my screaming, my first wife,
Kristen, came runni ng to see what the matter was. When she
found out what happened, she was in stitches. I no longer was.
When taking a risk, make sure to protect the downside.
Bill Gates invited me to talk to 30 or 40 chief executives from
around the world. Just before I got up on stage, forms were
handed out to everybody, and Gates said, "It's very
important that all ofus are tested in our li ves. Richard's
about to speak and I'd like you all to mark him [from] one out
of 10." Now, that intimidated me. I thought, "Fuck, I thought
I'd gotten out of school 35 years ago." I turned to the guy on
my right - I think he was the head of Amazon - and said,
"I'll give you a 10 if you give me a 10."
I've lived by the dangerous - and sometimes rather foolish
- maxim that I'm prepared to try anything once.
Monogamy? What's that?
Over the years, the parties have got bigger and bigger, but
the theme is the same: glorious irresponsibility for the night.
Get your priorities right. f
RICHARD
Entr e pr e n e ur, A d ve ntur e r , 62
BRANSON
128
x
w
~
WHAT l'VE LEARNED
What other people think of me is none of my business.
Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
An acting teachertold me that.
You choose your friends by their character and your
socks by their colour.
"Fuck 'em." Shortest prayer in the world.
A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me,
and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it
in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over.
I wanted to play Dracula because I wanted to say,
"I've crossed oceans of time to find you." It was worth
playing the role just to say that line.
We all look for that other half, that partner. I mean,
wouldn't it be great to say that line to someone and mean it?
There's 99 per cent crap across pretty much everything.
And then there's that one plateau where I want to be.
You ever go into a house, see a light switch, and it's slightly
crooked? Drives me crazy. Crazy.
There are bass players who know when not to play. I don't
know if that can be taught.
Bernie Taupin! My hero growing up! His lyrics are cinematic.
You can make a performance bet ter in the editing,
but you can sure tear passion to tatters with the scissors.
What would you do if you were a painter, and you gave
your painting over to someone, and then you saw it in an
exhibition and they'd cut seven inches off the top of it?
And the corner was painted red: "We thought it would
be better red". But that wouldn't happen.
I enjoy playi ng characters where the silence is loud.
The phone call is often the best part of it. Your agent says,
"They want you to play Hamlet atthe Old Vic." And you go,
"Holy shit! Hamlet at the Old Vic! Wow! God! Fantastic!"
Then you hang up and it's, "Fuck, I'm playi ng Hamlet."
The lights go down. What do you got?
When you meet someone, you can get something out
of him like when you first look at a painti ng.
"YOU CAN LEARN
GREAT LIFE
LESSONS FROM
BOARD GAMES"
'
INTERVIEW BY
I
Cal Fu ssman
I'm almost incapable oflying. I'd be a terrible spy.
New York is London on steroids.
Downtown LA looks like they started to build Chicago
and then gave up ... and let it become a sprawling suburb.
You're t ired? Have a baby, then come back and tell me
how tired tired is.
There' s no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine
li ne as a parent because you are civilising these raw things.
They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table.
At some point, you have to say, "We're gonna have to clean
that up because you don't paint with coffee on a table."
You don't step straight up to the front of the ATM line.
You don't cut in front of people at the ticket desk. You take
your turn. You can learn great life lessons from board games.
My kids are my greatest achievement. They're proud
of what I've done, but wonderfully underwhelmed.
I don't bring the work home. That's because I do the work
up front. I prepare. Once you fi nd the character and take
it around the block a few times, theengine will always be
warm. You just need to rev it up. You're not turning the key
cold. You can finish a day, leave it at work, go home,
and help the kids with their homework.
I never thought I'd see the end of celluloid in my lifetime,
but it seems to be one amazing deal away.
By the way, the Harry Porter series is literature, in spite
of what some people might say. The way JK Rowling
worked that world out is quite something.
A few years ago, my mother asked what I'd Ii ke for my
birthday. I had enough socks, slippers and t ies. So I said:
"I don't know, get me a ukulele." It kind off ell from the sky
into my head. And she got it for me. I started playing it and
now my kids are into it. So we've goneukulear in the house.
I don't pursue things. They come to me. Through the
letterbox. People get an idea: "What about Gary Oldman?"
A director expects you to come in, open your suitcase,
and say, "OK, here's my stuff, guv'nah."
Ther e's only one authentic version of Gary, and I've got
to really know who that is. fl
GARY
Ac t o r , 55
OLDMAN
130
SOMETHING
"I say f ind your
own way to live."
Salter in 1966,
wh en he wa s 40
INTERVIEW
"WE LIVE IN THE
ATTENTION OF
OTHERS. WE TURN
TO IT AS FLOWERS
TO THE SUN"
Jame s Salter, Light Years,
1975
A
valley overlooked by mountains under a pale blue
sky. A grid of streets off the main road through
town, clapboard Alpine-style chalets and
modernist glass boxes, everything heavy with
snow. On a corner, a modest wooden house
surrounded by tall trees, Volvo in the drive, logs piled by the
porch. Inside, a skew-whiffbrick chimney, groaning bookshelves,
stacks of papers. On the walls, female nudes and framed menus
from French bistros visited long ago. In a light-filled snug off the
living room, beneath an old map of French ski resorts, a small
desk, a typewriter, a sheet of paper fixed in place, pages under
correction and a pencil. In the kitchen, on the circular table, a
bowl of almonds, a white china teapot under a cosy, silver spoons,
three lemon segments on a dish: everything comfortable,
courteous , civilised, just so. This is the house of an epicurean,
a sensualist, a Francophile, a sportsman, a writer. Arms
folded, he s its in the kitchen in a wooden chair, wearing
a denim shirt and jeans, flip-flops on his feet, spectacles
in his top pocket. In another room, his wife - elegant,
younger, hair the colour of cherries- talks on the phone.
Outside, the melting snow is dripping from the roof. Now
and then a heap falls from a tree with astartlingwhump, which
either he doesn't hear or chooses to ignore.
James Salter bought his house in Aspen, Colorado, in 1969,
the year that man - actually men, one of whom, Buzz Aldrin, he
knew and had flown planes with - landed on the moon. He was
in his mid-forties then, a former fighter pilot who had risen to
the rank of major in the US Air Force but who had left active
service a decade before, filled with the idea, he has written, of
being a writer "and from the great heap of days making something
lasting". He vowed, still more dramatically, to "write or perish".
He was then married to a woman named Ann and they had four
children, three girls and a boy. They had been living, apart from
periods when he was stationed in Europe, on the east coast of
the US, in the country near New York City. It was or appears to
have been an idyllic existence, one that Salter would later use in
his novel of family life and the passing of time, Light Years. It was
135
a life of"wine, stories, friends". And Salter was, like the husband
and father in that book, "a man lying fully clothed in the stream
of days".
By the end of the Sixties, he had three novels to his name, none
of which had brought him fame or riches, although the first had
been made into a film starring Robert Mitchum, and the third
would later become regarded as a discrete classic of erotic fiction.
He also had prominent credits on three films that were released
in 1969, two as screenwriter, one as screenwriter and director.
None of these was a hit even though the best known of them starred
Robert Redford, at that moment perhaps the most popular actor
in America.
Salter was not, himself, quite a star, though by all accounts
he had charm and looks and style and talent to burn. He also had
a friend whose father had a ranch in Colorado and who encouraged
him to come out and ski and see for himself if this wasn't the perfect
spot for a rugged writer's winter retreat.
Salter paid, he thinks, $22,000 for the house. It was somewhat
dilapidated and he hired two hippie kids to help him restore it.
After a time, the hippies had to leave town. It turned out they were
wanted in Massachusetts for the armed robbery ofa liquor store.
"They took off on motorcycles," is how Salter puts it now, relishing
the story. "I never saw them again." So he had to finish the work
with his own hands. Sitting at his kitchen table today, he holds
up those same hands for emphasis, gnarled and mottled now,
44 years later.
The world has changed around James Salter. He has changed,
too, though perhaps not as far or fast. The Aspen he discovered
in 1969 was a tiny skiing village. It was remote, unspoiled,
spectacular. It's still spectacular but today it is an affluent
enclave where the super-rich keep second homes. The mountain
bike hire shops and ski equipment outlets are outnumbered by
international fashion boutiques, for those who have a sudden
desire for a Dior handbag at 7,oooft. Only a few old head shops
testify to the town's past as an outpost of the counterculture, the
place where, in 1970, Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff on a Freak
Power ticket. All that's gone now, vanished, along with Thompson.
One senses Salter felt more at home in the old Aspen, before the
West was tamed.
Salter doesn't ski any more. His knees are not up to it. And
anyway, the idea of an 87-year-old man skiing is, he says, "obscene".
These days he moves slowly. His eyes are watery, his skin is papery,
his hair is white and sparsely distributed. As we talk he sometimes
pauses, puts his hands over his face, rubs the sides of his head,
looks a little pained, or perhaps just tired.
In the years since he bought this house he has been
divorced and remarried, to Kay Eldredge, a playwright
- the cherry-haired woman in the other room - and
they have a son. He has published two further novels; two
collections of short stories; a collection of travel journalism;
a guide to entertaining, written with Kay; a collection of letters
to and from his fri end Robert Phelps; and two memoirs - he
prefers the term "recollection" - one of which, Burning the Days,
published in 1997, has done as much as any of his fiction to burnish
his reputation as a writer of exceptional talent.
Slowly, his literary stock has risen, but he has not yet achieved
wide recognition or sales commensurate with his status among
other writers. His work has been saluted by a parade of literary
giants (Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, John Irving), and
he has won prestigious awards and the favour of influential critics
(Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom), but just as often Salter has been
dismissed by the press and overlooked by the academy, and almost
consistently he has been ignored by the public.
Partly for those reasons he is a romantic figure, almost a mythic
figure, especially to other writers. But his cult status is not simply >
INTERVIEW
derived from his relative lack of commercial success. It is also
the result of his subtle, supple and seductive voice on the page.
His writing does not flinch from t he disappointments and the
tragedies of human existence. But Salter's books offer solace,
too, in s natching moments of beauty from the passing of time.
Against illness, sadness and death he arranges sex, food, nature,
friendship, love, art. He makes all these things seem urgent,
profound and necessary. His books are celebrations and
consolations, charged with a n appreciation oft he glories of life.
Then there is the story of his own life, which is glamorous in
a way that few writers' lives are today. He seems to hark back to
an earlier conception of what a writer might be- not surprising,
perhaps , given hi s age - which is dashing, worldly a nd
courageous. He is the literary writer who taught himself rock
climbing in his fifties, who drank with the greats of postwar
American letters, who opened fire in the skies above Korea, who,
not to put too fine a point on it, screwed John Huston's mistress,
and made love to French actresses and skied the Alps with
Olympians. He is the movie business outsider-insider who kept
his distance from Hollywood but still got to hobnob wit h Roman
Polanski and Sharon Tate in Santa Monica, who met Yoko before
she met John, who had Vanessa Redgrave over for dinner, who
spent time on set in Rome with Lotte Lenya and Anouk Aimee,
who met Nabokov and Nureyev and Graham Greene, who winters
in snowy Colorado and summers in sunny Bridgehampton, Long
Island, another picturesque haven for America's well-heeled.
He is an American who absorbed Europe, who learned from
his time there "a view of existence: how to have leisure, love, food
and conversat ion, how to look at nakedness, architecture,
street s ... " Who recollects, of the Sixties, "a kind of glamour and
sleekness, travel, the great hotels ... " Who aimed for - and it
seems, achieved - "a life of freedom, style, and art ... "
He has, he has said, attempted to cultivate the feminine in
himself, in terms of his intellectual and emotional responses,
but his voice is masculine and he writes about men who are
men and the alluring women who sust ain and entrance, or
disappoint and betray them.
There is a passage in Burning the Days when Salter
remembers "an Italian mistress, 0 very fine, who would fly
places to meet me. She was slender, with a body brown from
Rome's beaches and a narrow pale band, as if bleached, encircling
her hips ... "
He mentions her in connection with the moon landings.
As his former colleague was disembarking Apollo 11, Salter was
at the St Regis Hotel in New York, in bed with this extraordinary
sounding creature, who was "writhing, like a dying snake, like
a woman in bedlam."
He concludes: "I have never forgotten that night or its anguish.
Pleasure and inconsequence on one hand, immeasurable
deeds on t he other. I lay awake for a long time thinking of what
I had become."
There are those who find t hat sort of thing showy,
self-dramatising, or just plain icky. Others of us,
Salter snobs, feel ourselves uniquely attuned to his
refined, poetic sensibility. All that goes into the making
of t he cult, too.
But us cultists may be in for a jolt, because the convenient
narrative - writer toils away in obscurity, his work too exquisite
for brutish mainstream tastes - has been complicated in recent
years. As he prepares for the publication of his sixth novel and
first since 1979, Salter's position as holder of that least enviable
of literary titles, the writer's writer, is under threat. All That Is,
a novel covering half a century in the life of an American man,
t hreatens to finally torpedo the idea that Salter is too much an
acquired taste for popular success.
136
In his book James Sal ter, a rare scholarly study of Salter's
work, published in 1998, William Dowie describes his subject
as "fully aware of himself as sitting in the anteroom of fame,
waiting to be called. He believes in himself a nd the quality of
his work, but he also believes t here is no greatness without
recognition. In life or after death, one must be read widely to
qualify. And that has not yet happened."
It's true that Salter has never written a best seller. And to me
he puts his own formulation for success succinctly: "I have a
strict measure: you have to sell books ."
In his novel Light Years, Nedra, the cent ral female cha racter,
asks: "Must fame be a part of greatness?" Her husband, Viri,
realises that in fact fame is "the evidence" of greatness, "the
only proof." Viri "believed in greatness. He believed in it as if
it were a virtue, as if it could be his own. He was sensitive to
lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow,
a glory t hat would be discovered, that would rise one day to
the light."
This is an idea to which he returns. In the story "Via
Negativa", published in his 1988 collection, Dusk and Other
Stories, Salter introduces an underachieving writer, "unknown,
though not without a few admirers". "His hair is thin. His clothes
are a little out of style. He is aware, however, that there is a great,
a final glory which falls on certain fi gures barely noticed in their
time, touches them in obscurity and recreates their lives."
Like Viri and the writer in "Via Negativa", Salter believes in
greatness. He believes in it as a virtue. He believes in ambition,
in wanting to do something enduring, something worthwhile.
It is some years now since the author Richard Ford a nnounced
that, "It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that J ames
Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing
today." James Wolcott's characterisation of Salter as "the most
underrated underrated writer in America" no longer applies .
But Salter's success, if this is what it is, has been so long in coming
that he finds it hard, I think, to accept it. For a long t ime - maybe
the whole time - Salter struggled to believe that he had a literary
life, in the sense t hat other writers did: livi ng off t heir writing
alone, publishing books that were reviewed admiringly and
then read widely. Roth, Bellow, Mailer: those guys had literary
lives, literary careers. Meanwhile, Salter suffered setbacks. He
has not forgotten or forgiven the "bi t ter remarks" that
accompanied the publication his best books.
They left him uncertain. "I just didn't have deep enough
confidence to go on, and I suppose that let me stray away from
writing for periods. I lived this life here for at least five or seven
years, not writing a nyt hing important ."
The day before my visit to Aspen, he had taken a phone call
at 7am from someone at Yale University, who was calling to
inform him that he was one of three fiction writers to have
won an inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize, in recognition
of "outstanding achievement". He will receive $150,000.
He'd thought at first that he might be the victim of a
prank call - which speaks more eloquently for his
modesty than his status.
When I mention the growing excitement about the
publication of All That Is, he answers with practised
scepticism. "Apparently, I have an audience, and this book is
awaited," he says, his voice soft and slightly creaky. "We'll see
what the truth of that is. I don't want to get too excited about it
one way or another. You can work yourselfinto a state of nerves:
What did they say? What have you heard?"
Still, it must be gratifying that there's a certain amount of
excitement around the publication of All That Is?
"It's gratifying but a little unreal at the same t ime," he says.
"The clothes feel a little loose on me, if you know what I mean."
INTERVIEW
H
ewas born James Horowitz, an only child, to Jewish
parents in New Jersey in 1925, and raised in New
York City during the Depression. His father, who
worked in real estate, was successful enough at
that time to send his son to Horace Mann, a private
school in the Bronx, where his contemporaries included the
future doyen of American conservatives, William Buckley Jr, as
well as Jack Kerouac.
In 1942, at the urging of his father, James entered West Point,
the US military academy. He'd wanted to go to MIT or Stanford,
and at first he struggled to adjust to the regime, but in his second
year, by his own account, he came to enthusiastically embrace
the ethos of West Point: honour, courage, sacrifice, all these
meant something to him.
In his story "Dusk", Salter gives us the thoughts of an army
veteran attending a reunion of his class at West Point, thinking
back on "how ardently he believed in the image of a soldier.
He had known it as a faith, he had clung to it dumbly, as a cripple
clings to God."
James Horowitz was taught to fly in Arkansas and New York.
On VE Day, 8May1945, while millions around the world rejoiced
at the defeat of the Nazis, he became disorientated over
Massachusetts during a cross-country navigation flight. From
Burning the Days: "Something large struck a wing. It tore away.
The plane careened up. It stood poised for an endless moment,
one landing light flooding a house into which an instant later it
crashed." Happily, no one was home: they were out celebrating
the end oft he war in Europe.
He graduated in June 1945, less than two months before the
Japanese surrender. As he shipped out from San Francisco for
his first tour of duty, he passed under a sign on the Golden Gate
Bridge, addressed to America's returning fighters: "Welcome
Home Heroes". He was heading in the other direction.
He spent the following 12 years on active duty, first in Manila
and Hawaii, then as a jet pilot in the Korean War, in which he
flew over 100 missions, fighting Mi Gs over the Yalu River. Later,
he was stationed in Europe and the US; finally he commanded
an aerial acrobatics team.
In 1951, he married Ann Altemus. The first of their four
children, a daughter, Allan, was born in 1955, a year after he
began work on The Hunters, in which a doomed pilot, Cleve
Connell, chases glory in the skies, trying and failing to become
an "ace". That novel was published in 1956, when its author was
137
30 and still a serving officer. He chose the nom de plume Salter
because it was, in its Waspyness, far enough away from Horowitz
to prevent suspicion falling on him as the author. After he sold
the film rights for$6o,ooo, enough to live on for a few years, and
decided to resign his commission he felt, he tells me, "deep
regret" to be leaving the military.
In Burning the Days, he reckons with his achievements in
Korea. "I finished with one [enemy plane] destroyed and one
damaged ... When I returned to domestic life I kept something
to myself, a deep attachment - deeper than anything I had
known - to all that had happened." Later, his feelings hardened.
"I felt I had not done what I set out to do. I felt contempt for myself,
not at first but as time passed, and I ceased talking about those
days, as if! had never known them. But it had been a great voyage,
the voyage, probably, of my life."
To me he says: "Those years of flying have a brilliance for
me that is of a different order. The feeling of coming back from
something memorable, landing with your wingman, it's a feeling
of having out-sailed a storm.
"But that isn't my life. I have said many times I don't want
to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am.
I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing."
In 1958, he and Ann bought a half-converted barn in the
country, 30 miles from New York City. For a time Salter - the
name had become official - would drive into the city to write in
rented rooms or apartments. Briefly, he sold swimming pools
to supplement his income. With a friend he made documentary
films. He published a second novel, The Arm of Flesh, in 1961.
(Thirty-nine years later, he rewrote it almost from scratch and
published it under another title, Cassada). He began to write for
the movies, he travelled, he worked on a third novel.
The world that Salter conjures in Light Years, his 1975 novel
of family life and its disintegration, and in Burning the Days,
and now in All That Is, is, for want of a better phrase, haute
bohemian. He is sometimes accused of writing only about rich
people. In fact, the people in his books rarely have money, not
serious money anyway. But they are tasteful, educated, cultured.
Their sensibilities are delicate, their clothes and houses are
stylish. They are often beautiful. Their lives are, superficially,
enviable, even - dread word - aspirational. This will annoy
some readers. (Geoff Dyer once opined that the couple in Light
Years, Viri and Nedra, are "possibly the most irritatingly named
characters in literature"). I am bound to say: not me.
For me, it's his writing about family life that is most arresting.
From Burning the Days, again: "I remember the intensity of
family life, its boundlessness. It was an art of its own - costume
parties; daring voyages in an old sailboat, a leaky Comet, far out
on the river; dogs; dinner parties; poker on Christmas night; ice
skating." And again: "The seasons passed in majesty: summer's
inescapable heat, the storms of winter, the leaves of autumn
which in a s ingle night fell from the elms along the road."
Through the Sixties and into the Seventies, he wrote for the
movies. A film called The Appointment, directed by Sidney
Lu met in Rome, with Omar Sharif and Anouk Aimee. "Lumet
simply butchered it," he says now. "He didn't even have the
slightest idea. The film was a disaster. It was ridiculous."
Three he directed himself, based on an Irwin Shaw story
about a love triangle and starring Charlotte Rampling, with
whom he did not get on. It received some positive notices but
quickly disappeared. The only film remembered now, Downhill
Racer, starred Robert Redford as a conceited Colorado farm boy
who blasts onto the US Olympic ski team and receives an
unsentimental education from a beautiful Swiss party girl. The
film is recognisably Salterian in its milieu and its concerns - the
company of men versus the society of women, man in nature, >
INTERVIEW
the yearning for fame and recognition, the nobility of
competition. In Redford's words, "the combination of poetry
and danger." They changed his ending, of course. In Salter's
version, Redford's skier loses.
Hollywood, Salter says now, "didn't work out for me, really.
I don't think about it that much but it's probably my fault as a
screenwriter. I mean, the movies kept being bad. That can't all
be somebody else's fault." I'm not sure he really believes this.
In 1967, he published A Sport and a Pastime, his first really
distinctive work, the one in which he finds his beguiling voice.
It is the story, told by an unreliable narrator, of the relationship
between a 24-year-old Yale dropout and an 18-year-old French
girl. Looking back on it now, Salter says: "It has a lot of sex in it.
Youthful, sacred sex. Not just, you know, pop sex. And I like it
for that reason. That seems to remain fresh. And, of course, it's
a book dedicated to France and I like France." (France likes
him, too. Salter is regarded as an homme serieux in
France, where he has long been accorded a status that
has until now eluded him at home, and certainly here
in the UK. )
A short, sharp swoon of a book, A Sport and a Pastime
ends with an ironic flourish - an attack, in a single sentence, on
traditional family values of home and hearth, health and safety,
putting down roots, raising children, marriage, stability, order,
routine, "the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired".
In this way, I think, Salter is a subversive writer - and,
I suppose, a subversive figure, for all that he is hardly a figure of
the counterculture. Not because of all the sex in A Sport and a
Pastime, or All That Is, although there is plenty ofit. But because
much in his work seems to challenge the conventions ofbourgeois
society. This theme is developed in Light Years. To my mind, this
is a masterpiece to rank alongside any of the great American
novels oft he period. Light Years hymns the ineffable beauty, the
deep appeal, ofa harmonious domestic life - houses, children,
friends, pets, conversations, wine, music, late nights, days at
the beach - and then watches it slowly come apart. The novel
was conceived, in part, to demonstrate Salter's idea, outlined in
''Those years of
flying have a
brilliance for me that
is of a different
order." James Salter
with his F-86 Sabre
jet in Korea, 1952
138
Burning the Days, that "marriage lasts too long"; his own, to Ann,
ended in the year of the novel's publication, after 24 years. ("There
is a time to put one's self first," he wrote to his friend, the writer
Robert Phelps.)
The commercial failure of A Sport anda Pastime, which sold
fewer than three thousand copies in the US on first publication,
was one thing. My sense is that the commercial and critical
failure of Light Years, eight years later, was a watershed moment
for Salter. "I became excited when I was writing it," he says
now. "I thought I was writing, I don't want to say a great book,
but I thought I was writing a real book."
In Burning the Days, he admits that, upon finishing Light
Years, he had "wanted glory" and craved "widespread praise".
Then the reviews came in. "They were savage," says Salter.
The New York Times' reviewer called Light Years, "overwritten,
chi-chi and rather silly".
"It's a dismissal, is what it was," says Salter. "Silly,
fatuous, who cares? And so forth." The book, Salter still
believes, was "mortally wounded".
"That has an effect," he says. "It was 10 years or more
before it accumulated any kind of substance around it.
It's still a book that sells a thousand, fifteen hundred, two
thousand copies a year. I don't count that as much of a
significance, or importance. I'd say it's a little book. I don't know
how you can say people like it. Perhaps I'm looking at it from
the wrong side of it."
In the aftermath of Light Years, he did some journalism and
he published short fiction and memoir in Esquire, The Paris
Review - George Plimpton was another influential champion
- and the now defunct Grand Street. He interviewed literary
luminaries for People magazine. (Younger readers - those below,
say, 60 years of age - will have to take it on authority that there
was a time when celebrity weeklies would commission profiles
of Vladimir Nabokov and Antonia Fraser.)
He worked on another screenplay for Redford, this time
about a rock climber. When the star changed his mind about
doing it, Salter turned his script into a novel, Solo Faces (1979),
INTERVIEW
about Vernon Rand, an ascetic mountaineer who lives to climb,
has no interest in conventional life, and ultimately dies doing
what he does best.
Meanwhile, Salter lived a life mostly separate from t he
publishing world and from Hollywood, a "real life". "The snow
fell in the winter, and you cut your own wood and skied," he says.
He doesn't pretend to have lived without regret. "I know I should
have written more," he says, "but I didn't."
"LIFE PASSES
INTO PAGES IF IT
PASSES INTO
ANYTHING"
James Salter, Burning the
Days, 1997
T
o exist is to occupy a series of moments, each as
ephemeral as the last and the next, as ungraspable
as light, or water, or ai r. Memories, free- fl oating
memories, are as weightless, as intangible, as
dreams. The way to pin them down is to type them
on to a page or paint t hem on to a canvas. Beauty, happiness,
pleasure - all these are impermanent, they are lost to us except
when they are accurately captured in, or summoned by, art.
His new novel opens with an epigraph. "There comes a time
when you I realize that ever ything is a dream I and only those
t hings preserved in writing I have a ny possibility of being real."
He pinned those words to a wall of his house in Bridgehampton,
when he began writing All That Is in earnest.
He speaks to me oft he feeling one has sometimes standing
in front of a portrait - a Sargent or a Whistler, say - when, in
that moment, the subject of the paint ing comes alive, for you.
"And something of that life enters you as you look at it. I think
t hat writers have the possibility of doing that ... " That's quite a
power, to reanimate t he dead. Salter smiles. "It's an ill-paid
profession but it has t hat compensation."
The Hunters was born of his desire not to forget his time in
Korea. Not just not to forget it, but to have it not be forgotten.
"Otherwise, it might as well have been a dream." TheArm of the
Flesh reclaims his years on air force bases in Europe. A Sport and
a Pastime immorta lises his romances with France, and at least
one of its women. ("I had a long affair with a French actress," he
tells me at one point, which is t he kind of t hing too few among
us are able to matter-of-factly drop into conversation.) Light Years,
as we've said, is an elegy to the fragile beauty of family life.
Salter has never suggested or pretended, as some novelists
do, that his work is not autobiographical, or that his characters
are not based on people he has known or met or heard about. His
own greatest personal tragedy - the death, in 1980, of his
daughter Allan, his first child, in a freak electrical accident in
139
the shower, here in Aspen - was still five years off when he
published Light Years, but his novels have always confronted
pain and loss. His characters' hearts are broken, they fall ill, they
suffer and, often, t hey die.
Unlike happiness, Salter remarks to me, sorrow is not fleeting.
"You are it, you become it, you feel it fully, wholly and for a long,
long period." That's very sad, I say. "Yes, I suppose so. But as they
say: live with it."
The stories collected in Dusk and Other Stories and a more
recent collection, Last Night, have this clear-eyed, unsentimental
attitude. All That Is has one of the most devastating t ragedies in
all Salter's writing, and he frequently reserves his loveliest writing
for his stories' saddest moments. When Philip and Anne-Marie,
the young couple in A Sport and a Pastime, are reaching the end
of their affair, t hey make love and then, "Afterwards they lie for
a long time in silence. There is nothing. Their poem is scattered
about them. The days have fallen everywhere, they have collapsed
like cards. The air has a chill in it. He pulls the covers up. She is
so perfectly still she seems asleep. He touches her face. It is wet
with tears." This is t he "ecstatic melancholy" that the writer
Philip Gourevitch has identified in Salter.
He can be cruel. He can write this, of a marriage, from the
story "My Lord You", in Last Night: "They ate d inner in silence.
Her husband did not look at her. Her face annoyed him, he did
not know why. She could be good-looking but there were times
when she was not. Her face was like a series of photographs, some
of which ought to have been thrown away."
Last Night is full of s uch moments: sexual betrayals,
romantic disappointments, misunderstandings between men
and women. So is All That Is. Salter believes, fundamentally, that
men and women are different and, in some senses, in opposition.
Early in Burning the Days, he remembers his first sight of a
naked woman. He saw her through an apartment window, "an
empty box of illumination ... more compelling tha n any stage."
Then she d isappears : "I had never, t ill then, faced the paradox
of a dream vivid to the point of ecstasy yet desti ned to vanish."
He fell hard, and he may never have recovered. Salter's work
sings of the male libido, earthily and honestly. He understands
and expresses the way men think about women, the way we look
at t hem, what we desire from them. He knows that we want to
possess their beauty, and that while we can sometimes feel we've
caught it for a moment, we can never keep it. You can't hold on
to beauty. Beauty fades.
There's a minor character in All That Is, a novelist called
Russell Cutler, whose wife - a rather annoying woman - crosses
out t he sentences she considers sexist in his novels. Salter has
never had that kind of wife.
He once wrote: "Happiness is often at its most intense when
it is based on inequality." That was in a 1992 cover story for the
American edition of Esquire, called "Younger Women, Older
Men". It also includes t he line, "Men's dream and ambition is to
have women, as a cat's is to catch birds, but t his is something
that must be restrained." Take that last part however you will.
The tension between the desire for a settled, ordered existence,
and the lust for a life of sexual adventure, is central to his work.
("These demands for sexual exclusivity ... are the most maddening
thing on Earth," he wrote to Robert Phelps in 1978.)
I wonder if he feels the two impulses are irreconcilable?
"You can live both," he says. "Can you live them simultaneously?
That's difficult. You have to be prepared for the consequences."
Perhaps not surprisingly, he doesn't particularly want to
elaborate on his own arrangements over the years, and he fumbles
about for a bit when I press him. "I think this would be a bad thing
for me to assess here. Let's put it another way t here have been
various periods in which ... I don't know how to answer this.
INTERVIEW
"I can't provide any solutions," he says. "For myself,
I subscribe to Thai rules." In the same Esquire article, he had
explained: "In Thailand mistresses are an accepted part of the
society, often a mark of riches."
The only time I see a flash offire in my hours talking to Salter
is on this point about the desirability or otherwise of monogamy.
"I don't hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by
the tabloids or popular opinion. I don't like bourgeois values.
I say you find your own way to live."
Of the puzzle of marriage, he says this: "Men and women
want different things. There's a period, obviously, where their
desires coincide perfectly and then they begin to diverge."
He is scathing of those who would try to invent a formula to
keep couples together. "Family therapists and people who
specialise in all of this, they don't know anything.
"Try lighting candles in the evening! I mean this is all rubbish,
isn't it?"
J
ames Salter's new novel might be the most substantial
work of his career, in the sense that it has weight and
heft and it seems to rest firmly on solid ground,
rather than floating somewhere above it, or drifting
past like a stream. It is determinedly less lyrical, less
elliptical than earlier work. He beams when I tell him this.
"I wanted to write a book where nobody underlines anything
on any oft he pages," he says. "I don't want it to rely on language
or for the language to be conspicuous." Regarding his previous
work, "I was constantly hearing people talking about their
favourite passages, a sentence they'd underlined 10 times. I don't
know that that's what you read a book for. I began to feel it was
a fault. I got tired of it."
Salter's notes for All That Is date back to 1975, but it would be
misleading, he says, to think of the novel as being38 years in the
making. For a long time, he had no idea where the sentences
were leading. What he knew was that he had a subject : "the
journey oflife for a certain kind of man". Then, about seven years
ago, he read a line by Christopher Hitchens. "He said, 'No life is
complete that hasn't seen war, poverty and love.' And I thought,
'That's succinct. Is that actually what I'm writing?"'
The certain kind of man Salter has written about is Philip
Bowman, an editor of books in New York in the second half of
the 20th century - a man, says Salter, who "carries a bit of
civilisation with him". His story opens in 1945, on board a US
140
battleship bound for Japan. Bowman, 20-yearsold, a navigation
officer, is on lookout. He can't see what's coming. None of us can.
After the war, Bowman enters publishing, "a gentleman's
occupation, the origin oft he silence and elegance of bookstores
and the freshness of new pages ... " That world suits him. He is
promoted to editor and takes a tiny apartment in Manhattan.
He becomes friends with a fellow editor, Neil Eddins, a
Southerner and hopeful ladies man. They talk books and girls.
They are thirsty for sex and knowledge and experience. It is,
I think, a terrific evocation of the life of young, single men in
what was at that time almost certainly the most important, most
exciting city in the world.
In the background, we are aware of the passing oftime, of
the great socio historical schisms and movements, but these are
not Salter's real subjects. Neither is the world of literary
publishing, as appealing as he makes it sound.
The subject is Bowman's romantic life, his love affairs, their
rapturous beginnings and confounding endings. Unlike previous
Salter protagonists, Bowman is not striving for a greatness he
will never attain. It is only in matters of love, perhaps, that
he over-reaches himself.
Bowman's love affairs are contrasted with the more settled
life of his friend Eddins, who has the good fortune, early on, to
meet a smart, sassy Texan girl with a young son, and to settle
down to what promises to be a happy marriage. But as ever with
Salter, love and death lie together, limbs entwined. Everything
is temporary.
All That Is is the story ofa life, then, but like all Salter books
it is a river that meanders, that surges ahead and then is
becalmed. It has many t ributaries; one oft he great pleasures of
Salter is the way he dives into the lives of minor characters,
spending a few paragraphs on someone who wondered into the
action for a moment, telling you everything you ever need to
know about them, then leaving them be. And all in that spare,
elegant, shimmering prose, those sentences long and short that
seem to expand and compress time itself.
"It seems to me that when you read," Salter told The Par is
Review in 1993, "what you are really listening for is the voice of
the writer. That's more important than anything else." He was
speaking of Henry Miller, whose voice "makes you linger at his
elbow long past closing time ... " One can say the same of Salter's.
In that same interview, when he was a mere sapling of
67, Salter described himself as afrotteur: "Someone who likes
to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to
wonder ifthat really is the best word possible ... "
"That was an unfortunate choice of words," he says now.
"I meant that all I like to do is pick the right word, and rewriting
is really one of the more pleasurable parts of writing for me. But
I used that damn French and now it sounds self-indulgent: 'He's
afrotteur! Oh, he is, is he? I've never seen one before'."
If Salter's prose has approached purplish at times, and it has,
then it has also inspired much imprecise panting in others. Critics
use words like "luminous", "lapidary'', "limpid". All very nice,
but not too helpful. The Los Angeles Times once suggested that
Salter's short stories will "blow your heart out". They "glimmer
with the magic offiction" according to Michiko Kakutani, of The
New York Times.
One reviewer wrote that things are always falling in James
Salter's books. "I recognised it immediately," Salter says. "She
said rain is falling, dusk is falling, cities are falling beneath as
fighter planes rise. And I thought, goodness me, is that it?" Better
yet, as ever, is Richard Ford, who wrote simply that, "Sentence
for sentence, Salter is the master". Precisely what Ford means
by that, and why he says it, is best demonstrated by Salter's books
themselves. Buy one and see for yourself.
INTERVIEW
I
"LITERARY
ACHIEVEMENT IS
THE TRIUMPH OF
THE ANT"
James Salter, People
magazine, 1975
n All That Is, Philip Bowman is asked, on a night out
in London, "What are the things that have mattered?"
I ask Salter the same question. "I've told you," he says.
"This interview has been about them. All the answers are
in there." The women, the war, the work, the children,
the fri ends, the good luck and bad - all, that is, that goes to
make up a life.
Salter's nature, he says, is to be dissatisfied. There is much
he would like to have done that he will probably never do now,
places he would have liked to go, people he would have liked to
have known, books he would have liked to have written. "It's a
question of your desires being infinite and insatiable," he says.
Surveying his body of work, he says, "It's hard for me
to put myself in the position of looking back with pride at
accomplishments. That's just not the way I look at things."
He is old now, no doubt about it. Old, but not infirm, not
doddery, despite his self-effacing protestations. At one point,
he tells me his bones were formed in a different era, "the
Paleolithic era." He claims to be "out of it" on a few occasions,
unconvincingly. He says he doesn't see films any more, for
example, but when I mention Lincoln, the recent Spielberg movie,
he says, "Oh, yes, well I have seen Lincoln." And it turns out he's
a fan of Michael Haneke's work, and that he has a friend nearby
who gets sent the new stuff on DVD. So he's not exactly entirely
cut off from recent developments in the movies. He claims, too,
not to keep up much with the contemporary literary scene but
he's familiar with every younger writer I care to mention.
He reads The New York Review of Books and The New
Yorker, and he follows literary debate on line.
When I bemoan the disappearance of the scenery-
chewing novelist from the public stage - where is today's
Mailer or Styron or Capote?- he suggests that this is a temporary
situation. "I think we'll have some more rascals," he says. "I look
at Zadie Smith and I think, 'Good God, if she only stabbed her
husband we'd have a huge star!' Or if Lindsay Lohan could write!"
He's funny like that. He doesn't take everything entirely
seriously. When I ask him if he uses Twitter or Face book: "Do
I take pictures to send to my friends? This is what it looks like
outside today! This is my typewriter! I'vejustji.nished three pages!
What the hell? That seems to be about the level of it. Nobody
cares. About what I'm doing, anyway. Well, I hope they don't."
But the mostcompellingevidence for this late octogenarian's
continuing potency is the major novel he finished just last
141
"I know I should have wri tt en more, but I didn't."
Sal t er photographed in Aspen, Colorado, 1978
October. "Until the last 20 or 25 per cent of the book, I felt very
strong," he says, when I ask where he found the energy for such
an undertaking.
"Then it was rather like a race and we were coming up to the
last lap and I could tell that my legs did not have what they had
back then. I was strong enough to finish, but I don't want to talk
about the next book, or any such thing."
He's still writing, though, in long hand first, then on his
typewriter, then correcting in pencil, then typing up another
draft. There's a new story on the desk in the other room. He scoffs
at the idea of another novel but then confesses that he wouldn't
rule out making a start on one.
We're wrapping up now. I'm heading back to Denver, through
Rocky Mountain blizzards, to catch my flight home. Salter
suggests some places for me to look at on the way, meticulously
draws me a map in pencil. He and Kay fuss around me
solicitously before I leave. He signs a book for me. My two
days drinking tea at the kitchen table have been a brief,
friendly interruption in a life dedicated to a great many
glorious things - but above all to remembering, to
recreating, to writing. And that's what he'll go back to when
I'm gone.
Oflsaac Babel, the Russian Jewish writer who fell foul of
Stalin, Salter once said: "He is heroic to me. My idea of writing
is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find
the right words until you reach a point where you can make no
further progress and you either have something or you don't."
It turns out that Salter had something. He had a lot, an
enormous amount. It might sound fanciful, but don't bet against
him having something more. fl
All That Is (Picador) by James Salter will be published on 23 May,
alongside a new Collected Stories. Turn the page for "Comet ",
a classic short story by James Salter.
FICTION
COMET
A STORY
BY .JAMES SALTER
PHOTOGRAPH BY
I
Grego ry Cr ewd s on
143
FICTION
P
hilip married Adele on a day in June. It was cloudy and the
wind was blowing. Later the sun came out. It had been
a while since Adele had married and she wore white: white
pumps wit h low heels, a long white skirt that clung to her
hips, a filmy blouse with a white bra underneath, and
around her neck a string of freshwater pearls. They were married in
her house, the one she'd gotten in t he divorce. All her fri ends were
there. She believed strongly in friendship. The room was crowded.
"I, Adele," she said in a clear voice, "give myself to you, Phil,
completely as your wife ... " Behind her as best man, somewhat
oblivious, her young son was standing, and pinned to her panties
as something borrowed was a small silver disc, actually a
St Christopher's medal her father had worn in the war; she had several
times rolled down the waistband of her skirt to show people. Near the
door, underneath the impression that she was part of a garden tour,
was an old woman who held a little dog by t he handle of a cane hooked
through his collar.
At the reception Adele smiled with happiness, drank too much,
laughed and scratched her bare arms with long show-girl nails . Her
new husband admired her. He could have licked her palms like a calf
does salt. She was still young enough to be good-looking, the final
blaze of it, though she was too old for children, at least if she had
anything to say about it. Summer was coming. Out of the afternoon
haze she would appear, in her black bathing suit, limbs all tan, t he
brilliant sun behind her. She was the strong figure walking up
the smooth sand from the sea, her legs, her wet swimmer's ha ir, t he
grace of her, all careless and unhurried.
They settled into life together, hers mostly. It was her furniture
and her books, though they were largely unread. She liked to tell
stories about DeLereo, her first husband - Fra nk, his name was - the
heir to a garbage-hauling e mpire. She called him Delerium, but
the stories were not unaffectionate. Loyalty - it came from her
childhood as well as the years of marriage, eight exhausting years, as
she said - was her code. The terms of marriage had been simple, she
admitted. Her job was to be dressed, have dinner ready, and be fucked
once a day. One time in Florida with anot her couple they chartered a
boat to go bone fishing off Bimini.
"We'll have a good dinner," DeLereo had said happily, "get on
board and turn in. When we get up we'll have passed the GulfStream."
It began t hat way but ended differently. The sea was very rough.
They never did cross the Gulf Stream - the captain was from
Long Island and got lost . DeLereo paid him $50 to t urn over t he
wheel and go below.
"Do you know anything about boats?" the captain asked.
"More than you do," DeLereo told him.
He was under an ult imatum from Adele, who was lying, deathly
pale, in t heir cabin: get us into port somewhere or get ready to sleep by
yourself, she'd said.
Philip Ardet had heard the story and many others often. He was
mannerly and elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though
you were a menu. He and Adele had met on the golf course when she
was learning to play. It was a wet day and t he course was nearly empty.
Adele and a friend were teeing off when a balding figure carrying a
cloth bag with a few clubs in it asked if he could joi n them. Adele hit
a passable drive. Her friend bounced his across the road and teed up
another, which he topped. Phil, rather shyly, took out an old three
wood and hit one 200 yards straight down the fairway.
That was his persona, capable and calm. He'd gone to Princeton
and been in t he navy. He looked like someone who'd been in the navy,
Adele said. His legs were st rong. The first time she went out with him,
he remarked it was a funny thing, some people liked him, some didn't.
"The ones that do, I tend to lose interest in."
She wasn't sure just what that meant but she liked his appearance,
which was a bit worn, especially around the eyes. It made her feel he
was a real man, though perhaps not the man he had been. Also he was
smart, as she explained it, more or less the way professors were.
To be liked by her was worthwhile but to be liked by him seemed
somehow of even greater value. There was something about him that
discounted the world. He appeared in a way to care nothing for
himself, to be above that.
He didn't make much money, as it turned out. He wrote for a
business weekly. She earned nearly t hat much selling houses. She had
begun to put on a litt le weight . This was a few years after they were
married. She was sti ll beautiful - her face was - but she had adopted
a more comfortable outline. She would get into bed with a drink, the
way she had done when she was 25. Phil, a sport jacket over his
pyjamas, sat reading. Sometimes he walked that way on their lawn in
the morning. She sipped her drink and watched him.
"You know something?"
"What?"
"I've had good sex since I was 15," she said.
He looked up.
"I didn' t start quite that young," he confessed.
"Maybe you should have."
"Good advice. Little late though."
"Do you remember when we first got started?"
"I remember."
"We could hardly stop," she said. "You remember?"
"It averages out."
"Oh, great," she said.
After he'd gone to sleep she watched a movie. The stars grew old,
too, a nd had problems with love. It was different, though, they had
already reaped huge rewards. She watched, t hinking. She thought of
what she had been, what she had had. She could have been a star.
What did Phil know - he was sleeping.
A
utumn came. One evening they were at the Morrisseys'.
Morrissey was a tall lawyer, the executor of many estates
and trustee of others. Reading wills had been his true
education, a look into the human heart, he said. At the
dinner table was a man from Chicago who'd made a
fortune in computers, a nitwit it soon became apparent, who during the
meal gave a toast. "To the end of privacy and t he life of dignity," he said.
He was wit h a dampened woman who had recently found out that
her husband had been having an affair with a black woman in
Cleveland, an affair that had somehow been going on for seven years.
There may even have been a child.
"You can see why coming here is a like a breath of fresh air for me,"
she said.
The women were sympathet ic. They knew what she had to do, she
had to rethink completely the past seven years.
"That 's right," her companion agreed.
"What is t here to be rethought?" Phil wanted to know.
He was answered wit h impatience. The deception, they said, the
deception - she had been deceived all that time. Adele, meanwhile,
was pouring more wine for herself. Her napkin covered the place
where she had already spilt a glass of it .
"But that time was spent in happiness, wasn't it?" Phil asked
guilelessly. "That's been lived. It can' t be changed. It can't be just
turned into unhappiness."
"That woman stole my husband. She stole everything he
had vowed."
144
FICTION
"Forgive me," Phil said softly. "That happens every day."
There was an outcry as if from a chorus, heads thrust forward like
the hissing, sacred geese. Only Adele sat silent.
"Every day," he repeated, his voice drowned out, the voice of
reason or at least of fact.
''I'd never steal anyone's man," Adele said then. "Never." Her face
had a tone of weariness when she drank, a weariness that knew the
answer to everything. "And I'd never break a vow."
"I don't think you would," Phil said.
"I'd never fall for a 20-year-old, either."
She was talking about the tutor, the girl who had come that time,
youth burning through her clothes.
"No, you wouldn't."
He left his wife, Adele told them.
There was silence.
Phil's bit of smile had gone but his face was still pleasant.
"I didn't leave my wife," he said quietly. "She threw me out."
"He left his wife and children," Adele said.
"I didn't leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been
for more than a year." He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened
to someone else. "It was my son's tutor," he explained. "I fell in love
with her."
"And you began something with her?" Morrissey suggested.
"Oh, yes."
There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot
even breathe.
"Within two or three days," he confessed.
"There in the house?"
Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was
abandoning himself.
"I didn't do anything in the house."
"He left his wife and children," Adele repeated.
"You knew that," Phil said.
"Just walked out on them. They'd been married 15 years, since
hewas19."
"We hadn't been married 15 years."
"They had three children," she said, "one of them retarded."
Something had happened - he was becoming speechless, he
could feel it in his chest like a kind of nausea. As if he were giving up
portions of an intimate past.
"He wasn't retarded," he managed to say. "He was ... having
trouble learning to read, that's all."
At that instant an aching image of himself and his son from years
before came to him. They had rowed one afternoon to the middle of
a friend's pond and jumped in, just the two of them. It was summer.
His son was six or seven. There was a layer of warm water over deeper,
cooler water, the fadedgreen of frogs and weeds. They swam to the far
side and then all the way back, the blond head and anxious face of his
boy above the surface like a dog's. Year of joy.
"So tell them the rest of it," Adele said.
"There is no rest."
"It turned out this tutor was some kind of call girl. He found her
in bed with some guy."
"Is that right?" Morrissey said.
He was leaning on the table, his chin in his hand. You think you
know someone, you think because you have dinner with them or play
cards, but you really don't. It's always a surprise. You know nothing.
"It didn't matter," Phil murmured.
"So, Stupid marries her anyway," Adele went on. "She comes to
Mexico City where he's working and he marries her."
"You don't understa nd anything, Adele," he said.
He wanted to say more but couldn't. It was like being out of breath.
"Do you still talk to her?" Morrissey asked casually.
"Yes, over my dead body," Adele said.
None of them could know, none of them could visualise Mexico
City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the
weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying
on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her
as before a forbidden photograph, as ifbefore an overwhelming work
of art. Two years in Mexico City, oblivious to the wreckage. It was the
sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent
forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones
like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself,
his former self.
"I talk to her," he admitted.
"And your first wife?"
"I talk to her. We have three kids."
"He left her," Adele said. "Casanova here."
"Some women have minds like cops," Phil said to no one in
particular. "This is right, that's wrong. Well, anyway .... "
He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realised, in the
wrong order. He had scuttled his life.
"Anyway, there's one thing I can say truthfully. I'd do it all over
again if! had the chance."
After he had gone outside they went on talking. The woman
whose husband had been unfaithful for seven years knew what it
was like.
"He pretends he can't help it," she said. "I've had the same thing
happen. I was going by Bergdorf's one day and saw a green coat in the
window that I liked and I went in and bought it. Then a little while
later, someplace else, I saw one that was better than the first one,
I thought, so I bought that. Anyway, by the time I was fini shed I had
four green coats hanging in the closet - it was just because I couldn't
control my desires."
Outside, the sky, the topmost dome of it, was brushed with clouds
and the stars were dim. Adele finally made him out, standing far off
in the darkness. She walked unsteadily toward him. His head, she
saw, was raised. She stopped a few yards away and raised her head,
too. The sky began to whirl. She took an unexpected step or two to
steady herself.
"What are you looking at?" she finally said.
He did not answer. He had no intention of answering. Then:
"The comet," he said. "It's been in the papers. This is the night it's
supposed to be most visible."
There was silence.
"I don't see any comet," she said.
"You don't?"
"Where is it?"
"It's right up there," he gestured. "It doesn' t look like anything,
just like another small star. It's that extra one, by the Pleiades." He
knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over
heartbreaking coasts.
"Come on, you can look at it tomorrow," she said, a lmost
consolingly, though she came no closer to him.
"It won't be there tomorrow. One time only."
"How do you know where it' ll be?" she said. "Come on, it's late,
let's get out of here."
He did not move. After a bit she walked towards the house where,
extravagantly, every window upstairs and down was lit. He stood
where he was, looking up at the sky and then at her as she became
s maller and smaller going across the lawn, reaching first the aura,
then the brightness, then tripping on the kitchen steps. ft
145
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OBJECT OF DESIRE
No. 24
COLON IA
BY ACOUA DI PARMA
7lt FOR lOOML
AC QUA
DI
PARMA
COLON IA

D!al
~
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Timeless, n fact.
. . .. .. . . .
HONDA
The Power of Dreams
Nerds. That's us. Excited
by every little piece of
technology we create.
Take our new 1.6 diesel
engine. It's the stuff nerds'
dreams are made of. But
not everyone's a nerd.
Which is why we put our
new engine in the Civic.
So that more people like
you can enjoy it. That's
The Honda Way, after
all. We don't just make
things. We make things
for people.
New Civic 1.6 Diesel
78.5 miles per
gallon combined
120 PS of turbo-
charged power
94g of co2
per kilometre
0 road tax
honda.co.uk/thehondaway
Fuel consumption for the Civic 1.6 i-DTEC range in mpg (l/100km): Urban Cycle 70.6 (4.0),
Extra Urban 85.6 (3.3), Combined 78.5 (3.6). C0
2
emissions 94g/km.
Model shown: Civic 1.6 i DTEC SE Manual 1n optional Alabaster Silver Metallic at 20,075 On The Road.