‘I’d worked so hard the previous year that I decided to have a bit of a holiday after the series ended.’ She said it in a rush, as if she’d said it many times.
‘Now, I’m not casting this picture,’ said Nicolson, ‘because I haven’t yet settled the deal. I’m just taking a look at a few people.’
‘When would you be shooting, because I do have a few things planned for the coming year.’
‘October, November. Probably at Pinewood, no location work or anything. From where you live could you get out to Pinewood each morning?’
‘Dear old Pinewood.’
‘I’d send a car, of course.’
‘Of course.’ They left it there for a moment or so, each relishing their role of successful producer and glamorous star.
Nicolson said, ‘It’s the story of a woman who is haunted. She sees the past, the things that have happened in this strange old farmhouse, the things that are going to happen. Her husband and the grown-up sons think she’s going nuts and then one night this kind of crazy monster turns up. It’s a pretty scary movie; hokum, lots of special effects.’ He nodded to himself and added, ‘And a great part for you, quite different to anything you’ve done before.’
She tried to think of something appropriate to say. ‘It sounds fun. I’ve never done a horror film. Who will be directing?’
‘This is something that still has to be sorted out, Dorothy. I’m just taking a look round, you know.’
She smiled. I remembered her more clearly when she smiled. New York: a wonderful St Joan. And a Lear that had nothing except her superb Goneril. ‘I will have that cigarette,’ she said.
‘Sure,’ said Nicolson. He got to his feet, grateful to her for lessening the guilt he felt at knowing she was not suitable. She opened her handbag to look for a lighter. It was real leather, a treasure from the days when she was rich and had every prospect of getting richer. Now the leather was scuffed and one corner had been carefully repaired. Nicolson lit her cigarette for her. She had an envelope alongside her in the chair and now she put it on the canteen table. ‘I brought these,’ she said.
Nicolson tipped the contents of the envelope out on to the table. There were a dozen large glossy photographs. Some were the dreary stills of British films of the forties and others were stagey publicity pictures, the definition softened to a point where her face was like a back-lit bowl of rice pudding. The only thing they had in common was that in every one she was very young and very beautiful. We found it impossible not to look at her to compare the reality. Whatever she read in our faces it was enough to make her flinch.
‘You take these with you,’ said Nicolson. ‘As I say, we’re not casting yet.’
‘I had to come this way,’ said the actress. ‘I was visiting some friends who live just round the corner.’
‘That’s swell,’ said Nicolson. ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’
‘I like to keep in touch.’
Neither of us spoke until a couple of minutes after she had gone. ‘I’ll have to see a lot of people before I decide,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a special kind of technique, horror films. And anyway, the director is going to want a say in who we use. The wife: that’s a feature role we’re talking about.’
The unit runner came into the canteen. ‘Mr Benjamin says your rushes will be on the projector in ten minutes, sir. Will you be coming down or will you see them with Mr Preston this evening?’
‘I’ll be down.’
‘And your secretary says to remind you that they are screening the rough assembly of Silent Paradise at Koolman International tonight. There was a message from them saying that if Mr Koolman comes on the early plane, he will be at the screening too.’
‘OK,’ said Nicolson without enthusiasm. ‘And Mr Stone?’
‘His secretary says he’ll be there.’
To me Nicolson said, ‘Did either of us think we’d ever be pleading with Eddie to come and see himself starring in a movie?’ He sighed. Only Stone’s intimates called him Eddie. Often it had a disparaging tone, as if by knowing him before he was rich and famous, the speaker was in a privileged position to criticize him. Even Mary was able to imply that ‘poor Eddie’ or ‘little Eddie’ was what she meant when she used his first name.
‘Bookbinder must have seen something in him.’
‘Sure: Olivier’s head on Brando’s body. That’s what every actor was in 1948.’
‘But you don’t think so?’
‘Wait a minute, Peter. Eddie is bloody good. He has some of Olivier’s economy…’
‘But?’
‘Gielgud has perception, Peter. That’s why actors envy him.’
‘I screened Last Vaquero twice last week. Stone is very stiff. Did you ever notice that?’
‘He wanted that. He worked on it. Maybe he’s not very intellectual, but he’s not an instinctive actor: he uses his brains. I saw him acting with some old fellow once and this guy had thought up the business of pulling his ear lobe – he was Italian or something. Eddie said, look like you might pull your ear lobe, even touch your ear, but best of all be a man who is ashamed of this awful ear-pulling and is trying to break the habit. Now that’s what I mean by economy. Use that for your book, if you like.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, although I had the feeling that Edgar Nicolson’s anecdote had been related many times to many reporters.
‘Ellen Terry said it: act in your pauses.’ He arranged the empty plastic cups in front of us. The fleet of spoons was probably a Nicolson. He said, ‘The trouble that Preston is having with the girl is the thing you have with all young actors. They only act when they are speaking their lines. But acting is using your mind so that when you do speak, the lines come as a natural sequence of thought and emotion.’
‘Getting the lead in Last Vaquero made him,’ I said. ‘Without that, he’d still be hanging around Chasens hoping for a walk-on.’
‘And would you believe me if I told you that I nearly got that role, Peter.’ He took a pipe from his pocket and filled it. He closed his eyes while he did it and his face and his body gave those little twitches that dreamers show in heavy sleep.
There was electricity in the air that almost forgotten night in 1948. There was no rain or thunder, nor even the silent erratic lightning that so often presages a storm in southern California. Yet Nicolson remembered feeling that the air was charged. He might have ascribed this to his anxiety or to the special tensions of the night, except that the radio reacted to the same disturbance in the air. The San Jorge station had an hour of big-band jazz every night at the same time. That night it was Jimmie Lunceford, and Nicolson remembered how the static had eaten most of the vocal, ‘When you wish upon a star.’ He could never again hear that melody without going back to that night.
Even today that interstate highway out of San Diego isn’t complete. In 1948 there was not even talk of it. The road past the Sunnyside was dark except for the tourist court itself: a yellow floodlight on two moth-eaten palms and a jacaranda tree. The broken vacancy sign was flickering.
It was only after the car lights were off that the mountains could be seen, like huge thunderclouds that never moved on. San Jorge was on the far side of them, ten miles or more along the valley road. When the cops came – just county cops from San Jorge – the red lights of the two cars could be seen moving down those foothills like the bloodshot eyes of some prehistoric monster slithering across to the Pacific Ocean to slake its thirst. But it was much later that the cops