Memoirs From Beyond The Grave by Chateaubriand

 

Book Six, I. Prologue

London, April to September 1822;

            Revised in December 1846


Thirty-one years after having set sail for America as a simple sub-lieutenant, I set sail for London with a passport conceived in the following terms: Laissez passer sa seigneurie le Vicomte de  Chateaubriand, pair de France, ambassadeur du Roi pres Sa Majeste Britanique, etc., etc. ‘Let pass his lordship the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Peer of France, Ambassador of the King to His Majesty, the King of Britain.’ No description; my greatness was supposed to be enough to make my face familiar everywhere.

A steamboat, chartered for me alone, carried me from Calais to Dover. When I set foot on English soil, on April 5, 1822, I was saluted by the cannon of the fort. An officer came on behalf of the commandant to offer me an honor guard. Down at the Shipwright Inn, the owner and waiters of the place received me with deep bows and bare heads. Madame the Mayoress invited me to a soirée in the name of the loveliest ladies of the town. Monsieur Billing, an attaché of my embassy, was awaiting my arrival. A meal of enormous fish and monstrous quarters of beef restored Monsieur L’Ambassadeur, who had no appetite at all and who was not tired in the least. The townspeople, gathered beneath my windows, filled the air with their loud huzzahs. The officer returned and, despite my protest, posted sentries at my door. The next day, after distributing no small amount of my master the King’s money, I was on my way to London, to the booming of cannon, in a light carriage driven at full trot by a pair of elegantly dressed jockeys. My servants followed in other carriages, and couriers dressed in my livery rode alongside the cavalcade. We passed through Canterbury, drawing te gaze of John Bull and of every horse and rider that crossed or path. At Blackheath, a common once haunted by highwaymen, I found an entirely new village. Soon after, I saw the immense skullcap of smoke that covers the city of London.

Plunging into this gulf of carbon vapor, as though into one of the maws of Tartarus, and crossing the entire town, whose streets I well remembered, I landed at the embassy in Portland Place,. There the  chargé d’affaires, M. le Comte George de Caraman, the secretaries of the embassy, M. le Vicomte de Marcellus, M. le Elise Decazes, M.de Bourqueney, and other attaches welcomed me with dignified deferentiality. Every usher, porter, valet, and footman of the house assembled on the sidewalk. I was presented with the cards of the English ministers ad foreign ambassadors, who had already been informed of my upcoming arrival.

On May 17, in the year of grace 1793, I disembarked at Southampton in my way to this same city of London, an obscure and humble traveler coming from Jersey.  No Mayoress took notice of me,. On May 18, William Smith, the mayor of Southampton, handed me a travel permit for London to which a copy of the Alien Bill had been attached. My description read, in English: ‘Francois de Chateaubriand, French officer in the emigrant army, five feet four inches high, thin shape, brown hair and brown side whiskers.’ I modestly shared the least expensive carriage with a few sailors on leave. I changed horses at the most miserable inns. Poor, sick, and unknown, I entered a rich an opulent city, where Mr. Pitt reigned. I found lodgings, for six shillings a month, under the laths of a garret at the end of a little street off the Tottenham Court Road, which a cousin from Brittany had prepared for me:

Ah! Monseigneur, que votre vie,

D’ honneurs aujourd’ hui si remplie,

Differe de ces heureux temps!

Yet another sort of obscurity has come to darken my days in London. My political positon is overshadowing my literary fame, and there is not a fool in the three kingdoms who doesn’t prefer the ambassador of Louis XVIII to the author of The Genius of Christianity. I shall see how things turnout once I’m dead, or once I’ve ceased to fill M. le Duc Decazes’s post in the Court of  George IV – a succession as bizarre as the rest of my life.

Now that I am in London as the French ambassador, one of my greatest pleasures is to abandon my carriage in the corner of a square and go wandering on foot trough the backstreets I used to frequent; the cheap, working-class suburbs where sufferings refuge with similar sufferings; the unheralded shelters I haunted with my partners in distress, never knowing whether I would have enough bread to survive the morrow – I, whose table is laden with three or four courses today. In all those narrow and destitute doorways that were once open to me, I meet only unfamiliar faces. No longer do I see my compatriots wandering the streets, recognizable by their gestures, their gait, the state and cut of their clothes; no longer do I catch the sight of those martyred priests, wearing their little collars, their big three-cornered hats, and their long black threadbare frocks, to whom the English used to tip their hats a they passed by. Wide streets lined with palaces have been cut, brides built, and promenades laid; Regent’s Park occupies the site, close to Portland Place, where once meadows were covered with herds of cattle. A graveyard, which dominated the view from the window of one of my garrets, has disappeared into the confines of a factory. When I go to see Lord Liverpool, I am hard pressed to pick out the empty spot where Charles I’s scaffold once stood,. New buildings, closing in around the statue of Charles II, have encroached, along with forgetfulness, on memorable events.

How I mourn, amid my insipid pomp, that world of tribulations and tears, that time when my sorrows mingled with the sorrows of a whole colony of exiles! It’s true then that everything changes, that the poor die the same as the prosperous. And what has become of my brothers in emigration? Some are dead, and others have suffered various fates: like me, they have seen their family and their friends disappear, and they find themselves less at home in their own country than they were in a foreign land. Was it not in that land that we had our gatherings, our amusements, our celebrations, and above all our youths? Mothers and young maidens, starting their lives in adversity brought home the weekly fruit of their labors, then went out to revel in some hometown dance. Friendships were struck up in the small talk of the evenings, after the day’s work, on the grass of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. In chapels, decorated with our own hands in dilapidated rooms, we prayed together on January 21 and on the day of the Queen’s death, deeply moved by the funeral oration delivered by the emigrant curé of our village. We strolled along the Thames, gazing at the ships towering over the docks and loaded with the riches of the world, admiring the country houses of Richmond – we who were poor, we who were deprived of our fathers’ roofs. All these things were true happiness!

When I come home in 1822, instead of being greeted by my friend, trembling with cold, who opens the door of our garret calling me by my first name, who goes to bed on a pallet next to mine, covering himself with a thin coat and with nothing but moonlight for a lamp, I walk by torchlight between two lines of footmen ending in five or six respectful secretaries, and arriver, riddled along the way by the words Monseigneur, My Lord, Your Excellency, Monsieur, L’Ambassadeur, at a parlor draped in gold and silk.

- I’m begging you, young men, leave me be! Enough with these My Lords! What do you want me to do with you? Go and laugh in the chancery, as if I weren’t here! Do you think you can make me take his masquerade seriously? Do you think I am stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes? The Marquess of Londonderry s coming to call, you say, the Duke of Wellington has left his card: Mr. Canning came looking for me; Lady Jersey expects me for dinner with Lord Brougham; Lady Gwydir hopes that I will join her in her box at the Opera at ten o’clock; Lady Mansfield, at midnight, a Almack’s .  .  .

Have mercy on me! After all, where can I hide? Who will deliver me? Who will rescue me from these persecutions? Come back, you lovely days of indigence and solitude! Rise up and live again, my companions in exile! Let us go, old comrades of the camp-bed and the pallet, let us go out into the country, into the little garden of some forgotten tavern, and drink a bad cup of tea on a wooden bench, talking of our foolish hopes and or ungrateful homeland, mulling over or troubles, looking for ways to help each other or one of our relations even worse off than ourselves.

This is how I’ve felt and what I’ve thought these first days of my embassy in London. Only by saturating myself in the less ponderous sadness of Kensington Gardens have I been able to escape the sadness that besieges me beneath my own roof. At least these gardens haven’t changed ( I assured myself of this again in 1843); the trees alone have grown taller: here, in perpetual solitude, the birds build their nests in peace. It’s no longer even the fashion to meet in this place, as it was in the days when Madame Recamier, the most beautiful of French women, used to walk here followed by a crowd. Now, from the edge of the deserted lawns of Kensington, I love to gaze at the running of the horses across Hyde Park and the high society carriages among which one might pick out my tilbury, standing empty, while I, become once again a poor little émigré, climb the path where the banished confessor not long ago recited his breviary.

It was in Kensington Gardens that I contemplated the Essai historique. It was there that, reading over the journal of my travels overseas, I drew from it the loves of Atala. I was there, too, after wandering in the country, under a low English sky, glowing, as though shot through with polar light, that I penciled the first sketches of the passions of René. By night, I stored the harvest of my daydreams in the Essai historique and The Natchez. The two manuscripts advanced side by side, though I often lacked the money to buy paper, and, for want of thread, fastened what sheets I had together with tacks pulled from the windowsill of my garret

These places where I had my first inspirations make me feel their power; they refract the sweet light of memories over the present – and I feel myself prodded to take up the pen again. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have as much time here as in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, this edifice that I’m building from dry bones and ruins. My secretaries in London want to go picnicking in the morning and dancing at night, and I am glad to let them go. The men, Peter, Valentin, and Lewis, go to the tavern; the maids, Rose, Peggy, and Maria for a stroll on the sidewalks; and I am delighted. I have been left the key to the street door: Monsieur L’Ambassadeur is in charge of the house. If you knock, he shall open. Everyone is gone, and I am here alone. Let us get down to work.

It was twenty-two years ago, as I have just said, that I sketched The Natchez and Atala here in London; I am now at the precise moment in my Memoirs when I shall set sail for America: this coincidence suits me marvelously. Let us cancel out those twenty-two years, as they have in effect been canceled out of my life, and se off for the forests of the New World. The story of my embassy will be told when the time is right, if it pleases God; but as long as I remain here for a few months, I should have the leisure to proceed from Niagara Falls in New York to the Army of the Princes of Germany, and from the Army of the Princes to my refuge in England,. The Ambassador of the King of France can then recount the story of the French émigré in the same place where the latter was exiled.

 

 

Enemy of the State by George Scialabba

The facts of  Stone’s life have been told well and often, most recently by D. D. Gutttenplan in American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone. He was born on Christmas Eve 1907, in Philadelphia, and christened Isadore  Feinstein. His parents had a dry goods store, which prospered modestly during Izzy’s boyhood and adolescence, and his cheerful, bustling mother adored him. He was inordinately bookish, starting very young. ( and continuing throughout his life – he was, for what it’s worth, far more literate, in his unostentatious way, than William F. Buckley Jr.) But he didn’t care much for school or succeed at it very well. He was also moonlighting from schoolwork as a reporter for local newspapers, and after a year he left college to work full-time as a journalist. He never looked back, at least until retirement, when he learned Greek, investigated Socrates, and discovered that that universally revered martyr for free speech was actually a good deal more hostile to democratic freedoms in Athens than most of Senator McCarthy’s victims were to democratic freedoms in America.

Neither Stone’s inner nor his outer life seems to have been particularly  complex or dramatic. He was a dutiful son: when his father’s business suffered in the Depression and his mother intermittently became mentally ill, Izzy, who was well paid by then, helped. He met a lively, popular girl, not much given to reading but much taken with his ebullience; they stayed happily married for sixty years. He was an enthusiastic and good-humored but often distracted father. He had few but loyal friends, was close to his siblings and on good terms with his relatives and in-laws, and- especially during his years in Washington D. C. – was not much of a party-goer. He led a full life, professionally and domestically, with few storms, and had a sunny and feisty personality, with few shadows or enigmas. The one moment of high drama was his decision in 1953, amid the ostracism which followed his fierce denunciation of the Smith Act and the publication of The Hidden History of the Korean War, to found I. F. Stone’s Weekly. A lesser man would have folded his tent, or at least lowered his voice.

 

Stone was cursed all his life with interesting times, boiling over with warm, depression, revolution, and totalitarianism. He covered these calamities not on the scene but behind the scenes, where policy was made. Some journalists could bring political action to life, Stone was one of the few who could bring political causation to life. He read official reports, studies, speeches, press conferences, congressional testimonies, and budget documents, voraciously, analytically, skeptically. He found the threads, connected the dots, and brought the substructure of real causes and motives to light.

An early example, which made Stone’s reputation in Washington, was his coverage of American unpreparedness for World War II. Long after it became obvious that US involvement in the war was likely, American industry simply could not stoop doing business with fascist Germany and Japan, even in strategic commodities like oil, rubber, metals, minerals, chemicals, and machine parts. The trade was too profitable, and the ties between German cartels (by then the arm of the Nazis regime) and American banks, corporations, and law firms ( including Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles represented a great many German clients) were too close. Stone tracked down the figures of industry after industry and hammered away at the story until even the Senate committee investigating war preparedness commended him. The additional German and Japanese war production enabled by the delivery of these materials may well have cost  the lives of thousands of American and Allied soldiers- more damage, in all likelihood, than was caused by Communist infiltrators in the State Department.

Equally important were Stone’s reports on how greed  and incompetence retarded American industry’s conversion to wartime production. General Motors could not be induced to stoop making cars in record numbers even after its factories and workforce were needed for tank, truck, and aircraft production. Alcoa Aluminum would not increase supply of this vital component for fear than an early end to the war would result in a surplus, hence lower prices. Major oil companies would not open their pipelines to independents; and in general, dominant companies would not cooperate with smaller rivals. All this profitable foot dragging was aided and abetted by the ‘dollar-a-year men,’ the business executives and corporate lawyers ‘loaned’ to the federal government in order to keep an eye out for the interests of their employers and clients. These, of course, were precisely the ‘responsible’ people, the men of substance- bankers, executives, and lawyers, along with professional diplomats and military officers – to whom Walter Lippmann proposed entrusting real power in a democracy, while the fickle public meekly registered its preferences every four years and hoped for the best.

Another high profile demolition was Stone’s reconstruction of the Gulf of Tonkin episode. Which had prompted Congress to authorize the use of force against North Vietnam. Piecing together information from Senate and UN debates and from European and Vietnamese news reports, Stone showed that the official account was false. The US boats deliberately entered what they knew the North Vietnamese claimed a territorial waters; they were supporting, perhaps directing, a South Vietnamese military operation against the North; there was no second attack on the boats, as claimed; and the Pentagon had detailed plans already drawn up for the extensive bombing reprisals that followed the North Vietnamese ‘attack’ (which in any case had caused no injuries or damage), suggesting that the US was hoping for, if not actually attempted to provoke an  incident.

As with the Korean War fourteen years earlier, Stone was virtually alone at the time in challenging a misleading official justification for an undeclared war. And one again, millions of lives were lost because Congress and the press were not as conscientious as he was.

Far more than a few million lives would have been lost in case of a nuclear war, and Stone was rightly obsessed with the arms race. It was plain to him that the US remained far ahead of the USSR through most of the nuclear era and could have had afar-reaching arms-control agreement at virtually any time. It was equally plain that the prospect of ‘limited nuclear war’ adumbrated in Henry Kissinger’s influential Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was ‘poisonously delusive.’ And amid much high-mined hand-wringing about the malignant but mysteriously self-sustaining momentum of the arms race, Stone kept pointing out the extent to which it was not some tragic  historical imperative but rather sheer, unstoppable bureaucratic self-aggrandizement by the armed services that drove the progress of weapons technology.

To expose corporate fraud, diplomatic obfuscation, budgetary sleight-of-hand, and wartime propaganda required investigative enterprise for which Stone is renowned. To write about two of his other preoccupations, the internal security panic of the Truman era and the struggle for racial equality in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, required only common decency – as uncommon n these cases as in most others.. Stone harried – there is no other word for it- Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. “Melodramatic bunk by a self-dramatizing dick’ was his entirely  typical comment on a speech by Hoover to the American Legion, and he was hardly less scathing about McCarthy. Stone had his reward: The FBI read his mail, searched his garbage, tapped his phone, and monitored his public appearances, while the State Department denied him a visa and tried to confiscate his passport- marks of distinction not granted to his more cautious colleagues. About race, Stone simply said the obvious – the now-obvious, that is – repeatedly and eloquently. His columns on the subject are still bracing.

Stone was ardent Zionist in the 1940s and was the first American journalist to report on the Jewish exodus from Europe and the creation of the State of Israel. In 1944 he penned an open letter to American newsmen urging pressure on President Roosevelt to admit more displaced Jews into the United States, which would not only have saved many Jewish lives but might have also greatly reduced tensions in post-war Palestine. In 1945, when it was still feasible, he advocated a bi-national Arab-Jewish state. Beginning immediately after the 1948 war, he pleaded for a swift resettlement of Palestinian refugees. Immediately after the 1967 war, he warned Israel against occupying the West Bank and Gaza. Right from the start –and even before- he was right about Israel / Palestine.

Above all, he was right about the Cold War. He ridiculed the notion that the Soviet Union, bled dry by World War II, was poised to overrun Western Europe, or that it controlled every popular movement from Latin America to the Balkans to the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And he pointed out how much US-Soviet tension was the result of America’s insistence on rearming West Germany and integrating it into a hostile European military alliance. The cornerstone of Cold War ideology- that US actions were primarily reactive and defensive, dictated by unrelenting Soviet aggressiveness – took no account of Stalin’s fundamental conservatism or of American designs on Mideast oil or on Southeast Asians markets for its Japanese ward. Nor did allow Americans to perceive how arrogant and threatening the rest of the world considered America’s claim that Taiwan was our ‘first line of defense,’ a notion Stone set up superbly in a satire, The Chinese 7^th Fleet in Long Island Sound.’ Finally, Stone recognized the role of defense spending in America’s economic management, both as a subsidy for advanced technology and as a fiscal stimulus that entailed no government competition with private producers- what would later be called ‘military Keynesianism.’

All governments lie, Stone reminded his readers, and none act morally except when forced to by an aroused public. This moral universalism is his most valuable legacy. It is true that Stone worked harder than most other journalists and hobnobbed less. But what set him apart was something else: that he applied to his own government the same moral standards we all unhesitatingly apply to others. No reporter would accept at face value a Communist or even a non-Communist government’s account of its own motives and intentions. Japan’s insistence that it sought only to bring prosperity and order to the rest of East Asia in the 1930s, or the USSR’s protestations that it invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan at the request of their legitimate governments to save those countries from subversion by international capitalist conspiracy, were met with ridicule or simply ignored in favor of explanations based on Japanese or Soviet self-interest, an in particular on the interests of their ruling elites. But vey few journalists were equally skeptical ( in public, that is) about the motives of American intervention in Indochina, Central America, or the Middle East. Those actions may have been deemed imprudent for one reason or another; criticism in this vein was ‘responsible.’ But to question Americas good intentions – to assume that the US is as capable of aggression, brutality, and deceit as every other state, and that American policy, like that of every other state, serves the purposes of those with preponderant domestic power rather than a fictive ‘national interest,’ much less a singular idealism – was to place oneself beyond the pale. Then as now, such skepticism was the operative definition of ‘anti-Americanism.’ By that definition Stone was anti-American, and America badly needs more such enemies.

 

Spyros Skouras by Arthur Miller

 

Once again Twentieth Century Fox mysteriously reached into my life; Spyros Skouras paid us a surprise visit the evening before I left for Washington, in a try at getting me to cooperate with the Committee. He had called from Hollywood to ask Marilyn if he could stop by as soon as he got to New York. I knew what this meant, of course, since the president of Twentieth Century Fox was not in the habit of making such flying visits, not to see Marilyn, at any rate, when the studio was still at odds with her. He would be trying to get me to avoid a possible jail term for contempt of Congress. Not that I mattered to him, but if rumors that we were going to marry were true, the patriotic organizations might well decide to picket her films. Such were the times. If there was any surprise in his phoning, it was that he had not done so earlier. He was reputed to have worked over many an actor and director with his persuasive mixture of real conviction, paternalism, and the normal show business terrors of bad publicity.

When she returned to me from the phone, I must have looked disconcerted at her announcement that it was Skouras, for she quickly asked me not to refuse to see him. And this was curious.

By turns she resented him, hated him, and spoke of him warmly as a friend of last resort at the studio. Although she was furious at his denying her the ordinary perquisites of a great star, which she was unquestionably at this time – the best dressing room, her choice of cameraman and director, and the respect due her as by far the public’s favorite performer- she could still be moved by his repeated reassurances, often accompanied by actual tears, that she was closer to him than even his own adored daughter. At the same time she was sure it was his obduracy that denied her recognition as the number one Fox draw.

The company insisted on binding her to her old contract, which paid her one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a picture, a fraction of her market value even at that time. This was a figure negotiated before her amazing cult had formed and the studio’s profits from her pictures had commenced soaring. But despite everything, her resentment lost its steam when Skouras took her by the arm and said, ‘You are my daughter.’ I was encouraged when she felt warmly toward him; we were to be married soon, and I found myself welcoming any of her feelings that were at all positive and unworried. In any case, it would be up to me how to respond to Skouras, and about that I had no uncertainty, although his coming increased my uneasiness that my public condemnation might harm her career.

Spyros Skouras, I estimated then, might bean eel but was not really a bad fellow because his deviousness was obvious enough to be almost reassuring. One never had the slightest doubt where he stood- right next to Power. If he indulged in passionate self-promoting speeches about honor, compassion, and truth, it was much in the Mediterranean or more specifically, the Achillean tradition of rhetorical excess accompanying all of life’s grand shifts, such as weddings and births –especially of boy babies – as well as the more stunning betrayals that Power periodically necessitates. I has met Skouras a few times before, but only once  when I could watch him in full rhetorical flight, and I never forgot it.

One afternoon five years earlier, I had happened to meet Kazan a few yards from the Fox building on Forty-sixth Street, where he had an appointment with Skouras. He invited me to join him, and having nothing better to do, I agreed. Kazan was still in the early stage of his movie directing career and was excited about the work; his fellow Greek Skouras was his friend, boss, and godfather.

Skouras’s office was about the size of a squash court, with the entire wall at one end covered by a map of the world as a backdrop for the coffin-like executive desk in front of it. On the map, Latin America was some ten feet long and the other continents proportionately immense, all marked wit many large red stars where Fox offices were located. Alone on the desk top of beige marble a low baroque statuette supported a golden pen and pencil.

On a  hassock at the foot of this desk sat George Jessel, then in his fifties, who greeted Kazan and me with both his hands wrapped around each of ours in turn. At a wave of Skouras’s hand we sat on beige sofas from whose deep, downy cushions  it was nearly impossible to rise again.

For no reason I could imagine, Skouras, from a standing star behind his desk, launched – in a hoarse, shouting voice that seemed to dress several thousand people in his mind – into a tirade against Franklin Roosevelt, who by then was already six years dead. Slapping the stone desk top with the palm of his hand for emphasis, occasionally throwing his head back defiantly or shaking his finger at Kazan, apparently in reprimand, he portrayed the late president as a man without honor, decency, or courage.

   ‘He was terrible!’ Jessel suddenly piped up from his hassock in front of the desk.

   ‘He was not terrible, he was a goddamned sonabitch!’

   ‘That bastard,” Jessel concurred, shaking his head angrily with a glance over at Kazan and me as though something had to be done immediately about this vile person. “I could tell you things, Spyros, that you .  .  .’

   ‘You don’t known nothing! I know!

   ‘I know you know, Spyros, but I was in Des Moines once when he .  . 

   ‘Don’t tell me Des Moines!’ Skouras commanded in outrage’

‘This man sold out million pipple to Stalin! He was agent of Stalin! He was absolutely agent!’ And he slammed his desk.

   ‘He was worse than an agent!’ Jessel yelled, thrilling himself visibly.

Now without the slightest warning or tonal change or shift of emphasis, Skouras declared, his head thrown back pridefully, ‘Without Franklin Roosevelt the United States would have been revolution in spring of 1935. He saved America!’

   ‘Goddamned right! Jessel shouted, likewise without so much as an eye-blink at this abrupt reversal. ‘Chrissake,’ he amplified in pity-filled tones, ‘people were starving, dying in the streets .  .  .’

Skouras now soared into praise of Roosevelt with encomia worthy of a graveside while tears of mourning bubbled up along the lower lids of Jessel’s eyes, and shaking his head, he added his loving recollections of the dead president’s fineness of character, his humor and generosity. It took me some weeks to realize that Skouras relished this performance as his way of informing Kazan, and perhaps me as well, that his power was so immense that he could blatantly contradict himself in front of us without losing one ounce of his domination. He was a bull walrus in the beach, just howling his joy of life to the sun.

When I opened our apartment door to let Skouras in, I saw that he was tired, a weary old man in a dinner jacket. He may also have had a drop too much. His handshake was limp, and he let his gaze slip across my face without his usual electric greeting, as though he did not expect much from the evening. A bald man with a deep chest and a bull neck, he stood titled slightly to the rear of his center of gravity, back straight and chin tucked in like a boxer’s. He could smile warmly while his eyes darted about for signs of the enemy. Marilyn immediately came into the foyer, and they embraced, almost tearfully on his part, probably because of all the favors he had had to deny her. ‘Won’erful, won’erful,’ he kept repeating with his eyes closed, his nose in her hair.

She was moved, surprisingly so. But I did not know then how aged men often evoked in her so intense an awareness of her own power over them that it turned to pity within her and sometimes even love. Her nearness could make such men actually tremble. And this was more security for her than in a vault full of money or a theater echoing with applause.  Holding her hand to his lips, Skouras took her to the couch and sat beside her, but she immediately sprang up and insisted on getting him a cognac, which he accepted despite his asthmatic protests and sipped. Beside him on the couch again with her knees drawn up, she faced him with her upper lip ever so slightly flicking like the lip of a bridled horse, a prideful tic of self-possession. He could not have helped being struck by her beauty in a beige satin blouse with high Byronic collar and a tight white skirt and sparkling patent leather spiked heels. It had been months since he had seen her, time enough to have forgotten the impact of the force wave that her beauty seemed to displace.

Sitting on one cheek like an awkward circus bear, he kept sliding off the couch cushion as with his rather adolescently charming hoarseness he touched on the illnesses and deaths of mutual Hollywood friends, problems with his Rye estate, and developments in his daughter’s life. Marilyn was charmed and happy as emotion alone could make her happy, almost without regard for its hostile of benevolent significance, for only in emotion was there truth. Incredibly now he began pleading with her to renounce her own company and return to the studio, something that had been settled by contract almost a year before, but she understood the diversion – he ha come with something  difficult for him to say, and this roundabout way of getting down to business, absurd as it was, showed a certain respectful deference that moved her to listen and react as though he were talking about something real.

‘Hones-to-Gah-dahlin, I worry about you personally. I can’t help what some of those people out there doin’ to you these years, I’m not Twentieth, I’m only the president. I am speakin’ to you from my heart. I promise you gonna be happy again with Twentieth. I’m absolutely serious, Mahlin dahlin’, you make such a mistake, come back with us we are your own family, you fadder and mudder. ‘ On he went, like certain fish who spray an alkali before laying their eggs in acidic waters. Now he talked of his cathedral, which he had built in Los Angeles for the Greek Orthodox Church, the pride of his life. You could hate Spyros, but you had to like him, if only for the naiveté of his disregard for the truth, which was at least not surgical and dry but had a certain ardor: he always meant what he said while he was saying it.

Out of the blue, he took Marilyn’s hand, and with an envelopment of privacy between them he asked, ‘You in love, switthar?’
She seemed to fill up, caught a breath, and nodded that she was.

  ‘You sure?’
Not without guilt she confronted him eye to eye, he who knew her story, and nodded again.
‘Gah-bless-you won’erful,’ he said, patting he hand with fatherly benediction; if it was really love and marriage, especially the latter, then God ha entered the case and the fooling around was over. Skouras sat there nodding in active calculation as he studied  her short black shoe on the carpet. Turning to me, he said, ‘Gah-bless-you Artr-won’erful. I know you a fine man, you goin’ take good care this girl, she’s like my own daughter, hones-to Gah.’

Now that he had to believe we were not merely shacking up, the Company was inevitably and menacingly involved. With two pictures still owing them before she was totally free, her marrying at all was bad enough for her image of sexual availability, but to marry me in my situation was disaster.

He sighed. ‘Artr, I hopin’ very much you not goin’ to make some terrible mistake with the Committee.’

I had every reason to think he would carry back to the Committee whatever I said, so I could only shrug and mutter something about doing what I thought was right.

He came wide awake now, watching for my reaction. ‘I know these congressmen very well, Artr, we are good friends. They are not bad men, they can be reasonable. I believe personally, Artr, that in your case they would take you privately in executive session, you understand? No necessity to be in public at all, I can arrange this if you tell me.’

In the code of the hour this meant that in exchange for ‘clearing’ myself by naming names and engaging in the formula of obeisance to the Committee, such as publicly thanking the members for helping me find my way back to America, I would be questioned in camera, spared an open hearing.

‘I’m against the Committee, Spyros. How can I come out and thank them for anything?’

Mixed into my response I heard ‘Socrates,’ and when I finished he said, ‘You must read this man’s book.’

“Socrates! Spyros, Socrates was condemned by the same kind of committee .  .  . .?

“Yes, but he had the courage to say what he thinks, Artr.’

For a moment this had me puzzles, until I realized  that he meant I should use the hearing to declare my differences with the left and the liberals, an ‘attack’ on my part that would take the sting out of my caving in to the Committee. It was more or less what Odets had been beguiled into doing, and something he never ceased regretting to he last day of his life.

‘I don’t need a congressional committee to give me a platform to attack the left, Spyros, I can do that on my own time.’ Privately I thanked my stars that I worked in the theater, where there was no blacklist; a as a film writer, I would now be kissing my career goodbye.

Getting up with his finger pointed to the ceiling, he tried to seem propelled by burning conviction, but repetition, I judged, had emptied his speech of real feeling. “Stalin’, he began, ‘crucified the Grik pipple, Artr. I know what I’m talking about! The Grik Communist Party made civil war, torture, and shootin’ pipple.’

.  .  .  And he poured out a knowledgeable capsulized  history of the post-war Greek political catastrophe between the right and the left, naturally with all of the blame on the latter and all of the good with the former. But even if I had known or been able to acknowledge the truth of the left’s brutality at the time, it would not have changed what I saw as the issue in 1956, and that was the manifestly anti-democratic contempt for basic American rights on the part of the Committee, something impossible to support.

“It’s out of the question, Spyros, I can’t do it. I don’t like those people.

How the rage hit me or what exactly triggered it I could never recall later, but in his persistence I felt myself cornered, it was as though he was trying to exercise control over my work, and it was intolerable. I got off only a sentence or two, but he quickly caught the idea and held up both his hands and went to his coat, which was lying over the back of a chair, and incredibly enough, I was sure I heard him mutter, ‘You are Socrates.’ He embraced Marilyn again ,but now with real sadness, and I walked him out to the elevator. By the time it arrived he was his earlier sleepy self, and his last glance towards me as he disappeared behind the closing door was forgetful, as though I was a complete stranger he had met in the building corridor, for he was not a man to waste emotions.

Marilyn was sipping scotch when I got back, in a mood of uncertainty; I felt he had moved her, not by his argument but by his feeling, for in some crazy way he did care about her. A few years later, Skouras would invite her to sit at the main table when Nikita Khrushchev visited the studio, presenting her to him as a great star. The Soviet chairman was very obviously smitten with her, and she in turn like him for his plainness. Spyros then declaimed, for the thousandth time, the epic story of how he and his brother had arrived in America with a few carpets on their backs as their only capital  and now he was president of Twentieth Century Fox, such was the reality of opportunity in America. Khrushchev got up and countered that he was the son of a poor coal miner and was now the headman of the whole Soviet Union. Marilyn thought that a fantastic reply; like her, Khrushchev was odd man out.