The conversation was effervescent to the point of delirium. Beller and I soon exhausted our store of Jewish jokes. Then we turned to obscene jokes, to which Bercq contributed his share. Jean-Jacques, our resident buffoon, was strangely quiet. Another contingent, just arrived from Paris, put in an appearance around 2 AM: Henry Lange in the company of friends , and actor Michel Subor, the Police Inspector in "Belle Au Bois" .
Daniel Ghelin, who is rarely sober anyway, quickly became stinking drunk.With his compulsive guzzling his jokes became stupider, coarser, and more directly offensive to the people who were the butts of his ridicule. The ambience had become oppressive. On the other side of the room piles of cherry tartes were stacked on a table, waiting to be served as our dessert. As Georges Beller stood up I asked him if he could bring one back for me when he returned. Georges was already drunk. He left the room then returned. Stopping by the table he picked up a tarte by its outer rim and, its contents dribbling over the floor, carried it across the room. Coming within striking distance of our table he threw the tarte more or less in my direction, scattering cherries, crust, jelly and fruit over everything and everyone, including Daniel Ghelin and his wife!
The whole production was in an uproar. Persisting in his farcical role, Georges Beller went through the motions of sitting down on a piece of tarte he'd dropped on his chair. Panic-sticken the old waitress ran over and began to pulled the chair away from him. Beller then began a mock battle with her to wrest control of the chair.
While he was doing this, Ghelin began smearing people's faces with his hands covered with the contents of the tarte, whose consistency did make it look as if they were covered with blood! The hi-jinks went on for another 20 minutes, after which things calmed down. I even managed to get my hands on a piece of pie. After bolting it down I stood up to leave, which I was allowed to do after shaking hands with about 15 people as one must do in France.
Entering the front room I discovered Anouk Ferjac sitting alone . She was bent double over a table, her silked reddish hair falling over her crossed arms, crying her heart out. Roger ran over with a bridge chair and we installed Anouk in the back courtyard. There for the next half-hour she literally cried on my shoulder .
Once she was in the mood for talking again I expressed the cautious opinion that there was not point in getting upset for the sake of a trashy movie. Anouk explained to me that she couldn't play her part unless she lived it. Then we returned to a table in the lobby where Roger had placed a teapot of vervaine tea. She drank it in thoughful silence.
In the interim the horseplay in the adjoining room had once again risen to a fever pitch. It was an uneasy lull before the storm.
It soon broke. Anouk's composure was shattered anew by the noise of breaking glasses and plates. Roger ran into the dining-room, while I stepped into the connecting doorway to see what was happening. Daniel Ghelin was in the open space before the dinner table, dancing around a heap of rubble he'd creating consisting of meat, watercress, glass and broken porcelain. Roger wasn't the least put out: it was all money in the bank. Ultimately Maya Films would pay him for all the damage, provided he lived so long. He started joking with Ghelin and even managed to get him to sit down.
"So" I said, turning to Anouk, "What do you think of your Ghelin now?"
" An amazing man - above all an amazing actor - Formidable .." a crashing plate - "vraiment formi -" ..Five, six plates, glasses, silverware crash to the floor. Four college-age tourists were at the bar. They rushed into the dining-room to see what is going on. Roger's wife was throwing a tantrum, Anouk reduced once again to hysterical sobbing. Later the next day Anouk told me that Daniel Ghelin always does something like that with every film he works in, a kind of trademark like Hitchcock's face.
Finally even Ghelin had worn himself out. Throughout the rest of the meal he sat mute and subdued. In any case it was almost over. The 4 tourists returned to the bar. Jean-Marie Bertrand, quartermaster for the production, offered to drive Anouk back to the mansion. The inventory of the damage revealed that Daniel Ghelin had smashed 17 plates and an comparable amount of glassware. Maya Films picked up the tab, cheerfully swallowing this added tax over and above his normal fee of a thousand dollars a day.
This was the evening on which Ortion and I got together to perform and record my improvised composition: concerto for Atomic Bomb and busted upright piano. ( Ortion, the sound man and exceptionally kind-hearted person, died in a tragic accident a few years later). The piano, regal in its ruin, stood in the parlour referred to as the "billiards room", a large dismal room holding a billiard table, hearth, and the aforesaid piano. Its walls are covered with century old hand-painted wallpaper, the brushwork of some reactionary and frustrated hack. He seems to have inflamed his imagination, no doubt already sufficiently enflamed, by portraying a sweeping tableau of all the major battles of France's wars in the first two-thirds of the 19th century.
Near the doorframe where hoardes of Russkies emerge to rid the Crimean Peninsula of the Turkish invader, Napolean struts under a tree, not any old tree I'm sure, but one whose name symbolizes his conquering might. To the left Austrians are perishing in flame and powder. Over on the other side of the room Zoauves drink themselves blind in the shadow of a great cannon. Englishmen, Germans, Musselmans, Frenchies fighting, screaming, killing and dying like flies. ( The fly simile is intended to cover all these activities.)
Atop a hill, indifferent to this fulsomely vulgar display squats a picturesque Oriental minaret encircled by tulip-filled gardens and wreathed in a glowing sunset. Portrayed below this idyllic scene from the Rubiyat the artist has given us still more gory murdering, soldiers with heads swathed in turbans, their haggard faces distorted by hate, chopping down the cream of Persia, their horses foundering in rivers of blood and gore.
I've tried to make my description better than the painting. The wallpaper renders the already cloying atmosphere of the room repulsive, not the least owing to the ambience of sickly charm the artist has shed over his tribute to French "esprit de corps". A sudden inspiration made me want to draw the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb in the mid-section of the back wall. High up to the left of the cloud I intended to add a tiny drawing of a plane flying off, the pilot picking his nose. The project would have been put into execution immediately had not Henri Lange explained that this wallpaper was worth lots of money as an antique and we were only renting the building for the duration of the filming. Ortion and I therefore got together for the recording session at around 11 PM
It turned into a musical free-for-all, what in more generous terms one might call a jam session: myself at the piano, Georges Beller on tenor recorder, Chauffard as barker of onmatopoetic sounds, Nathalie ( the Girl Friday) as can drummer, a lawyer, one of Henri's Parisian associates, who struck a bottle with a fork, and Ortion and Ughetto as sound men.
Jean-Jacques, who cannot stand to be upstaged and probably resented my ousting him from his throne at the piano, threw in a few yowls and left. The concerto took an hour; there were no retakes. Its highpoints included a prolonged solo by Chauffard, a recorder cadenza by Beller, and a piano episode of my own.
Sometime after midnight Ortion, Ughetto and I adjourned the session to go dig up Daniel Ghelin and invite him to join us. We eventually discovered him in the Hotel Golub, crocked to the gills and fast asleep in Jean-Pierre Bastid's bed . Ortion, Ughetto and myself physically hoisted him out of bed and carried him to his own room on the upper floor; I doubt we would have had to strength to do so had his room been on the upper floors. We were too tired to improvise the second movement of the concerto and I returned to the mansion and my bed.
Around 3 in the morning I was awakened by Michel Subor:
"Pussycat : where is Michel Martens?"
"I don't know. If he's not in the cot he sometimes uses here he's probably sleeping in his room at the hotel."
" I need a place to sleep. Ghelin has turned the hotel into a shambles. Not only me: the two girls ( Anouk Ferjac (Clara) and Sabine Sun (Anne) ) don't have anywhere to sleep."
"Use Michel's bed. He's away for the night. So is "Boeuf" ."
"All right". He closed the door to my room and I immediately fell back to sleep.
The next morning I learned what had happened. When Ghelin woke up to find himself alone in his bed, he concluded that his wife must be sleeping with another man. He staggered into the corridor, broke down the door of her room, dragged her out of bed and began slapping her around all over the hotel. ( Jacqueline had left only a few days earlier; but what is justice to people like that?)
The hotel was turned upside down; Golub called the police. That was when Subor, Anouk and Sabine came over and woke me up. Ghelin's wife wasn't hurt and didn't press charges. The police made a routine investigation and there were no serious repercussions for Maya Films. The only difference is that now there are always 3 policemen on the set. We put them to work, stopping the traffic for the village street scenes.
Ghelin arrived on the set that morning at around 10. Racous laughter all the way around. An hour later,following a few drinks with Sabine Sun at the Café Industriel , and Ghelin was ready to get down to work.
Daniel Ghelin finally bid good-bye to us on Tuesday, August 29. Shakesmundes, crew member and chauffer for the occasion, reported back to us that Ghelin blazed a trail of legend at every bar along the route from Ainay-le-Chateau to Normandy, where he is on contract for another film. As he slid into the backseat of his limousine, zipper open and legs spread wide, he blew kisses at the generous crowds of fans, well-wishers and, ( no doubt with real nostalgia), asylum inmates.
After returning I went to the terrace of the Café Industriel to sit at a table, drink a cassis and revise my notes on the history of the village. Jean-Pierre Bastid came by in his car, rollicking like an overflowing bathtub. He saw that I was writing, laughed, waved and drove on.
A few minutes later Jean-Claude Bercq and his Norwegian girl-friend Astride came onto the terrace and took an adjoining table. Bercq is built like a sports advertisement and thoroughly Americanized, something of a grown-up kid. Astride is tall and angular, with sparkling eyes and silvery hair. She speaks a good English and fair French, standard for the northern countries .
Bercq spent several years in the US, 18 months of it with the American army in the Korean War. I haven't got much to say to a professional cowboy, and he hasn't go much to say to a Yanqui vagabando , so Astride filled in the gap, talking to me about Norway. Then we just sat there for awhile, enjoying the good weather, glad that the producton of "Belle Au Bois" was just about over. From time to time a hospital inmate staggered down the street. Across the street from the Café stood Charles Goldstein, author/editor of L'Echo, regarding us with his usual inquisitive obstinacy and taking down shorthand in a tablet.
Because of the steep descent and the long shadow of the massive clock-tower, this central area of the village is always in the shade. Bicycles raced down the road, disappearing through the ancient clock tower. Jean-Claude was watching a pretty girl coming up the road. It was Anne-Marie, the waitress at the restaurant L'Escargot d'Or . She was dressed in a tight-fitting muslin dress covered with flower prints and green foliage. Her black hair fell away from her ears, covering her neck and dropping below her shoulders. As she walked she impulsively swept away her hair with a shake of the head, or pushed it away with her right hand.
I waved to her. She returned a smile radiant enough to crack a chandelier. I invited her to sit down with us and brought her a mint soda. She sat there politely thinking, her thoughts very far away in some distant place. From the way her hands stayed crossed on her lap, one might think she was sitting at attention in a classroom.
For the hundreth time I was able to confirm how strikingly beautiful she was: skin deathly pale, almost waxen; face impassive like a marble wall, inclining slightly inward ( a genetic characteristic of the region) , lending her an air of haughtiness that contrasted markedly with a sensitive and docile nature; eyes very large, almost distended, vivid; slender, neither athletic nor quite spindly. It led one to surmise that she was malnourished. Her arms, stiff bent ashen sticks, extended from her short sleeves to the lap of her green dress. Altogether dress , waxen pallor and blushing lips gave her an allure of exotic sensuality, while her posture gave the impression of a severely constrained child . Jean-Claude was speaking in English for our benefit:
" I really wish I could do something for that kid." He'd learned that Anne-Marie worked from dawn to dusk at the hotel and restaurant of the Escargot d'Or whose owner had an unsavory reputation:
" He beats her! I tell you, he's a pimp! She lives a dozen kilometers outside the village and comes in every morning by bicycle. She has to do everything in his hotel: sweeping, changing the beds, waitressing in his crummy restaurant. God I wish she'd get out of this hole and come to Paris!" He looked her up and down: " Look at that! That girl really makes you want to cry!" Bercq became so excited that he pulled his chair up close to hers and began questioning her in French:
" Anne-Marie: how old are you?"
" Eighteen"
" Does that man at the hotel beat you?"
" Just once."
"That's all?"
" Yes. Just once." I suggested to Bercq that he might just possibly be embarrasing her.
" Look Anne-Marie, I'm not asking you these questions to embarrass you. I just want to see if I can help. You do understand that, don't you?"
" Yes". Her reply had the character of a formality,
" Doesn't he beat you?"
" Only once."
" Can't you find some other work around here?"
" Perhaps. But I have a three year contract with the hotel."
" You see that?" Bercq said, turning to me , "They've got her screwed!" Then, as if a new idea had just struck him, he turned back again to her and asked:
" Say, Anne-Marie: wouldn't you like to get out of here? What if you had the chance to come to Paris?" Then as an aside to us in English: " This girl really gets to me ! "
" Yes I would like to leave. But I don't know anyone."
" Look Anne-Marie, here's my address. When you come to Paris you can stay at my place. A week, two weeks, a month, until you get set up." Bercq wrote out his address: "This girl has to be watched. She can't just come to Paris all alone by herself. She'll fall in with the wrong crowd, go with some guy who'll hurt her... I can tell. Look at her! She's weak!"
Her gave her his address and asked for hers. She started to write down the address of the hotel, but he asked for her home address : "You can't take chances with that bastard!"
We sit around in silence, each with our own thoughts. Perhaps Anne-Marie has a boyfriend in the village, and is wondering if she should leave him for a new life in Paris. She may leave the next week; she might never leave... who knows? Perhaps, strangely enough, she loves this little village, yet it is difficult to see how anything could keep her here indefinitely. There are many children in Ainay-le-Chateau, but no young people above eighteen. There is nothing here for a young woman. All the same the decision must be difficult.
She may just take Jean-Claude Bercq up on his proposal. He seemed sincere enough. The tourists who pass through Ainay often stay at the Hotel. Bercq may be the first to offer her the chance she needs.
Perhaps we were witnessing the turning point in a young woman's life.