Close-Up. Len Deighton

wasn’t so admiring. ‘All writers are supposed to use Gate Three.’

      I smiled to both of them and kept walking.

      ‘You think Olivier for best actor?’ Koolman called.

      ‘And Shakespeare will get “story and screenplay”.’

      The nine A.M. newscast gave the nominations as I’d predicted: Dan Dailey, Clifton Webb, Lew Ayres and Montgomery Clift. Seven weeks later Olivier got his Oscar. Leo Koolman was heard to describe me as psychic but he didn’t come offering me a seer’s job. Perhaps because Shakespeare lost out to John Huston.

      Olivier was an easy guess. The previous year – in a tussle with Colman, Peck, Garfield, Powell and Redgrave – he might have been given a tougher run for his money but there was a growing feeling that Hollywood had been kissing its own backside for too long. Hamlet was a fine opportunity to break the tradition that only US productions got the award.

      In spite of their accents, at least these limeys spoke some kind of English, and no one could say that the bard was a commie. The ‘best actor’ was foreign, but at least he was a ‘sir’ with three previous nominations behind him. It was on this ripple of reckless xenophilia that Leo Koolman launched Marshall Stone to his place in cinema history.

      News of neither my genius nor my prescience had spread to script departments of the other studios. Whether I was blacklisted or merely redundant I never found out, but after nearly three months of explaining my screen credits and the ones that got away, I nursed my old Ford back to New York in easy stages.

      I hadn’t liked New York in 1944 and I didn’t like it all over again in 1949. I wrote indifferent advertising in the copy department of a Madison Avenue agency for three months until my air conditioner went out of action in late August. A decision I had been deferring for several weeks was made easier when the agency merged and I was the ‘last in’ that a management agreement had promised would be ‘first out’.

      It was only after I got back to London that my luck changed. I wrote a biography – Stanislavsky: A Man and His Method. It was a labour of love financed by a job as a bartender. It was a book-club selection. I followed it the following year with a history of Italian opera that was little more than a compendious reference book. Then, after two years hard work, I had a lucky success with my biography of Caruso. Soft-cover rights enabled me to pay off the mortgage on my small house in Islington, and serial rights put something into the bank and got me a contract as entertainment editor on a posh Sunday newspaper.

      Many many years ago, my wife had been married to Marshall Stone. We met at a party not long after her divorce. She recognized my face from my days in Hollywood, and three years later a middle-aged author had breakfast in bed with a brunette lawyer before walking round the corner to be married.

      So the three articles I did for the paper: ‘Cinema tomorrow, overture or finale?’ perhaps over-emphasized the importance of Marshall Stone’s contribution to the post-war history of the cinema.

      Several times I’d mentioned to my publisher the idea of doing a book about the superstar phenomenon. He insisted that only Stone’s life had all the ingredients such a book needed: the overnight fame, the ostentatious wealth, the immense talent evident and so sadly squandered. The fact of having done that first Stone script and of being married to his one-time wife gave me all the cards. And yet it also made the task impossible. To write about the other man is difficult enough but when that man is Marshall Stone…

      There had been times when I wondered if our two daughters – six- and eight-year-olds – would grow up disappointed at a father who had so nearly been Marshall Stone, but one meeting with the grown-up son of Stone and Mary dispensed with that one.

      I still would not have gone ahead if Mary hadn’t encouraged me. Primarily I was keen on the project because I believed Stone to be a rare talent. It was only after I began work on the book that I discovered other motives within myself. I wanted to revisit the world I’d walked out of, that sunny day on the Koolman lot. And to some extent I wanted to know more about the life that my wife had exchanged for mine.

      There was no mistaking the address the film company had given me. Pantechnicons, generators, a couple of limousines with dozing chauffeurs left no doubt that this was where Stool Pigeon was being shot. Edgar Nicolson – the producer – had leased this condemned house in Notting Hill Gate for five months at fifty pounds per week. It was a high rent for a derelict London slum but by using the lower half of it as production offices and building his sets floor by floor as they were needed he could save the cost of going into a studio. Offices, projection theatre, workshops, recording facilities and space to do the same film in one of the big studios would have cost him ten times the money. However, the big cars and luxury dressing-rooms were still mandatory. The industry had learned how to tighten its belt, but it still had quite a gut.

      These all-location films were more relaxed than studio productions. There was an atmosphere of goodwill and informality among the crews. The big studios had too many elderly technicians watching the clock so that they could rush back to their semi-detached around the corner. These location crews were the industry’s Foreign Legion. Most of them had spent their lives travelling from unit to unit. They drank, screwed and gambled like legionnaires too. In the hallway one of them asked me for a light. He was a fuzzy-haired man in denims. I remembered him from a decade ago when I had been on my very first assignment for the newspaper. He’d been a twentieth assistant director then: now perhaps he was eighteenth. I remembered him telling me what was wrong with Godard and Fellini in exact and lucid detail. He was right but it hadn’t done him much good. Did he still dream of becoming a director, and did he still believe that this was the way to do it?

      He said, ‘And next week Richard is going to do the explosions right there in the garden.’

      ‘That should give the neighbours something to talk about.’ Two prop men and some grips pushed past us with a plaster section of a battle-scarred Buddha.

      We watched them huffing and puffing up the stairs. He said, ‘The bangs: yeah, but we’ve got permission. Dick Preston is quite a character.’

      Richard Preston was a director from TV. Someone at Koolman International had decided that, since youngsters made up the bulk of the audience, kids should make the movies. As a business philosophy it would hand Disney to the adolescents and the computer industry to the computers.

      ‘They’re shooting on the roof today, Mr Anson. Wait on the top landing if the red light’s on.’ He took a call-sheet from his pocket. ‘You’ve got Suzy Delft doing shot number 174,’ he grinned, ‘for the fifteenth time.’

      ‘It’s her first day on the set?’

      ‘I think it’s her first day anywhere.’

      ‘Is she going to be all right?’

      He grinned. ‘The greatest little piece in the business, and for half a page and a photo in your rag – she’d do it!’

      ‘Where’s the big man?’

      ‘Marshall Stone – he’s gone to the Test Match.’

      ‘He’s on the call-sheet.’

      ‘Yeah! Fixed it with the director. After the girl’s done, there are a couple of pick-up shots with Jap soldiers. We’ll finish early. It’s a slack day.’

      ‘Where’s publicity?’

      ‘Next landing, he’s in there, no one with him.’

      ‘Ta.’

      The unit publicist had found a nice little office. On a cork board behind him there were a dozen stills pinned up in sequence. On another wall there were the Press clippings that had so far appeared. Mostly they were in the fan mags and trade journals: about one hundred column inches in all. The biggest of the clippings included a photo of Marshall Stone relaxing in a canvas chair. One cowboy boot was flung carelessly over the arm of it and the stills man had angled the shot to include the star’s name stencilled on its canvas back. Stone was smiling a wry compulsive grin that made