Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. – Luis Buñuel

Otto. He had been pissed with me since Oscar night, when he and Electro-Voice won a Technical Achievement Award for the 642 Cardiline shotgun microphone. At Sardi’s afterwards, I told the table that Otto and I had developed the mic more than ten years earlier, that it was nothing compared to the stuff we were using today, “in the real world.”

“Pay no attention to him, he’s drunk,” said Otto. “The real world, my ass. You wouldn’t recognise reality if it shit in your shoes.”

“Tell them, Otto, tell them about the Momo gig.” Momo was Sam Giancana, who they later killed in his basement kitchen while he was frying sausages. With peppers. Just days before he was to testify about CIA links before a Senate committee. Seven times in the head and neck, including one to the mouth. Classic mob execution.

Otto looked at me like he was going to smash his glass in my face.

“Look,” I said, laughing. “There’s Frank. Tell them about the time we miked his confessional. Tell them about the time we bugged Hoover’s toilet party.”

He kicked me, hard, under the table. I grabbed my drink and limped away, headed straight for Sinatra, grinning like a loon.

“Hey, Frankie.”

Bent down and whispered in his ear, eyes on Otto: “You smell like a daffodil.”

Frank’s head spins, eyes flash.

Otto covers his eyes, thinking I’ve spilt everything.

A non-physical barrier prevents the guests from leaving. Only the colonel notices. The women talk among themselves. They grow restless. The colonel watches.

“What a night, “says one of the women. “I feel dreadful.”

“Can we leave?” says another.

“Of course,” says the hostess.

“Let’s go freshen up first.”

The colonel whispers to Dr. Aranda, “I’ll wager they can’t leave.”

The two men watch the women closely. Sure enough, the women stay in the room. The colonel claps his hands and clears his throat. “After last night’s party,” he says to the group, “none of us has made the slightest effort to go home. Why? Was it normal for us to spend the night in this room, violating the most basic precepts of good etiquette? We turned this room into a gypsy campground.”

“I find it very original,” says Alicia de Roc, Alberto’s much younger wife. “I love when things deviate from the routine.”

“Come now, gentlemen,” says Gomez with a dismissive wave of his fat hand. “There’s no need to blow things out of proportion. We were all under the spell of the music, the banter and the high spirits. It is hardly surprising.”

Carlos’s curiosity is piqued. He approaches Lucia, the hostess, and asks, “Why did you order the butler to serve breakfast in the music room and not in the dining room?”

Lucia has no answer.

Blanca leaps from her chair. “The children. I’ve left them at home all alone. What was I thinking? I must go at once.”

Before she can leave, Julio enters with the breakfast cart, blocking the door, and everyone starts to eat. Lucia orders Julio to return to the kitchen to get more cutlery, but something happens when he tries to leave the room – he is mysteriously stopped at the door, unable to exit.

Lucia does not understand his refusal to carry out her orders and asks if he feels well. Then she sees Blanca crying in the corner. Carlos, too, notices Blanca’s crying and Julio’s odd behaviour.

“It’s true, then,” he says to himself, “since last night, no one has been able to leave the music room.”

Hours pass. Then days? The food has begun to rot.

“Oh, my hands!” says Rita. “They are like dead twigs!”

The guests relieve themselves in the Chinese vases that fill a closet. There is a painting of a virgin and child on the door.

Ana starts to scream hysterically. Sergio’s health worsens. He slips into a coma.

“I just don’t get it,” says Raul. “There has to be a solution. We haven’t all gone crazy, have we?”

Alberto tells them to keep their heads. Raul blames Edmundo. Letitia slaps Raul. Sergio regains consciousness, but is close to death.

“I’m happy,” he whispers to Carlos, “that I won’t have to witness the extermination.”

Later, Aranda and the colonel will hide the corpse in a closet. There is a painting of an exterminating angel on its door. Eduardo and Beatriz, a young couple in love, are already hiding inside. The doctor and the colonel lay down the body, stand up and look pensive as they hear the lovers’ conversation. First, Edouardo, who says, “This is where the sea flows in.”

“I can't,” whispers Beatriz.

“Lower... There, already… the rictus... It's horrible!”

Beatriz responds passionately, “My love!”

Edouardo: “My death! Oh, my refuge!”

The doctor and the colonel look at each other in silence. The colonel closes the door.

Otto was driving a Veritas Meteor convertible, this was just after the war, he was pie-eyed, and no, your mother was not in the car. According to the military police report, there was a young woman in the passenger seat, a German, unidentified, who went through the windshield. According to Otto, however, she had never been in the car. He swore he had heard gunshots. He was convinced someone shot out the tires. “I don’t know who,” he screamed down the telephone from his hospital bed. “Probably the Russians. Or the Freemasons. Or the fucking Russian Freemasons.”

Earlier, before the accident, right after dessert, Otto had said, “You'll have to forgive me. It's late and I'm tired.”

“Late?” said your mother. “This is the most intimate and pleasant hour of the whole evening.”

“Time to turn in, Lydia. Early flight.”

“Just five minutes.”

He went to get the car and your mother said, “There’s no way in hell I’m getting in that thing with him.” This less than two minutes before his car crashed into the largest oak tree in the city. We were still on the hotel terrace, drinking post-prandial schnapps with Isaiah Berlin and Henry Murray, shooing away the ravens competing for table scraps, arguing about Germany, the German character, etc. Murray thought the country was suffering from a collective Icarus complex and could be cured by lacrosse and baseball, which made your mother click her teeth and snort. “The German people,” he had said earlier, while still more or less sober, “should be made to understand that the world regarded them as unwitting and unhappy victims of instinctual forces.” Your mother said, “The world should have bombed them back to the Middle Ages”. Sir Isaiah Hedgehog came back with this: “I don’t wish to ‘crow”’, with his usual air quotes, “but ravens are rooted in Germanic and Norse mythology, most notably as Odin’s two raven companions, Huginn, which means thought, and Muninn, which means memory. Ravens are also the Teutons’ ominous beasts of battle, representatives of death and war, and in folklore, mediators between worlds, and in art, the embodiment of prophecy, death, and the supernatural. But one mustn’t forget that raven is also a verb – to raven, to hunt voraciously for prey. To devour ‘ravenously’.”

“Raven is not a German verb,” said your mother.

“Yes, dear, true. But kuckucken or kucksen is, derived from the kuckuck, the cuckoo, and it means ‘to cuckoo’, to call like a cuckoo, or ‘to peek’ or ‘to look quickly.’ And krähe, ‘cro'w’, becomes the verb krähen, ‘to crow’.

“The crow of a rooster, not a crow. What is the point of all this nonsense, Isaiah?”

The Hedgehog looked flustered. “And then there is the miraculous woodpecker, the ‘specht’ which is almost ‘sprecht’, the second person plural form of the verb ‘sprechen’, which means ‘to speak’ or ‘you all speak’.

Lydia shook her head. “And your point?”

“Here is ‘my point’, Lydia,” Berlin said, and then went blank, his quoting fingers still curled in the air. Then, at least five long seconds later, to no one, “Why don’t woodpeckers get headaches?”

“What?”

“They hammer their heads into trees twelve thousand times a day. Fifteen miles an hour. Why aren’t they perpetually concussed? Why don’t their retinas detach? Why don’t their brains slam against the sides of their skulls?”

“They’re turning out the lights.”

“The moment has come to decide.”

“I’ve only got two bottles left.”

“Lydia’s staying, Otto.” I remember saying something like this to him as he overrevved the engine. There was no girl next to him in the car. “We haven’t finished dinner.”

“Your loss, losers, see you in the free world.” And off he raced, fishtailing down the boulevard.

He didn’t get far. Barely thirty seconds and half a block away. We heard the crash. The car was concertinaed and he was in a coma for a week, on the edge of death, his knees crushed and his back, neck and right arm – his painting arm – fractured. According to the report, he was “under the influence of alcohol”, but there is no mention of this in any other file.

He was a mess. Two months later, he forced us to re-enact the accident using a commandeered Ford Taunus and two requisitioned Arriflex 35s. He had a sharpshooter shoot out the front tires. The crew and cast were drawn from the Education Division. We strapped another German girl into the passenger seat. She was scared out of her wits. The man behind the wheel was a Canadian poet, I forget his name, a member of the Strategic Bombing Survey. He was injured, not seriously, but badly enough to be sent home.

Otto’s arm was partially paralysed. “I can’t hold a brush,” he said. “I can’t paint. I can barely feed myself. I can barely wipe my ass.”

There was a problem with his dosage that took years to correct. He did not trust anyone. He was “surrounded by enemies.” He fought hard with the generals, especially Clay. He wanted Germany to be turned into a potato field. “Reduce them to peasantry, the whole buggerish lot. Strip away all industry and devolve the fucking country to a pre-Industrial Revolution bogwater. That is what they deserve for this nonsense.” That was what he called the war — all wars, all conflict, all stratagem and subterfuge — “this nonsense.”

“We all have enemies, Otto,” I said.

“This is different. Even the enemies of my enemies are my enemies.”

“We are your friends,” I said.

“You are my family. You are my son.”

“I am like a son.”

“I am your father.”

I never responded when he said this. He was a good man, and he had done many great things.

“It was Sokolovsky,” he told me. “I know it.”

Marshall Sokolovsky commanded the Soviet offensive on the Central Front and was the only front-line general in the group. The other council members, Generals Clay, Robertson, Douglas and Noiret, were glorified desk clerks who had never seen action. Sokolovsky was also the youngest, and, according to your mother, the only one even remotely attractive. He was sharp-eyed and bright, with piercing eyes and a disarming smile.

Clay, on the other hand, was tight-assed dick with a smirk, tiresome but tireless, fueled by paperwork, cigarettes and coffee, as sharp-witted as the Marshall but short-fused and dangerous. He threw tantrums when he did not get what he liked. Kaiser Clay, we called him, the most powerful American in Europe. Berlin’s Father, the King of Bizonia. He had James Forrestal’s full support and did not have to run things past State.

Disarming smile. The sort of thing you read in romance novels. I hadn’t been in such torment since the train to Nice went off the tracks.

“You’ve gone off the tracks before? How interesting.”

“You should see yourself in a mirror.”

“I’m confused.”

“What’s going on here?”

“I don’t know how we got to this point, but there’s a limit to everything.”

Dyslexia, my eye. Let me spell it out for you: anybody can make history, but only a great man can write it. Sir Isaiah Hedgehog wrote this – quoting Wilde, who had said it fifty years before, in between shots of absinthe and laudanum – in one of the four hundred million memos the beknighted lawn ornament sent me during the three decades of our lopsided correspondence. In another: “Your labours for, with, and about the immortal figure that you now know better than anyone, assure you a place not merely in heaven (on which I am a poor authority) but on earth, too.” Foxy old dweeb. But that was when?

Otto taught me many things. He opened my eyes. But by the end, he was raving like a lunatic, spitting and cursing, confessing to all manner of sins and crimes, braying at the moon, challenging the stars.

“The poor should be housed in public parks,” he told me once. “Like a petting zoo. People can bring their children, and the children can feed them. Have their picture taken with them. Shiver at their terrible stories.”

“You’re my friend,” he said at the hospital, a few hours later. “But I’m going to tell you something. You don’t have my eyes. You don’t have my hair. My wit. My charm. My mind. You’re not my son. You will never be my son.”

“It is not what we say and think and do and know that is important,” Berlin used to say, “but what we don’t say, what we don’t think, what we don’t do, what we don’t know.”

Robert “Bob” Murphy, third from right, a Vatican man, the former US Ambassador to Vichy. Next to him, Henry Murray, no relation to Vatican Bob, a Herman Melville expert – the Herman Melville expert – head of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, a lieutenant colonel in the OSS. He’s the guy who would later build the Unabomber. Next to him, Kaiser Clay’s economic adviser, Brigadier-General Draper, another Dillon Read associate of James Forrestal. Leni Riefenstahl with her back to the camera. Otto half-hidden under the umbrella. Taken four or five days before his accident. I’m the gimcrack drunk in the floppy hat next to him. With my eyes closed. The others I don’t recognise.

The day, though, cold and dark under damp Teutonic skies, seared forever into the deepest grooves of my failing cortices. Lydia had been to the doctor that morning – a German with a British accent in a bombed-out building in the American section. We ate lunch after in a café below his office, spätzel and grey meat with our own bottle of wine. Berlin came along uninvited, the same pale, quavering blankness, too drunk to realise he wasn’t following the conversation, a softened trowel nodding and smirking between sips from a flask of commissary gin.

I’m not sure why I wrote “softened trowel”.

“We’ll take some time off,” I said, ignoring the Hedgehog and taking her hand. She smiled. “We’ll try again.” She shook her head. “We’ll get past this.” She lit a cigarette, drained her glass. What were we, all of twenty-four? Not Berlin, he was thirty-five. Maybe older.

Spontaneous, the doctor had said. He couldn’t tell us how or why. “Has she had a fall?” “No.” “Infection? Fever?” I shook my head. “No trauma whatsoever?” “Nothing since the hostilities ended. That I know of at least.” The hostilities. That was the word we used back then.

“Well then.”

Well then. And that was the end of it. Not another word. A decade later, just before you, I learned she’d had it terminated by the same doctor earlier that afternoon.

The other man who made his mark in those early days was Shipwreck Kelly, the flagpole sitter. He knew how to promote better than anyone in the business. He would hit a town with his handler, an old friend of mine from the neighbourhood, and within twenty-four hours, he would have front-page coverage in every newspaper.

He was dedicated to his craft. He saw himself as the descendant of the great pole sitters of the Middle Ages, the saints who sat on pillars. Unlike them, of course, he still ate – drank, rather. He'd have a pail of broth hoisted up on a rope. Never solids, of course. A discrete funnel attached to a long tube carried his liquid waste down the pole.

He, Luis, and Karl were in a hotel ten minutes up the road in Arsuz when Shipwreck's appendix burst and he had to be airlifted to the US military base near Ankara, where he died, two days later, misdiagnosed – his guts leaking bile and his peritoneal cavity filled with pus. The army doctor thought it was food poisoning. It was a terrible setback for the project. We tried to keep things going by finding a replacement, but nobody local was suitable. The problem was language, but also mentality. Turks generally are not self-conscious; they’re too focused on the world around them. This is true of most former empire builders. Predictably, Lydia and Luis started squabbling, and he left in a huff. We hung around for another few days, scouting locations, planning shots, training a second unit, interviewing extras – we even had a Saint Simon dummy made – till word came back that with Luis out and Shipwreck dead, further funding would not be forthcoming. Lydia jumped a troop transport to Marseilles, then a flight to Tokyo; Karl returned to Los Angeles. I had the Streamline shipped back to New Jersey – we were based out of the Meadowlands studios at the time – and, after a few days on the beach and in the bars and brothels of Arsuz, I went home, pushed the episode out of my head, focused on WHAM-O, and didn't give Buñuel and his crackpot scripts another thought.

Then, on July 21, 1963, I got a person-to-person call from him. He was in Mexico. “Qué hay?” I asked, surprised to hear his singsong Castellano coming through the receiver. Luis hated telephones, and if he did have to use them, he would always call collect. It wasn't that he was cheap; he could be extravagantly generous. But he sought acceptance, he wanted people to choose him. Forcing his opinions on someone was anathema to him. This was why he always refused to participate in our television projects. The cinema, to his way of thinking, was different; you lined up, purchased a ticket, entered the room, and whether you kept your eyes and ears open till the end or fell asleep after ten minutes or left in a rage after twenty didn't matter: you had chosen to be there – you had paid to be there. For Luis, as with all psychoanalytically driven individuals, paying was key; money was a symbol of one's desire to connect – with, in his case, the filmmaker – to listen to what he had to say, to hear him out.

“Put your house in order,” he said. “I've got something.”

I could hear the excitement in his voice and tried not to get excited myself. One thing you had to say about Luis, he was a great pitchman. He could sell just about anything.

“For me?”

“For you and your fascista wife and the bully gillipollas you work for.”

I could never figure out Luis’s sexuality – his female characters were always so perverse – but I don’t think he had a political bone in his body. He hadn't fled Franco, Paris just offered more, and no one was making films in Spain at the time. Even France, where he had had considerable success, was hard for him, and the US was a closed shop – he would never have survived in a studio environment anyway, which is why he, like Welles and Eisenstein before, was working in Mexico.

“Dime, mi amigo,” I said. “Drop the dime.”

“Remember Simon?”

“Simon says?”

“Simon the Stylite. We start shooting next week. Simón del desierto.”

“Congratulations. Who?”

“Who else? You who. Lydia too. Freund three, Otto four. Leni five if she's available.”

“Who’s the money?”

“Ni puta idea. Russian, maybe. I don’t ask, they don’t tell.”

“Who's your Simón?”

“Claudio Brook. Es perfecto.”

I knew Brook. We'd worked together on The Wonderful Country in 1959. He was a solid guy, but no Shipwreck. I wasn’t sure he could carry the weight.

“Is he even Christian?” I asked.

“Who cares?” Luis never bought our theories. “Put your house in order. You still have the camping car?”

“Long gone, and I've got no juice in Turkey anymore,” I said, which was true. Not since Papandreou had had been made head of the economics department at Berkeley. This would change again, of course, under Johnson and with Cyprus, but Turks would never be serviceable, and, for the time being, the country itself was off-limits.

“Forget Turkey,” said Luis. “Mexico. Cheap labour, buenos technicos, good karma. The Indians use the same word for working and dancing. Es perfecto.”

We had initially built the project around Shipwreck, the idea being that he could bounce it into the real world in a way no actor could. Shipwreck was perfect. Like so many of the best, he was mindblind – incapable of visualising mindstates – and thus shut off from the wants, beliefs, and intents that drive other people's behaviour. He couldn't make sense of anything and would believe whatever you told him. On the flight over, when the plane was above the clouds, he asked me: “So this is where God lives? How come I can't see him?” This, years before the web, completely self-developed, a perfectly realised world of constant confusion, one blunder after another, a total lack of common sense.

And then, nada. A busted appendix.

He was the real thing, a true believer, a religious athlete. He once stood on his head for thirteen hours eating donuts dunked in coffee. He would bow so deeply in worship that his forehead touched the ground. Once I tried to count the number of times he bowed; I got as far as fourteen hundred and sixty-four and then desisted from sheer weariness, and still Shipwreck kept bowing. No wonder his fucking guts blew up.

The idea was we would run it as a road show, the Streamline was totally outfitted. Put the ladder up, let people climb up to him, ask him questions, clutch at his cloak. Not on a flagpole; on a pillar, chained to the top of a sixty-foot tower, doing penance, trying to get closer to God, moaning about his sins, growing in grace as he atoned for our wickedness. The pillar would be on a flatbed truck so we could move it around without having to take Shipwreck down – keep him up on his holy perch through wind, rain, and sun, drive him right into the middle of thunderstorms and hailstorms, the eyes of hurricanes. We'd put a balustrade around the top of the pillar so he wouldn't pitch off when he slept. We didn't want him to die falling off the damn thing; we wanted him to die, but up there, next to god. Strength to strength towards the ultimate goal. We'd use the helicopter to get in close. The idea was he would eventually die up there and we would send somebody up, a local journalist first, probably, then the helicopter crew, and the world would see him dead, lying up there on his perch covered with hair, a ball of wool and ulcers, a black cloud of swarming maggots and flies and gnats. And we’d tack on hours of biography – Shipwreck’s life story – a television obituary such as had never been seen before. Also extensive background on the Stylites, Mesopotamia, ancient Syria, modern-day Turkey, Middle East politics and religion, constant reporting from abroad, conversations with network correspondents, and in-depth, up-close-and-personal probing by academics, clerics and psychologists.

But then Shipwreck upped and died on us before we even finished pre-production.

Paranoids, according to Henry Murray – this from the post-war Germany report that he presented to FDR – cannot be treated successfully if they are not impressed, consciously or unconsciously, by the ability, knowledge, wisdom, or perhaps mere magnetic force, of the physician. “The indwelling burning hunger of the paranoid is for recognition, power and glory – praise from those he respects. This hunger should be appeased as soon as possible, so that the paranoid thinks to himself: ‘The great man appreciates me. Together we can face the world.’ It is as if he thought: ‘He is God the Father and I am his chosen son. Special efforts must sometimes be made to achieve this end, since paranoids, being full of scorn, are not easy to impress.”

“It is not what we say and think and do and know that is important,” Berlin used to say, “but what we don’t say, what we don’t think, what we don’t do, what we don’t know.”

These men. We were all there at one time or another, the happy few. The house intellectuals, the court jesters, the flunkey monkeys, the effete corps, the cold war lukewarm weekend warriors. We shrink-wrapped the best minds of an entire generation. Coldcutted and unabombed them all.

You'll have to forgive me. It's late, and I'm tired.

Exactly. We're all tired.

It's very late, and we must be going.

Let's go.

The group is suddenly able to leave.

Outside, too, the crowd and the police find themselves able to move freely.

But later, after the Te Deum in the cathedral, where the entrapped have gone to give thanks for their release, the clergy are stopped at the vestry door, unable to exit. They turn and see that the congregation cannot leave either.

A flag is flying from the top of its entrance. Shots and machine guns are heard. Helmeted policemen are shooting into the crowd. Others on horseback with truncheons beat back the rioters.

People fall, women shout.

A flock of sheep advances toward the cathedral. The first one enters as the following words appear on the screen:

Thanks for reading. My apologies to El ángel exterminador, its authors, Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, and the unpublished play by José Bergamin that inspired them. I also apologise to the memory and descendants of Shipwreck Kelly, Leni Riefenstahl, Isaiah Berlin, Henry Murray, Lucius Dubignon Clay, Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and everyone and thing else mentioned, including these poor sheep, one of which was roasted by the entrapped guests.

Luis Buñuel, El ángel exterminador, 1962.

Apologies, too, for switching from Sunday to Thursday without warning. Hope that’s okay with everyone?