REMEMBERING

But again this preference may come from having begun my fishing the way I did, the prejudice we all have for the things we did first, that “I don’t know but I think I’d rather go after them over dogs the way we used to.”  Opinions of this kind are memories and memories of early days seem true.  The earlier these memories may be the truer they seem and not only the earlier in time but rather anything one remembers of the start of an experience.

Henry Green -- Pack My Bag (1940)

I woke up extremely late next morning with a definite feeling of having lived through a key experience in my life.  My only trouble was not being able to remember it.

Gavin Lambert – Inside Daisy Clover (1963)

CHARACTER BUILDING

When he came to watch me work, Wade said it was amazing because you couldn’t tell where instinct left off and technique began.  I couldn’t either, and Alex said it didn’t matter.  Wade thinks Alex has a very commonplace mind, which is the result of confining himself to the movies and never getting a whiff of the keen stimulating air of the theater.  

When you work in the theater, even in a flop, you realize all over again that an actor can be the prisoner of his mechanical responses.  Anyway, my instinct makes me do a lot of things that Stanislavski teaches, and they’re right.  Frankly, this doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve studied in my own way, and I really knuckled down when I made all those recordings on the pier, thinking about the songs and the feelings they gave me, etc.

However, Wade points out that even if you start with a rare natural gift, the world will corrupt it.  You have to be a very special kind of person to stand up to the world and say no.  Even though I said no to the last scene of Song and Dance and I don’t intend to sing unless I believe it, according to Wade the whole experience is insidious and the world tricks you into believing your own lies.  That’s what happens when I go cute.

   

Gavin Lambert, Inside Daisy Clover, New York, Viking Press, 1963.

INSIDE DAISY CLOVER

From the highway, all you could see of the beach house was a high white wall and an electrified wire gate.  Melora pressed a buzzer and it swung open.  We were in a courtyard with stone angels and tubbed geraniums.  The front door opened straight onto a big white airy room with more windows than walls, and the sound of the ocean hitting the rocks below.  At one end there was a bar with a striped awning and a sign above it saying CHEZ SWAN.  The floor around it had been made to look like a sidewalk, with small round tables and chairs instead of bar stools.

“That’s pretty cute,” I said.  “Like you’re in Paris.”

“Cannes, honey.”

I followed her out to the sun deck.  It was like being on a pier, there was no beach, only rocks and pilings underneath.  A butler appeared, very formal in white tie and tails, which I thought weird, and asked Melora if she’d care for a drink before lunch.  She ordered a dry vermouth and I said I’d like to try one too.

“Make Miss Clover’s long, with soda,” Melora said.

I sat down on a canvas swing seat and faced the ocean.  The ocean!  It was really a long while since I’d seen it, and right now I felt very glad we were together again.  The wind made whitecaps on it, the water looked bright and glossy.  I closed my eyes for a moment, just to listen more closely to the marvelous thud of the waves.  When I opened them, Melora was putting on dark glasses.

My mind began to wander.  I thought how strange it was that a few miles down the coast, at this very moment, someone must be looking out at a quite different ocean, gray and sour, from a trailer in Playa del Rey.  I thought of old men playing chess on the boardwalk near Santa Monica pier, and the smell of seaweed and fish.  And I remembered a whole afternoon I spent, staring out the window from behind that bead curtain in the old Spanish dump, waiting for Mr. Swan to call until the moon came up.

Gavin Lambert, Inside Daisy Clover, New York, Viking Press, 1963.