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If it is true that a man’s character develops for the good in proportion to the fun, the degree of happiness and the amount of bountiful love he experiences in childhood, then I must have the most noble and wonderful character in all the world. Personally, I feel that I am the living proof of this contention. However, a surprising number of people think otherwise.
Among the White Russians in Paris and elsewhere the habit of living in the past became just as deeply ingrained. Consequently, aptitudes and talents were enfeebled, and opportunities to start a new life tragically neglected. So much time was spent in thinking and talking about the past, that there was little time for the present.
In other arts proficiency can be obtained, but in life little more can be done than to make the best of a bad job. Art is an effect of design: life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
So it was that from this experience I arrived at the conclusion that to enjoy one’s life to its fullest, one must build contrast into it. And the more extreme the contrast the fuller the life.
A person taking a vacation during which he lives simply, rigorously, and with a complete change of habits, will find on his return to city life that he enjoys the office, the smog, and the routine.
It seems to me that the mistake so many of us make is that of looking for fun during a holiday when the real trick is to use a vacation to make the rest of the year fun.
We have no problem with audience response because our only audience is the director who is paid to tell us that we are great.
The average audience is also incapable of distinguishing between a good actor and a good part. The actor gets the credit every time when more often than not the credit should go to the writer.
Even those who profess most strenuously that they loathe all the vulgar curiosity which they attract would, I am sure, be perfectly miserable without it. This is where I differ from them.
Being a person of the highest taste, I am continually incurring my own disapproval, since my standards are too high for my performance ever to come up to them. I expect perfection but can only provide mediocrity. It gives me no particular satisfaction to think that actors even more mediocre than I are hailed as great artists; it merely proves what lamentable taste most people have.
I am a drifter, and I drifted into fame.
Somewhat belatedly I have come to the conclusion that my real vocation in life is to be idle; this is something at which I could really shine. It seems most unfortunate that I have not been provided either with the courage or the means to practice it. It is one of the sad ironies of life that one has to make money in order to spend time but waste time in order to make money.
It is a curious fact that the list of actors who have gone on and on in a state of unwavering popularity without benefit of Oscars includes three of the most distinguished. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. received one after he had died, Garbo after she had retired, and Chaplin not at all.
I know, in my own case, that the kind of actor I have become has been determined to a large extent by the weakness of my character. On the screen I am usually suave and cynical, cruel to women and immune to their slights and caprices. This is my mask, and it has served me faithfully for 25 years. But in reality I am a sentimentalist, especially about myself – readily moved to tears by cheap emotions and invariably the victim of woman’s inhumanity to man.
That I should choose to protect my easily wounded and ultrasensitive nature by adopting my particular mask is understandable. Fortunately my mask has not only protected me but provided me with a living. Perhaps the greatest fulfilment in acting is not just the satisfaction involved in the opportunity for the extrovert to exhibit himself but more the opportunity to act out that part of himself for which he has the imagination and the capacity, but not the heart or the courage.
I mention all of the foregoing examples merely in order to make it easier for you to understand that whereas on the screen I am invariably a sonofabitch, in life I am a dear, dear, boy.
He pointed out that I had nothing to fear about the hypnotic state since I could not be made to do anything against my natural inclinations or of which my moral sense disapproved. This did not reassure me particularly as my natural inclinations are limited only by the broadest horizons and my moral sense scarcely exists.
I do not feel compelled to sacrifice myself and say yes merely to please another person. Therefore, before giving my answer in such a situation I say to myself, “I am not a child, therefore I don’t need to go out of my way to please grownups in order to guarantee my survival. If I do not please myself, I please no one.” If I make a habit of saying yes when the answer is no, I shall not only lose my own self-esteem but in the end I shall also lose the esteem of the person I’m trying to please.
I am sometimes tempted to load my Hi-Fi, my radio alarm clock, and all the other parasitical devices of which I am the irresolute possessor, into my car and drive them – and my car – over a cliff and be done with it.
I am ineluctably drawn to the gloomy conclusion that the genius of the American people will drive them into ever tightening bonds of enslavement to technological progress. Out of this the machine will emerge triumphant, man will concern himself exclusively with its maintenance, and we shall all sing, “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner still wave O’er the land of TV and the home of the slave.”
Something sinister has happened in the conduct of modern life whereby one’s time is divided between the excruciating bore of personal maintenance and the chronic necessity of signing papers relating to the general maintenance of one’s position in society.
To begin with, it is impossible to be in love with a woman without experiencing on occasions an irresistible desire to strangle her. This can lead to a good deal of ill-feeling. Women are touchy about being strangled.
It had only been a moment’s interruption but it was enough to upset the delicate mechanism of what I sometimes refer to rather facetiously as my brain.
Paris is a different place every time you go to it, mainly because it does not change. You change, and blame it on Paris.
Yet I sometimes feel puzzled. Once in a while I have an uneasy qualm that I should know more about painting in order to understand more; there is doubt in my mind as to the exact meaning of a masterpiece. I feel the finer points are passing me by. Well, what I am really wondering is why the goddam thing was painted in the first place and who had a sense of humor warped enough to suggest hanging it.
Tyrone Power was so young, so strong, so full of life, so full of plans for the future. How could so much energy suddenly evaporate? And where did it all go?
There is an unwritten law in the picture business that all observations and expressed opinions must be replete with superlatives. Generally speaking you can’t go wrong if you make sure to use the word “sensational” at least once in every sentence.
Art is the only thing that matters. In comparison with art, wealth and rank and power are not worth a row of pins. We are the people who count. We give the world significance. You are only our raw material.
