The Merchant of Shadows-1

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    I killed the car. And at once provoked such sudden, resonant quiet as if, when I switched off the ignition, I myself brought into being the shimmering late afternoon hush, the ripening sun, the very Pacific that, way below, at the foot of the cliff, shattered its foamy peripheries with the sound of a thousand distant ema ans.

    Id never get used to California. After three years, still the ented visitor. However frequently I had been disappointed, I still couldnt help it, I still tingled with expectation, still always thought that something wonderful might happen.

    Call me the I Abroad.

    All the same, you  take the boy out of London but you t take London out of the boy. You will find my grasp of the local lihusiastic but shaky. I call gas "petrol", and so on. I dont io go native, Im not here food, Im here upon a pilgrimage. I have hied me, like a holy palmer, from the dishevelled capital of a foggy, three-ered island oher side of the world where the light is only good for water-colourists to this place where, to wax metaphysical about it, Light was made Flesh.

    I am a student of Light and Illusion. That is, of ema. When first I clapped my eyes on that HOLLYWOODLAND sign ba the city now five hours hard drive distant, I thought Id glimpsed the Holy Grail.

    And now, as if it were the most everyday thing in the world, I was on my way to meet a legend. A living legend, who roosted on this lonely cliff-top like a forlorn seabird.

    I arked in a gravelled loed botty, she turned upon the camera a toothy smile. Shed been quite pretty, in a spit-curled way. She said I could have the snap for a couple of hundred dollars but I was on a tight budget and thought it wouldnt add much to the history of film.

    Fhtfully, von Mannheim had left Germany in good time, but he started over in Hollywood at the bottom (five the double entendre). His ast, however, was brisk. Assistant art director, assistant director, director.

    The masterpieanns Hollywood period is, of course, Paracelsus (1937), with Charles Laughton. Laughtons great bulk swims into pools of scalding light out of greater or lesser shoals of darkness like a vast monster of the deep, a great, black whale. The movie haunts you like a bad dream. Mann did not try to give you a sense of the past; instead, Paracelsus looks as if it had been made in the middle ages -- the gargoyle faces, bodies ed with ague, gaunt with famine, a claustrophobise of a limited world, of ic, cramped unfreedom.

    The Spirit of ema cameos in Paracelsus as the Gnostic goddess of wisdom, Sophia, in a kind of Rosicru sabbat se. They were married, by then. Mann wanted his new bride nude for this sabbat, which caused a stir at the time aually he was forced to shoot only her disembodied face floating above suggestive shadow. Suggestive, indeed; from his piece of sleight of hand sprang two myths, one, easily discredited by afiados of the rest of her oeuvre, that she had the biggest knockers in the business, the other, less easily dismissed, that she was thickly covered with body hair from the sternum to the knee. Even Manns ex-assistant director believed the latter. "Furry as a spider," he characterised her. "And just as damhal." Id smuggled a half-pint of Jack Daniels into his geriatric ward; he waxed virulent, he warned me to take a se kit to the interview.

    Paracelsus was, needless to say, one of the greatest box-office disasters in the history of the movies. Plans were shelved for his long-dreamed-of Faust, with the Spirit either as Gret or as Mephistopheles, or as Gret doubling with Mephistopheles, depending on what he said in different interviews. Mann was forced to perpetrate a hack job, a wallowing melo with the Spirit as twins, a good girl in a blonde wig and a bad girl in a blae, from which his career never recovered and her own survival truly miraculous.

    Shortly after this notorious stinker was released to universal jeers, he did the A Star is Born bit, although he walked, not into the sea, but into the very swimming pool, that one over there, in which his reliow disposes of her glassware.

    As for the Spirit, she found a new director, was rumoured to have undergone a little, a very little plastic surgery, and, the  year, won her first Oscar. From that time on she was unstoppable, though always she carried her tragedy with her, like a perma widows veil, givihe spooky allure of a bain princesse lointaine.

    Who liked to keep her guests waiting.

    In my nervous ennui, I cast my eyes round and round the terratil I came upon something passing strange in the moist earth of a flowerbed.

    Moist, therefore freshly watered, though not by whatever it was had left such amazing spoor behind it. No big-game hunter I, but I could have sworn that, impressed on the soil, as if in fresh crete outside Graumanns ese Theatre, was the print, uhe tiger lilies left it, of a large, clawed paw.

    Did you know a lions mane grows grey with age? I didnt. But the geriatric felihat now emerged from a clump of something odorous beh the cryptomeria had snow all over his hairy eaves. He appeared as taken aback to see me as I was to bump into him. Our eyes locked. Face like a boxer with a broken heilted his enormous head to one side, opened his mouth -- God, his breath was foul -- and roared like the last movement of Beethovens Ninth. With a modest blow of a single paw, he could have batted me arse over tip off the cliff half-way to Hawaii. I wouldnt say it was mufort to see hed had his teeth pulled out.

    "Aw, e on, Pussy, he dont want to be gummed to death," said a cracked, harsh, aged, only residually female voice. "Go fetch Mama, now, theres a good boy."

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