She is happy to comply. By the time we are on the apple pie, a certain glaze in his eyes suggests our guest has begun to wonder how much is truth and how much fiction. Even Cheyenne doesn’t know. When we first were together, she decided in a kind of offbeat homage to my profession to set the historical record straight by providing specific data. For an entire afternoon she paced up and down her studio, sitting occasionally to scrawl names of lovers. The final list totaled fifty-seven. Thirteen were no more than X’s.
Black Muslims? I ask.
Cheyenne is embarrassed. The total is way too low. She makes excuses. She used to drink a lot, do some drugs. She has forgotten many one night stands. Give her time and she swears that number will rise above two hundred. And though she never does another accounting, she continues to use the same number when anyone asks—and often when they don’t.
Before the evening ends we get to enough historical stuff for TJ to say that when the film goes into production he wants me on the payroll. Until that time, we should meet regularly as part of pre production to talk about the Lincolns. For the next three nights he and I dine at the Aware Inn on the Sunset Strip. Long before cell phones took over our lives the restaurant had special lines at the tables for important people. Our attempts at conversation are regularly interrupted by TJ making or taking phone calls, by autograph seekers, well wishers, and old friends like Elaine May, Robert De Niro, Goldie Hawn who stop by to say hello. To each I am introduced as The Professor. When on the second night I am brave enough to complain that I’m not just a title, I’ve got a name, TJ says Shit. We’ve all got names but we don’t all got titles. What other Hollywood project has a PhD attached? Enjoy the status while you can. We ill educated types can use someone to admire.
Our meetings don’t go on for just three days or three months, but for years, seven years of me playing the role of teacher, librarian, and consultant, spilling out endless details about the backgrounds, personalities, beliefs, motivations, situations, quirks, fears, and heroics of these volunteers for liberty, as the Communist Party liked to call them. A good deal of the time I am no more than an ear for TJ’s monologues. He loves to ramble, to regurgitate stuff from my book and make it sound as if he were its author and I a rather slow student who is being introduced to a difficult subject. Often enough TJ is—how can I put it delicately?—full of shit, enormously stubborn about what he doesn’t know. When on occasion I become tired and fed up enough to criticize his pseudo facts, ill informed opinions, or bizarre interpretations, he pouts, then when others are present, gets back at me.
The professor, TJ says. Oh, never argue with the professor. He has a PhD. He knows everything about everything.
The years take us from the Aware Inn to his messy bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel to the enormous but empty living room of the mansion he buys on Mulholland Drive. Sometimes he phones me at home or at the university for a talk which is inevitably interrupted by another call. Sometimes he reaches me in unlikely places at unlikely hours, places where I am teaching or doing research or on vacation. The term I have a chair at the Europe University Institute in Florence, he catches me after a dinner in the Tuscan hilltop town of Montalcino. After a bottle of Brunello, I am drunk enough to suggest he come over and we have our talk while dipping in the old Roman hot springs at Bagno Vignoni. Never do I believe a film on the Lincolns will actually be made. Who in the world of film would, after all, be crazy enough to finance an epic about a bunch of American Communists?
Flash forward almost a decade and I am in Madrid, enjoying the perks of Hollywood which begin the morning of the day I meet Aisha, begin right past immigration at Barajas Airport where a uniformed driver takes my suitcase and my laptop, leads me outside, and holds open the door of a black Mercedes. Through tinted windows I watch a red dawn stain the sky behind the huge billboards and the rows of office buildings and apartment houses that line the expressway. The porters at the Palace Hotel are dressed like admirals, the clerks at Reception like the directors of funeral homes. A bellhop leads me into a sixth floor room with flowery period furniture. Don’t ask me what period. If it’s not Bauhaus, I won’t recognize it, and the curving legs and bronze fittings of the table in the corner of the room are definitely not Bauhaus. Neither is the cut glass vase that holds the huge bouquet or the silver ice bucket with the bottle of Dom Perignon leaning at a jaunty angle and a note card propped against the side.
Dear R: Bienvenidos a Madrid. We are honored that you can leave your busy schedule to join us. Your presence here will help make this a great and historically ACCURATE film. I’ve always said we couldn’t do it without you.
Abrazos, TJ
P.S. Take the day off. Drink champagne. Get some rest. Enjoy!! See you Jarama tomorrow! No pasaran!
I start to crumple the note, then think better of it. Here’s a possible piece of documentation for the new book.
The telephone buzzes as I am about to get into the shower. It’s too early for local friends and too late for California, so it must be the production office in search of their daily bit of historical data. That’s one of my jobs. Historical Consultant. I wrote the book, I must know all the facts. Or so the producers think. Early on I tried to respond honestly to their questions. When asked how many Americans were in the trenches of Jarama on February 22, 1937, I played the good academic and said: Nobody really knows. The records aren’t complete. This wasn’t a regular army. Lots of paperwork never got done, lots of stuff was lost in the great retreats, or shipped to the Soviet Union. Some who claim to have been at Jarama were still back at the training camp in Tarazona. Some guys got to the front lines without being listed. The best I can do is put the figure at somewhere between 375 and 425.
Not good enough, shouts Rick Toomey, the line producer. I can’t work with approximate. You’re the goddamn historian. Give me facts. Isn’t history facts?
No, not exactly. But neither he nor you really want to hear a lecture on the epistemology of historical knowledge. Surely you don’t want me to go on about how facts are, as we say, constituted by the discourse—or to make it simpler, by the way we write the past (discourse being one of those scholarly words that nobody inside the academy can give up and nobody outside it wants to hear). It’s simpler than it sounds. There are all these traces of stuff that happened in the past, documents, letters, newspapers, artifacts, but nothing becomes a fact, a useful piece of data, until we use in a story that involves connecting it to other facts and claiming we understand how these facts affect each other.
End of lecture.
Soon enough I dropped the academic approach and adapted to the historical logic of production, one based on a different kind of fact: how many extras must be hired for a particular sequence? Now it was easy to be precise. When we shoot the February 27 sequence, 413 extras will storm up the slopes of Mount Pingarron.
I pick up the phone.
Professor Benjamin.
Yes.
Good morning. Eduardo Gonzalo Hernandez here, from the American Embassy. Assistant Secretary to the Secretary to the Assistant Vice Consul for Cultural Affairs.
Good morning.
Welcome back to Spain, Professor Benjamin. We at the Embassy know and admire your work.
Thank you.
We want to consult with you about the . . . the project that brings you here. The film of your book, Crusade in Spain.
Fine with me.
The Embassy car will pick you up in forty five minutes.
Not right now. I’m exhausted. I just got off a flight from the States.
Sorry, but we really need you right away. We understand that you must be tired and we won’t keep you more than a few minutes. But it’s very important. Your government needs you.
I say okay before he begins to sing the Star Spangled Banner. I suppose it’s my government even at nine in the morning. Even if I haven’t cared much for the people running it for the last few decades.
Embassies give me the creeps. At the entrance, the usual tall unsmiling marines with slit eyes, wearing blue pants with red stripes at the seams, khaki shirts