stars – the friends and enemies
Colette
The woman who owns the theatre [where Sartre’s play, Dirty Hands, was being staged], an ex-beautiful woman, a dreadful whore, having slept with thousands of men, took us to her home for dinner. The dinner was strange and wonderful: Arabian dishes, because she was once the mistress of a Morocco sultan. But the interesting point was she had invited, with Cocteau, the old Colette. I think you heard of Colette: she is the only really great woman writer in France, a really great writer. She was once the most beautiful woman. She danced in music- halls, slept with a lot of men, wrote pornographic novels and then good novels. She loved country, flowers, beasts, and making love, and then she loved, too, the most sophisticated life; she slept with woman too.
Now she is 75 years old and has still the most fascinating eyes and a nice triangular cat face; she is very fat, impotent, a little deaf, but she can tell stories and smile and laugh in such a way nobody would think of looking at younger, finer women.
Margaret Mead
In the late afternoon, I met an horrible American doctor woman, Mrs Mead [the anthropologist], who wrote a book, Male and Female, on the difference of sexes in Samoa, New Guinea, and USA. People had decided we had to meet. I told her: “Sorry, I have not read your book”, she said: “We are even, I did not read yours.” Then I tried to say how I longed to read her book, but she does not speak French and does not seem to understand my English, so I began to speak to other more pretty women.
Paul Klee
I had a very good day because I went to a painting exhibition which was wonderful. Did you ever hear of Paul Klee? He was half-German, half-Swiss and died in 1940. He did the most poetical, appealing painting I saw in my whole life. I knew him a little before, but there were never many shows of him because during the war he was forbidden by Germans as decadent. And there were more than 100 pictures today: a whole life, a whole man. It is very fancy painting, sometimes abstract, always irreal. Yet when you go out and look at the real night, you think: yea, it is just like it. The same beauty, the same humour, the same sadness and joy in the red and green lights of the real night and in the irreal paintings with the wonderful colours. So I feel good tonight.
Truman Capote
Truman Capote [right] tells around (it was printed in magazines) that Sartre called him a “fairy existentialist”; he is not existentialist, and not fairy, just a fairy, and Sartre never told such a thing.
Arletty and Jean Genet
Yesterday I had a funny lunch with the poet-burglar Genet and Arletty, the woman who played in Les Enfants du Paradis. I know you did not like the movie, but did not you think the girl was beautiful? She is beginning to get old, 50 by now, but keeps something gay and lively of a young girl. Sad for her, the face is no longer good enough for movies and she even hardly works any more. Then she behaved rather wrongly during the war; in my eyes, it is not important if she slept with a German officer: other ones slept with American officers and were no better for it. Such a love affair in a woman who does not know much about the world, and never cared for politics, does not scandalise me; but yet it seemed very bad to many people and she is lonely now. Yet she remains funny, lively, and witty; she is fond of Genet; they were very gay together. He has found a nice little parachutiste (now all the pansies sleep with parachutistes, as they did with sailors in former times). This boy is Russian and speaks with a Marseille accent; he has been an SS and in jail. As Genet loves bad boys, murderers, SS, and so on, he is very pleased. The boy is very handsome indeed.
Edith Piaf
You asked about Edith Piaf the other day. It just happened I receive a letter from a French friend in New York about it. She went to listen to her; she says the singers who sang with her, and are not half as talented as she is, had much more success. She explains it in a clever way, I think. She notices that American people, when they get something from France, react exactly as we do in France when getting something from America: they like what looks very French in them. The singers singing old French songs, they understand and like. But the real French things do not seem so French, they are just new; and in France we like them because they are different from the other French things. You see what I mean?
So Edith Piaf, in her black dress, with her hoarse voice and very ugly face, does not seem so French, and American people do not know what to find in her – they remain cold. We like her here; we think she is rather wonderful, but in this strange way when beauty and ugliness meet. And you told me yourself, American people do not like so much this mixture. Then, when she touches her neck, the scope of her neck, in a strange, sensual and distressed gesture, the public does not like it: this is the place where men feel the hang-over at morning, and the place where frustrated women would like to feel a man’s lips and don’t, so everybody is uneasy. That is the way my friend, who likes Edith Piaf, explains the whole thing, and it seems to me it could be true.
Charlie Chaplin
I saw Mr Verdoux on Broadway, the first morning when it was produced there. I was rather disappointed. I used to love Charlot and I am afraid he is dead, and Charlie Chaplin is not so good. Did I tell you I met him in New York? All a long evening I heard him speaking and I was rather disappointed with him, too, though he was sometimes charming. Once I went to Utrecht, in Netherlands, to a little museum and I saw some paintings by an old painter; he was unskilful and awkward and nave but he painted very good portraits, there was a soul in it, they were fascinating. Then he went to Italy and admired Titian and Italian painters, skilful ones. When he came back, he never could do anything good, he was through. I am afraid it is a bit the same story with Chaplin. Something is lost since he knows what he wants to do, and yet he does not succeed in doing it. I am reproachful about it because I was so fond of him. And even in Mr Verdoux he is often wonderful. Do you agree with me?
What did you think about Limelight? There were big quarrels here; we divided in two seats, for and against Limelight, and there was a hard hatred from one side to the other. I was for, Sartre against.
The secretary played a funny little trick on Sartre, pretending Charlie Chaplin had invited him, and saying to Chaplin that Sartre invited him – in the end they had dinner with the secretary, Guyonnet, Bost, Olga and Picasso. Everybody was delighted with Chaplin. He explained he would not come back to the States, since [Dwight D] Eisenhower had been elected. He told a lot of stories, was so good- natured and friendly that even Sartre, who is hard to make, was fond of him.
Picasso was angry the whole time, because he is used to be the first one everywhere he goes, and he was nothing at all this time, everybody interested only in Chaplin. They all drank much. Oona, Chaplin’s wife, did not speak a word; it seems she never does.
Did you ever hear of Jean Cocteau? This very important French poet did many things in theatre and movies. I think La belle et la bte is being produced in USA now.
He is a pansy, 60 years old now, a very attractive funny man, friend of the poet-burglar Jean Genet. I like him. He knows much about theatre, and he decided to work himself upon Sartre’s play [Dirty Hands], I mean to direct the actors, to find good ones, to care about the way they’ll play . . . I never saw a play-writer care for the success of another play-writer and heartily help him! They are always mean with each other. So I was very moved about this Cocteau being so generous. I like when a man is not mean, it seldom happens. Cocteau lives among beautiful young boys. One was his lover 15 years ago and he contrived to make him the first French movie player. He really did everything for the handsome boy; they are funny together, so womanlike. I am rather fond of pansies when they are of the right kind – not too sophisticated, but real human beings as other ones, with just these peculiar ways in love. Thursday, 12 February 1948