Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries Read online

  “One time, in 1998,” Jan says, “I was in the kitchen with Stanley and I mentioned that I’d just been to the opticians in St. Albans to get a new pair of glasses. Stanley looked shocked. He said, ‘Where exactly did you go?’ I told him and he said, ‘Oh, thank God! I was just in the other opticians in town getting some glasses and I used your name!’”

  Jan laughs. “He used my name in the opticians, in Waitrose, everywhere.”

  “But even if he didn’t reply to the fan letters,” I say, “they’ve all been so scrupulously read and filed.”

  The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps fifty orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front—Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California; and so on—and is in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F—P” on the positive ones and “F—N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F—C.”

  “Look at this,” I say to Jan.

  I hand him a letter written by a fan and addressed to Arthur C. Clarke. He forwarded it on to Kubrick and wrote on the top, “Stanley. See P3!! Arthur.”

  Jan turns to page 3, where Arthur C. Clarke marked, with exclamation points, the following paragraph:

  What is the meaning behind the epidemic? Does the pink furniture reveal anything about the 3rd monolith and it’s emitting a pink color when it first approaches the ship? Does this have anything to do with a shy expression? Does the alcohol offered by the Russians have anything to do with French kissing and saliva?

  “Why do you think Arthur C. Clarke marked that particular paragraph for Kubrick to read?” I ask Jan.

  “Because it is so bizarre and absurd,” he says.

  “I thought so,” I say. “I just wanted to make sure.”

  In the back of my mind I wondered whether this paragraph was marked because the writer of the fan letter—Mr. Sam Laks of Alhambra, California—had actually worked out the secret of the monolith in 2001. I find myself empathizing with Sam Laks. I am also looking for answers to the mysteries. So many conspiracy theories and wild rumors surrounded Kubrick—the one about him being responsible for faking the moon landings (untrue), the one about his terror of germs (this one can’t be true, either—there’s a lot of dust around here), the ones about him refusing to fly and drive over 30 mph. (The flying one is true—Tony says he wasn’t scared of planes, he was scared of air-traffic controllers—but the one about the 30 mph is “bullshit,” says Tony. “He had a Porsche.”)

  This is why my happiest times looking through the boxes are when things turn weird. For instance, at the end of one shelf inside the stable block is a box marked “Sniper head—scary.” Inside, wrapped in newspaper, is an extremely lifelike and completely disgusting disembodied head of a young Vietnamese girl, the veins in her neck protruding horribly, her eyes staring out, her lips slightly open, her tongue just visible. I feel physically sick looking at it. As I hold it up by its blood-matted hair, Christiane, Kubrick’s widow, walks past the window.

  “I found a head!” I say.

  “It’s probably Ryan O’Neal’s head,” she replies.

  Christiane has no idea who I am, or what I’m doing in her house, but she accepts the moment with admirable calm.

  “No,” I say. “It’s the head of the sniper from Full Metal Jacket.”

  “But she wasn’t beheaded,” calls back Christiane. “She was shot.”

  “I know!” I say.

  Christiane shrugs and she walks on.

  “I was just talking to Tony about typefaces,” I say to Jan.

  “Ah yes,” says Jan. “Stanley loved typefaces.” Jan pauses. “I tell you what else he loved.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Stationery,” says Jan.

  I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan.

  “His great hobby was stationery,” he says. “One time a package arrived with a hundred bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, ‘What are you going to do with all that ink?’ He said, ‘I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.’ Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink. He loved stationery, pads, everything like that.”

  Tony Frewin wanders into the stable block.

  “How’s it going?” he asks.

  “Still looking for Rosebud,” I say.

  “The closest I ever got to Rosebud,” says Tony, “was finding a Daisy gun that he had when he was a child.”

  Tony and I leaf through some memos Kubrick wrote in 1968:

  Please see that there is a supply of melons kept in the house at all times. Do not let the number go below three without buying some more. Thanks, Stanley.

  “By their memos you shall know them,” Tony says.

  And another:

  Please check with the weather bureau and find out what the barometric pressure in London was last Friday 11th October between 6pm and 4am in the morning. Also find out what the average barometric pressure is on most days of the year, what is considered extremely high and what is considered extremely low and how they would describe the pressure on Friday, 11th October during the times I mentioned. Thanks, Stanley.

  “God knows what that was about,” says Tony.

  Right from the beginning I had mentally noted how well constructed the boxes were, and now Tony tells me that this is because Kubrick designed them himself. He wasn’t happy with the boxes that were on the market—their restrictive dimensions and the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the tops off—so he set about designing a whole new type of box. He instructed a company of box manufacturers, G. Ryder & Co., of Milton Keynes, to construct four hundred of them to his specifications.

  “When one batch arrived,” says Tony, “we opened them up and found a note, written by someone at G. Ryder & Co. The note said, ‘Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off.’”

  Tony laughs. I half expect him to say, “I suppose we were a bit fussy.”

  But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “As opposed to non-fussy customers who don’t care if they struggle all day to get the tops off.”

  • • •

  I HAVE DINNER with Christiane. They met when Kubrick gave her the part of a bar singer in Paths of Glory. They married and barely left each other’s side for the next forty-two years. They raised three children: Anya and Vivian, plus Katharina, her daughter from an earlier marriage. I’ve got to know her well but there are some things I’ve always felt awkward asking her about, like anything to do with her uncle Veit Harlan. But tonight over dinner she brings the subject up herself.

  “Stanley and I came from such different, such grotesquely opposite backgrounds,” she says. “I think it gave us an extra something. I had an appalling, catastrophic background for someone like Stanley.” She pauses. “For me, my uncle was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown’s world. Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so intimately—and yet not know.”

  It turned out that when Harlan wasn’t clowning around with Christiane, he was writing and directing propaganda films for Goebbels, including Jud Süss, in which venal, immoral Jews take over and ruin a German city, stealing riches, defiling Aryan women, etc. The film was shown to SS units before they were sent out to attack Jews. Harlan was tried twice for war crimes, and exonerated, proving that Goebbels had interfered with Jud Süss, forcing him to reedit and inject more anti-Semitism.

  “Where my uncle was an enormous fool, as many talented people are, was that he mistook his gift for intelligence,” says Christiane. “He was a great big famous film person. He looked better and talked better and had enormous charm. S
o he thought he was also far more intelligent than Mr. Goebbels. Goebbels was ten thousand times smarter than my uncle.” She pauses. “Film people, actors, are puppets. We are silly. We are silly folk.” She says her uncle’s story reinforced for Stanley and her their great principle in life: Always be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power.

  “All Stanley’s life he said, ‘Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.’ We both were very nervous on journeys when you have to show your passport. He did not like that moment. We always had to go through separate entrances, he with [our] two American daughters upstairs, and me with my German daughter downstairs. The foreigners downstairs! He’d be looking for us nervously. Would he ever get us back?”

  Christiane laughs. Of course they were always reunited. They spent a lifetime together inside Childwick, where Stanley created his self-governing mini-studio. I never meet their youngest daughter, Vivian. There was mention of her being in Los Angeles. Vivian had once been a big presence in the family. When she was nineteen she directed a brilliant documentary, The Making of The Shining. When she was twenty-six she composed the score for Full Metal Jacket. She shot eighteen hours of behind-the-scenes footage for that film, too, but it was never edited or released. It just sits in film cans in the stable block.

  I watch some one day. Here’s Kubrick sitting in a chair on an old airstrip during a break from filming. Crew members stand around him. Vivian has caught a tense moment.

  STANLEY KUBRICK: We fucked around for an hour and twenty minutes. . . .

  CREW MEMBER: I know it seems like a lot of tea breaks but we had the tea break that was up at . . .

  KUBRICK: You had a tea break at four o’clock? And you had a tea break at six o’clock? If you had a tea break at four, you don’t need to break for this tea break. This must be a complimentary tea break. So figure it out.

  TERRY NEEDHAM (FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR): I’d prefer to do away with them all. Because it gives me more fucking headaches, poxy tea breaks, I’d like to sling them right down their fucking piss holes.

  KUBRICK: Right, Terry.

  TERRY NEEDHAM: I’m the sort of man we need, eh, Stanley?

  KUBRICK: That’s right.

  You catch glimpses of Vivian in the rushes. She looks beautiful, effervescent.

  “She is a fabulous person,” says Christiane. “Beautiful, very witty, enormously talented in all sorts of directions, very musical, a great mimic, she could play instruments easily, she could sing, she could dance, she could act, there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. We had fights. But she was hugely loved. And now I’ve lost her.” She pauses. “You know that? I used to keep all this a secret, as I was hoping it would go away. But now I’ve lost hope. So. She’s gone.”

  It all began, she says, while Stanley was editing Eyes Wide Shut, which starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Stanley asked Vivian to compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn’t. Instead, she disappeared into San Francisco and Los Angeles. “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy. He wrote her a forty-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”

  On the day of Stanley’s funeral, Christiane says, Vivian arrived with a woman nobody recognized. “She just sat in Vivian’s room. Never said hello to us. Just sat. We were all spooked. Who was this person? Turns out she was a Scientology something-or-other, don’t know what.”

  “Did Vivian give a reason why she joined the Scientologists?” I ask.

  “It’s her new religion.” Christiane shrugs. “It had absolutely nothing to do with Tom Cruise, by the way. Absolutely not.”

  “Maybe it was her way of dealing with her father’s death?”

  “I think she must have been very upset,” Christiane says, “but, again, I wouldn’t know. I know nothing. That is the truth. I can’t reach her at all. I’ve had two conversations with her since Stanley died. The last one was eight years ago. She became a Scientologist and didn’t want to talk to us anymore and didn’t see her dying sister, didn’t come to her funeral. [Her sister Anya died of cancer, aged fifty.] And these were children that had been joined at the hip.”

  I tell her that she seems to have handled all her tragedies with remarkable resilience. “I daresay I have, yes,” she says. “But I’ve also been very sad. I was helped by my children. Anya, in particular.”

  She says that when Stanley was alive, he kept her and their daughters cosseted from stress, from life’s legal and financial arrangements, allowing them to float through Childwick without worries. But he died long before anyone expected he would, and Christiane has been left with burdens she never anticipated. So she’s forever finding herself second-guessing him. Would he have handled the Vivian situation differently? Would he have approved of letting me look though the boxes? She has bigger plans for the archive. She wants to donate them to a university. Would he have approved of that?

  “I am very self-conscious and surrounded by his ghost,” she says. “I’m always having these conversations with him, as I am not terribly secure. And I try to live like I think he would want me to go on, because of the grandchildren and everything.”

  At the end of our dinner I tell her, with some embarrassment, that I find her quite inspiring. She thinks about this for a moment. “I’m very pleased that Stanley liked me,” she replies.

  • • •

  FOR MONTHS, as I look through the boxes, I don’t bother opening the two that read Shadow on the Sun. But, one evening just before last Christmas, I decide to take a look.

  It is amazing. The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a slightly cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog:

  “Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?” says the dog’s owner. “He’s not very well. I’m a bit worried about him, John.”

  This is typed.

  Kubrick has handwritten below it: “THE DOG IS NOT WELL.”

  A virus has been carried to earth on a meteorite. This is why the dog is listless, and also why humans across the planet are no longer able to control their sexual appetites. It ends with a speech:

  There’s been so much killing—friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, but we all know nobody on this earth is to blame, Mrs. Brighton. We’ve all had the compulsions. We’ll just have to forgive each other our trespasses. I’ll do my part. I’ll grant a general amnesty—wipe the slate clean. Then perhaps we can begin to live again, as ordinary decent human beings, and forget the horror of the past few months.

  This, too, is typed. But all over the script I find notes handwritten by Kubrick. (“Establish Brighton’s interest in extra-terrestrial matters.” “Dog finds meteorite.” “John has got to have very powerful connections of the highest level.” “A Bill Murray line!”)

  “I know what this is,” says Tony.

  Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early sixties, he happened to hear this drama serial—Shadow on the Sun. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished Full Metal Jacket, he was looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track the scripts down. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about Shadow on the Sun, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually—after working on and rejecting AI—made Eyes Wide Shut instead.

  “But the original script seems quite cheesy,” I say.

  “Ah,” replies Tony, “but this is before Stanley worked his alchemy.”

  And I realize this is true. “Dog finds meteorite.” It sounds so banal, but imagine how Kubrick might have directed it. Do the words “Ape finds monolith” or “Little boy turns the corner and sees twin girls” sound any less banal on the page?

  All this time I have been looking in the boxes for some embodiment of the fantasies of the outsiders like Mr. Sam Laks and me—but I never do find anything like that. I suppose that
the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the towns from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.

  It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped. Tony says that if I’m looking for the solution to the mystery of Kubrick, I don’t really need to look inside the boxes. I just need to watch the films.

  “It’s all there,” he says. “Those films are Stanley.”

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH THE KUBRICKS always guarded their privacy inside Childwick, I come to the end of my time at the house just as Christiane and her daughter Katharina decide to open the grounds and the stable block to the public. They’re going to hold an art fair, displaying their work and the work of a number of local artists. Christiane has decided to let the boxes go. She’s donating them to the University of the Arts London—to a special climate-controlled Kubrick wing, where film students and other students can look through them. She’s letting them go because, she tells me, “I get very upset at seeing some of his old things. The paper is so dusty and old and yellow. They look so sad. The person is so very dead once the paper is yellow.”

  I’m there to watch a fleet of removal vans arrive to take them away. During the months and years that follow, Christiane oversees the publication of two books about the things inside the boxes—The Stanley Kubrick Archives (Taschen) and Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made (Taschen). She turns up for special screenings of his films—I watch her introduce Paths of Glory in the open-air cinema at Somerset House, Central London, and we have dinner afterward. I mention this to a friend, a Kubrick buff. “Oddly, I was just thinking about her today,” he replies. “A Twilight fan said to me, ‘Is there anything more romantic than Edward and Bella?’” I immediately thought, “Christiane Kubrick’s protection of her husband’s legacy.”