Mr. Wilder and Me
By Jonathan Coe
4/5
()
About this ebook
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ROTTERS’ CLUB AND MIDDLE ENGLAND
In the heady summer of 1977, a naïve young woman called Calista sets out from Athens to venture into the wider world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing. But the time she spends in this glamorous, unfamiliar new life will change her for good.
While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realization that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his new film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich for the shooting of further scenes, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.
In a novel that is at once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of one of cinema’s most intriguing figures, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze on the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go?
“Outstanding... In a sense, the novel toward which Coe’s fiction has always been heading.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. An award-winning novelist, biographer and critic, his novels include What a Carve Up! (which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger), The House of Sleep (which won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award), The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle . He is also the author of the highly acclaimed biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant. He lives in London.
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Reviews for Mr. Wilder and Me
49 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Not one of his characteristic state of the nation novels this time but Mr Wilder & Me still has plenty of typical Jonathan Coe themes and trademarks. There’s the fusing of fact and fiction, the strong storytelling plus formal innovations, the humour tinged with melancholy. Music and film have long been inspirations for Coe and so they are again. Fifty something film composer Calista is at a crisis point in her life. Her music isn’t in the demand it once was and her children are leaving home. This is the framing device Coe uses for the story of how the young and naive Calista found herself, almost by accident, as an assistant on the set of Billy Wilder’s penultimate film Fedora, the story of an old and faded film star, in 1977.When Wilder made that film he was no longer the king of Hollywood he had once been. He and his style of filmmaking were being superseded by a new type of film and a new generation of filmmakers- Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg. Mr Wilder & Me is at once a coming of age and coming of old age novel. It’s about being young and finding your way in the world and being old and finding the world no longer wants what you have to offer. Although ostensibly about Billy Wilder this book feels very personal - the ‘Me’ of the title could as easily be Coe as Calista. When Wilder talks about the value of entertainment, of wanting his films to be serious but also give the audience ‘some little spark’ they didn’t have before, it could be Coe talking about his own novel. Any one of his novels, in fact. Towards the end of the novel Calista tells Wilder she thinks Fedora will be a ‘very… compassionate film’. Mr Wilder & Me is certainly a compassionate novel. Like all of Coe’s best work it carries it’s seriousness lightly. Warm, touching and deeply humane, it’s a gift of love from Coe to Wilder and the reader.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a charming novel which centres on a young Greek woman, Calista, who happens to be invited to a dinner with Billy Wilder and his screenwriter as a friend of a family friend. She is young, on holiday on the West Coast of California, and has no real idea of who he is. Wilder is in the autumn years of his career and they connect again when he is shooting a movie on a Greek island and Calista is asked to work on the set as an interpreter and translator. She is kept on as a PA/general dogsbody when the shooting transfers to Munich and this coming of age story is intertwined with a portrait of Wilder, his career on the wane, reminiscing about earlier times in his pomp. The lightest of touch is skilfully applied and it’s a book to whisk you away to different times in a welcome way.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What happens when what you want to give, no one really wants anymore? Fortunately, this is not a problem that Mr Coe himself needs to face, as this a perfectly imagined and executed meditation on the waning, not some much of fame, but the perceived value of your contributions. Billy Wilder attempts to make a defining, serious, film Fedora, that even he knows, the world is not interested in; times have moved on. Calista, in middle age is facing a world that no longer wants her film scores and daughters that no longer need her parenting. This is a perfectly imagined and realised miniature of Calista's coming of age story whilst being recruited, through a series of fairly unlikely coincidences - but hey, the plots of most films hang on unlikely coincidences - to be the Greek translators of Billy Wilder and crew as they shoot Fedora in Corfu. Through Calista's eyes, Coe brings Billy Wilder, his scriptwriter I.A.L Diamond and their cast and crew vividly to life. Wilder in his artistic decline is driven by a passion to finish this one last film (which in fact turned out not to be) and is in turn, melancholy, resigned and in the main, extremely funny. The monologues on the films Jaws and Despair are memorably acerbicYou don't have to know the film Fedora to like this - myself, I have never seen it. Nor do you need to be familiar with Mr Wilder's work in general. But you do need to be able to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who is facing the prospect of what to do, when the major opportunities of life seemed to have passed by. Perhaps that's many of us. It's highly recommended
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I had high hopes for this novel, having greatly enjoyed several of Jonathan Coe’s previous books. There was, however, a slight cloud of doubt on the horizon because there have been a couple of books by him that I disliked.The basic premise is intriguing in itself, and takes the reader in to territory that Coe has trodden before. In his earlier novels, What a Carve Up and its sequel, Eleven, he demonstrated his enjoyment of vintage British films. He is back in similar subject matter here, although this time it is on Fedora, on of Billy Wilder’s later and lesser known films, that he hangs his story.I am not familiar with Fedora, but I don’t know if that matters particularly – the film is really just a vector through which the characters of Billy Wilder and his associates are introduced. The book takes the form of recollections of a woman looking back upon her unexpected encounters with Billy Wilder, Having met him more or less by chance, she was engaged to act as a translator for him and his crew while they filmed on one of the Greek islands.To be honest, I completely failed to engage with this novel, and was left wondering why I had bother ed with it. A forgettable book about a forgettable film.
Book preview
Mr. Wilder and Me - Jonathan Coe
MR. WILDER AND ME
For Neil Sinyard
LONDON
One winter’s morning, seven years ago, I found myself on an escalator. It was one of the escalators that takes you up to street level from the Piccadilly Line platforms at Green Park station. If you’ve ever used those escalators, you will remember how long they are. It takes about a minute to ride from the bottom to the top and, for a naturally impatient woman like me, a minute standing still is too long. Even though I was not in any particular hurry that morning, I soon began walking up the escalator, easing my way past the line of stationary passengers on the right-hand side—thinking to myself, all the while, I may be almost sixty, but I’ve still got it, I’m still fit
—until, about three quarters of the way up, I found myself stuck. A young mother was standing on the right-hand side and on the left, holding her hand, was her daughter, a girl of maybe seven or eight. She had blonde hair and was wearing a red plastic mac with a hood that made her look a bit like the little girl who drowns at the beginning of Don’t Look Now. (Everything makes me think of a film, I can’t help it.) There wasn’t room to push past her, and in any case I didn’t want to rupture this lovely moment of connection between a mother and her child. So I waited until they reached the top of the escalator and then I watched as the little girl prepared herself to jump off. Even from behind, I could sense her anticipation, the way her eyes must have been fixing themselves on the moving track ahead of her with concentrated energy, the coiled readiness in her tiny limbs and muscles and then, when the moment arrived, the sudden fierce movement as she leaped forward and landed safely on terra firma , following which, no doubt relieved and elated by the manoeuvre, she performed two little skips, still clasping her mother’s hand and pulling her slightly forward in the process. And I think it must have been these skips, more than anything else, that made my heart flip, that made me catch my breath, that made me watch in wonder and longing as the mother and her daughter headed off towards the ticket barrier together. It made me think at once of my own daughters, Francesca and Ariane, children no longer, and how for them, when they were seven or eight years old, the mere act of walking was sometimes not enough, it must have felt simply too ordinary, too boring to express the intensity of their delight in motion, in the joyous novelty of their relation to the physical world, which meant that sometimes they, too, would randomly break into a skip, or a hop, and in the process they would carry me forwards with them, each of them clasping one of my hands, and sometimes I would skip too, to keep up with them and to show them that I was also capable of sharing their joy in the world, that middle age had not yet drained it out of me.
All of these thoughts flashed through my mind as I watched the mother and her daughter proceed to the ticket barrier, and they all swelled and distilled themselves into a sudden, transitory but overwhelming sense of loss and longing, which flattened me and took my breath away and obliged me to rest for a moment, stepping aside from the relentless flow of passengers, catching my breath and resting my hand upon my breastbone until I too was ready to rejoin that flow, to press on with life, to put my card on the card reader and pass through the barrier and then head upwards towards Piccadilly and the thin late-morning light.
I walked along Piccadilly very slowly, reflecting on what I had just seen and the way it had made me feel. Tomorrow Ariane, the elder of my twins (by forty-five minutes), would be leaving home at last, flying to the other side of the world. It would be my job to drive her to Heathrow, to wave goodbye at the entrance to Departures while pretending to feel nothing more ambiguous than pleasure at the wonderful opportunities waiting for her in Sydney. And then my husband and I would be left only with Fran, with the problem of Fran, with Fran who in the last few weeks, suddenly and dramatically, had gone from being a child to being a problem, a problem which had floored us both, and would no doubt continue to do so for the foreseeable future, until we could find a path which led through the mess she had created and out the other side. But there was no sign of that path appearing yet.
The task I’d set myself in coming to Piccadilly was soon accomplished. I went into Fortnum’s to buy Ariane a goingaway present and it didn’t take long to find what I wanted: tea. She loved tea—for her it was the taste of home—and I had always loved making it for her. I bought her a pack of six different blends, which came complete with its own silver teapot and strainer, and I tried to picture her in some featureless student room in Sydney, pouring tea from this pot into her Union Jack mug and sipping it and being transported back to our kitchen at home, her elbows resting on the old pine table and her hair sheened with low sunlight cutting through the branches of the apple tree in the winter garden outside.
Maybe it would comfort her. Or maybe (perhaps more likely, and even better) she would not need comforting.
The year was 2013, and it was the first week of January, that disorientating time when the Christmas festivities are over but the world has not yet quite returned to normal. Feeling the need to do something that would seem routine, quotidian, I decided to go for a coffee in the bar at BAFTA. Perhaps there would be somebody there that I knew. It would do me no harm to have a chat, an exchange of gossip and pleasantries.
The bar was almost empty. It still had that air of post-Christmas desolation. There was only one person that I recognized, sitting by himself at a table for two by the picture windows, overlooking the street. Mark Arrowsmith. Not the first man I would have picked for a friendly catch-up. But beggars, as they say, cannot be choosers. Mark it was. I went over to his table and waited for him to look up from his MacBook.
Calista,
he said. Darling! What a nice surprise.
May I?
Of course.
He closed the lid of the computer and moved some papers out of the way to make room for the cappuccino I had already bought myself at the bar.
Sorry about all this junk,
he said. I’ve finally got a meeting with Film4 next week. They’ve asked to see a budget which I assume means they might be serious at last.
He arranged the last bundle of papers into a stack and put them away in a plastic folder.
Mark must have been in his late sixties by then. Although nothing like as athletic, he had something of the look of Burt Lancaster in Local Hero. (As I said, everything and everyone reminds me of a film.) He had the eyes of a dreamer—or used to, about ten years before—but these days they were clouded with defeat. Mark had been trying to get the same film made for the last twenty-five years or more. Some time in the late 1980s he had taken out an option on a novel by Kingsley Amis—a name which, back in those days, still carried a certain cachet. It had seemed quite a realistic proposition and he had secured the services of a well-known director and three or four bankable actors. But for some reason the final tranche of money had fallen through at the last minute and then the director had become unavailable and then two of the actors had become unavailable and one of the others had begun not to look so bankable any more and before he knew what was happening the project had a bad smell hanging around it which everyone started to notice except for Mark himself. As a producer he already had a couple of reasonably successful credits to his name—a feature film and a one-off drama for BBC Two—but since then he had made nothing and the quest to get this stupid Kingsley Amis adaptation off the ground had come to obsess him. He had become one of the fixtures at BAFTA, always sitting by himself at a table for two with his MacBook, waiting to have a meeting with someone who might or might not have read the fifteenth draft of the script and who might know someone who knew someone who worked for a hedge fund which might have some money lying around at the end of the tax year and who might have nothing better to do with it than invest it in the screen version of a minor novel by someone nobody ever talked about any more and who was now so out of fashion that you might as well try to get an adaptation of the Yellow Pages onto the screen. But still Mark refused to give up, and in the meantime his moustache had turned white and a film of rheumy disappointment had begun to cloud his eyes.
The odd thing was that he also kept a house in the South of France and had two children by his second marriage in private schools and nobody knew where his money came from. But I’d often observed this state of affairs among the British and assumed that he came from a family who had plenty of money going back generations and were skilled at keeping it to themselves. It stopped me from feeling too sorry for him, anyway. And the other thing that stopped me from feeling too sorry for him was the awareness that I hadn’t done a serious piece of work for about ten years either so I wasn’t exactly one to talk.
Have you been working much?
Mark asked now, speaking with a directness I could have done without.
Not really,
I admitted. Did you see—?
I mentioned a British film which had enjoyed modest theatrical success a few months earlier.
I did,
said Mark. Was that you? I thought it was—
He named a young British composer of film and library music, with a growing reputation.
Some of it was him. I was just the orchestrator, in theory. You remember the little figure on marimba, which played whenever you saw them driving in the car?
I sang the simple melody for him.
Of course,
said Mark. That’s what made it. That’s what everybody remembers.
That was me.
And yet he got the Oscar nomination.
Mark shook his head, dismayed as always by the way of the world. You’re so talented, Cal. Will you do the music for my film? Say you will. It has to be you.
Of course I said yes, but I did not take the offer seriously. It was as if Mark was offering to pay off my mortgage for me when he won the lottery. Never mind. It was a nice gesture, and he meant it, and it wasn’t his fault that he was sure to spend what little remained of his working life in pursuit of this doomed project.
I’ve got Dame Judi interested, you know,
he said, as if he could read my thoughts and wanted to reassure me that he was not some deluded madman.
I thought she was already attached,
I said, casting my mind back to a conversation we seemed to have had on this very subject decades ago.
She was attached, and then she wasn’t attached, and now she’s attached again,
he explained. Only now she’s going to play the grandmother, not the mother.
That figures, I thought. The cast for this film remained pretty much the same in Mark’s head, they just kept moving up a generation. If it ever got made, the one-time hot young leading man would end up playing Grandpa as he pushed himself around the set in a wheelchair.
Also,
I said, a tad too defensively, not wanting him to think that I was sitting at home twiddling my thumbs and waiting for the phone to ring (even though I was), I’m writing some music of my own.
Concert music?
he asked.
"Kind of. It’s film-related, but not actually for a film. It’s a little suite, for chamber orchestra. I’m calling it Billy. And then I added, in response to his interrogative look:
As in Wilder."
What a nice idea. I didn’t know you were a fan.
I adore his films. Doesn’t everybody?
"Of course. It’s incredible, really, when you look back. Just one masterpiece after another. I mean, how do you manage to do that, in this industry? Double Indemnity—masterpiece. Sunset Boulevard—masterpiece. He just kept turning them out. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment . . ."
What about after that?
I asked.
Mark frowned. I don’t know . . . Did he make many films after that?
Of course he did. About ten of them.
Struggling to recall, he said, Was there one about Sherlock Holmes . . . ?
"Did you ever see Fedora?" I asked.
Mark shook his head. I don’t think so. If I have, I’ve forgotten it.
Well, I haven’t,
I said, because I was there when he shot it.
His eyes widened. Really?
Frowning again, he mumbled, "Fedora, Fedora . . . What was it about?"
And I’m afraid I couldn’t resist saying: It was about lots of things. But I suppose you could say that mainly . . . mainly it was about an ageing film producer, trying to make a film which was completely out of step with the times.
That seemed to close the conversation. Shortly afterwards, Mark gathered up his things and left. From the window, I could see him crossing Piccadilly and heading north towards Regent Street. The sky was darkening, and it was starting to rain.
*
I am a contrary person, I would be the first to admit that. Our last dinner together as a family of four was perfectly cheerful and pleasant, but that was exactly what depressed me about it. There will be no more of those for a long time, I thought to myself afterwards, as I loaded the dishwasher. The girls had gone upstairs to their bedrooms, to do whatever it was they did up there. I decided to watch a film, for distraction. We were at the start of the awards season and as BAFTA voters, Geoffrey and I had about thirty DVD screeners to get through. We started watching an American action movie with a cacophonous soundtrack in which the noise of explosions, gunfire and car crashes competed with a thunderous orchestral score. After about ten minutes he was fast asleep on the sofa, his snores loud enough to drown out even the noise of the movie. I watched it to the end without the least sense of interest or involvement. Everything about it was formulaic to the last degree, and I marvelled at the time, energy and expense that must have gone into something that would be forgotten in a few months’ time (and forgotten by the audience the minute they left the cinema). I followed it up with a British comedy about two feisty old dears who went on a road trip to the South of France and got involved in all sorts of scrapes. It was meant to be quirky and life-enhancing but it filled me with a deep sense of existential despair. Every time something amusing was about to happen the composer nudged us in the ribs by having the strings play pizzicato. (Back in the 1950s and ’60s it would have been a bassoon that did the nudging.) After thirty minutes of these two lovable pensioners larking about in Provence I wanted to kill them both. I turned off the TV and went back into the kitchen, gloomier than ever.
In circumstances this desperate there is only one thing that can console me. I always keep at least three different kinds of Brie in the kitchen for emergency situations. Other people drink to forget; I eat Brie. At the moment my fridge contained a good Coulommiers—not strictly a Brie, but close enough—as well as a superior but mass-produced supermarket brand, but this was no time for compromise: only a top-notch Brie de Meaux fermier would do tonight.
Of course, it should have been standing at room temperature for a couple of hours, but there was no time for that now. I spooned a good dollop out of the box and plastered it onto a water biscuit. The release of those delicate nutty, mushroomy flavours onto my tongue was exquisite. The texture was firm but creamy. Bliss. I scraped out some more and then some more and before I knew what I was doing I’d eaten about half of it in ten minutes flat.
Oh dear,
said Geoffrey. He had woken up and was standing watching me from the kitchen doorway. Bad as that, is it?
You will never understand,
I said, with my mouth half-full, the consolations of a good Brie. You’re a cheese philistine.
Geoffrey liked Cheddar and Red Leicester, at a pinch. He really didn’t have a clue when it came to cheese.
He sat down opposite me and poured himself a half-tumbler of Laphroaig.
Everything will be all right,
he said.
I spread cheese onto a new cracker and devoured it in two mouthfuls.
How will it be all right?
I asked.
It just will. Life goes on.
I thought about this answer and found it wanting.
So our daughters have grown up,
he continued. That’s wonderful, isn’t it? They’ve turned into beautiful young women.
It’s not just that,
I countered, petulant.
Why, what else is it?
Did you notice the music in those two films?
Not really.
No—you did the sensible thing and fell asleep.
Well, what about it?
That wasn’t music, it was just . . . noise. Written by numbers. Not a single melody, not a single new idea . . . And that’s what people want these days. They don’t want what I write. For God’s sake, no one’s commissioned a score off me for fifteen years.
The industry’s not what it was, everybody knows that. Anyway, now you have time to do other things.
Other things? Such as?
I thought you were going to write some new music—your Billy Wilder thing.
This was true, of course, but it wasn’t enough.
What’s to become of me, Geoff?
I said, clutching both of his hands. I have two talents. Two things that give me a reason to go on living. I’m a good composer, and I’m a good mother. Writing music, and bringing up children. That’s what I do. And now I’m basically being told that neither of these skills is required any more. On both fronts, I’m finished. Kaput. And I’m only fifty-seven! Fifty-seven, that’s all.
I reached out for his whisky glass and took a swig. Big mistake. Whisky and Brie don’t go together, not at all. What’s to become of me?
I repeated.
*
The next morning was the one I had really been dreading. The post came freakishly early, while Geoffrey and I were having breakfast. Ariane was upstairs finishing off her packing. Fran was in the shower. When she came down to the kitchen, she was in a hurry. She had a temporary job at Caffè Nero and her shift started in half an hour. There was a letter for her, with the NHS logo in the corner of the envelope. She opened it and said:
January the fourteenth. A week on Monday.
She meant that this was the day the procedure had been scheduled, to terminate her pregnancy.
She handed me the letter and I read it, but couldn’t think of anything to say.
Geoffrey said: Well, that’s good, I suppose. The sooner it’s over with, the better.
I stood up and walked towards Fran, meaning to give her a hug, but she saw me coming and managed to duck out of the way.
I’m late,
she said, taking a bite out of a piece of toast, and downing her espresso in one. I’ll see you later.
Did you say goodbye to your sister?
Oh—I forgot,
she said, and ran back upstairs.
She’s not going to see her again for months,
I said to Geoffrey. How could she forget?
Teenagers are weird,
he answered.
She