Chocolates for Breakfast Page 24

  I had vaguely known that, after the first publication of Chocolates, Pamela had fallen under the sway of filmmaker, screenwriter, and international man of intrigue Edouard de Laurot. She had met him on the ocean liner that took her from New York to Paris in August 1956, around the time that the media buildup began around Chocolates. For the next two years she followed him on an odyssey across Europe, investing all the profits from the international sales of her book into his projects, supporting de Laurot on his “revolutionary missions,” and purchasing a car—a Mercedes-Benz 180D—for his use.

  During this time, Adam Kanarek, the man who would become my father, was back home in New York. He and Pamela had been introduced by a mutual friend, and they sometimes met in the libraries at Columbia University, where Adam had a job in the Slavonic department. During Pamela’s European travels, she and Adam wrote each other with increasing frequency. Adam was cast in the role of loyal, steadfast friend, submitting Pamela’s papers to Barnard College and lobbying her professors to give her the credits she would need to graduate.

  Although she was nearly eight years younger than he, in her letters to Adam, Pamela often took to lecturing him on the importance of engagement in history. One must not allow one’s fate to be determined by circumstances, she wrote, nor by lack of faith or courage. Adam sometimes responded that, having witnessed in Poland both the Nazi occupation and the Soviet liberation, he was suspicious of all ideologies and their calls to action.

  (In addition to my father’s letters and anecdotes, I had the complete typescript of Pamela’s second novel, “Prophets without Honor,” which was largely based on her experiences with de Laurot. Her agent, Sterling Lord, sold this book to Knopf in 1959. The villain, named André de Sevigny, is a bona fide military spy and a traitor, rather than a fabulist filmmaker. Like de Laurot, de Sevigny is of mysterious trans-European origins. There is a dangerous edge to his charm, as he and the heroine, Susan, engage in a kind of power play reminiscent of Anthony Neville and Courtney in Chocolates, only much darker. Once the full book was submitted to Knopf, however, it was rejected—in spite of the publisher having paid a hefty advance. Pamela continued to rework the story in various forms, including the unfinished novel she was working on at the end of her life, “Kathy on the Rocks,” with its themes of “Europe versus America” and innocence betrayed.)

  But what had really happened during that two-year hiatus? To find out, I began meeting with people who had known de Laurot, and they described a charismatic, fascinating, and often destructive genius of boundless energy who was always engaged in some highly important and secret mission. His son told me how his father had taught him to build pipe bombs for an explosion sequence on one of his films, and how he would disappear for years at a time. The widower of one of de Laurot’s later companions told me that de Laurot had tested her usefulness early in their collaboration by instructing her to raise $10,000 for his next film. When she showed up a week later with the cash, he asked her, “How did you get this?” “We robbed a bank,” she replied. According to the story I was told, this caught de Laurot off guard, but he must have decided that this girl was a keeper, because they remained lovers and then friends for many years, collaborating on screenplays with Abel Ferrara.

  De Laurot also collaborated with the filmmaker Jonas Mekas on the magazine Film Culture and on Mekas’s first film, Guns of the Trees. This was in the late 1950s, before Mekas went on to make dozens of acclaimed films and eventually founded Anthology Film Archives. When I met with Mekas in August 2012, he recalled de Laurot’s imperious style, and how de Laurot had begun to direct the actors and the camera crew until Mekas kicked him off the set. He also recalled de Laurot’s letter to him, when he first met Pamela on the ocean liner. She was interested in cinema, de Laurot wrote, and would be useful to their projects. Mekas then gave me a large envelope stuffed with my mother’s letters, which de Laurot had entrusted to him for safekeeping nearly fifty years before.

  With these letters, I have pieced together some of the story behind her two-year disappearance beginning in 1956, which the press took to be a charming eccentricity of a young writer— very Salingeresque, perhaps. My first discovery was that Pamela’s relationship with de Laurot began long before she was a celebrity. Perhaps de Laurot had chosen her in part for her naïveté and usefulness to him, but her wealth and fame could not yet have been a factor. Her first letter to him, written after she had gotten off the boat where they had first met, was dated June 14, 1956. “I have been progressing in my elementary education, as you outlined it, so perhaps when I see you again, I shall have become more conversant.”

  Though a very charismatic man—the center of attention in any room, by many accounts—de Laurot always kept his activities shrouded in secrecy. Pamela wrote that she would do anything to support his projects, and that her greatest fear was to be unworthy of helping him.

  Why did you go to Zurich? Only to earn money, or to work on a film? I am not interrogating you, but I was distressed to think that you might have been sent from Paris solely by need of money. It is now only a dream, but it is my most fervent wish that I might make enough money so that you could be freed for more significant work . . . I want to do so much, Edouard . . . I think, with the joy that one might have in contemplating a revolution, of how much you might do if you were not beset with the problem of mere sustenance.

  With the income from her book sales and film rights, Pamela purchased a car for him. No cadre of the revolution should have to cross the continent in an unreliable or uncomfortable car—the stakes were simply too high, and his comfort and sense of style were essential to his ability to command. Pamela dwelled on the details of the car, and the kind of coat that she would send de Laurot, in her letters that Jonas Mekas handed me more than fifty years later.

  These letters make plain her love for de Laurot, which she tried to contain with a soldierly resolve. She would put her talents at his command and “bear him a novel,” as a wife would bear a man his child. She pined for him in nondescript towns along the Czechoslovakian and Polish borders while he made forays beyond the Iron Curtain.

  She described in one letter her outline for “Prophets without Honor.” Although the book was delivered to Knopf once she was married to my father, the outline on the basis of which Sterling Lord sold it had been written while she was still with de Laurot. I searched in the archives and found it: the heroine in the outline is a novelist, not the fashion model she would later become. In one scene she is on her way to meet André at a Paris café:

  But when she sees him, the last refuge of her independence, the belief in her writing ability will be destroyed, and she will no longer be able to justify to herself her refusal to submit wholly to his intellectual domination. She stares from her hotel room out over the roofs of the Latin quarter: she is struck with horror at the vision of herself become the tool of this passionate, overpowering man. In this crisis, she even asks herself whether her abdication will make her lose his love, because he scorns and casts aside those that are weak.

  In the outline, a dark hero. In the submitted manuscript, a craven villain. But the same man can be discerned in these very different renderings, the man who first captivated her on the ship sailing across the Atlantic in June 1956.

  His appearance was bizarre, so flagrantly so that this seemed his intention. He wore his hair in a nineteenth-century manner only slightly modified with the dark, thick locks long and full, brushed back from his high, square, furrowed forehead . . . “Come with me,” he repeated, the playfulness gone from his carefully-modulated voice. “You will find it more amusing than avoiding me.”

  After two years, Pamela was exhausted and broke. She returned to New York and confided in my father enough detail about de Laurot’s past for him to begin showing her how much of it must have been fabrication. De Laurot then came to New York and summoned her to a meeting, to which my father showed up instead. This dramatic showdown on a highway overpass featured prominently in the final version of “
Prophets without Honor.” But most of her money was already gone; she owed more income tax to the IRS than she was ever able to pay off in her lifetime, and although Chocolates continued to sell briskly and generate royalties, her career had suffered a derailment and never got back on track.

  In the wake of de Laurot, Adam Kanarek rose to the occasion and rescued and protected my mother—but in such a way, it seems to me, that ensured she would never be really free. Some vital force in her had already diminished. Or perhaps she allowed herself to be saved only on condition that she might sacrifice herself again. The arrow fits the wound exactly.

  In trying to understand what happened to Pamela, I have to also consider the role of her mother, Isabel Moore. Clearly the model for the has-been actress Sondra Farrell, Courtney’s mother in Chocolates for Breakfast, Isabel had even more of a malevolent streak than the fictional character. A successful writer of pulp fiction and editor of Photoplay magazine, Isabel, like Sondra, lived at the Garden of Allah in Hollywood in the late 1940s, although it was actually Pamela’s half-sister, Elaine, who resided with her there, not Pamela herself. Paralleling a scene in Chocolates, where Sondra fails to warn Courtney of their impending eviction from the hotel, Isabel abruptly departed from an Arizona spa, where Pamela awoke to find her mother gone. Isabel had left nothing behind but the unpaid bill and her fifteen-year-old daughter as collateral. Pamela had to fend for herself until several months later, when Isabel settled the bill and sent for her.

  When Pamela was nineteen, Isabel visited her in Paris. Pamela was already deeply involved with de Laurot but kept him and their activities a secret. In a letter to Adam, still back in New York, Isabel tantalized him with news about her daughter, while being coy and even flirtatious with her daughter’s would-be suitor. The letter also gives a remarkable picture of Isabel’s relationship with Pamela:

  [S]he became quite petulant and demanding when I couldn’t have dinner with her. You will like the fact that when she did complain, I burst out, “For heaven’s sake, Pamela, I’m not—” and stopped, appalled. Pamela had the good humor to chuckle and to say, “That’s very good, Mummy. You were about to say, ‘I’m not your mother—’ ” And I said, “Yes, I’ve disciplined myself to the point where, I guess, the new arrangement is so without my having to pretend it’s so.”

  In the same letter, Isabel told another story, one that a different mother might not have taken quite so casually:

  I prefer not to think too much about her personal relationships, Adam. I think they were summed up pretty well by her when, in discussing Rimbaud, she said, “he had to destroy himself in order to prove that the things he represented should be destroyed—” and I said, “Is that how you feel,” and her answer was, “Of course.”

  In the letters that Pamela wrote to de Laurot, she endeavored to show him how well she understood the importance of secrecy and her utter loyalty to their cause. But I suspect she also had her own reasons for keeping her mother at a distance—a mother who could refuse to be nurturing in any way, who placed her self-advancement ahead of any other person in her life, family included, yet respected no boundary between her daughter’s psyche and her own.

  In a letter postmarked June 24, 1964, Isabel Moore wrote to Adam Kanarek:

  It is now two weeks since Pamela’s tragic death, and I have not heard from you regarding any of the questions I put to you in my previous letter . . . Meanwhile, I have been contacted, through my agent, by two publishing houses who wish me to do a biography of Pamela . . . I’m sure you as well as I wish to do full justice to her memory. Therefore it seems we should stop being immature and get together to make her death a memorial to the living rather than the tragic waste it is now.

  Ultimately, she wrote the book by herself, entitled “Forgive Me My Darling,” and sold it to World Publishing. Advance ads for it began appearing, until Adam and Pamela’s father, Don Moore, convinced Isabel and her publisher that they would block the book’s publication by any means necessary. Uncharacteristically, in this case, Isabel backed down.

  As Pamela wrote toward the end of Chocolates for Breakfast, after Janet’s suicide: “There never is anything anyone else can do. Everyone must save himself, no one can help him.”

  In the end, it was Pamela Moore who killed Pamela Moore.

  In a diary entry written shortly before the end of my mother’s life, she contemplates a possible different pathway her life might have taken. This reverie was triggered by the name of her old high-school boyfriend, the one who had inspired the character of Charles Cunningham:

  March 31 1964: In the phone book I see “John W.” “Cortland” the name that inspired Courtney. So he must have returned, John W., to become a broker like everyone else. Does he still associate with the old people? Would I, if I were with him? To think that my life might have taken that turn! I would have stayed in the same milieu, with the problems, like alcoholism, that I understood at 16! No Faustian despairs? Would I have written Chocolates? Yes, I have no doubt. And then what, if not for college if John instead? Nursing an alcoholic at worst, and a non-intellectual one, writing would without any doubt have reasserted itself.

  Here she was, two months before her death, looking back over the trajectory of her life and considering the choices she had made. What if she had married John? She would have been spared the humiliation and abuse to which Edouard subjected her, and the airless claustrophobia of safety with Adam, these two very different men, who had so much in common: both of them far removed from the milieu of her own upbringing, both Polish refugees, survivors of World War II, dark and overbearing.

  And then follows a refrain that crops up several times in her entries that last year, the invocation of “deviltry.”

  I bit off more than I could chew in this Europe . . . Please leave me alone and spare me all that heavy baggage of culture . . . As for deviltry—that is what I’ve done with Edouard and Adam. One was a con-man, the other gave up being a devil because he realized he was nothing on his own. The devil-principle is in me and must be realized in me.

  I don’t fully understand her meaning, and I do not wish to overstep whatever right a son has to question the archives and writings of his mother, looking for answers. Pamela is no longer here to explain herself, and I can only go so far in trying to decode her thoughts, or to infer a sequence of events and reasons from what is essentially a cry of pain, a call for help.

  Read on

  The Three Texts of Chocolates for Breakfast

  Excerpts from the Original Manuscript and the French Nouvelle Édition

  IN THE MANUSCRIPT that Pamela Moore submitted to Rinehart early in 1956, dozens of pages were crossed out and did not appear in the published book. By the time the first American edition came out in September 1956, Moore had already left the United States for France.

  The first French edition was published by Julliard soon after, in November 1956. It was a straight translation of the book published in America. This French edition had already begun to ship when Moore came to René Julliard with dozens of typewritten pages that she wanted him to include in the book. As Moore would later tell the story, Julliard at first refused, saying, “Pamela, even if you were my mistress, I couldn’t do this.”

  Eventually, he agreed. Julliard released the second edition with the heading “New Edition, Revised by the Author” printed on the cover. This nouvelle édition, dated January 1957, includes a great deal of new material, including a preface about the kind of self-censorship (censure par anticipation) that Moore believed she had imposed on herself in the United States.

  But the restored material is different from the cut pages of the original manuscript. It is essentially a new text. A study of the original American manuscript, the French text, and Moore’s notes, letters, and diaries from that time suggests that much of this French material was created after the original work, in collaboration with the filmmaker Edouard de Laurot. There are in fact three versions of the story: the book written by Moore, the book published by Rineha
rt, and the nouvelle édition that Julliard published afterward in French. This new edition was used as the basis for subsequent European translations.

  Readers have sometimes remarked on the episodic nature of Chocolates for Breakfast. As Courtney moves from boarding school to Hollywood and then to New York City, the continuity with her previous situation isn’t always apparent. But in the alternative versions of the story, there is a refrain: the memory of Miss Rosen, Courtney’s kindly and intelligent boarding school teacher, comes back to Courtney at key moments throughout the book.

  In the American manuscript, Courtney’s attachment to Miss Rosen is visceral; her former teacher reappears as a kind of sense-memory of lost love and affection. In the French version, Miss Rosen embodies a political awareness and existentialist philosophy—one’s destiny is created, not discovered—with which Courtney wrestles right up until she meets the Charles Cunningham character, who in the French edition is cast as a student revolutionary. The differences between these alternative versions of the same book can be quite striking.

  La Nouvelle Édition: The French New Edition

  The French book begins with a preface, in which Moore explains a process of self-censorship, which she calls a “a censorship by anticipation,” that had caused her to leave out not only some of the more explicit sensual content but also what she now sees as the moral to her story: the conflict between American values and the human condition. “We turn away from this terrifying truth with what I would term a kind of collective bad faith (mauvaise foi commune).” She concludes by saying, “I felt obliged to try to arrive at the causes of this moral crisis that so afflicts the youth whom I describe in this book.”