‘Two goats in the Mojave Desert. Have you heard it, Viney?’ Weinberger shook his head.
‘They find a tin of film. One of them nuzzles it until the lid falls off. The film leader loosens around the spool and the goat eats a few frames. The second goat eats some too, and they all pull the film off the reel until they have eaten the whole of it. There is nothing left except the can and the spool. The first goat says,”Wasn’t that great?” and the second goat says,”The book was better.”‘
Stone laughed heartily and Weinberger joined in although he’d heard it before (p.191)
Filmworld
After spies, comedy and war, this is another deliberate new departure, or experiment by Len Deighton – this time into the glitzy glamorous world of movie-making and Hollywood film stars.
Deighton had quite a bit of experience of the movie world and no doubt that’s what gave him the inspiration and much of the material for this book. His hugely successful début, The Ipcress File, was turned into a movie in 1965 and there are plenty of photos of Deighton showing its star, Michael Caine, how to cook. Deighton formed a production company with photographer Brian Duffy to produce the film adaptation of his own comic novel, Only When I Larf (1968), and the same company helped produce the screen version of the hit stage play Oh What A Lovely War, for which Deighton also wrote the screenplay (1969), one of the classic British movies of the 1960s.
Thus Deighton knew what he was writing about when he turned to creating a novel about an English actor caught up in the Hollywood machine. However, there isn’t exactly a shortage of novels about Hollywood, quite a few of which reveal that it’s a cut-throat business full of cynical studio bosses, jaded directors, egotistical stars, gagging starlets, alcoholic writers and so on and so on.
What Deighton did for the spy novel (bring a completely new, wonderfully fresh and irreverent style to it) he doesn’t do for the movie-world novel. Close-Up is well-imagined and well-written but it doesn’t break any moulds. In fact, considering the extravagance, cynicism and obscenity of some of the competition, Close-Up is quite cosy and conservative. It fits very snugly into ‘the mould’.
Characters
Marshall Stone is the main character. He’s in his late 40s, risen from suburban dullness (real name Edward Brummidge) to work his way up the ranks of provincial stage actors, before being spotted and given the lead in the wildly successful Western Last Vaquero (1949) (no, it doesn’t exist and doesn’t sound as if it could have been a classic Western). He manages to keep a foot on the English stage with a decade-defining Hamlet i the 1950s, before making more movies through the 60s and now, in the early 1970s, reaching his 50th birthday, he faces difficult personal and professional choices, which the novel describes and dramatises.
Leo Koolman is the unsmiling head of a Hollywood studio who is over in London partly to fête Stone, to make sure he turns up for the filming of his current project, Stool Pigeon, but mainly to coerce him into signing up for a series of TV dramas, a move Stone is understandably reluctant to agree to.
Jake Weinberger (Viny), former publicity manager who is now Stone’s long-suffering agent and confident, and who is being squeezed by Koolman to bring pressure on Stone to sign the contentious TV deal.
Kagan Bookbinder, the stocky producer of Stone’s breakthrough movie, who appears in numerous subsequent scenes as his career intersects with Stone’s, espcially in the climactic scenes where Stone gets talked into starring in an ill-fated independent movie of Bookbinder’s which goes seriously wrong.
Edgar Nicholson, another English actor who appears in the famous breakthrough movie, but whose part is savagely cut to foreground Stone, and whose career never recovers, who appears in verious subsequent scenes as a permanent reminder of the price others paid for Stone’s success.
Suzy Delft is Stone’s illegitimate daughter, now in her early 20s and herself trying to break into the movies. Something odd is going on because since puberty she has had to fend off Stone’s rather more-than-fatherly embraces and outright groping. Is he an incestuous pedophile? Or is Suzy, in fact, not his daughter at all?
Peter Anson was a one-time movie hopeful whose career was shafted and so became a writer. Now he’s been commissioned to write Stone’s biography, so gets to meet him and his family and poke around in his past. Given added piquancy because he is married to Stone’s former wife, Mary.
Slow plot
There are lots of leisurely long scenes between these and a few other characters which allow Deighton to display his knowledge of the finances, deals, technology and psychology of movie-making. The novel is long on leisurely conversations (it’s 345 pages in length) and fairly short on plot.
There’s some technical interest in the way chapters alternate between an omniscient third person narrator and the first-person narrative of Peter Anson as he compiles his biography.
And in the way the time frame leaps around, rooted in a present where Stone is feeling his age, insecure, unhappy filming his latest movie and stressed about the TV deal, but abruptly switching to Stone’s youth in the 1940s, to scenes surrounding the making of his breakthrough Last Vaquero, Anson gets hold of Stone’s first wife’s diary of the late 1940s and 1950s and these are reprinted verbatim.
All this is cleverly handled but there is no tension or forward pull to the narrative. It could have gone on like this for a few hundred more likeable pages. Deighton is always engaging, if never quite believable, company.
I thought the business with a lover of Stone’s in his early days, who Koolman says is blocking his career and needs to be got rid of – I thought it might emerge that she was murdered or something. There’s also a permanent shimmer of uncertainty around whether Suzy Delft is or isn’t the illegitimate daughter Stone claims her to be… And there are unlikely suggestions that Stone’s ex-wife had an affair with Koolman…
But none of these build up to anything: there is no big plot revelation at the end. Instead, in the final pages the book becomes unexpectedly post-modern as the biographer, Anson, confronts a Koolman gloating about finally persuading Stone to do the TV deal – and then, in a slightly surreal way, Anson announces he’s not going to write a factual biography of Stone anyway, he’s going to turn the actor’s story into a fiction – ‘A book of fiction can get closer to the truth than a biography.’ (p.344) whereupon the studio owner enthusiastically joins in, suggesting ideas: how about they call the star actor ‘Marshall Stone’; and how about the scheming mogul is called ‘Koolman’ – ‘Say, that’s not a bad name for me – Koolman: cool man, yes, I like it.’ Thus the fiction closes with the fictional characters creating it and the entire book ends with Anson saying he’s just composed the opening to his novel – and quoting the opening paragraph of this book 🙂
Clever though this kind of ending is, it doesn’t add to or undermine the preceding fiction, which we have engaged with too much (or to little) to be swayed by a final throwaway device. I already knew Koolman and Stone were fictions. They’re in a novel. Having the novel say they are fictions doesn’t alter my experience of the text in the slightest.
The risks of writing a Hollywood novel
Writing a Hollywood novel is a high-risk undertaking from the start for at least three reasons: 1) fictitious movie star names and movie titles always seem silly 2) it quickly dates 3) you can’t out-gross the gross things we already know.
1. There is a very big, costly publicity machine working all the time to make sure everyone in the world knows what the new movies are, who the top actors are, who’s making what with whom, and all the gossip and scandals of their private lives. The advent of the internet hasn’t exactly damped down celebrity culture. The reverse, it’s become an all-consuming, hyperactive machine and goes at an incredible pace. Everything in it dates so fast, product moves to dvd and then box set in months and we have moved onto the next thing, it’s impossible to avoid the daily diet of ads or news snippets, reviews on TV, radio, in newspapers and magazines, espcially the annual brou-haha about the Oscars. Hundreds of millions of consumers pride themselves with being bang up to date about the movies.
Thus we are all sensitised to the names of the actors and actresses and hit movies of our time – George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Liam Neeson – without trying, I feel I know all about them. They are, in fact, very ordinary names (George) but attached to people of extraordinary skill and amazing charisma who, through their talents (and good looks) and the efforts of a multi-billion dollar multinational industry, have become household words or brands. Name recognition is immediate and total, the mind is flooded with images and emotions evoked by their roles like the palate is by the taste of chocolate.
No work of fiction can compete with that depth of aura. Marshall Stone, Valentine Somerset, Suzie Delft – heard of them? They are the made-up names of the ‘hugely famous’ movie stars in this novel. Except they are not remotely famous. And so their names fall flat. When le Carre invents the spy George Smiley or Forsyth invents Inspector Lefebre, their names barely matter, they are ‘ordinary’ people we would never have heard of. Their character emerges from their actions in the narrative. But the movie novel must persuade us that the whole world knows Marshall Stone, he is mobbed wherever he goes, everyone’s seen his movies, as the premise of the story, for it to make sense. But we haven’t heard of him and we don’t really care what happens to him.
Creating names for fictional movie stars is uniquely difficult because we know to within a millimetre all the names of current and previous generations of stars, as well as having warm feelings for eg Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen. To insert ‘Marshall Stone’ in among such names in the narrative is like a bad special effect, is like the appearance of Zelig with famous people in the Woody Allen movie of the same name, or the scenes where Forrest Gump meets famous people – instead of weaving his characters into a seamless fiction, namedropping real movie stars only highlights the empty, connotation-free, arbitrary quality of the fiction.
2. And nothing dates quicker than this topical knowledge. The text references recent industry-changing hits like The Sound of Music (1965), Easy Rider (1969) and Love Story (1970), suggests that Tom Jones or Andy Williams sing the title song of the new movie, Laurence Olivier is namechecked as the actor Stone most resembles and Stone’s 20-something daughter is mistaken for Nancy Sinatra, or is it Jane Fonda? It all seems such a long, long time ago.
3. Out-grossing the gross. Part of the appeal of the Hollywood movie is its ‘thrilling revelations’ about the scandalous behaviour of the stars and bureaucrats – look they take drugs, wow they screw starlets, God the studio boss is a cynical Machiavelli! But this is hardly news. The 1959 classic Hotel Babylon set a new low in its scurrilous stories of movieland’s cynicism, corruption and criminality. Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 bestseller Valley of the Dolls didn’t pull its punches about the sex and drugs world of 1940s and 50s Hollywood.
By contrast, the way Deighton’s studio head is a calculating manipulater who sometimes loses his temper, or the main character a 50-something male actor who’s a bit selfish and egotistical, seem very pale revelations indeed. It seems that the girl he was having an affair with in the early days died having a backstreet abortion and Stone paid for a fake story about her dying in a car crash to appear in the newspapers. That seems to be the most scandalous event in the book.
Deighton is too nice, too decent to give real bite to his satire, let alone convey real fear at Stone’s plight. And although Stone appears to have been cunningly stitched up by Koolman in the end, what does that amount to? He has to make a Dirty Harry-style movie and then ten episodes of the TV spin-off for a vast fee. Oh what a terrible fate.
This is an amiable 350-page read, with lots of the usual pleasures of a Deighton novel eg the crisp sentences, the understated humour and the interesting factual stretches packed with knowledge about cameras and lighting and directing and editing, and with topical conversations which are now quite interesting social history, where characters worry about TV killing off cinemas or the impact of the newfangled technology of tape cassettes on the movie business … but it isn’t the Deighton novel you’d recommend to newbies.
Related links
Paperback edition of Close-Up
Len Deighton’s novels
1962 The IPCRESS File Through the thickets of bureaucracy and confusing misinformation which surround him, an unnamed British intelligence agent discovers that his boss, Dalby, is in cahoots with a racketeer who kidnaps and brainwashes British scientists.
1963 Horse Under Water Perplexing plot which is initially about diving into a wrecked U-boat off the Portuguese coast for Nazi counterfeit money, then changes into the exposure of an illegal heroin manufacturing operation, then touches on a top secret technology which can change ice to water instantly (ie useful for firing missiles from submarines under Arctic ice) and finally turns out to be about a list – the Weiss List – of powerful British people who offered to help run a Nazi government when the Germans invaded, and who are now being blackmailed. After numerous adventures, the Unnamed Narrator retrieves the list and consigns it to the Intelligence archive.
1964 Funeral in Berlin The Unnamed Narrator is in charge of smuggling a Russian scientist through the Berlin Wall, all managed by a Berlin middle-man Johnnie Vulkan who turns out to be a crook only interested in getting fake identity papers to claim the fortune of a long-dead concentration camp victim. The Russians double-cross the British by not smuggling the scientist; Vulkan double-crosses the British by selling the (non-existent) scientist on to Israeli Intelligence; the Narrator double-crosses the Israelis by giving them the corpse of Vulkan (who he has killed) instead of the scientist; and is himself almost double-crossed by a Home Office official who tries to assassinate him in the closing scenes, in order to retrieve the valuable documents. But our Teflon hero survives and laughs it all off with his boss.
1966 Billion-Dollar Brain The Unnamed Narrator is recruited into a potty organisation funded by an American billionaire, General Midwinter, and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union. A character from Funeral In Berlin, Harvey Newbegin, inducts him into the organisation and shows him the Brain, the vast computer which is running everything, before absconding with loot and information, and then meeting a sticky end in Leningrad.
1967 An Expensive Place to Die A new departure, abandoning all the characters and much of the style of the first four novels for a more straightforward account of a secret agent in Paris who gets involved with a Monsieur Datt and his clinic-cum-brothel. After many diversions, including an induced LSD trip, he is ordered to hand over US nuclear secrets to a Chinese scientist, with a view to emphasising to the Chinese just how destructive a nuclear war would be and therefore discouraging them from even contemplating one.
1968 Only When I Larf Another departure, this is a comedy following the adventures of three con artists, Silas, Bob and Liz and their shifting, larky relationships as they manage (or fail) to pull off large-scale stings in New York, London and the Middle East.
1970 Bomber A drastic change of direction for Deighton, dropping spies and comedy to focus on 24 hours in the lives of British and German airmen, soldiers and civilians involved in a massive bombing raid on the Ruhr valley. 550 pages, enormous cast, documentary prose, terrifying death and destruction – a really devastating indictment of the horrors of war.
1971 Declarations of War Thirteen short stories, all about wars, mainly the first and second world wars, with a few detours to Vietnam, the American Civil war and Hannibal crossing the Alps. Three or four genuinely powerful ones.
1972 Close-Up Odd departure into Jackie Collins territory describing the trials and tribulations of fictional movie star Marshall Stone as he betrays his wife and early lovers to ‘make it’ in tinseltown, and the plight he currently finds himself in: embroiled in a loss-making production and under pressure from the scheming studio head to sign a lucrative but career-threatening TV deal.
1974 Spy Story The Unnamed Narrator of the Ipcress spy novels returns, in much tamer prose, to describe how, after escaping from the ‘Service’ to a steady job in a MoD war games unit, he is dragged back into ‘active service’ via a conspiracy of rogue right-wingers to help a Soviet Admiral defect. Our man nearly gets shot by the right-wingers and killed by Russians in the Arctic, before realising the whole thing was an elaborate scam by his old boss, Dawlish, and his new boss, the American marine General Schlegel, to scupper German reunification talks.
1975 Yesterday’s Spy Another first-person spy story wherein a different agent – though also working for the American Colonel Schlegel, introduced in Spy Story – is persuaded to spy on Steve Champion, the man who ran a successful spy ring in Nazi-occupied France, who recruited him to the agency and who saved his life back during the war. Via old contacts the narrator realises Champion is active again, but working for Arabs who are planning some kind of attack on Israel and which the narrator must foil.
1976 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (aka Catch a Falling Spy) The narrator and his CIA partner manage the defection of a Soviet scientist, only for a string of murder attempts and investigations to reveal that a senior US official they know is in fact a KGB agent, leading to a messy shootout at Washington airport, and then to an unlikely showdown in the Algerian desert.
1977 Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain Abandoning fiction altogether, Deighton published this comprehensive, in-depth and compelling history, lavishly illustrated with photos and technical diagrams of the famous planes involved.
1978 SS-GB A storming return to fiction with a gripping alternative history thriller in which the Germans succeeded in invading and conquering England in 1941. We follow a senior detective at Scotland Yard, Douglas Archer, living in defeated dingy London, coping with his new Nazi superiors, and solving a murder mystery which unravels to reveal not one but several enormous conspiracies.
1979 Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk Another factual history of WWII: Deighton moves quickly over Hitler’s rise to power and the diplomatic bullying of the 1930s, to arrive at the core of the book: an analysis of the precise meaning of ‘Blitzkrieg’, complete with detailed notes on all the weapons, tanks, artillery and hardware involved, as well as the evolution of German strategic thinking; and then its application in the crucial battle for the river Meuse which determined the May 1940 Battle for France.
1980 Battle of Britain
1981 XPD SIS agent Boyd Stuart is one of about 20 characters caught up in the quest for the ‘Hitler Minutes’, records of a top secret meeting between Hitler and Churchill in May 1940 in which the latter was (shockingly) on the verge of capitulating, and which were ‘liberated’ by US soldiers, along with a load of Nazi gold, at the very end of the war. Convoluted, intermittently fascinating and sometimes moving, but not very gripping.
1982 Goodbye, Mickey Mouse Six months in the life of the 220th Fighter Group, an American Air Force group flying Mustangs in support of heavy bombers, based in East Anglia, from winter 1943 through spring 1944, as we get to know 20 or so officers and men, as well as the two women at the centre of the two ill-fated love affairs which dominate the story.
1983 Berlin Game First of the Bernard Samson spy novels in which this forty-something British Intelligence agent uses his detailed knowledge of Berlin and its spy networks to ascertain who is the high-level mole within his Department. With devastating consequences.
1984 Mexico Set Second of the first Bernard Samson trilogy (there are three trilogies ie 9 Samson books), in which our hero manages the defection of KGB agent Erich Stinnes from Mexico City, despite KGB attempts to frame him for the murder of one of his own operatives and a German businessman. All that is designed to make Bernard defect East and were probably masterminded by his traitor wife, Fiona.
1985 London Match Third of the first Bernard Samson spy trilogy in which a series of clues – not least information from the defector Erich Stinnes who was the central figure of the previous novel – suggest to Samson that there is another KGB mole in the Department – and all the evidence points towards smooth-talking American, Bret Rensselaer.
1987 Winter An epic (ie very long and dense) fictionalised account of German history from 1900 to 1945, focusing on the two Winter brothers, Peter and Paul, along with a large supporting cast of wives, friends, colleagues and enemies, following their fortunes through the Great War, the Weimar years, the rise of Hitler and on into the ruinous Second World War. It provides vital background information about nearly all of the characters who appear in the Bernard Samson novels, so is really part of that series.
1988 Spy Hook First of the second trilogy of Bernard Samson spy novels in which Bernie slowly uncovers what he thinks is a secret slush fund of millions run by his defector wife with Bret Rensaeller (thought to be dead, but who turns up recuperating in a California ranch). The plot involves reacquaintance with familiar characters like Werner Volkmann, Frau Lisl (and her sister), old Frank Harrington, tricky Dicky Cruyer, Bernie’s 23-year-old girlfriend Gloria Kent, and so on.
1989 Spy Line Through a typically tangled web of incidents and conversations Samson’s suspicions are confirmed: his wife is a double agent, she has been working for us all along, she only pretended to defect to the East. After numerous encounters with various old friends of his father and retired agents, Samson finds himself swept up in the brutal, bloody plan to secure Fiona’s escape from the East.
1990 Spy Sinker In the third of the second trilogy of Samson novels, Deighton switches from a first-person narrative by Samson himself, to an objective third-person narrator and systematically retells the entire sequence of events portrayed in the previous five Samson novels from an external point of view, shedding new and sometimes devastating light on almost everything we’ve read. The final impression is of a harrowing world where everyone is deceiving everyone else, on multiple levels.
1991 MAMista A complete departure from the Cold War and even from Europe. Australian doctor and ex-Vietnam War veteran Ralph Lucas finds himself caught up with Marxist guerrillas fighting the ruling government in the (fictional) South American country of Spanish Guiana and, after various violent escapades, inveigled into joining the long, gruelling and futile trek through the nightmareish jungle which dominates the second half of the novel.
1992 City of Gold A complex web of storylines set in wartime Cairo, as the city is threatened by Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps forces in 1942. We meet crooks, gangsters, spies, émigrés, soldiers, detectives, nurses, deserters and heroes as they get caught up in gun smuggling, black marketeering and much more, in trying to track down the elusive ‘Rommel spy’ and, oh yes, fighting the Germans.
1993 Violent Ward Very entertaining, boisterous first-person narrative by Los Angeles shyster lawyer Mickey Murphy who gets bought out by his biggest client, menacing billionaire Zach Petrovitch, only to find himself caught up in Big Pete’s complex criminal activities and turbulent personal life. The novel comes to a climax against the violent backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in April 1992.
1993 Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II
1994 Faith Return to Bernard Samson, the 40-something SIS agent, and the world of his friends and family, familiar to us from the previous six Samson novels. Most of the characters (and readers) are still reeling from the bloody shootout when his wife returned from her undercover mission to East Germany at the climax of the previous novel. This book re-acquaints us with all the well-loved characters from the previous stories, in a plot ostensibly about smuggling a KGB colonel out from the East, but is really about who knows the truth – and who is trying to cover up – the real cause of the Fiona-escape debacle.
1995 Hope 40-something SIS agent Bernard Samson continues trying to get to the bottom of the death of his sister-in-law, Tessa Kosinski and is soon on the trail of her husband, George, who has gone missing back in his native Poland.
1996 Charity Ninth and final Bernard Samson novel in which it takes Bernard 300 pages to piece together the mystery which we readers learned all about in the sixth novel of the series, ie that the plot to murder Fiona’s sister, Tessa, was concocted by Silas Gaunt. Silas commissioned Jim Prettyman to be the middle-man and instructed him to murder the actual assassin, Thurkettle. Now that is is openly acknowledged by the Department’s senior staff, the most striking thing about the whole event – its sheer amateurish cack-handedness – is dismissed by one and all as being due to Gaunt’s (conveniently sudden) mental illness. As for family affairs: It is Bret who ends up marrying Bernard’s one-time lover, the glamorous Gloria; Bernard is finally promised the job of running the Berlin Office, which everyone has always said he should have: and the novel ends with a promise of reconciliation with his beautiful, high-flying and loving wife, Fiona.
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