The Dreamers

Its 3am here, but as the song goes, this city never sleeps. I’m watching the cars on the Brooklyn Bridge, headlights glinting like stars, their occupants heading who knows where – maybe over into Brooklyn Heights, along Atlantic Avenue into Queens, or perhaps further still, onto Long Island itself.

In the apartment all is quiet, save for the poignant sax of Roland Kirk on the stereo. Saul is telling me about his parents’ beach house on Long Island. Apparently each summer his family holds a reunion there, and he’d be delighted if I’d accompany him. Naturally I’m flattered, but politely decline, citing the very plausible excuse that it clashes with Bastille Day. He protests that I’m only half-French, but my mind is made up.

What I don’t tell him is that NYC is already beginning to needle me. I’m thinking like the taxi driver in Scorcese’s famous film - someday a real rain will come and wipe all the scum off the streets – it hasn’t happened yet.

The truth is that I’m not half-French. I was born and raised in a Parisian banlieue and educated at Bordeaux. My father was American, but apart from the language thing that’s as far as it goes. So I make my excuses and promise him some other time. He looks disappointed so I give him a hug. As Bogart once said, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

It feels like we're drifting into an incestuous relationship. rather like the young things in Bertolucci's movie The Dreamers. We spend days just talking - about art, literature, politics, but mainly about films. Saul obviously has the mind of an obsessive - but I'm willing to bet he isn't as good on European cinema.

Maybe if he comes to Paris we'll put it to the test?

The first time I saw The Dreamers I was dumbfounded. The film features the debut of Eva Green, looking uncannily like the young Sandrine, as she would have been in soixante huit. I began to think Bernardo was playing with my head, or the skunk was, one of the two. But actually the film is disappointing in some ways, with a vapid ending and no real structure. For me, it didn’t capture the spirit of ’68 – not the way my parents related it to me anyhow.

I guess the beach house can wait until the fall, when I'll return to NYC, in the company of la belle Helene. That promises to be an interesting menage a trois.

Native New Yorker

So I get to meet the former Esther Kellerman. She won’t want me to reveal her identity, but she’s been in many films over the last thirty years. Now in her fifties, her looks belie her years – though how much of this is cosmetic, I wouldn’t like to guess. Her mind is still sharp as a razor, and thankfully, her memory is excellent. She can recall events forty, fifty years ago with great clarity. She’s been married twice but is currently single, and enjoying a rest from filming. The scripts keep coming but she’s more selective these days, she says. Definitely no more nudity.

So you’re Krantz’s girl she says, absolutely charming. I didn’t know, it was a surprise when Saul told me.
It’s strange, I say, but if things had turned out differently, you might have been my mother.
She starts to laugh, Krantz might never have left America. Maybe we’d have been married? But its no good crying over how things might have been. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean about your parents.
I shrug. It’s okay, I’m getting over it. This is part of my therapy.
Anything I can do to help, I will. Krantz meant a lot to me. He was my first love, you know, the first boy I kissed. The first one I dated. He was really something.
Yeah, I know. He was something else.
Where do I start?
How about the beginning. That’s always a good place.

I’ll let her do the talking:

I was born in 1950, the youngest of the four Kellerman children. We lived in an apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which in those days was quite a mix of cultures. The Krantz family were our neighbours on the same block, and my brother Daniel, two years my senior, was your father’s best friend. They were pretty much inseparable as kids – neither had a natural brother, so they became like brothers. It took the war in Vietnam to split them up, but that came later.

It’s hard now to imagine now how exciting it was growing up in America in the Sixties. It was a time of change, a time when it was great to be young. In my mid teens I started dating the boy who became your father. He was a very charismatic fellow, intelligent and strong-minded.

One thing I'll never forget is the Open Poetry nights at Les Deux Megots, the coffee house on East 7th Street. The truly serious poets suffered from monotone deliveries and spewed nonsense endlessly. Krantz, on the other hand, was the one guy you could rely on to come up with something inspiring, uplifting, and different. He had a knack, a gift. The tragedy is that his poetry never found it into print.

In the June of 1967, the summer of love, Krantz decided that he wanted to drive out west and see the revolution at first hand. But when we got there he became disillusioned, and didn’t share in my enthusiasm for the hippy way of life. You have to understand that New York was his world, and he felt uncomfortable outside. How ironic that within a year he had left America for good. I didn’t see him again for twenty years.

Meanwhile Danny had been drafted into the army, and posted to Vietnam. It was an experience that left him traumatised, from which he has never fully recovered. Today he’s in a psychiatric unit in LA, where I keep an eye on him. Towards the end of the war he did meet Krantz again, in Saigon, but by then he was so far gone, it didn’t register.

I used to get news of Krantz from my mother, during our numerous long distance phone calls. I heard that he’d returned to France after Nam, gotten married to a local girl, and was living just outside Paris. About this time I’d also married for the first time, but it didn’t last. My second husband rescued me from oblivion, became my manager, and engineered my successful years in Hollywood. But these things never last in movie land, and he eventually traded me in for a younger model. So it goes.

I did get to meet Krantz one more time though. I happened to find myself on location in Paris, shooting a movie for Godard, of all people. Through press contacts I managed to locate Krantz, who was working as a freelance photographer. He was happy to meet me and catch up on what had happened to us both. I saw his photos of Sandrine, she was really pretty, much like you.

That was the last time we ever met. I cried when I heard about the accident, it was so sad. I’m really glad to have met his daughter, to know that there is something of him still alive in the world. I want us to keep in touch, to become friends, united in our memory of Krantz.

The Labyrinth

New York, an inexhaustible city
A labyrinth of endless possibilities
No matter which way he turned
Or how well he came to know
Various neighbourhoods and streets
It always left him feeling lost

Lost, not only in the physical sense
But also lost within himself
Wandering aimlessly, all places equal
It longer mattered where or who he was
Sometimes he felt that he was nowhere
But he had no intention of leaving

In the past he’d been more ambitious
Even published several volumes of poetry
But quite abruptly that had changed
A part of him had died
And he didn’t want it coming back to haunt him
It was then that he took the name of his father

Now he was no longer that person
The person that could write poems
Although he continued to exist
He no longer existed for anyone but himself
He no longer wished to be dead
But he didn’t care to be alive either
He was in a limbo of his own creation

It had been more than ten years now
He didn’t think about it much anymore
Recently he’d removed the photos
Of his mother from the lounge
Once in a while he’d suddenly feel
What it felt like to hold her
But it was not really remembering