Writers always complain about American tours. There is only one thing worse than your American publisher sending you out, city to city, condemning you to flights at 5:30 a.m. or else 11:05 p.m., and that is if your American publisher doesn’t care enough about the book to make you do it. The size of the United States, the proliferation of big cities, and the fact that early morning and late night television and radio were so popular in America, helped squeeze the writer’s available rest time. It is an experience full of semivivifying showers before the sun rises, and drinking grainy black coffee in departure lounges.
Simon & Schuster were publishing the book as Schindler’s List, in accordance with my earlier lost quarrel with Dan Green, and though they went back to print even before publication, based on the reaction of the booksellers, I found by the start of the third week of the tour that, as Poldek had predicted, they had sold out. I was expatiating on radio and TV into vacancy. I complained to Patricia Solomon, and informed Poldek of the sad fact. He did his What-did-I-tell-you? act with Patricia.
Out in California in mid-tour, I saw Poldek and the lawyer Glovin, Poldek omnisciently predicting that the next thing would be the film. The book had been reviewed on the front page of the New York Times, he said. His attitude was, if the film business didn’t react they weren’t worth the money copiously paid them.
Within a few days two interesting production houses had indeed responded. One was Goldcrest, the British company which had recently made the film Gandhi. The other was Amblin, Steven Spielberg’s production company at Universal. Apart from Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, I had had a few other experiences with film companies. Another book of mine, Gossip from the Forest, had been painlessly translated by Granada TV in Britain into a film for television. It had been shot in the forest near Chester, and I had been invited to visit the shoot but had never managed to do so.
I was something of a film option skeptic, in fact. Many of my books had been optioned by American, British or Australian producers. There seemed a pattern to the way things flowed. When a producer first approaches a writer, he or she is unapologetically in love with the book. To realize it in film is his sole desire. And the uniqueness of the book will override any of its problems, which he admits there are, but rather like the dimples of the beloved. And so he wants to tie up your book for a year or so by offering a small option price on the understanding that when he gets the money to make it, the horn of plenty will open, there will be a full contract and a glorious payday.
But after the producer has visited a number of studios, other funding sources and production companies, his ardor is always somewhat muted. The book now presents a series of real challenges—perhaps that it’s a period piece; that it belongs to a genre to which three other recently failed films belong (bye-bye uniqueness!); that the studios have been stung with projects like this before; that they presented it to the agent of the beloved actor of the moment, but the beloved actor and his agent had “passed on it.” The producer with whom you have the modest option deal has been trying intermittently to find other hunks, but the pre-option unconditional love has gone, and there is weariness in the producer’s voice, a warning that nothing miraculous and unexpected is likely to happen. So I did not think this production company interest in Schindler would really lead anywhere.
Meanwhile the book was in print again, and Poldek and I had been invited back to New York to appear on the Today Show with Jane Pauley. They wanted Poldek so they could talk about what he had been through with Oskar and how he had placed the story in my hands, and so on. We caught a plane to New York, stayed a night in a hotel, and ended up together on the favorite morning TV show of the United States. I had told Poldek at dinner the night before that television is a frantic medium. A ruthless lack of elbow room prevails. One’s message has to be scaled down to a degree of rigor such as, I could see with some dread, was not in Poldek’s character to achieve.
We were made up by early morning cosmeticians who had applied pancake to every senator and rock star in America. In the green room in the studio in New York, Poldek was an instant hit with all the other guests, praising gifts of feature and talent in them. When they asked what he was doing there, he pointed to me as his Cervantes and told everyone to watch out for the movie. Poldek similarly tried to make a lifelong friend of the stage manager who ushered us onto the set between commercials. The producer of our segment approached us nervously and told him we would have eight minutes.
“Eight minutes,” he said. “That’s not nearly enough. You are a fine woman. Could you, darling, get us at least ten?” But the television gods were immovable on this.
As Jane Pauley rose to meet us, Poldek confessed his undying love despite the fact that “you are already married to that nice man the cartoonist” (Garry Trudeau, creator of the Doonesbury cartoon strip). There was the faintest panic in Jane Pauley’s lovely eyes as she hoped some allied presence out in the darkness of the studio might help her to control this force of nature. The floor manager interrupted Poldek’s praise of the Trudeau-Pauley marriage by crying urgently, “Thirty seconds!”
Poldek dropped his voice to an Irish whisper. “You must be so tired, darling, working like this every morning. Take care of yourself, Jane. For God’s sake, darling. You are still a young woman!”
Jane Pauley nodded when the stage manager said, “Ten seconds.”
As the lights came up on us, Pauley introduced us both and asked me about our first meeting, Poldek’s and mine. I explained it briskly, and then Poldek explained it with joyous expansiveness, and there was time for one last question. When did Poldek first see Schindler? Poldek told the story of his and Schindler’s first meeting at the Pfefferberg home in Grodzka Street in 1939. And suddenly we were being thanked and ushered out of the lit circle of brief national fame in which Jane Pauley remained.
“We did very well, Thomas,” Poldek told me on the way to get his makeup off. “But my God, what was wrong in giving us a little more time?”
I noticed that the young minders who ultimately got us from the green room to the street were quite refreshed by Poldek. They were used to folk who had learned by experience of other interviews to say things with the unnatural crispness the media required. It was a trick which, once you were on to it, took no particular gifts. But they had not encountered anything like Poldek’s omnivorous goodwill and lack of television pretense.
In terms of telling the story of the book, however, it seemed a catastrophic interview. So I thought then, anyhow. Now, I’m not so sure. As Poldek said in the taxi, “That should make those sons-of-bitch publishers print more and more copies.” Indeed, soon after this interview, the print run of the book, as Poldek had promised, sold out again.
And as we returned to California, November 1982 turned to December.
The message had come through the U.S. publisher that Steven Spielberg, whose E.T. was flickering from innumerable cinema screens throughout the world, wanted to see me on the following Saturday at the house of Sid Sheinberg (the head of Universal) in Bel Air.
“I’ll go too,” Poldek told me when he heard.
“I think I’m the only one invited, Poldek.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I know Spielberg’s mother. I eat at her restaurant all the time. She’s a beautiful woman. A tiny woman but gracious.”
Indeed, Spielberg’s mother, Leah Adler, ran an eclectic kosher dairy restaurant in Beverly Hills called the Milky Way. To prove the point, Poldek took me there a day or two later, and we ate the best kosher food I’d encountered, much better than the King David’s. I can’t remember the small-boned Mrs. Adler having any protection at that stage from celebrity hunters, or from enthusiastic screenwriters trying to pass on to her scripts for relaying to her renowned son. Much later in the century, she certainly employed a huge yarmulke’d man, reputed to be a former Israeli paratrooper, to repel such nuisances.
Mrs. Adler was a strong woman, a woman of presence. Though she hung Steven’s posters on the walls, she admitted that he had mystified her as a child. She would tell one journalist, “I didn’t know he was a genius. Frankly, I didn’t know what the hell he was.”
Poldek, of course, told her all about our coming meeting with her son, news of which she listened to with an ageless tolerance.
On Saturday morning, Poldek, having cleared it with Steven’s office, turned up at the little hotel, comfortably and miraculously remaining in the heart of Rodeo Drive, where I stayed. It was a bright, early winter morning without sea mist, and the air looked auspicious—not nearly as stained as usual. Some breeze from the mountains had flushed it clean overnight. I very much doubted that Spielberg would want to make a film, but it would be fascinating to meet him. Knowing a little about films, I knew not to be too enthusiastic, and as we ascended into the hills it was Poldek who twitched with certainty.
We passed improbable pavilions of marble, and majestic gates through which we saw curving driveways and swards of green almost too perfect to believe in. Extensive stone walls hemmed in mysteries of wealth. Indeed, the streets here were said to be confusingly pretzel-shaped to prevent intrusions into stars’ homes by fans or people with ideas for films. Along one of these thoroughfares we chased the number of Sid Sheinberg’s place. When we saw it we pulled up to the tall garden gates and I muttered into a voice box with Poldek egging me on. “Tell him you’re here to see Steven!” The gates opened.
A house could not yet be seen. It needed to be driven to, atop the hill beyond a screen of tall shrubs. Dickens had never been able to lay claim to such a mansion; James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were strangers to such places. This was the Bel Air version of Versailles created out of the minuscule filaments called movies, out of the work of screenwriters, blessed and unblessed, and of authors humble and grand. By the time Poldek had parked the car behind the house in a spot indicated by a muscular man, half waiter, half bodyguard, I felt a little disoriented. But it was Poldek’s policy not to be.
“All right,” he boomed to me. “Let’s go and meet the wonder boychickel!”
Sid Sheinberg appeared almost at once in the door of something like a Bel Air conservatory. He was a genial, slim, bald fellow. Physically, he resembled the sort of Californian of whom people said, “He has a tremendous backhand.” Obesity was considered God’s own curse in Beverly Hills, and he was lean as salvation. Lunch was set in a pleasant room within, where there was so much glass that one felt oneself to be outside anyhow.
Steven had not yet arrived, and we stood talking about such things as the publication of the book and Poldek’s experience of Schindler. “Sure I knew him, Mr. Sheinberg. I was black-marketeering for him before he went into business in 1939!” So we took up from where we left off with Jane Pauley. Barely a glass of water had been drunk when Steven Spielberg appeared, having been brought in from the front of the house. He had a fast-moving, Ohio-cum-Californian accent. We shook hands, and he said the sort of things film people always say about books.
Like a true out-of-his-depth colonial boy, I declared, “An honor to meet you, Mr. Spielberg. This is my friend Poldek Pfeffer berg, the man who introduced me to the story.”
Spielberg was dressed for the weekend, in sports shirt and slacks and sneakers. Of the four of us, Poldek was the only one wearing a tie. And he had no such reverence as mine in store for Spielberg, who now said hello to him and shook his hand.
Poldek said casually, “Steven, I was talking to your mother the other day, and she says you’re doing very well.” There was a suspicion in his voice that Mrs. Adler might have been exaggerating, and a sort of implied addendum—If you’d only studied harder in high school like your cousin Leon, you could have been a chartered accountant too. Thus, I noticed, did old Jews always put successful younger Jews in their place. Not a bad cultural habit, I suppose, but a tough one.
We sat to our light lunch. No wine was served, of course, wine wasn’t really the Californian style, despite the splendid vineyards of the north of the state. Spielberg proved to be particularly interested in exactly what I would have wanted him to be interested in—the ambiguity of Schindler, the balance between opportunism and human compassion, the fact that no one could tell where one ended and the other began. And the fact that Schindler, the unself-reflective hero, had been unable to tell anyone either.
Poldek gave his version, of course, and it was the beginning of a communication between Poldek and Spielberg which would last for fifteen or sixteen years.
We were not far into the lunch before Spielberg told Sid Sheinberg he’d like to use his bathroom. Sheinberg gave directions, and Spielberg was barely out of hearing before dapper Poldek appealed to me, “Grossing two million a day, he has to wear sneakers? I ask you!”
But despite Poldek’s perception that Spielberg lacked nattiness, in the conversations we had that day the director showed himself an urbane fellow, soft-spoken but still with urgency in his voice. He proved also an accurate reader of the import of the book. And the truth was, grossing two million a day, he was entitled to wear sneakers. He had no concern for fashion.
The lunch drew to a close without any firm undertakings. Poldek assured Spielberg, “I tell you, Steven, you make this film of humanity man to man, it will win you an Academy Award! Guaranteed! No doubt at all!” I had not dared achieve first names with Spielberg myself, but it seemed to present no challenge for Poldek. And Poldek had no problem naming the unspoken entity, the film. “You’ll get an Oscar for Oskar!” In case Steven did not understand, Poldek made a similar case to Sheinberg. Spielberg shook my hand. “Fine book, fine book,” he murmured. But that was all. It might have been a farewell.
At the little hotel in Rodeo Drive that December, I also met one of the Goldcrest producers. I had greatly admired Gandhi, and was convinced Goldcrest, if they made an offer, would do a subtle job not only on Oskar but on the SS’s fresh-faced boys and young men who, between unspeakable acts, sent home to their mothers items of Polish linen bought in the Sukiennice. Hollywood did not have as good a record for creating three-dimensional Nazis.
I went back home for another antipodean Christmas, vigorously celebrated by Judy, who took Christmas as seriously as Dickens. Suppressed excitement, astonishing wrapping paper and ribbon, and presents which genuinely did take one by surprise were all part of her Australian Yule-craft. Though it is often a day of some eighty-five to ninety degrees Fahrenheit with considerable humidity, the Australians celebrate Christmas with a thoroughness which leaves them exhausted and hung-over.
In the New Year, a young woman named Kathy Kennedy, executive producer of E.T. and before that Steven’s secretary, made an occasional call about the progress of plans. The usual parsimonious word option was thankfully not mentioned. With Universal behind it, Amblin would either buy the rights or not.
As these events were shaping, I got a call on a Wednesday morning, Sydney time, from Amblin, asking me if I could come that night to Los Angeles and sign a contract with Universal. The idea of a contract at once put paid to my skepticism about films. I told Spielberg I would need to be back in Australia on Sunday to give a lecture. That was fine, he said, I could leave Australia Wednesday night, arrive in Los Angeles Wednesday morning by grace of the dateline, sign the contract, confer with my friends Poldek and Glovin. If I caught the Thursday night plane back to Sydney, I would be home on Saturday morning.
It is twelve hours from Sydney to Los Angeles and the flights were then all overnight. Though I was tired, I did not worry about that. I was on my way to what every writer sometimes secretly dreams of: payday. I knew of writers whose rights had been violated and who had been neglected and underrewarded for their films—Ken Kesey, who claimed to have received a mere $10,000 for what he saw as the violation of his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I had asked Anthony Burgess, two years before at that BBC studio in Shepherd’s Bush, whether it was true that he had received something like fifty pounds for the film rights to A Clockwork Orange. He claimed it was. He had been living in Malta, and for some mysterious reason to do with taxes, a rock group had been buying up film properties for small amounts of money and had bought the rights to his brilliant book.
Kathy Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, however, did not seem to intend any malice toward me.
The necklace of bumpy storms always strung across the Pacific between Sydney and California barely woke me in my ample seat—no one in the American film industry flew at the back of the plane, it seemed, the cramped region in which Poldek and I had made all our research trips. Indeed, I was to learn that first class was actually considered hardship travel by Universal’s standards, and that one’s own private jet was the only ultimately reasonable way for a mogul to get around.
Even though Australians have plenty of practice in sleeping on long flights, the well-rested still arrive in foreign parts a little dislocated. It is as if the brain is somewhere near Hawaii and has not caught up. There is a tendency to slight blurring of vision, accentuated by the smudged air over Los Angeles. There was a booking for me at the Sheraton in Universal City, and I received the room key in the midst of families departing the hotel for a big day in the theme park of Universal Studios.
My friend Poldek visited me. “They get you to come from Sydney for two days? It means they must want to make the film straightaway.” That certainly seemed a reasonable proposition.
Chiefly I was full of a quiet anticipation. It seemed that I would be freed from want for some years, from the anxiety of waiting, an overdraft in place, for publishers to accept a manuscript and pay an advance on royalties; of sweating for a release date, when the payment on publication became due.
There was still a little light-headedness and sense of dislocation on the second day, when I was taken across by car to Universal’s legal department, an entire white office block in Universal City. All parties were there, under the chairmanship of a Universal lawyer. There was a prenuptial stillness in the room. I wondered if the lawyer was one of those functionaries who kept films in notional debt so that future earnings were not squandered on such people as writers. But this morning the fellow seemed like a kind uncle. In front of him, Spielberg, Sid Sheinberg, Poldek, Glovin (as Schindler’s lawyer) and myself all affixed our signatures to the contract. A sweet part of the deal was that I would write the first screenplay, and so I would not need to leave the Schindler story yet—it had become something of a home, even with its foul pit of nightmares and its chancy rescues.
Glovin signed a contract as associate producer, Poldek one as technical adviser. Sid Sheinberg made some pro forma remarks about the day being a happy one, and Spielberg thanked me for coming so far for so short a time. At that moment he was, I believe, editing the first Indiana Jones movie, and its needs pressed on him. We all said farewell to Spielberg, expecting to see him again soon.
I boarded the Los Angeles–Sydney flight and reencountered my distrait and overstimulated brain in the dark air somewhere east of Tahiti. In Sydney, I was met by my wife and daughters at the airport and we went and had coffee, and the universe seemed an abundant place, with the only serpent in the garden being that unarguable reality that all this fruitfulness was based on the mulch of lives taken or closely threatened in the Second World War.
At everyone’s insistence, and in the face of my doubts about being able to handle such a mysterious implement, I now acquired a grossly annoying and inscrutable personal computer. The personal computers of the day, 1983, were large, clunky and erratic. But they had something I had always needed—the cut-and-paste facility. It would help a lot with the writing of the screenplay. With the coming of PCs, Barbara, the woman with the office in Avalon who had previously done my and other local transcription work, acquired a video store, and I began to help her make her modest fortune out of late return fees on films.