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Excerpt from
Sun and Shadow
by Jean-Pierre Aumont
Chapter 2-
"Don't Smile, You Idiot!"
"A child will be born from our encounter tonight: Hercules."
On the stage of the Comedie des Champs-Elysees, Jupiter was taking leave of Alemene.
"Poor little girl," sighed Alemene, who clearly hadn't read Homer.
"It will be a boy!" thundered Jupiter.
No presentiment or hope suggested to me at that moment that I would be playing the very same part some twenty years later. I was hypnotized, spellbound by the incantations filtering from the stage...
After the curtain fell, I tiptoed through the wings between hanging ropes and pulleys to meet Louis Jouvet. He was playing Mercury in "Amphitryon 38" by Giraudoux. He had directed the play. He was also the producer and the manager of his theatre, la Comedie des Champs- Elysees.
Everything about him was blue: blue cape, blue helmet, blue eyes. He had an ironic smile which was tempered by a certain tenderness. Without giving me the chance to introduce myself, he guessed I was an aspiring young actor:
"What are you working on now?"
"Romeo and Juliet."*
"Why not? And what do you think of Romeo?"
I was stumped. The speech I'd practiced about my esteem and admiration for him, my desire to become a member of his company, suddenly fell to pieces. I hadn't thought he would skip all conventional formulas of politeness and ask me point-blank what I thought of Romeo. I couldn't answer. I was riveted to the blue eyes of Jouvet and I wanted to cry. He went on:
"I see... You don't think much of Romeo. It doesn't matter, my boy, not at all. I might be able to use you somehow. Come back and see me tomorrow." The next day, he offered me a three-year contract. How much I liked him already! Twenty years later, I would still be calling him "Monsieur Jouvet" and he would still be calling me "my Jean-Pierre," boxing my ears and treating me like a kid.
We started rehearsals of a revival of Knock, his perennial success. He cast me in the part of a mute peasant. In the wings, a gaunt, secretive, nearsighted fellow wandered to and fro. He was writing plays no one cared to read. Jouvet was using him to run errands. His name was Jean Anouilh.
Knock enjoyed its usual success. I must have been eloquent in my speechless part, for one of the critics wrote of me: "How lucky he is to be seventeen, to be gifted, and to have Louis Jouvet as a mentor."
One lovely afternoon, I was strolling along the Champs-Elysees with a head full of fantasies, confidence, and hope for the future. I ran into a friend. "Instead of walking around with your finger in your nose, you should be running over to Cocteau's on rue Vignon. He's been trying to find you for a week."
Cocteau! For us apprentice actors, he was not only an author, but a figure of legend. Les Enfants Terribles, Orphee, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinsky... we weren't sure how all these magic names and titles fit together, but we did know that they all gravitated around a single name, even more mysterious, and charged with magic: Cocteau.
I arrived at his apartment, a somber curiousity shop full of odds and ends: pencil sketches, plaster masks, photos pinned to fragments of red velvet, gothic chairs, old postcards. Marcel Khill, a young Moroccan fellow who was Cocteau's secretary, led me into his room. When my eyes were accustomed to the darkness of his smoky lair, I discovered Cocteau sitting in bed looking like a withered pharoah. His burning eyes and boney profile seemed drawn (even here Cocteau was twenty years ahead of his time) by Bernard Buffet. Before I could utter a word he declared, "You will be my Oedipus."
"But you don't even know me..."
"You will be my Oedipus."
I had heard that Jouvet was going to produce La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine) at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees. � But he hadn't breathed a word of it to me. He was thinking of giving Oedipus to Charles Boyer, or even to Serge Lifar. But Cocteau swept away all my apprehensions. He scribbled out a letter which he asked me to deliver to Jouvet:
"Jean-Pierre is the one. Look at him closely. Listen to him carefully. Without thinking about who he 'was.' Don't forget that I'm seeing and hearing him for the first time without past prejudices. He has the youth, the command, the wildness, the arrogance, the moonstruck quality, the fury, etc. You know how I hate to impose myself on a director and of course the final decision is yours. But if you agree, we would have an actor trained by you. Once the part is cast you'll see how simple everything is. In short, give him a chance! Don't abandon him to filthy movies which are destroying the theatre for us. And don't let me down."
In February we began to rehearse. Jouvet had reserved the practically silent role of the messenger in the last act for himself.
It's impossible to remember the long rehearsals of La Machine infernale without emotion. I can't look at the violet poster without being saddened by the fact that eight of my friends listed on it are now dead: Jouvet, Cocteau, Christian Berard, Romain Bouquet, Jane Lory, Le Vigan, Pierre Renoir, and Marcel Khill, who was killed at the beginning of the war.
There were four months of rehearsals Jouvet, consumed by doubts, would bend over a row of seats scrutinizing us, tormenting us. When he didn't get what he wanted from an actor, Jouvet bullied him and attacked his ego until he was stung to the quick, until he reared like a bewildered horse, and charged the lines of the text with newly discovered energy, with new rage. But Jouvet was also unusually willing to take the risk of being contradicted, and was constantly asking us for our opinions. Maybe this is a quality of all true leaders, a knowledge of the human heart which Saint-Exupery refers to when he writes: "Make your subordinates feel that you need them, and not that they need you."
[...] During the rehearsals Jouvet had bullied and tortured me. As I made my exit on opening night, after the encounter with the Sphinx, the applause was frenetic. Jouvet was in the wings, checking the lights. I stationed myself in front of him and waited for a compliment. He pretended not to see me. I couldn't understand. As the applause continued, I stood there gasping for breath, hoping for a word. He persisted in ignoring my presence. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I grabbed his arm and shouted: "Well?"
Finally, he looked at me and answered calmly. "Well my boy, just try to repeat consciously every night what you did unconciously tonight."
Between the third and the last act, there was a costume change. I barely had time to glue on a beard and age myself twenty years. It was Jouvet who helped me put on my make-up. It was also he who poured the hemoglobin on my cheeks before Oedipus came back on stage with his eyes gouged out.
The opening night was a triumph. Forgetting my costume, my beard, my punctured eyes, the blood which flowed down my cheeks, the tragedy we had just played, and the audience's emotion, I bowed, smiling with all my teeth.
"Don't smile, you idiot," hissed Jouvet.
Excerpt from:
Sun and Shadow (Le Soleil et les Ombres)
by Jean-Pierre Aumont,
translated by Bruce Benderson
W.W. Norton and Co Inc
1976
*The play Aumont was studying was actually Musset's "On ne badine pas avec l'amour"; the part was that of Perdican... Back
