Lost At Sea Part 19

"Somewhere else in this house," Tony says, "is a cabinet full of twenty-five thousand library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon's inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July twenty-third, seventeen-whatever, you go to that card and it'll tell you."

"Who made up the cards?" I ask.

"Stanley," says Tony. "With some a.s.sistants."

"How long did it take?" I ask.

"Years," says Tony. "The late sixties."

Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon. During the years it took him to compile this research, a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo was written, produced, and released. It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.

"Did you do this kind of thing for all the movies?" I ask Tony.

"More or less," he says.

"OK," I say. "I understand how you might do this for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?"

"Somewhere here," says Tony, "is just about every book about ghosts ever written, and there'll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world."

There is a silence.

"Tony," I say. "Can I look through the boxes?"

I've been coming to the Kubrick house a couple of times a month ever since.

I start in a Portakabin behind the stable block, with a box marked Lolita. I open it, noting the ease with which the lid comes off. I flick through the paperwork inside, pausing randomly at a letter that reads:

Dear Mr. Kubrick,

Just a line to express to you and to Mrs. Kubrick my husband's and my own deep appreciation of your kindness in arranging for Dmitri's introduction to your uncle, Mr. Guenther Rennert.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

I later learn that Dmitri was a budding opera singer and Rennert was a famous opera director, in charge of the National Theatre Munich and Glyndebourne. This letter was written in 1962, back in the days when Kubrick was still producing a film every year or so. This box is full of fascinating correspondence between Kubrick and the Nabokovs but-unlike the fabulously otherworldly Napoleon room, which was accrued six years later-it is the kind of stuff you would probably find in any director's archive.

The unusual stuff-the stuff that elucidates the ever-lengthening gaps between productions-can be found in the boxes that were compiled from 1968 onwards. In a box next to the Lolita box in the Portakabin I find an unusually terse letter, written by Kubrick to someone called Pat, on January 10, 1968:

Dear Pat,

Although you are apparently too busy to personally return my phone calls, perhaps you will find time in the near future to reply to this letter?

(Later, when I show Tony Frewin this letter, he says he's surprised by the brusqueness. Kubrick must have been at the end of his tether, he says, because on a number of occasions he said to Tony, "Before you send an angry letter, imagine how it would look if it got into the hands of Time Out.") The reason for Kubrick's annoyance in this particular letter was because he'd heard that the Beatles were going to use a landscape shot from Dr. Strangelove in one of their movies.

"The Beatle film will be very widely seen," Kubrick writes, "and it will make it appear that the material in Dr. Strangelove is stock footage. I feel this harms the film."

There are a similar batch of telexes from 1975: "It would appear," Kubrick writes in one, "that 's.p.a.ce: 1999' may very well become a long-running and important television series. There seems nothing left now but to seek the highest possible damages... . The deliberate choice of a date only two years away from 2001 is not accidental and harms us."

This telex was written seven years after the release of 2001.

But you can see why Kubrick sometimes felt compelled to wage war to protect the honor of his work. A 1975 telex, from a picture publicity man at Warner Bros. called Mark Kauffman, regards publicity stills for Kubrick's somber reworking of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. It reads: "Received additional material. Is there any material with humor or zaniness that you could send?"

Kubrick replies: "The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray's novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany."

I take a break from the boxes to wander over to Tony's office. As I walk in I notice something pinned onto his letter box.

"POSTMAN," it reads. "Please put all mail in the white box under the colonnade across the courtyard to your right."

It is not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is exactly the same typeface Kubrick used for the posters and t.i.tle sequences of Eyes Wide Shut and 2001.

"It's Futura Extra Bold," explains Tony. "It was Stanley's favorite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant."

"Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to talk about?" I ask.

"G.o.d, yes," says Tony. "Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs."

Tony goes to his bookshelf and brings down a number of volumes full of examples of typefaces, the kind of volumes he and Kubrick used to study, and he shows them to me.

"I did once get him to admit the beauty of Bembo," he adds, "a serif."

"So is that note to the postman a sort of private tribute from you to Kubrick?" I ask.

"Yeah," says Tony. He smiles to himself. "Yeah, yeah."

For a moment I also smile at the unlikely image of the two men discussing the relative merits of typefaces late into the night, but then I remember the first time I saw the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, the way the words CRUISE, KIDMAN, KUBRICK flashed dramatically onto the screen in large red, yellow, and white colors, to the song "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing." Had the words not been in Futura Extra Bold, I realize now, they wouldn't have sent such a chill up the spine. Kubrick and Tony obviously became, at some point during their relationship, tireless amateur sleuths, wanting to ama.s.s and consume and understand all information.

But this attention to detail becomes so amazingly evident and seemingly all-consuming in the later boxes, I begin to wonder whether it was worth it. In one Portakabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes marked EWS-Portman Square, EWS-Kensington, and Chelsea, etc., etc. I choose the one marked EWS-Islington because that's where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaners, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find to my astonishment pictures of the doorways of the houses on my own street.

Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words "Hooker doorway?"

"Huh," I think.

So somebody within the Kubrick organization (it was, in fact, his nephew Manuel Harlan) once walked up my street, on Kubrick's orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth. Judging by the writing on the boxes, just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this Portakabin. This solves one mystery for me-the one about why Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, chose the St. Albans countryside, of all places, for his home. I realize now that it didn't matter. It could have been anywhere. It is as if the whole world is to be found somewhere within this estate.

LATER I GET TO MEET Manuel Harlan. "How long did all this take you?" I ask him.

"A year," he says.

"Every day?" I ask.

"Pretty much," he says.

"Was it a good year?" I ask.

"It was a great year," he says. "I think I took thirty thousand photos in all. That's a number I arrived at once. At first it was just going to be stately homes. Then I started looking for coffee shops. And then doorways. Then toy shops. Mortuaries. Oh! Costume places! That was a really long job. I was in every costume shop in the southeast of England."