Meeting Cocteau : A memorable encounter with the poet-playwright-film maker

It is not difficult to pinpoint exactly when we met: Three months almost to the day before I left Egypt to come to America in 1949. I was 18, fired up with literature, particularly French literature and particularly theater literature.

Jean Cocteau--poet, painter, novelist, doodler, film maker, playwright and dabbler in all the arts--was passing through my home town of Alexandria where nothing even half as exciting ever happened. But with the end of the war had come the end of cultural isolation. At last, we were beginning to get a trickle of theater companies from overseas and, yes, even some lecturing playwrights and other writers. Mostly French. Names we’d heard like disembodied buzz words during our growing-up days, plays we had read and loved in and out of school but had never seen, all were coming to life.

It had started three years earlier, when John Gielgud brought his “Hamlet” to the Cairo Opera House just as the war was ending. We saw it on a class outing. Nothing quite as galvanizing had occurred before in my short life. It affirmed a tyrannizing passion for the theater that was destined to remain with me. Then the actor/director Louis Jouvet brought Giraudoux and Moliere to Alexandria. For the first time the sets and costumes of the extraordinary designer Christian Berard were more than illustrations in a book. Jean Marchat came with Claudel’s “The Tidings Brought to Mary.” But Cocteau?

The anticipation of the playwright’s arrival in 1949 with a company of actors and a repertoire of plays that included his own (“Les Monstres Sacres,” “Les Parents Terribles,” “La Machine Infernale”) as well as plays by Jean Anouilh, Feydeau and Sartre was almost more than Alexandria could withstand.

In 1947 on a visit to Paris, my Uncle Max, who knew of my fascination with the theater, had taken me to see the original production of “L’Aigle a Deux Tetes” (“The Eagle With Two Heads”) with Jean Marais and Edwige Feuillere, the actors for whom the play had been expressly written. Both of these remarkable performers were familiar from the movies (such films as Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bete” and Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” with the entrancing and then very young Gerard Philippe). Not in spite of, but because of its intense romanticism, this star vehicle was amazing to watch.

In this historical fiction of love, intrigue and murder in the highest places (he took the circumstances surrounding assassination of Elisabeth, empress consort of Austria, merely as a point of departure), Cocteau pitted ideas against each other: “A queen with an anarchic spirit, an anarchist with a regal spirit.” Cocteau described his characters as betraying “their causes to create one. They become,” he wrote, “a constellation or, better yet, a meteor that burns for an instant and disappears.”

But the actors provided considerably more than a moment’s incandescence, and Marais’ backwards flip from a high central staircase at the end of the play, struck through by poison, was breathtaking. He went back like a board, with nothing to break the fall to the far floor below.

Melodrama and tricks? Of course, but of such a high order that you bought the whole package.

In many ways such high-flying panache is emblematic of Cocteau’s work, the “poesie” he saw himself attempting in all fields. Unconventionality was the guideline as he plotted and charted the course of his creative life with his actors, with composers, choreographers, designers, cinematographers, even his editors.

Cocteau, who died in France in 1963, chronicled his 1949 Egyptian odyssey in a published journal called “Maalesh,” which makes it easy to recall with precision when we met.

It was an uncommonly cold mid-April, in the lobby of the Cinema Royal, across an alley from the Mohamed Ali movie palace, where the company was to perform and where Cocteau was scheduled to talk. The Mohamed Ali was so cavernous that it was described by Cocteau as “not a theater but an echo chamber without acoustics and nothing that allows for changing or adjusting scenery . . . Everything must be built and nailed together on the spot, with stagehands who don’t speak our language.”

I had gone down to buy tickets for the plays one morning when I spotted him having coffee with Tommy Christou, the owner of the theater--a portly, genial Greek who was the father of a good friend and schoolmate.

The sight was so unexpected it stopped me in my tracks.

I happened to be carrying two books: Cocteau’s journal of the filming of “La Belle et La Bete” and a copy of “The Eagle With Two Heads.” Should I ask him to autograph them? Should I use my acquaintance with Mr. Christou as an introduction? Possibly, but it wasn’t that simple. I didn’t want Cocteau to think of me as just an autograph hound. If I was going to meet the man at all, it had to be on some other footing. I didn’t want to be seen as a goggle-eyed adolescent. I wanted . . . to make a connection. My plans were to join the theater and I had to find a way to tell him that, as though such knowledge would magically place us on an equal plane.

Looking back on it now, the presumptuousness seems at once ludicrous and painfully naive. But it was dead serious then. I think I really wanted him to know that beyond the admiration there was an intention to emulate, if not the talent at least the life course. It was an idea of being on some sort of parallel inside track.

While I was agonizing over how to cope with the situation, Mr. Christou motioned me to come over. Dilemma gave way to panic. I approached their table, handed my books to Cocteau entirely too fast and asked for an autograph, while blurting out some hideously trite phrase about intending to become an actress.

Cocteau looked up and right through me for what seemed like an eternity. It was probably only a second or two. I felt embraced and unmasked. To this day I’ve not experienced a more sustained or penetrating look. Then he lowered his eyes, opened one of the books to the title page, ingesting, it seemed to me, the whole situation.

Taking a pen from his pocket he drew one of his famous line sketches: A pair of eyes at least as clear and piercing as his own.

When he finished he asked for my name and wrote a short dedication, repeating the process with a different sketch in the second book. He returned them in silence, but the eyes under the wayward salt and pepper hair were again fixed on mine: Steady, lucid, with the unsmiling, unwavering mystery of a sphinx. Many times since, I’ve been instructed by the memory of that look. It taught me how you acknowledge and dignify others.

Clearly, Cocteau gave far more than was asked of him on that chilly April day. Later, reading his account of this Egyptian journey, I was struck by the tenderness and melancholy of the poet, by his innate grasp of the eloquence of the desert and salt marshes in which I grew up and through which he traveled between Cairo and Alexandria, of the turbulent desolation of his own wintry soul matched by the swollen seas outside his hotel.

“Tempest,” he wrote as the tour ended and the company prepared to leave. “The icy room is a draft. The roar of waves and wind commingle. The hotel feels as if it may take off like the cabin in ‘The Gold Rush.’ The shutters flap. The windows shake. We dread waiting, lingering in a city where our role is finished. From Cairo, Mrs. M. sends me an Arab chieftain’s costume. I’ll use the headdress as a muffler. It’s freezing.”

The weather matched the political chill that was overtaking the country. Among his notes Cocteau wrote: “After the theater, an intimate evening with princess Faiza. As in New York, we move from house to house until 4 a.m. This is a milieu that eats, talks, drinks, dances on a soft sand apt to swallow up kingdoms.”

Shortly thereafter the kingdom was indeed swallowed up. Farouk was gone. Cocteau was gone. And I, too, left. Egypt remained, with its gaudy colors and painted sunsets--in reality and in Cocteau’s notes:

“The desert road has been open for a week. We speed along unaware of how fast we’re going for lack of landmarks. The sky is a pale lavender at its base. And the desert begins to lie as in Marseille. It offers mock water. Everywhere it offers what it does not possess, to the point where one wonders if the Arabs one meets and who never lose their way are not themselves mirages of men who are in fact marching elsewhere.

“I write these lines at the Rest House near Wadi Natrun, a Catholic monastery 121 miles outside of Alexandria . . . We will arrive in Alexandria in an hour and a half.

“A fresh wind is blowing.”