What falls away : a memoir Read Online Free Page B

in great comfort when, one morning as I was going to the lagoon to fish, I met the gendarme. 'If you are interested to know,' he told me in the most casual of tones, 'the bed you are sleeping in is the bed of a leper.'
    "A frantic check revealed this to be true. The son of my hosts was a leper, who had been relegated to a hut of his own behind the main house. I further learned that we had been sharing the same dishes. I got hold of the stongest disinfectants available and scrubbed till the blood ran. After a week had passed, drawn by boredom and the pessimistic certainty of my own fate, I began to visit the leper and we became friends. He was only twenty-five and resigned to his affliction. He strummed the guitar and in a patois of French, Tahitian, and English, he told me stories about the leper colony and the exploits of a character so heroic as to seem highly fictitious—called Kamiano. Tale after tale, punctuated by bobbings of reverent salutes, filled me with curiosity. When at last I sailed back to Papeete I learned that Kamiano was the native name for the priest who had worked and lived among the lepers until he too contracted the disease, and died a leper's death. His name was Father Damien."
    My father's biography of Father Damien, Damien the Leper, was published in 1937. In the foreword, Hugh Walpole wrote: "I scarcely know how Mr. Farrow has been able to

    leave so vivid a picture of Father Damien in the reader's mind with so few words ... I feel that I have Damien as a companion for the rest of my days. This is an addition to one's spiritual experience." Pope Pius XI responded to the book by naming my father a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.
    In one port, San Francisco, my father lingered to pursue a seventeen-year-old beauty from a prominent local family. Always a voracious reader, he took the opportunity to formalize his education and earned a degree in literature from Loyola Marymount University, staying afloat by painting portraits of socialites. A brief, stormy marriage to that same young woman produced his mirror-image daughter, my half sister Felice.
    In 1927, while writing for a local theater, my father became friends with the producer David Selznick, who tried to convince him to become an actor. But while Dad had no interest m acting, David's stories about HoUywood were intriguing enough to bring him to Los Angeles, to try his hand at screenwriting.
    His first credit for a screenplay came that same year, for The Wreck of the Hesperus, based upon Longfellow's poem. Before long he had a contract with Paramount, where he wrote scripts for, among others, William Wellman, Gary Cooper, William Powell, Victor Fleming, and Clara Bow. His short stories were by then appearing in The Atlantic Monthly.
    My parents first met in 1931 at the Cotton Club in Culver City. My mother's escort that night was Oscar Levant; she says my father was "flirtatious" that evening, and his date, Dolores Del Rio, was furious. "He was, without any doubt, the most colorful, fascinating character on the Hollywood scene," she told me, "and at twenty-six, he had the worst reputation in town. When he asked me for a date, he told me that the first evening he had free was in two weeks' time. Here I was with every night of the week free! But I was very excited about going out with him. He wasn't

    like other people in the industry: he was a complete mystery to me, which was all part of the attraction."
    When my mother returned to Hollywood from a trip to Ireland they started seeing each other again, but before long he ran off to London and almost married one Mary Churchill. That fell through, and one night he rang up my mother to ask if she'd go to Tahiti with him. "You must be crazy!" Mom replied. 'Tve read in the papers what you've been up to. You're too unreliable for me!" And she hung up. A few days later she found out he'd flown to Tahiti with another girl, where he stayed for most of that year.
    "He was my