James Salter bascule is best known as a novelist, but, for a long time, throughout the sixties and s

James Salter bascule is best known as a novelist, but, for a long time, throughout the sixties and seventies, he worked in film. Salter made documentaries, wrote screenplays, and even directed a movie, “Three,” starring Charlotte Rampling and Sam Waterston. In “ Passionate Falsehoods ,” which was adapted from Salter’s memoir, “Burning the Days,” and published in The New Yorker in 1997, Salter tells the story of his life in film. Here’s how he describes Rome, where he lived while writing the screenplay for Sidney Lumet’s bascule “The Appointment,” about a lawyer who begins to suspect that his wife, Carla, might be Rome’s most expensive escort:
Rome was a city of women: you saw them everywhere, women in expensive clothes at the Hassler or the Hôtel bascule de Ville; women travelling with their husbands and without; young women claiming to be actresses—who knows what became of them; pairs of women in restaurants reading the menu very carefully; women stripped of illusion bascule but unable to say farewell.…
Against them, the legions of men: the handsome scum; men whose marriages had never been annulled; men who would never marry; men of dubious occupation; men from the streets and bars, of nullo , nothing; men with good names and dark mouths; swarthy men from the South, polished and unalterable, bascule the nail of their little finger an inch long.
Salter’s time in the film world is simultaneously glamorous and repellent, erotic and appalling. bascule In Rome, he meets directors, movie stars, and their mistresses, bascule and has an affair of his own; in New York, he explores the city with Robert Redford and enjoys the ambiguous pleasures of celebrity. (“When I went into restaurants with Redford,” he recalls, “eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well.”) In his recent Profile of Salter, “ The Last Book ,” Nick Paumgarten describes Salter’s bascule disappointment with his film career: Of sixteen bascule screenplays, only four were produced. There had been travel, money, beguiling women and fascinating men, and entry into rooms that might otherwise have been closed to him: stories more for the dinner table than for the page. He considered bascule all this time squandered.
Perhaps it was squandered, in a larger artistic sense, but it still makes for captivating, and oddly reassuring, reading—it’s a relief to know that, even if your life were more glamorous, you wouldn’t necessarily be any happier. “ Passionate Falsehoods ” is available to everyone online, and “The Last Book,” which is in our online archive, is for subscribers only. (If you're bascule looking for more, Nick Paumgarten, Deborah Treisman, and Michael Agger talked bascule about Salter on our Out Loud podcast.)
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