by ZACK SIGEL
Stanley Kubrick was a man ever careful to remain two steps ahead of his own demise. Terrified of flying, he arrived in England in his early 30s and never again left its borders, not even to attend the funerals of his parents. He forced his drivers to stay under the speed limit and famously decamped to a manor house that predated the Great Fire of London from which he could accomplish all his pre- and post-production work without ever stepping outside. His paranoia was legendary, even as it forms the backbone of some of his greatest films, including 2001, which was inspired as much by Kubrick’s fear of the unknown as it was by the ongoing proliferation of nuclear weapons. Kubrick would tell the rare interviewer he was merely shy; anything to excuse his stubborn unwillingness to talk with real people. The closest he came to an admission was telling Timein 1975 that it was “helpful not to be constantly exposed to the fear and anxiety that prevail in the film world.”
The obsessive consistency he maintained in his private life turned out to be in vain. Kubrick didn’t perish in a car accident or a mushroom cloud. Death stalked him within the walls of Childwickbury and claimed him in the midst of his only true refuge. He had just completed and delivered the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut when he retired to the master bedroom on the second floor of his home. He never came back down.
Even in death, Kubrick never left the house. The funeral was held at Childwickbury and Kubrick’s body remains interred there today. Christiane contributed a bright orange portrait she’d painted of her husband in earlier years, with a benighted Stanley at the center of it resembling Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining by way of Francis Bacon. Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and the executive producer of his later work, gave a short eulogy describing him as a kind man of boundless energy. “If you want to know more,” he said, “you’ll have to ask Emilio.”
That would be Emilio D’Alessandro, who was hired by Kubrick in 1970 to serve as his driver and rapidly rose to the level of his personal assistant. He also frequently played the roles of mechanic and handyman, prepared Kubrick more than a handful of meals, and took care of what grew to be a vast menagerie of cats and dogs. Toward the end of his tenure, he even got to sell a newspaper to Tom Cruise — his only cinematic cameo. The subtitle of the latest pseudobiography of Stanley Kubrick, written with help from Filippo Ulivieri and translated by Simon Marsh, is “Thirty Years at His Side,” and it is meant to suggest an intimate relationship between its author and the great film director who employed him. For all we believe we know about Kubrick, the chilly recluse, that is a tantalizing prospect, and D’Alessandro’s promise of such a portrait threatens to undermine the secondhand reports we have of Kubrick generally seen terrorizing Shelley Duvall or neglecting his family.
D’Alessandro meets Kubrick during the preproduction of A Clockwork Orange. He is poached from a taxi service by Jan Harlan and agrees to become Kubrick’s driver without ever having heard of the man. (He had seen Dr. Strangelove in 1964 but failed to remember the director’s name.) One of his first responsibilities is the delivery of the enormous porcelain phallus employed by Alex to bludgeon a woman to death in Clockwork. Whether out of curiosity or because Kubrick figured a champion motor sportsman would make for a safer driver, D’Alessandro was selected because Kubrick had discovered a 1968 news article about his former career as a Formula Ford driver. Eventually, Kubrick let him go the speed limit.
Very quickly, D’Alessandro begins to suspect that he is more than just on the Kubrick payroll. He speaks of Kubrick not as a tough but fair boss, but with the fawning tones of a semi-requited romance. “I loved him,” D’Alessandro writes. “The mechanism of our relationship worked perfectly.” All this to explain the feeling he gets whenever Kubrick smiles at him at the end of the workday. “My job was to see to it that he didn’t have to waste time. I was there to spare him the small, and sometimes not so small, burdens of life, so that every day he could quite simply be Stanley Kubrick.” And like any good infatuation, D’Alessandro allows his heart to do the seeing for his eyes. He finds he admires the man even when Kubrick is only tossing him chum — “Don’t call me sir. […] Call me Stanley.” — and takes it for granted when Kubrick tells him, “All I need is a desk, a chair, a pen, and a coffee machine; nothing else.” Wait a minute — hadn’t D’Alessandro just spent the preceding chapter expounding on the army of assistants and helpers enlisted to the cause of Kubrick, Inc.?
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