Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [24]
Despite the protestations of the senior producer, Kenny and I brought our wives. “The wives will be trouble,” he told us. “They will get in the way.” I didn’t care. Judy had tagged along with me for a number of shoots, often in sunny California but also in the most god-awful of places. This time we were staying in Paris and at a thousand-year-old castle in Normandy. She was coming.
The castle rose up out of a verdant field, its towers and parapets flanked by a moat and lined with a string of stunning, if unkempt, gardens. Other than Cinderella’s digs in Orlando, Château de Canisy was the first castle I’d ever seen, and it was stunning.
We arrived just before dark. Over introductory glasses of estate (as in, grown out back) bottled Calvados, our host, a twitchy yet amiable long-haired man named Luc, told us that the castle had been in the family for nearly a thousand years and was now owned by his cousin, otherwise known as the count.
Over a simple late snack Luc told us how the family had avoided execution by hiding here during the French Revolution and how, prior to the Allied invasion on D-day, the German field marshal Erwin Rommel (who, incidentally, was home visiting his wife on D-day) had used the castle as his headquarters. After dinner we retired to the parlor for more drinks. Then we took a tour of the rooms. Apparently, the production company was able to secure the estate for us at a reasonable price because it was being renovated. Some rooms were gutted or being used for storage. Others were simply locked, and the bathroom faucets, when they worked, spit brown water. But we didn’t care. It sure beat the hell out of shooting a diaper commercial in Queens.
Upstairs on our way to our rooms we stopped at the end of a long hallway and looked through closed double doors (what do you call French doors in France?) into a grand library that Luc said we were not allowed to enter under any circumstances because it was filled with antiquities.
“Do you live here?” I asked Luc.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I am just visiting.”
Then, changing the subject, he looked at Betsy, one of our production assistants, a cute woman in her early twenties who was on her first shoot. “And you, Betsy,” Luc said, so lasciviously that it made me giggle. “I know that Jeeem and Kennee are married to these beautiful ladies, but you … are you married?”
Betsy shuddered, blinked her eyes, and reluctantly shook her head.
Later in our room, just before my wife turned the light out, there was a knock at our door. It was Betsy. She said she was scared.
“Of ghosts?”
“No,” she said. “Of Luc.”
On the third morning we were up early and out of the castle to scout locations. The D-day veterans, who were staying in a separate location nearby, joined our caravan. First we stopped in Sainte-Mère-Églíse, the small town near Utah Beach into which one of our veterans (along with about fifteen thousand others in the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions) had parachuted in the early morning darkness of June 6, 1944. His younger brother, who was part of the beach assault, would die later that morning a few miles away on Omaha Beach.
Next we went to the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. On D-day the Germans had six massive 155 mm cannon emplacements on top of the cliffs, smack in the middle of Omaha and Utah beaches. Today many of the massive concrete German observation posts are still intact, and the ground is pocked with hundreds of thirty-foot-wide craters from the American naval bombardment.
Two of the veterans we’d brought with us had been part of the U.S. Army Rangers assault team charged with climbing the hundred-meter cliffs—mostly with muddy rope while being fired upon—and taking out the gun emplacements. I was familiar with Pointe du Hoc from my research,