Who's Tony?

"....so, it's never gonna be Me,

You'll never Get It, 

You'll never Know --

and Whatever You Think I am, 

that's What I'm NOT..."

Stanley Kubrick's House 

looks as if 

The Inland Revenue 

took it over long ago.

Tony takes me into a large room 

painted blue and filled with books. 

"This used to be The Cinema," he says.

"Is it The Library now?" I ask.

"Look closer at The Books," 

says Tony.

I do. "Bloody hell," I say. 

"Every book in this room 

is about Napoleon!"

"Look in The Drawers," 

says Tony.

I do.

"It's all about Napoleon, too!" I say. 

"Everything in here is about Napoleon!"

I feel a little like 

Shelley Duvall in The Shining, 

chancing upon her husband's novel 

and finding it is comprised 

entirely of the line 

"All Work And No Play 

Makes Jack A Dull Boy" 

typed over and over again. 

John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick, 

"Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick 

to Kubrick's passion for Privacy, 

and drew parallels with 

Jack Torrance in The Shining."

This room full of Napoleon stuff seems 

to bear out that comparison. 

"Somewhere else in This House," 

Tony says, "is A Cabinet full of 

25,000 Library Cards, 

three inches by five inches. 

If you want to know 

what Napoleon, 

or Josephine, or anyone 

within Napoleon's inner circle 

was doing on the afternoon 

of July 23 17-whatever, 

you go to that card 

and it'll Tell You."

"Who made up The Cards?" I ask.

"Stanley," says Tony. 

"With some assistants."

"How long did it take?" I ask.

"Years," says Tony. 

"The late 1960s."

Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon. 

During the years it took him to compile this research, 

a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo 

was written, produced and released. 

It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon 

and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.

"Did you do this kind of massive research 

for all the movies?" I ask Tony.

"More or less," he says.

"OK," I say. "I understand how 

you might do this for Napoleon, 

but what about, say, The Shining?"

"Somewhere here," says Tony, 

"is just about every ghost book ever written, 

and there'll be A Box containing 

photographs of the exteriors 

of maybe every mountain 

hotel in The World."

There is a silence.

"Tony," I say, "can I look 

through The Boxes?"