The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 93
Greene called the movie “a complete travesty” and “a real
piece of political dishonesty.” He later wrote, “One could believe
that the film was made deliberately to attack the book and its
author. But the book was based on a closer knowledge of the
Indo-China war than the American possessed and I am vain
enough to believe that the book will survive a few years longer
than Mr. Mankiewicz’s incoherent picture.”
Greene and Lansdale met only once. As recounted by Lansdale
in a conversation with his biographer Cecil Currey, Greene
and a group of French military officers were installed on the terrace
of the Continental Hotel, sipping their afternoon cocktails,
when Lansdale drove up and parked in front of the hotel. As
Lansdale entered the Continental, Greene and the Frenchmen
seated around him—estimated by Lansdale to number
between thirty and fifty—began booing him. Greene leaned
over to make a remark to Peg Durdin, the New York Times
correspondent who was seated next to him. According to Lansdale,
“Peg stuck out her tongue at him and said to him, ‘But we
love him [Lansdale].’ Then she turned around and gave me a
big hug and kiss. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to get written up someplace
as a dirty dog.’ So I guess I made his book. I had a French
poodle at the time and he was with me, in the car with me, and
they commented about the dog.”
Greene said the dog he had in mind belonged to René de
Berval, editor of France-Asie in Saigon. (The Quiet American is
dedicated to Berval and his girlfriend Phuong.) As Greene wrote
in a letter to the British Sunday Telegraph in 1966, “Just for the
record, your correspondent . . . is completely wrong in thinking
that I took General Lansdale as the model for The Quiet American.
Pyle was a younger, more innocent and more idealistic
member of the CIA. I would never have chosen Colonel Lansdale,
as he then was, to represent the danger of innocence.”
An worked for Lansdale on psyops material and rumor campaigns
for the Catholic exodus from the north, the battle