“One time, in 1998,” Jan says, “I was in the kitchen with Stanley and I mentioned that I’d just been to the opticians in St. Albans to get a new pair of glasses. Stanley looked shocked. He said, ‘Where exactly did you go?’ I told him and he said, ‘Oh, thank God! I was just in the other opticians in town getting some glasses and I used your name!’”

Jan laughs. “He used my name in the opticians, in Waitrose, everywhere.”

“But even if he didn’t reply to the fan letters,” I say, “they’ve all been so scrupulously read and filed.”

The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps fifty orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front—Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California; and so on—and is in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F—P” on the positive ones and “F—N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F—C.”

“Look at this,” I say to Jan.

I hand him a letter written by a fan and addressed to Arthur C. Clarke. He forwarded it on to Kubrick and wrote on the top, “Stanley. See P3!! Arthur.”

Jan turns to page 3, where Arthur C. Clarke marked, with exclamation points, the following paragraph:

What is the meaning behind the epidemic? Does the pink furniture reveal anything about the 3rd monolith and it’s emitting a pink color when it first approaches the ship? Does this have anything to do with a shy expression? Does the alcohol offered by the Russians have anything to do with French kissing and saliva?

“Why do you think Arthur C. Clarke marked that particular paragraph for Kubrick to read?” I ask Jan.

“Because it is so bizarre and absurd,” he says.

“I thought so,” I say. “I just wanted to make sure.”

In the back of my mind I wondered whether this paragraph was marked because the writer of the fan letter—Mr. Sam Laks of Alhambra, California—had actually worked out the secret of the monolith in 2001. I find myself empathizing with Sam Laks. I am also looking for answers to the mysteries. So many conspiracy theories and wild rumors surrounded Kubrick—the one about him being responsible for faking the moon landings (untrue), the one about his terror of germs (this one can’t be true, either—there’s a lot of dust around here), the ones about him refusing to fly and drive over 30 mph. (The flying one is true—Tony says he wasn’t scared of planes, he was scared of air-traffic controllers—but the one about the 30 mph is “bullshit,” says Tony. “He had a Porsche.”)

This is why my happiest times looking through the boxes are when things turn weird. For instance, at the end of one shelf inside the stable block is a box marked “Sniper head—scary.” Inside, wrapped in newspaper, is an extremely lifelike and completely disgusting disembodied head of a young Vietnamese girl, the veins in her neck protruding horribly, her eyes staring out, her lips slightly open, her tongue just visible. I feel physically sick looking at it. As I hold it up by its blood-matted hair, Christiane, Kubrick’s widow, walks past the window.

“I found a head!” I say.

“It’s probably Ryan O’Neal’s head,” she replies.

Christiane has no idea who I am, or what I’m doing in her house, but she accepts the moment with admirable calm.

“No,” I say. “It’s the head of the sniper from Full Metal Jacket.”

“But she wasn’t beheaded,” calls back Christiane. “She was shot.”

“I know!” I say.

Christiane shrugs and she walks on.

“I was just talking to Tony about typefaces,” I say to Jan.

“Ah yes,” says Jan. “Stanley loved typefaces.” Jan pauses. “I tell you what else he loved.”

“What?” I ask.

“Stationery,” says Jan.

I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan.

“His great hobby was stationery,” he says. “One time a package arrived with a hundred bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, ‘What are you going to do with all that ink?’ He said, ‘I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.’ Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink. He loved stationery, pads, everything like that.”

Tony Frewin wanders into the stable block.

“How’s it going?” he asks.

“Still looking for Rosebud,” I say.

“The closest I ever got to Rosebud,” says Tony, “was finding a Daisy gun that he had when he was a child.”

Tony and I leaf through some memos Kubrick wrote in 1968:

Please see that there is a supply of melons kept in the house at all times. Do not let the number go below three without buying some more. Thanks, Stanley.

“By their memos you shall know them,” Tony says.

And another:

Please check with the weather bureau and find out what the barometric pressure in London was last Friday 11th October between 6pm and 4am in the morning. Also find out what the average barometric pressure is on most days of the year, what is considered extremely high and what is considered extremely low and how they would describe the pressure on Friday, 11th October during the times I mentioned. Thanks, Stanley.

“God knows what that was about,” says Tony.

Right from the beginning I had mentally noted how well constructed the boxes were, and now Tony tells me that this is because Kubrick designed them himself. He wasn’t happy with the boxes that were on the market—their restrictive dimensions and the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the tops off—so he set about designing a whole new type of box. He instructed a company of box manufacturers, G. Ryder & Co., of Milton Keynes, to construct four hundred of them to his specifications.

“When one batch arrived,” says Tony, “we opened them up and found a note, written by someone at G. Ryder & Co. The note said, ‘Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off.’”

Tony laughs. I half expect him to say, “I suppose we were a bit fussy.”

But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “As opposed to non-fussy customers who don’t care if they struggle all day to get the tops off.”

•   •   •

I HAVE DINNER with Christiane. They met when Kubrick gave her the part of a bar singer in Paths of Glory. They married and barely left each other’s side for the next forty-two years. They raised three children: Anya and Vivian, plus Katharina, her daughter from an earlier marriage. I’ve got to know her well but there are some things I’ve always felt awkward asking her about, like anything to do with her uncle Veit Harlan. But tonight over dinner she brings the subject up herself.

“Stanley and I came from such different, such grotesquely opposite backgrounds,” she says. “I think it gave us an extra something. I had an appalling, catastrophic background for someone like Stanley.” She pauses. “For me, my uncle was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown’s world. Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so intimately—and yet not know.”

It turned out that when Harlan wasn’t clowning around with Christiane, he was writing and directing propaganda films for Goebbels, including Jud Süss, in which venal, immoral Jews take over and ruin a German city, stealing riches, defiling Aryan women, etc. The film was shown to SS units before they were sent out to attack Jews. Harlan was tried twice for war crimes, and exonerated, proving that Goebbels had interfered with Jud Süss, forcing him to reedit and inject more anti-Semitism.

“Where my uncle was an enormous fool, as many talented people are, was that he mistook his gift for intelligence,” says Christiane. “He was a great big famous film person. He looked better and talked better and had enormous charm. So he thought he was also far more intelligent than Mr. Goebbels. Goebbels was ten thousand times smarter than my uncle.” She pauses. “Film people, actors, are puppets. We are silly. We are silly folk.” She says her uncle’s story reinforced for Stanley and her their great principle in life: Always be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power.