Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (10 page)

Occam’s Ducks

Producers Releasing Corporation Executive: Bill, you’re forty-five minutes behind your shooting schedule.

Beaudine: You mean, someone’s
waiting
to see this crap??

—William “One-Shot” Beaudine

F
OR A WEEK, LATE IN THE YEAR 1919,
some of the most famous people in the world seemed to have dropped off its surface.

The Griffith Company, filming the motion picture
The Idol Dancer
, with the palm trees and beaches of Florida standing in for the South Seas, took a shooting break.

The mayor of Fort Lauderdale invited them for a twelve-hour cruise aboard his yacht, the
Gray Duck
. They sailed out of harbor on a beautiful November morning. Just after noon a late-season hurricane slammed out of the Caribbean.

There was no word of the movie people, the mayor, his yacht, or the crew for five days. The Coast Guard and the Navy sent out every available ship. Two seaplanes flew over shipping lanes as the storm abated.

Richard Barthelmess came down to Florida at first news of the disappearance, while the hurricane still raged. He went out with the crew of the Great War U-boat chaser, the
Berry Islands
. The seas were so rough the captain ordered them back in after six hours.

The days stretched on; three, four. The Hearst newspapers put out extras, speculating on the fate of Griffith, Gish, the other actors, the mayor. The weather cleared and calm returned. There were no sightings of debris or oil slicks. Reporters did stories on the
Marie Celeste
mystery. Hearst himself called in spiritualists in an attempt to contact the presumed dead director and stars.

On the morning of the sixth day, the happy yachting party sailed back in to harbor.

First there were sighs of relief.

Then the reception soured. Someone in Hollywood pointed out that Griffith’s next picture, to be released nationwide in three weeks, was called
The Greatest Question
and was about life after death, and the attempts of mediums to contact the dead.

W. R. Hearst was not amused, and he told the editors not to be amused, either.

Griffith shrugged his shoulders for the newsmen. “A storm came up. The captain put in at the nearest island. We rode out the cyclone. We had plenty to eat and drink, and when it was over, we came back.”

The island was called Whale Cay. They had been buffeted by the heavy seas and torrential rains the first day and night, but made do by lantern light and electric torches, and the dancing fire of the lightning in the bay around them. They slept stacked like cordwood in the crowded belowdecks.

They had breakfasted in the sunny eye of the hurricane late next morning up on deck. Many of the movie people had had strange dreams, which they related as the far-wall clouds of the back half of the hurricane moved lazily toward them.

Nell Hamilton, the matinee idol who had posed for paintings on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
during the Great War, told his dream. He was in a long valley with high cliffs surrounding him. On every side, as far as he could see, the ground, the arroyos were covered with the bones and tusks of elephants. Their cyclopean skulls were tumbled at all angles. There were millions and millions of them, as if every pachyderm that had ever lived had died there. It was near dark, the sky overhead paling, the jumbled bones around him becoming purple and indistinct.

Over the narrow valley, against the early stars a strange light appeared. It came from a searchlight somewhere beyond the cliffs, and projected onto a high bank of noctilucent cirrus was a winged black shape. From somewhere behind him a telephone rang with a sense of urgency. Then he’d awakened with a start.

Lillian Gish, who’d only arrived at the dock the morning they left, going directly from the
Florida Special
to the yacht, had spent the whole week before at the new studio at Mamaroneck, New York, overseeing its completion and directing her sister in a comedy feature. On the tossing, pitching yacht, she’d had a terrible time getting to sleep. She had dreamed, she said, of being an old woman, or being dressed like one, and carrying a Browning semiautomatic shotgun. She was being stalked through a swamp by a crazed man with words tattooed on his fists, who sang hymns as he followed her. She was very frightened in her nightmare, she said, not by being pursued, but by the idea of being old. Everyone laughed at that.

They asked David Wark Griffith what he’d dreamed of. “Nothing in particular,” he said. But he
had
dreamed: There was a land of fire and eruptions, where men and women clad in animal skins fought against giant crocodiles and lizards, much like in his film of ten years before,
Man
’s
Genesis
. Hal Roach, the upstart competing producer, was there, too, looking older, but he seemed to be telling Griffith what to do. D. W. couldn’t imagine such a thing. Griffith attributed the dream to the rolling of the ship, and to an especially fine bowl of turtle soup he’d eaten that morning aboard the
Gray Duck
, before the storm hit.

Another person didn’t tell of his dreams. He saw no reason to. He was the stubby steward who kept them all rocking with laughter through the storm with his antics and jokes. He said nothing to the film people, because he had a dream so very puzzling to him, a dream unlike any other he’d ever had.

He had been somewhere; a stage, a room. He wore some kind of livery; a doorman’s or a chauffeur’s outfit. There was a big Swede standing right in front of him, and the Swedish guy was made up like a Japanese or a Chinaman. He had a big mustache like Dr. Fu Manchu on the book jackets, and he wore a tropical planter’s suit and hat. Then this young Filipino guy had run into the room yelling a mile a minute, and the Swede asked, “Why number-three son making noise like motorboat?”, and the Filipino yelled something else and ran to a closet door and opened it, and a white feller fell out of it with a knife in his back.

Then a voice behind the steward said, “Cut!” and then said, “Let’s do it again,” and the guy with the knife in his back got up and went back into the closet, and the Filipino guy went back out the door, and the big Swede took two puffs on a Camel and handed it to someone and then just stood there, and the voice behind the steward said to him, “Okay,” and then, “This time, Mantan, bug your eyes out a little more.” The dream made no sense at all.

* * *

After their return on the yacht, the steward had performed at the wrap party for the productions. An Elk saw him, and they hired him to do their next initiation follies. Then he won a couple of amateur nights, and played theaters in a couple of nearby towns. He fetched and carried around at the mayor’s house in the daytime, and rolled audiences in the aisles at night.

One day early in 1920, he looked in his monthly pay envelope and found it was about a quarter of what he’d earned in the theater the last week.

He gave notice, hit the boards running, and never looked back.

* * *

So it was that two years later, on April 12, 1922, Mantan Brown found himself, at eight in the morning, in front of a large building in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He had seen the place the year before, when he had been playing a theater down the street. Before the Great War, it had been part of Nestor or Centaur, or maybe the Thantouser Film Company. The Navy had taken it over for a year to make toothbrushing and trench-foot movies to show new recruits, and films for the public on how to spot the Kaiser in case he was working in disguise on your block.

It was a commercial studio again, but now for rent by the day or week. Most film production had moved out to the western coast, but there were still a few—in Jersey, out on Astoria, in Manhattan itself—doing some kind of business in the East.

Mantan had ferried over before sunup, taken a streetcar, and checked in to the nearby hotel, one that let Negroes stay there as long as they paid in advance.

He went inside, past a desk and a yawning guard who waved him on, and found a guy in coveralls with a broom, which, Mantan had learned in two years in the business, was where you went to find out stuff.

“I’m looking for The Man with the Shoes,” he said.

“You and everybody else,” said the handyman. He squinted. “I seen you somewhere before.”

“Not unless you pay to get in places I wouldn’t,” said Mantan.

“Bessie Smith?” said the workman. “I mean, you’re not Bessie Smith. But why I think of her when I see you?”

Mantan smiled. “Toured with her and Ma Rainey last year. I tried to tell jokes, and people threw bricks and things at me till they came back on and sang. Theater Owners’ Booking Agency. The TOBA circuit.”

The guy smiled. “Tough On Black Asses, huh?”

“You got that right.”

“Well, I thought you were pretty good. Caught you somewhere in the City. Went there for the jazz.”

“Thank you—”

“Willie.” The janitor stuck out his hand, shook Mantan’s.

“Thank you, Willie. Mantan Brown.” He looked around. “Can you tell me what the hoodoo’s going on here?”

“Beats me. I done the
strangest
things I ever done this past week. I work here—at the studio itself, fetchin’ and carryin’ and ridin’ a mop. Guy rented it two weeks ago—guy with the shoes is named Mr. Meister, a real yegg. He must be makin’ a race movie—the waiting room, second down the hall to the left—looks like Connie’s Club on Saturday night after all the slummers left. The guy directing the thing—Meister’s just the watch chain—name’s Slavo, Marcel Slavo. Nice guy, real deliberate and intense—somethin’s wrong with him, looks like a jakeleg or blizzard-bunny to me—he’s got some great scheme or somethin’. I been painting scenery for it. Don’t make sense. You’d think they were making another
Intolerance
, but they only got cameras coming in Thursday and Friday, shooting time for a two-reeler. Other than that, Mr. Brown, I don’t know a thing more than you do.”

“Thanks.”

* * *

The waiting room wasn’t like Connie’s; it was like a TOBA tent-show alumnus reunion. There was lots of yelling and hooting when he came in.

“Mantan!” “Why, Mr. Brown!” “Looky who’s here!”

As he shook hands he saw he was the only comedian there.

There was a pretty young woman, a high-yellow he hadn’t seen before, sitting very quietly by herself. She had on a green wool dress and toque, and a weasel-trimmed wrap rested on the back of her chair.

“Somethin’, huh?” asked Le Roi Chicken, a dancer from Harlem who’d been in revues with
both
Moran and Mack
and
Buck and Bubbles. “Her name’s Pauline Christian.”

“Hey, Mr. Brown,” said someone across the room. “I thought you was just a caution in
Mantan of the Apes!
”

Mantan smiled, pleased. They’d made the film in three days, mostly in the Authentic African Gardens of a white guy’s plantation house in Sea Island, Georgia, during the mornings and afternoons before his tent-shows at night. Somebody had called somebody who’d called somebody else to get him the job. He hadn’t seen the film yet, but from what he remembered of making it, it was probably pretty funny.

“I’m here for the five dollars a day, just like all of you,” he said.

“That’s funny,” said fifteen people in unison, “us all is getting
ten
dollars a day!”

While they were laughing, a door opened in the far corner. A tough white mug who looked like an icebox smoking a cigar came out, yelled for quiet, and read names off a list.

* * *

Mantan, Pauline Christian, and Lorenzo Fairweather were taken into an office.

“Welcome, welcome,” said Mr. Meister, who was a shorter version of the guy who’d called off the names on the clipboard.

* * *

Marcel Slavo sat in a chair facing them. Willie had been right. Slavo had dark spots under his eyes and looked like he slept with his face on a waffle iron. He was pale as a slug, and smoking a Fatima in a holder.

“The others, the extras, will be fitted today, then sent home. They’ll be back Thursday and Friday for the shooting. You three, plus Lafayette Monroe and Arkady Jackson, are the principals. Mr. Meister here”—Meister waved to them and Marcel continued—“has got money to shoot a two-reeler race picture. His friends would like to expand their movie investments. We’ll go on to the script later, rehearse tomorrow and Wednesday, and shoot for two days. I know that’s unusual, not the way you’re all used to working, but this isn’t the ordinary two-reeler. I want us all to be proud of it.”

“And I—and my backers—want it in the can by Friday night,” said Mr. Meister.

They laughed nervously.

“The two other principals will join us Wednesday. We can cover most of their shots Thursday afternoon,” said Slavo.

He then talked with Lorenzo about the plays he’d been in, and with Mantan about his act. “
Mantan of the Apes
was why I wanted you,” he said. “And Pauline,” he turned to her, “you’ve got great potential. I saw you in
Upholding the Race
last week. A small part, but you brought something to it. I think we can make a funny satire here, one people will remember.” He seemed tired. He stopped a moment.

“And—?” said Meister.

“And I want to thank you. There’s a movie out there right now. It’s the apotheosis of screen art—”

“What?” asked Lorenzo.

“The bee’s knees,” said Mantan.

“Thank you, Mr. Brown. It’s the epitome of moviemaking. It’s in trouble because it was made in Germany; veterans’ groups picketing outside, all that stuff everywhere it plays. There’s never been anything like it, not in America, France, or Italy. And it’s just a bunch of bohunks keeping people away from it. Well, it’s art, and they can’t stop it.”

“And,” said Meister conspiratorially, “they can’t keep us from sending it up, making a comedy of it, and making some bucks.”

“Now,” said Slavo, all business. “I’d like you to make yourselves comfortable, while I read through what we’ve got for you. Some of the titles are just roughs, you’ll get the idea though, so bear with me. We’ll have a title writer go over it after we finish the shooting and cutting. Here’s the scene: We open on a shot of cotton fields in Alabama, usual stuff; then we come in on a sign: County Fair September 15–22. Then we come down on a shot of the side-show booths, the midway, big posters, et cetera.”