Kanata (33 page)

King Vidor sat on a chair surrounded by people, under a blanket, wearing a white shirt and tie and a dark tweed jacket. Behind him the huge lights glared, a camera on a small platform beside him, the look of a command post, the general in the field, directing his troops. Vidor was more than a general, though. He was a god who raised the dead after each take and returned them to their fate. Michael walked toward the woods, moving cautiously among the trees, then crawled noisily in his unfamiliar uniform among the others.

At three in the morning they broke for lunch and Michael ate his chili con carne among the other extras in the big craft tent. Most of them were complaining about the work, or saying they could easily do what the star, John Gilbert, was doing. Seen from this perspective, in its minute, belaboured steps, it was true that Gilbert's job was difficult to appreciate. His worth became clear only when you viewed him through the camera, when his face—likable, handsome in an unthreatening way, a regular guy—took on its trademark radiance, an inner meaning that conveyed something incalculable to the audience.

Michael noticed a woman carrying a clipboard, walking purposefully. She had short black hair that gleamed, helmetlike. She was tall and there was a dancer's sensuality to her
movements, even in the way she held herself when she stopped at Vidor's table, one foot at a balletic angle, her body coiled, languid. She bent down and whispered to Vidor and showed him something on the clipboard. They talked for a few minutes and her face suddenly opened up with a crooked smile. It dented the armour that her walk presented, and it gave Michael the idea that it might be possible to approach her. The woman got a coffee and walked to a separate table and sat down.

After a few minutes, Michael walked over to her. “Can I get you anything while I'm up?” he asked.

She stared intently at the clipboard. “No,” she said without looking up.

It occurred to Michael that she might have thought he was a waiter, even though there weren't any. “I died four times tonight,” he offered, the only thing he could think of.

The woman didn't look up. “Let's not make it five, shall we,” she said. Michael was rooted for two long seconds. Unable to think of a winning response, he slowly fled.

He got another coffee and took it outside the tent and breathed deeply, staring at the hills.

After lunch they regrouped and walked through the forest once more before dawn, then the Ford drove them back to the MGM lot. The morning sun was pale and cars briskly filled the Los Angeles streets. Michael got in his Buick 44, which he had bought second-hand, and drove home. He had rented a small, decaying bungalow with chipped red clay tiles on the roof and a curious gothic window in the tiny living room. It was ten years old but aging badly. A billboard that Michael had passed near a new housing development proclaimed “A Castle For Every King!” Perhaps that was what had inspired the builders of his
bungalow. A striped awning designed to keep out the afternoon sun was supported by two grand spiked poles and lent a mocking majesty. The lawn was untended and shrubs grew randomly against the house. Michael made toast and coffee and sat at the small kitchen table. He wasn't tired enough to sleep. The dark-haired woman from the set was on his mind. What did she do? Some kind of underling. Every film had hundreds of them. Outside, the sun began to bake the city and a hot wind moved the palms.

A
few days later during an afternoon shoot in Griffith Park there were camera problems and Michael heard prolonged yelling. He saw an intense-looking man no older than himself; Irving Thalberg, the Boy Wonder, a twenty-six-year-old producer, the new head of MGM. It wasn't Thalberg who was yelling though. It was the man with him, who was almost frothing, his hands jabbing the air like Dempsey. Thalberg looked contemplative as he walked around the set, taking it in, while his sergeant threatened everyone.

The extras were told they had two hours. Michael walked through the hills and hiked to the top of one of the wooded ridges. A woman was sitting beneath a pine tree thirty yards away. It was the woman from the craft tent. She was wearing black pants and a white shirt, looking at the same view, smoking a cigarette. Michael watched her for a moment, then approached.

“You won't remember me,” he said.

She examined Michael. “The recurring casualty,” she said, smiling slightly.

“Yes.”

“It seems you may be spared today.”

“Equipment problems?”

“By the time they get back with what they need they'll have lost the light. The errand boy, all that urgency down there, the death threats, all that. That was for Thalberg. To make it look like we're worried about the studio's money.”

“Aren't you?”

She blew smoke and stubbed her cigarette into the dry earth. “As worried as they are about
my
money,” she said.

Michael introduced himself and she stood up and held out her hand. “Marion,” she said. They began walking along the ridge. Marion made a gesture that took in the park. “Colonel Griffith J. Griffith owned this land,” she said. “Everyone has a movie name here. Three thousand acres. It was a ranch once, and the owner, Antonio Feliz, died here. Legend has it he haunts it still. His ghost spooked Griffith anyway. He gave the land to the city, all of it, then he shot his wife. Under everything in this town you find ghosts and blood. Or fake blood. The battle scenes for
Birth of a Nation
were filmed here.”

Michael looked at her. She somehow retained her balletic glide even as they walked the uneven hills. Her skin had the whiteness of porcelain, a challenge to maintain in Southern California. Her hands moved gracefully through the air as she talked, elliptical paths that left a thin trail of smoke. Her face had a slightly feral quality.

“You were there,” she said. “France.”

“I was with the Canadian army.”

“And did you fall in love with a French peasant girl the way John Gilbert does in the movie? Every soldier in the movies seems to.”

“I think everyone fell in love with a French girl.”

“What could be more lovable than a girl who doesn't speak English,” Marion said.

They walked in the hills for an hour, her hand resting lightly on his forearm as she told him intimate Hollywood horror stories. She briefed him on Chaplin, the scandalous genius. “Do you know why he married a sixteen-year-old? Because he couldn't find a fourteen-year-old.” She went down the list: Fatty Arbuckle, charged with raping a starlet with a champagne bottle and then crushing her to death under his lucrative weight (though there was talk he was actually innocent and was being set up by the Hearst newspaper chain—“Who wants to read about the innocent?” Marion said). She had stories of the studios giving its stars morphine to stave off pain and working them like pack mules until they collapsed. “It happened to Wallace Reid. He died of it. A martyr. The industry's first.” Abortions, incest, and murder, Marion was steeped in it. A man was murdered and two of the suspects were Rudolph Valentino and Mack Sennett, she told him. At least one of them was innocent. The funny ones carry a lot of anger inside. She went on for an hour.

Marion was the continuity girl, ensuring that there weren't any glaring discrepancies between shots, that makeup, hair, and costumes were right, that cigarettes hadn't disappeared at an impossible rate, that drinks were consumed at a reasonable pace. She said she had come to Los Angeles to be an actress but you needed a leather hide and it was difficult to know what the camera would love. Mousy girls flowered in the alchemy of light. The pretty became merely ordinary. A velvet voice was useless, while a screechy voice, an unfortunate accent, a speech impediment even, were all forgiven in the silence of film. Intelligence wasn't prized. Like so many people, Marion was near the flame and she assumed something would come of it. She had the King's ear every day, however briefly.

T
hey ate lunch together the next day. Michael attacked the indifferent food, hungry after his crawl through the woods, while Marion listlessly picked at her plate of vegetables.

“Does it remind you of the war?” she asked.

“The waiting, maybe.”

“This picture will be the war for a lot people. You know that.”

“I suppose. Better this version than the real thing.”

“I wonder.”

After lunch they walked toward the woods. There was a latrine thirty yards from the craft tent. She led him there by the hand and pulled him inside, locked the door, and then kissed him. She pulled away, appraised him briefly, then kissed him again. She reached down and undid his belt and moved his pants down over his hips and they fell to his knees. She coolly took off her own pants and hung them on a nail, then slipped out of her white, unadorned panties and hung them there as well. Michael was immobilized, had stopped breathing, the continuity girl stopping time. She climbed up as if scaling a mountain and then settled on him. Michael needed all his strength to keep their weight balanced and to stay upright, his legs bound by his pants at the knees. He leaned lightly against the wall as she held his head with both hands as if she were sculpting it, making a small determined noise in his ear. When she came, she clutched his hair as if she meant to tear it out. Then she climbed down, dabbed herself with the white panties, threw them away, and put her pants on. Michael was still standing, semi-erect, his pants at his knees. She opened the door and disappeared.

W
hen the movie came out in November, Michael and Marion went to see it at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre, sitting in the back row.
The Big Parade
was already a hit, celebrated as the first realistic depiction of the war.
Time
magazine said it was “easily the greatest war picture, one of the greatest of all pictures.” John Gilbert became a star, and King Vidor was sought after. Irving Thalberg was declared a genius for going against popular opinion. No one wants realism, he had been told; the American public wants escape.
The Big Parade
gave them both and now MGM was financially secure and Thalberg was a genius. From the back row, Michael watched the story unfold in earnest folksy scenes. Three men from diverse backgrounds go to war. They become close, compete for the favours of French girls. It was almost comic in tone for the first half.

Marion sat restlessly smoking, occasionally offering criticism. The second half had the battle scenes. Griffith Park had seemed like playacting: unconvincing and childish. But on screen, bolstered by the martial music that played as the soldiers walked toward the woods, by the solemnity of black and white, and by the distance of the camera, there was a grudging grace. Explosions went off, gas crept along the ground, extras died. Michael couldn't see himself anywhere on the screen and was relieved. He understood the appeal of the film-going experience, the collective huddling in the dark. The interior of Grauman's was exotic, a glorious tomb with Egyptian detail, filled with the congregational hopes of a thousand people. A perfect refuge. Even Marion's whispered cynicism failed to erase this. Michael had the yokel's joy of being deceived, and movies were a harmless deception. They sat and read the subtitles:

Jim: Do you think he'll make it all right?

Bull: Sure! Slim'll come back wearin' the Kaiser's mustache!

In the end John Gilbert lost his leg but got his French peasant girl. They embraced, the music swelled, and the crowd wept and applauded and then filed out into the cool evening air.

Marion walked with her arm linked through Michael's. They went back to her Wilshire apartment and she made a messy omelette.

“Sentimental nonsense,” she said. “I can't imagine that's what it was actually like.”

“Parts weren't far off. What they missed is the horror.” But you couldn't get that with a movie camera. And who would want to?

“You look like a movie star, Michael. You've got something that John Gilbert doesn't have. My God, he's as sexy as a piece of cheese. But women in the theatres don't want sex. They want to be comforted.”

They went out onto the fire escape and climbed onto the roof and made love. Michael lay on the flat roof, his skin dotted with black cinders that were pressed into his back by Marion's thrusting weight. He looked, she said, like a side of beef that had been peppered, ready for the coals. In the realm of sex, she was wholly alien, but he was thrilled by her appetite. When she came, her face sometimes went numb, she told him. Afterwards, she lay there detached from him, from herself even.

4

1925

On the weekend, he and Marion drove out of the city, north along the coast until they passed a faded wooden sign.

“Stop,” Marion said. “Back up.”

Michael put the car in reverse and backed up along the shoulder until they could read the sign:
LAZY J RANCH HORSES BY THE HOUR THE HALF DAY OR ALL DAY
.