Missing Reels (18 page)

“But I really do think a man can fall in love gradually.”

“That’s what I mean, dear. I’m talking about sex, you’re talking about love. I don’t mean they’ll instantly try it with any woman who makes them think ‘yes,’ I mean they don’t sit around for months, then decide, ‘next week, if I’ve nothing better to do.’ Anyway, I’m sure now that wasn’t why he cast me. The movie was too important for him to be that self-indulgent. He wanted the actors to look a certain way; to him they were like figures in a painting. You can imagine how they loved him for that too.” She rolled her eyes. “I had the look he wanted. And it was just as he said, he wanted someone who would do as she was told. At Ufa his first movie was with an actress …” Miriam trailed off. “What was her name. I used to know it. Something like Lina.” She shrugged at Ceinwen. “Name’s gone. No matter. I’m sure Lina or Nina or whoever is gone too. She wasn’t a big star but she’d made a lot of movies and because he was a newcomer, she felt free to argue every part of every scene. Which he would have found irritating from anyone. Coming from a young woman it was intolerable. He wasn’t going to do that again.”

“You don’t exactly seem like a pushover.”

“Don’t I? Didn’t I just tell you I went to bed with him one night after he kissed me?”

“That’s what you do when you’re in love.”

“That must be good news to your boyfriends.”

“
Miriam
,” protested Ceinwen.

She smiled. “I had small ways and small moments, like the Chaplin audition, but mostly all Mother had to do was lie down and moan and it was off to another casting call. Emil was shrewd and he saw that. My backbone grew in later. Anyway, after that, for all intents and purposes, I moved in with him.”

“What?”

“I know. You would think, wouldn’t you, that with all Mother’s show of protecting me, she would have something to say about that. And you’d be wrong. I told her that I had to rehearse with him because the work we were doing on my acting was important. And that we were working late, and naturally I stayed over sometimes. And she pretended to believe me. I would stay at our house one or two nights a week and the rest of the time I was with Emil. He was going to make me a star, and if that meant she had to hand me over to him in the bargain, she was willing to do it.

“Of course word got out on the set, and almost everyone started to despise me. I tried not to care, I was caught up with him. But it was dreadful. Edward Kenny, Valancourt, after takes he would tell me how nice it was to work with someone with a lot of life experience. The one who was playing Morano …” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Old age. Thought I’d never forget him and here I have. But I remember his mouth well enough. Swearing under his breath as soon as they quit rolling, to show me I wasn’t enough of a lady for him to watch his language. Although one day he forgot himself and did it on camera and Emil lit into him. Audiences could read lips and they’d know those words right away.

“Even the crew, they were supposed to be respectful, but the wardrobe woman would say things about my costumes. They were rumpled, what had I been doing in them? There was another man, a set dresser, very low on the totem pole but he was always around sticking his nose into everything, making a big phony show of being friendly, like he thought I’d confide in him or something. And we couldn’t do a thing about him because he was cousin to Frank Gregory’s wife. The only one who still treated me like a human being was Norman Stallings, the assistant director.

“I could have complained to Emil, but I didn’t want to set him off. As it was, I was afraid someone would drop a light on him, they hated him that much. There weren’t any unions and he would make everyone stay until he got it right. Half the time we would go home and he would have a few drinks and then we’d just fall asleep.

“It took almost two months, which was a long time in those days, but Emil finished it right on schedule and they started cutting it. And we finally started going to some parties, and I was still staying with him most nights, and it was as happy as we ever were together.

“Now it was the fall. 1928. You know what happened the year before, yes?”

Oh yes. “
The Jazz Singer
.”

“Terrible movie.”

“I didn’t like it either.”

“Jolson.” Miriam made a face. “The things I could tell you about
him
. Anyway, it wasn’t like
Singin’ in the Rain
, not everything changed at once. But anything with sound, all talking, half talking, sound effects, music, whatever, it was packing them in. They were still making silents, but it was different. People were, I don’t know, they looked at things in a different way. Once they’d seen talking pictures certain things didn’t play to them anymore. I don’t think Emil understood that. I know I didn’t.

“And they finished the movie and they arranged a preview out in, oh, some dreadful little inland town, very ugly. Emil took me and Mother, and I got dressed up even though I knew it wasn’t going to be a fashionable crowd. And Frank Gregory was there and a bunch of men from the studio, and we were all feeling very confident. And then the movie started.”

Miriam looked tired, and Ceinwen wondered if she should leave. But Miriam picked up the box of cigarettes again, offered one to Ceinwen and went on.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a theater where a movie was playing, and you thought it was good, and the rest of the audience …” She made a waving gesture.

“Sure.” She didn’t have to think hard. “I saw
Imitation of Life
in a theater once.”

“Claudette Colbert?”

“No, the other one, with Lana Turner. I love that movie, I’d seen it on TV and I wanted to see it on screen because it’s beautiful. But the audience kept laughing at it. The more tragic it got the more they laughed.” The 8th Street Playhouse. She still hated that place. Miriam said nothing. “That was what happened? You liked it and they didn’t?”

“Yes. After about ten minutes it was like I was watching a different movie from everyone else. It was slow and pensive, no real jokes or comic relief. There were dissolves and process shots, there were times when he was trying to make the characters’ thoughts visible. The novel has a lot of digressions that he’d cut out. He’d used it instead to make a movie about … well, about this naive young girl’s fear of sex, raw terror of men really. And I could feel people getting restless, and then there were some giggles, and then more. Mother kept trying to shush people until I shushed her.”

Miriam lit her own cigarette. “I don’t know. I loved him so, and it’s been so many years. I hadn’t seen any rushes, Emil thought they would make me self-conscious. Maybe it did have more problems than I thought. It seemed to me that on screen he’d made my inexperience look like Madeleine’s naiveté. I didn’t think I was bad. A couple of years later I saw a Murnau movie, called
City Girl
. I thought, yes, completely different story and setting, but that was Emil’s vocabulary.” She exhaled and watched the smoke vanish overhead. “From time to time I’ve wished I could see it again. Find out whether time passing made it look different to me, better or worse.”

“I’m sure it was a great movie,” said Ceinwen. She meant it as comfort, but Miriam shot her a look.

“That would be more romantic, wouldn’t it.”

“I didn’t meant that,” said Ceinwen, defending herself once again. “Don’t you trust your own taste?”

The same look, only longer. Finally, “If I had to put money on it, I’d bet on my judgment, not Frank Gregory’s. Yes. I will say that. We’d been sitting near Gregory and his people …” Miriam’s cigarette burned untouched. “I think … I think I won’t say more about that night, if you don’t mind.”

Ceinwen saw it was almost midnight. She was wearing Miriam out, and making her sad, and she felt ashamed of herself. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to tell me anything else at all.”

“Oh well,” said Miriam, her voice regaining the old briskness, “you’ve come this far. You can’t leave at intermission. Not much more to tell anyway.” She stubbed out her cigarette and checked the pot. “No coffee left. I think we’d best avoid the brandy straight, don’t you? I’ll get some water.”

She came back with a tray set with a pitcher of water and two more glasses, and put it on the table. “I never drank brandy with Emil. He paid his bootlegger a fortune for the best stuff, but back then I still didn’t like it.” She sighed and poured the water for them both. “They asked for recuts, of course, and Emil did it because he didn’t want them doing it without him. He’d stay out late and then he’d come home and pass out, sometimes on the couch because he never made it back to the bedroom. They finally released it in November and the reviews …” Miriam drank some water. “James Quirk at
Photoplay
, he liked it. The way a movie was shot mattered to him, he didn’t see them as overdressed plays. But the rest, they just waved it off.” She dropped her voice to a pompous baritone. “‘A rather tedious romance. It isn’t altogether without interest, and perhaps it will appeal to certain distaff segments, but for an intelligent audience …’” She set the glass down with a thump. “Meaning men, I suppose. That
idiot
at the
New York Times
, Mordaunt Hall. I wanted to kill him.” She gave her half-smile. “I walked around wanting to kill a lot of people. Starting with Frank Gregory. What a monster he was. They were all monsters, the studio heads, but Gregory, he was two-faced on top of it. So kind, so understanding, while he was poisoning your life. He told Emil they believed in the film and then he gave it this piddling release, here one minute, gone the next. Said they’d try to sell it in Europe, never did. Poor Emil, he’d worked so hard to keep the movie cheap. All that meant was the studio could swallow the loss more easily. My contract was for just a year, but Emil’s was for two. Gregory could have released Emil, while there was still a chance to get something else, but he was angry his prestige picture had flopped. Thought he’d been made a fool, and he held Emil to the terms out of spite. Kept saying oh, of course there’d be assignments. Then, nothing. Civitas went under in 1932, and the day I heard, I went out and bought a bottle of champagne.

“I knew I was through, and I didn’t care, I’d always thought it was a dirty business. But he wanted to work, so badly. And he didn’t want to make talkies. I don’t know if you know what that was like.”

“A bit. They had to put the camera in a box.”

“Yes, at first, with big things almost like carpet to mask the sound of the cameras. They hid microphones all over the set. The actors could barely move and the camera couldn’t move at all. Emil loved to move the camera,
Mysteries
had all these long, slow shifts. They developed some better talkie techniques pretty fast, but Civitas was too cheap to buy the best equipment, and Emil said if he’d wanted to direct plays he’d have joined a theater. But after six months he went to Gregory and said he’d reconsidered, he could do talkies. Gregory said that was great news, he had just bought a play that would suit Emil, and he came home and we celebrated. But then another month went by without a call from anyone, and Emil knew Gregory was still lying to him.

“He’d drink and then, well. It always seemed to end with him saying I was young and ignorant and I should shut up. One night I told him we should go back to Germany together.”

“Really?” Germany in 1929. That didn’t sound like a great idea.

“Hitler wasn’t in power.”

“I know, but …”

“Well, yes. I imagine that’s why Emil got angry. He told me I was stupid even to suggest it. Everybody knew the man who’d taken over Ufa was a stooge. He was in bed with the Nazis and he knew nothing about film or anything else except money and right-wing politics. I said that didn’t sound much different from Frank Gregory. That was when Emil punched a wall.” Miriam’s eyes slid to the side of the room, as though she could still see a mark. “I was terrified, for a second I had thought he was going to hit me. I started crying and he told me he was fine, not to make a scene, and went to get another drink. And he couldn’t hold the glass while he poured, his right hand was swelling so much already.

“I made him get in the car and I drove us to the hospital. His hand was broken and they spent all night putting it in a cast. When the doctor found out how it happened, he told Emil that from time to time he got patients who’d been fighting with walls, and the wall always won.

“We got back some time after dawn and I watched him get a drink. And then I got the case I’d brought with me, and I packed all my things in it and I called a taxi. And he sat there with his brandy, and he never said a word, and neither did I.

“I went back to the house and when Mother wanted to know what happened I wouldn’t tell her. I didn’t think Emil and I were finished, but I didn’t want to stick around and find out how bad things could get. The first couple of times he called I wouldn’t talk to him, but he called a few weeks later when Mother was out and I answered. He sounded sober and he wanted to see me, and I said all right.

“We met at a park close to the house. He told me Civitas was never going to do anything else with the picture, and never going to give him another one. He was going to stay for the ten months he had left on his contract, and then go to France. He knew some people there and thought he could find something. He said if I’d go with him, he’d marry me. I told him I’d think about it. He wanted to drive me home and I told him I’d walk. He got into his car and I asked him how he could drive with his hand in a cast. He said he used his other hand and could sort of brace the wheel with the cast, and anyway it was best to use the hand, he didn’t care what the doctor had said.

“Next day, early morning, I heard someone knocking, getting louder and louder. I went to the door and it was Norman. I’d always liked him, he was the one person who was always nice to me on that set. Emil had liked him too. And he was crying, and he told me Emil was dead. Mother was standing right behind me when he said it. And she said, ‘My poor dear’ or some such blather and reached to put her arms around me, and I pushed her away. I got dressed and asked Norman to drive me to Emil’s house. Mother wanted to come too and I told her that was the last thing I wanted. In my mind it was somehow her fault.