Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (2 page)

Bix's brother Charles and Charles's wife, Alicia Burchell, had been among those contract players, and the gimmick of casting them along with Bix in their real-life relationships had been the modest production's one source of interest.

As limited as the studio's expectations had been for the picture, Oliver McClay's rough cut was disappointing, so disappointing that the studio had considered not releasing it.

Then Cass Casler, Jill's father, came into the story. He had been an editor under contract to the same studio. Too well paid to have been included in the picture's original budget, he was interested in its fate. Both he and Bix were from the Shenandoah Valley, and
Weary Hearts
had been set there.

So when Bix's love song to the Valley was about to be buried, Cass stepped in to try to undo Oliver McClay's mistakes. Working first with the script, he restructured the movie's narrative, coming up with such a compelling story that the studio was willing to put the film back into production for extensive retakes. The cast and crew returned to the Shenandoah Valley for reshooting, and Cass wove the new footage into the old. This version of
Weary Hearts
was an instant success at the box office. It was nominated for Best Picture and decades later was still so popular that it was one of the first classic films successfully released on videocassette.

Cass's work on
Weary Hearts
had been a turning point in his career. It was the first clear indication of his enormous cinematic talent, which later became part of the studio's trademark. Never again did he play the editor's safe, anonymous part. From then on he was a director, responsible to his own vision.

He ultimately made twenty-eight movies, including his Oscar-winning
Nancy
and
Mustard Lane,
but Jill knew that
Weary Hearts
had always been special to him, not just because it had been his stepping stone into direction, but because, alone among his movies, it had been set in the Shenandoah Valley.

Weary Hearts
ought to have launched Bix's career as well, but his part ended tragically. The day after the filming of the new material was completed, he, his equally talented sister-in-law Alicia Burchell, and a number of the crew members boarded a small plane on a foggy night. The plane crashed into the Blue Ridge, killing all on board. Of the principal actors, only Charles Ringling, who had been cast as Booth, survived. In order to play the starving Confederate soldier, Booth had had to lose a great deal of weight quickly. After the shooting was over, he stayed in the Valley until his mother's cooking got his weight back up.

Recently a freelance writer named John Ransome had discovered in Cass's files Bix Ringling's original treatment for
Weary Hearts.
Bix's material was, Ransome asserted, a routine, even mediocre action-adventure war story without a trace of the final version's haunting love story or of Phillip's agonizing choices. It would have made a very ordinary blood-and-guts war movie. Cass had taken out the blood and had added heart. His contribution, Ransome concluded, had been even more extensive than anyone had thought. He had added everything that made people love the picture: the emotion, the romance, the bittersweet ending, all those had come from Cass.

Jill smoothed her hand across the top sheet of Doug Ringling's copy of Ransome's article. The photograph on the first page, dulled by the Xeroxing, was the movie's most famous still—Phillip gripping his sister-in-law, Mary Deas, by her shoulders as they stood in front of the burning barn. On the next page, Jill knew, would be a photograph of her father, her brilliant, devoted father. She didn't turn the page. He had been dead for two years, but it still hurt.

He used to tuck her into a corner of his deep chair and tell her stories about his boyhood home. He told her about the Valley's sweet limestone soil, its wooded hills and gently rolling farmlands. The Valley had been the "grainery of the Confederacy," sheltering Stonewall Jackson's fifteen thousand men, paralyzing fifty thousand hard-worn Yankees. Cass had spoken of the Valley proudly, longingly.

Jill's eyes stung as she thought about her father's death. She felt her lips tighten, her throat close. She blinked quickly. There, on the sofa across from her, was Phillip.
Phillip will understand. He knows what it's like to lose someone, he knows what I've been through these two years.

Suddenly this man having come wasn't funny and delicious. It was strange, unsettling. He was a stranger to her; she had to remember that. There was no reason for him to understand her any more than would any other stranger.

She spoke carefully. "What can I do for you?"

"I realize the movie was made before you were born, but did your father ever talk to you about how it was made?"

"A little, but it was a difficult time for him." Jill willed her voice into an even cadence. "His first marriage was breaking up. All I remember was him speaking well of your uncles, especially Bix." Actually, Jill didn't recall her father ever mentioning Charles, the brother who had played Booth. "He said Bix was a true gentleman, which wasn't something he said about many people."

"Did he ever say anything to contradict this article?" Doug gestured to the papers still in Jill's lap.

"No." What an odd question. "He certainly didn't dwell on his own role as much as the article does, but he wouldn't have." Cass had never been arrogant. He hadn't needed to be. His pictures had always been popular with moviegoers, and his reputation among the critics was as steady as anyone's ever was. "Why do you ask?"

"How interested are you in this movie?"

Did he always answer a question with a question? "It got me through puberty," she answered lightly. "I owe it a great debt."

He was sitting forward now, his elbows resting on his knees, his Phillip-Wayland eyes in direct contact with hers, confiding, urgent. "Great enough to help me find out what really happened?"

Bells went off, clanging, screeching warning bells shrieking at the base of Jill's skull. This was not Phillip Wayland who would sweep her off her feet and understand all her troubles. She had to keep that absolutely clear. This was a twentieth-century man with his own twentieth-century agenda. She didn't know what he wanted from her, but clearly he wanted something.

She was curious, but she was determined to be cautious. She happened to be rich, and rich people were manipulated enough. "What do you mean? Is there something wrong with the article?"

"I don't know for sure."

That was crap. He certainly believed something or he wouldn't have come here. "But?" she prompted.

"But my family tells a different story."

First he reviewed the "official" story. The movie had been shot in March and April of 1948, with the location work having been done in the Valley during April. Shortly thereafter the studio executives had rejected the rough cut. During June and July Cass had helped draft a new script. The movie had gone back into production in August. Only part of what had been shot in March and April had been used in the final version.

Jill knew all that. She listened politely, growing more uneasy. What did he want from her? She wished he would get to the point.

He continued. "My grandfather—Bix's father—told me that when Bix and everyone were out in the Valley the first time, they were doing things that the studio had no idea they were doing."

That did not seem remarkable. Jill had been on a number of movie sets where the actors and crew were doing all manner of things that the studio or production company had no idea they were doing—usually cocaine.

But she didn't suppose that was what Doug was talking about. "Such as?"

"Such as filming a different script."

"What?" Jill sat up, caution gone. Filming a different script? She couldn't have heard him right. "That's not possible."

"Is it really? That's what I'm trying to find out, if this is possible."

"If what's possible?" She stared at him. "The cast and crew filming one script while the studio thought they were doing another?" That was too strange to be true. She leaned back against the mounds of tropical-colored pillows, almost laughing, relieved that this was so ridiculous, that this wasn't anything she would have to deal with. "What script would they have been filming?
King Lear?"

"No, it was a script that Bix had written, but that the studio had turned down... or was sure to turn down. It was work that he really believed in, that he was determined to see filmed. So he decided—"

"Wait a minute," she interrupted. "You're serious, aren't you? You believe this."

Doug nodded.

"Then start at the beginning."

The beginning, he told her, was in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Bix had been captured at Kasserine Pass, and during this confinement his thoughts had turned homeward, to Virginia.

"Bix was born in 1920," Doug said. "The Civil War still felt very close; he would have grown up on Civil War stories. People of his generation were always surprised when they found out that their parents weren't born until long after the war was over."

So it was inevitable that his mind should turn to that war, and he endured captivity by creating characters and planning a story set in Civil-War Virginia.

He escaped from the camp. An injury to his hand kept him from returning to combat. He was instead assigned to Army Signal Corps where he did chores for Frank Capra, who was making the
Why We Fight
series. This introduced him to the world of movies, and after the war he took a job as a writer at one of the studios.

"He was first assigned to a number of low-budget horror films and then polished up the men's dialogue on bigger pictures," Doug said, "but nights and weekends he was always working on what really mattered to him, this Civil War story."

When he finished the screenplay, he started showing it to friends. Apparently everyone who read it loved it, but nobody thought that the studio would touch it. It wasn't commercial enough.

"You have to understand Bix. He escaped from the Germans because he was smart. He was crafty, that's probably a better word for it. He was Tom Sawyer. When he wanted something done, he got it done even if he had to go in through the back door, though a cellar window. He had a scheme for everything."

The scheme he crafted for
Weary Hearts
was his most ambitious ever. He set aside his first script and wrote a second one, the treatment for which was later found in Cass's files. It was every war-movie cliché strung together, but it could be made cheaply—Bix had learned a lot from his work on the horror films—and so the studio decided to do it.

"Now, I don't know the logistics of this," Doug said, "who he told and who he didn't. But some little group of them all agreed that they would actually film the first script, his 'secret' script. Apparently it was magnificent; everyone involved really believed in it. Bix had made sure that the characters' names and the settings were the same in both scripts so they could do it without the studio knowing."

Jill could feel her head shaking, her long blond hair brushing her shoulder blades. This was not possible. Having the characters' names and the settings the same would hardly have been enough. In those days the studios exercised great control over their productions. There were committees, budgets, contracts, a producer, a director, an editor. There were shooting schedules and call sheets. Even on location, there were daily reports from the unit manager and the director, giving California counts of how many pages had been filmed, how many feet of film had been used. There would have been no way to keep the studio from knowing what script was being filmed. Absolutely no way at all.

"So have you read this other script?" Jill asked. "The one they supposedly filmed?"

Doug shook his head. "No. Apparently all the copies were on the plane with Bix and Alicia when it crashed."

Jill frowned. "That doesn't make any sense." She wasn't being argumentative. It just didn't make any sense. "They came out in August to film new material. There'd be no reason to bring the April scripts back with them. Maybe one copy or so, but certainly not all of them."

"I don't know," Doug admitted. "And most everyone's dead—Bix, Alicia, and a lot of the crew died in the plane. Oliver McClay, the first director, Miles Smithson, the producer, and then your father... they've all died."

"Your uncle Charles is still alive, isn't he? What does he say?"

"He says it's all true, but he doesn't know what was in the script. He says he paid attention only to his own part; that was his technique as an actor."

"That's not so unusual." At last here was something plausible. "That's the way Elizabeth Taylor worked, only reading her own lines. But without a script, without anyone who was a part of your 'little group,' how do you know the story's true?"

"You can tell from the movie," he said. "Things that would have been filmed in April, had they been shooting the war-movie script, were obviously filmed in August."

"Such as?" Jill could hear how cool her voice sounded. She was closing herself off, growing too polite, radiating disinterest. She didn't much like herself when this happened, but it was necessary sometimes, a rich girl's classic defense.

"The depot scene," he answered.

In the final version of
Weary Hearts,
Phillip rode with Mosby's Rangers, a Confederate guerrilla troop, only once as they looted and burned a Federal depot. But the original treatment—the "war movie" script Doug was calling it— had Phillip riding regularly with Mosby.

"So surely," Doug said, "the depot scene, as part of the first script, would have been shot in April."

"I'd think so," Jill responded.

"Well, it wasn't. It was shot in August. I know the Valley, I grew up there. I know what April looks like, and I know what August looks like, and that was August."

"Maybe they had to reshoot it for some reason." But as soon as she spoke, Jill knew that she was wrong. The burning depot was the most expensive scene in the movie. They wouldn't have reshot it. Maybe on a
Heaven's Gate
budget, but not on
Weary Hearts'.
Her father might have stood the scene on its ear in the cutting room, but he wouldn't have reshot it.