by Gore Vidal
“That’s right. Didn’t we endorse you for mayor, this fall?”
Hearst’s face was blank. “The Tribune, on orders from Wilson I expect, has told me to tend to my papers, and support the incumbent, the hopeless John Purroy Mitchel.”
Caroline was all mock wide-eyed innocence. “That must be our new editorial writer …”
“That was my old friend Blaise. You must’ve missed the issue. Anyway, I’ve got Murphy. I’ve got Tammany. So if I win …”
“You’ll be the Democratic candidate for president in 1920.”
“And the president in 1921, when I take the oath of office. It’s about time, don’t you think?”
Caroline had never understood Hearst’s ambition other than to suspect that there was, simply, nothing more to it than sheer energy. “I have never known an election when there were so many candidates so early, and so—so unashamed.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of.” He rinsed his teeth noisily in Coca-Cola. “The people don’t like third terms. They also don’t like Wilson. Roosevelt’s a wreck and a spoiler and the people are tired of him. McAdoo …” He paused.
“James Burden Day?” Loyally, Caroline said the name, which did not interest Hearst. “Champ Clark?” The Speaker of the House was the leading Bryanite; and already at work. “And those are just the Democrats.”
“The Republicans will nominate Roosevelt, who’s done for, or Leonard Wood, who I can do in any day of the week. He’s a general,” Hearst added with disdain.
“So is Pershing, and when we win …”
“There won’t be a general on any ballot. Remember what I say. This war’s too big. The ordinary man hates officers, West Pointers particularly. Every man who’s gone through training will want to get back at the men who gave him such a hard time.”
“Why wasn’t this true in the other wars?”
“Well, it was true in my little war against Spain. I don’t count Roosevelt, who was already a politician when he rode up that hill with my best reporters covering him. The true war candidate—back then—should’ve been Dewey. Dewey of Manila. Dewey the conquering hero. So what happened? Nothing.”
“He was stupid.”
“That’s usually no drawback. Anyway, this time something called selective service is going to crowd the military out. These boys aren’t volunteers for this war. They’re being taken captive to go fight alongside people they hate, like the English, or against their own people.”
“Your Irish and German supporters?”
“You bet. Or if they’re just ordinary buckwheat Americans they won’t know where they are once they’re in Europe, or why they’re supposed to be mad at something called the Kaiser. That means when they get back, if they get back, they’re going to blame Wilson and their officers for the whole mess. You know, you ought to put some flags on your front page. There’s this new color process. Good red. Pretty good blue. Looks nice and cheery. Patriotic. People like it.”
Caroline had always regarded Hearst as a mindless genius; or an idiot savant; or something simply not calculable by the ordinary criteria of intelligence. Yet there was no getting round the preciseness and practicality of his instincts, including his occasional odd forays into socialism. Recently he had convinced Tammany Hall of the necessity of municipal ownership of public utilities. If such a thing were to come to pass and if Hearst were to become president, the entire Senate, at his inauguration, would converge upon him and strike him down, like Caesar, in the name of those sacred trusts that had paid for their togas.
Twenty sat down to dinner in a long timbered room hung with Aubusson tapestries. On the table huge crystal girandoles alternated with bottles of tomato ketchup and Worcestershire sauce. Caroline sat on the Chief’s right in deference to her high place as a fellow publisher. Seated on Caroline’s right, at her request, was Timothy X. Farrell, the successful director of ten—or was it twenty—photo-plays in the last two years. Farrell had come to see Hearst on secret business, which Caroline had quickly discovered involved a screen career for Marion Davies and a new production company for Hearst, who had also just acquired, he told Caroline, casually, the Pathé Company from its war-beleaguered French owners.
Farrell was thin and dark and nearer thirty than forty; spoke with a Boston Irish brogue; had been to Holy Cross when he had got the call to make movies at Flushing, New York. He had moved on to Santa Monica, California, where he had worked as a carpenter and general handyman for Thomas Ince. Now he was a successful director, noted for his use of light. Caroline was in a new world of jargon, not unlike—but then again not very like—journalism. Farrell was touchingly eager to make films celebrating the United States, freedom, democracy, while attacking, of course, the bestial Hun, monarchy and the latest horror, Bolshevism, now emerging from the ruins of czarist Russia and connected closely, Creel maintained, with various American labor unions, particularly those that sought to reduce the work day from twelve to eight hours.
“What we need is a story,” said Farrell. “You can’t just start shooting away, like the Chief. He’s old-fashioned. He thinks Perils of Pauline is the latest in the movies. But it isn’t. That serial’s four years old. Four years is like a century in the movies. Everything’s different now. The audience won’t pay their dollars—or even nickels—to see just anything that moves on a sheet. But they’ll pay as much as two dollars for a real story, and a real spectacle. Griffith changed everything.”
“You, too,” Caroline remembered to flatter. A film director was no different from a senator.
“Well, I got lucky last year. Missy Drugget had the biggest gross of any film for the year, in the States.” Farrell frowned. “That’s another problem with this war. Our overseas distributors—crooks all of them to begin with, but now there’s a war they can really cheat us, and they do. Goldstein was going to do something about it. But now I guess he’s going to jail.”
“Who’s Goldstein, and why jail?”
“Spirit of ’76. Remember? About the American Revolution? Came out just before April, before we were in the war. Well, your friends in Washington thought,” there seemed to be no sarcasm in Farrell’s naturally urgent voice, “that any mention of our own revolution was an insult to our ally, England. You know it might confuse our simple folks to be told how we once had this war with England so that we could be a free country. Anyway, under one of the new laws, the government went and indicted Bob Goldstein, the producer, and they say he’s going to get ten years in prison.”
“Just for making a movie about how we became a free country?”
Farrell seemed without irony, but his voice was hard. “Free to put anyone—everyone—in jail. Yes.”
“Why hasn’t the press taken this up?”
“Ask Mr. Hearst. Ask yourself.” The eyes were arctic blue with black lashes and brows.
“What is the exact charge against Goldstein?”
“I don’t know. But it’s all covered by the … what’s its name? Espionage Act, which didn’t even exist when we made the picture.”
“Your picture, too?”
Farrell flushed. “Yes. Me, too. I did the lighting and camera work as a favor. But they don’t go after the small fry. Now, I’m working with Triangle. They’re the group that Mr. Ince did Civilization with. He’s a friend of Mr. Hearst, which is how I happen to be here, I guess.”
“Will Mr. Ince be arrested, too?” Caroline remembered that Ince’s Civilization had been a pacifist film. Since Hearst not only had been against the war but was considered pro-German, Caroline suspected a connection between the anti-war films of some of the best movie-makers and Hearst himself. In fact, Hearst had been so anti-Allies that the British and French governments had denied his newspapers the use of their international cables. In a fit of over-excitement, Canada had banned all of Hearst’s newspapers and should a Canadian be caught reading so much as the Katzenjammer Kids comic pages, he could be imprisoned for five years.
“I doubt it. He has connections. He knows the President.
But I’ll bet he wishes he’d stuck to ‘westerns.’ ”
After dinner, Hearst led them into a tent that served as a theater; and here he showed them a western of his own making, Romance of the Rancho. The hero was Hearst, looking rather bulkier than his giant horse; the heroine was Millicent, who sat next to Caroline during the performance, complaining bitterly about her appearance. “I look like a Pekingese. It’s awful, seeing yourself like this.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Caroline, who was attracted to the idea of film not as an art or as light or as whatever one wanted to call so collective and vulgar a storytelling form but as a means of preserving time, netting the ephemeral and the fugitive—there it is! now, it’s past, gone forever. Millicent, now, was seated beside her, face illuminated by the flickering light upon the screen while, on the screen, one saw Millicent then, weeks ago—whenever, unchanging and unchangeable forever.
As applause for Romance of the Rancho ended, Hearst stood up and gave a mock bow, and said, “I wrote the title cards, too. Couldn’t be easier. Just like picture captions.” He looked at Caroline. “Now we’ll see something that’s still in the works. A super western epic.” The lights went out. A beam of light from the projector was aimed at the screen, which suddenly filled with a picture of Hearst’s train-of-all-work coming to a halt. Caroline recognized the sweaty cowboy with whom she had worked that day. Obviously he was much used in Hearst’s home movies. She was struck at how startlingly handsome his somewhat—in life—square, crude face became on the screen. She noted, too, that his eyebrows grew together in a straight line, like those of an archaic Minoan athlete.
There was a murmur in the tent as a slender woman got off the train. She was received by the cowboy, hat in hand. A porter then gave him her suitcase. The camera was now very close on the woman’s face: a widow’s peak and a cleft chin emphasized the symmetry of her face; high cheekbones made flattering shadows below large eyes. Slowly, the woman smiled. There was a sigh from the audience.
“Jesus Christ,” murmured Millicent, now all Hell’s Kitchen Irish, “ain’t you the looker!”
“I don’t believe it.” And Caroline did not. A title card said, “Welcome to Dodge City, Lady Belinda.”
Then the cowboy and Lady Belinda walked toward a waiting buggy; and Caroline stared at herself, mesmerized. But this was no longer herself. This was herself of two weeks ago; hence, two weeks younger than she now was. Yet here she was, aged forty, forever, and she scrutinized the screen for lines and found them only at the edge of the eyes—mascara could hide the worst, she thought automatically. Then as she smiled what she always took to be her most transparently insincere smile of greeting, usually produced in honor of a foreign dignitary or the president of the moment, she noted that Lady Belinda—she regarded the woman on the screen as an entirely third person—looked ravishing and ravished, and the only lines discernible in the bright sunlight were two delicate brackets at the corners of her mouth. For twenty minutes the incomplete film ran.
When the lights came on, Caroline was given a standing ovation, led by Hearst. “We’ve got a brand-new star,” he said, sounding exactly like a Hearst story from the entertainment page of the Journal, where a different chorus girl, at least a half-dozen times a year, went on stage in the place of a stricken star, and always triumphed and became the Toast of the Town.
Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s principal editor, shook Caroline’s hand gravely. “Even without blue eyes, you hold the screen.” Brisbane was notorious for his theory that all great men and presumably women, too, were blue-eyed.
“Perhaps my eyes will fade to blue in the sun.” Caroline gave him her ravishing smile; and felt like someone possessed. She was two people. One who existed up there on the screen, a figure from the past but now and forever immutable, while the other stood in the center of a stuffy tent, rapidly aging with each finite heartbeat, entirely in the present tense, as she accepted congratulations.
“It’s a pity you aren’t younger,” said the merciless Millicent. “You could really do something in pictures.”
“Lucky that I don’t want to, and so I can enjoy my middle age.”
The cameraman, Joe Hubbell, came up to her. “It was really my idea, sticking the film together like this. So you could see it.”
Hearst nodded. “We’ve Joe to thank. I never look through the camera lens and I don’t see rushes. So when Joe kept telling me that Mrs. Sanford is really something, I thought he was just being nice to the guests.”
“He was,” said Caroline. “He is.” She was thoroughly bemused and alarmed, like one of those savages who believe that a photograph can steal away the soul.
After most of the guests had retired to their tents, Caroline and a chosen few went back to Hearst’s wooden house, where George poured Coca-Cola, and Caroline talked to Farrell about the uses of film for propaganda purposes. “I don’t think you—or Mr. Creel—will have to do much arm-twisting. Everybody in Hollywood does the same thing anyway, particularly now we’re in the war, and you can go to jail if you criticize England or France or …”
“Our government. In order to make the world safe for democracy,” Caroline parodied herself as an editorial writer, “we must extinguish freedom at home.”
“That’s about it.” Farrell gave her a sharp look. “Personally, I don’t see much choice between the Hun and the Espionage Act.”
“You are Irish, and hate England, and wish we had stayed out.” Caroline was direct.
“Yes. But since I don’t want to join Bob Goldstein in the clink, I shall make patriotic films about gallant Tommies, and ever-cheerful doughboys or hayseeds or whatever we’ll call our boys.”
Caroline stared at Hearst across the room. He was in deep conversation with a number of editors from various Hearst newspapers; or rather the editors, led by Brisbane, were deeply conversing while their Chief listened enigmatically. For the first time in her life, Caroline was conscious of true danger. Something was shifting in this, to her, free and easy-going—too easy-going in some ways—republic. Although she and Blaise had contributed to the war spirit—the Tribune was the first for going to war on the Allied side—she had not thought through the consequences of what she had helped set in motion. She had learned from Hearst that truth was only one criterion by which a story could be judged, but at the same time she had taken it for granted that when her Tribune had played up the real or fictitious atrocities of the Germans, Hearst’s many newspapers had been dispensing equally pro-German sentiments. Each was a creator of “facts” for the purpose of selling newspapers; each, also, had the odd bee in bonnet that could only be satisfied by an appearance in print. But now Hearst’s bee was stilled. The great democracy had decreed that one could only have a single view of a most complex war; otherwise, the prison was there to receive those who chose not to conform to the government’s line, which, in turn, reflected a spasm of national hysteria that she and the other publishers had so opportunistically created, with more than usual assistance from home-grown political demagogues and foreign-paid propagandists. Now the Administration had invited Caroline herself to bully the movie business into creating ever more simplistic rationales of what she had come, privately, despite her French bias, to think of as the pointless war. Nevertheless, she was astonished that someone had actually gone to prison for making a film. Where was the much-worshipped Constitution in all of this? Or was it never anything more than a document to be used by the country’s rulers when it suited them and otherwise ignored? “Will your friend Mr. Goldstein go to the Supreme Court?”
“I don’t think he has the money. Anyway, it’s war-time so there’s no freedom of speech, not that there ever has been much.”
“You are too severe.” Caroline rallied to what was, after all, her native land. “One can—or could—say—or write—almost anything.”
“You remember that picture with Nazimova? War Brides? In 1916?”
“That was an exception.” In 1916 a modernized version of Lysistrata had so enrag
ed the pro-war lobby that it had been withdrawn.
“That was peace-time.”
“Well, no one went to jail.” Caroline’s response was weak. How oddly, how gradually, things had gone wrong.
“It’ll be interesting if they get Mr. Hearst.”
“They’ve tried before. Remember when Colonel Roosevelt held him responsible for President McKinley’s murder?”
“That was just peace-time politics. But now they can lock him up if he doesn’t praise England and hit the Germans …”
“And the Irish?” Caroline had got Farrell’s range. “For not coming to England’s aid?”
“Well …” Farrell accepted Coca-Cola from George. “Your friend Mr. Creel’s moving fast. I’ve been invited to join the moving-picture division of his committee, to work with the Army Signal Corps, to glorify our warriors.”
“But they haven’t done anything yet. Of course, when they do …”
“We’ll be ready. You’re very beautiful, you know.” As no one had said such a thing to Caroline since she was nine years old, she had taken it for granted that whatever beauty she might ever have had was, literally, unremarkable and so unremarked.
“I think that you think,” she was precise in her ecstasy, “that my picture projected a dozen times life-size on a bedsheet is beautiful, which is not the same thing as me.”
“No. It’s you, all right. I’m sorry. I have no manners.” He laughed, then coughed. “My father kept a bar in Boston. In the South End.”
“Your manners are very agreeable. It’s your taste I question. But without zeal, as the French say. At my age, I can endure quite a few compliments without losing my head.”
Caroline allowed Mr. Farrell to escort her to her tent, where, in the moonlight, to the howls of appreciative coyotes, a man not her lover kissed her. She noted that his lips were far less soft and alluring than those of the Minoan cowboy.
“Woman are not destined to have everything,” she observed to Héloise, who helped her undress. “Or, perhaps, anything.” But this sounded too neat; as well as wrong. “I mean, anything that we really want.”