by Gore Vidal
A tall dark man of thirty with a small nose and round blue eyes, suitable for shutting in death scenes, saluted them. He wore a torn French uniform. The plot: An American, he had enlisted in the French army. Lost in action at Belleau Wood, his mother, a society butterfly, became an heroic nurse, a second Florence Nightingale; and her search through the battlefields for her lost son was like the stations of the cross, Tim maintained, or Dante’s descent into hell. Caroline grew nobler and nobler as the death and destruction all about her grew worse and worse. Caroline was also working herself into an hallucinatory mood: she really was home in France, searching for Plon. From that point of view, the transference of actual self to fictional character was working perfectly, and Tim was awed by the ease with which she became, as they called it, the character.
“Hi, Emma. Mr. Ince. You keeping track of how much film we’re using up today?”
“No, I’m just a tourist!”
“Well, don’t forget that western you told me about. Did you know,” he turned to Caroline, eyes even rounder than usual, “Mr. Ince discovered William S. Hart?” Then Tim pulled Caroline’s “son” onto the set and covered him with mud.
“I must’ve made a hundred westerns,” said Ince. “They’re fun. Always the same plot. No problems.”
“Unlike Civilization?” One of the reasons that Caroline was acting as vicereine for Creel in Hollywood was to make sure that nothing like Civilization was ever made again. Although it was regarded as Ince’s two-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, the pacifist theme popular in 1916 was now, in 1918, treasonable—even blasphemous, as the subtitle indicated, He Who Returned. The plot concerned the return of Christ as a German submarine engineer, who preaches peace with the usual result. But Ince had cleverly covered himself. Since Wilson was then running for president as the peace candidate, Ince added an epilogue to the film, showing Wilson himself thanking Ince for having made so powerful a contribution to peace and, as it turned out, his own re-election. A man of no particular beliefs, political or otherwise, Ince was now concentrating on films like Caroline’s Huns from Hell. Meanwhile, his partner, D. W. Griffith, had gone to London to make pro-Allies films; and it was rumored that once the war was over he would make his future photo-plays in the East. The failure of Griffith’s expensively ambitious Intolerance had so wrecked Triangle that Famous Players had then bought two sides of the Triangle, Ince and Sennett, as well as the debonair screen-lover Douglas Fairbanks and the bucolic William S. Hart.
“This is the last Triangle film. So we want to go all out. Open at the Strand in New York. Charge a dollar-fifty a ticket.”
As he talked, Caroline thought not of movies but of France. She had made no effort to go back even though there were so many things that she could be doing there, if somewhat less heroic than what she was now playing. Mrs. Wharton—the ancient friend of Henry James—had organized the seamstresses of Paris, and was making clothes for the troops. Saint-Cloud-le-Duc had been taken over by the French government as a hospital, to Blaise’s alarm but her secret delight. She could see herself, gently smiling, moving from bed to bed amongst the familiar boisserie while …
Caroline stopped the image in her mind. She was beginning to think like a movie, always a bad sign. But then she had been thinking for years like a newspaper—in headlines, sub-heads, bold roman, italics and, of course, pictures artfully arranged upon the page, bigger and bigger pictures as reproductions luckily improved at the same rate that people were able to read less and less text. Once a year the book critic of the Tribune would write a despairing piece on literature’s approaching end while the drama critic would deplore the effect on the theater of the public’s passion for movie-going. As yet, there was no critic for the moving pictures. But that would come, Caroline decided, as she bade Mr. Ince farewell. They would meet again that evening, socially. There was a Mrs. Ince and children. There was an elaborate social life already established in what was known as the “movie colony,” set down like a pillar of fire in the midst of bewildered Iowans.
Tim led her onto the set of a ruined church. There was a section of nave, containing the high altar on which a crucified Christ loomed, amidst the wreckage. Behind the altar a round window contained a few fragments of stained glass. Above the roofless set was the same gray gauze that had filtered the light of Belleau Wood.
“Most authentic,” Caroline commended the art director, a newly arrived Russian who spoke no English but, somehow, between bits of French and sign language was able to create anything that Tim required. The make-up man kept fiddling with Caroline’s face like a painter with an unfinished canvas. He added white greasepaint to the white layer already in place. We look like dead people, she thought. Yet, on the screen, a transformation took place: the ghoulish white faces in life came alive, while the imagination of the audiences made lips red, cheeks rosy. But not the young old, she thought, grimly, trusting to Tim’s instinct that a middle-aged woman could be “ravishing” on screen.
Tim and the cameraman whispered to one another. Two technicians presided over a pair of blazing klieg lights that made the crucifix glow eerily in the dimness. A third light was in place to illuminate Caroline’s face. She noted, professionally, that the light was sufficiently high on its arc to erase her lines. Daylight was the worst for an aging woman. Only when the sun was low—rising or setting—could one look at all like oneself and not haggard. Because of the cruelty of natural light, the original film stars had been extremely young, like Pickford and the Gish sisters. But now, thanks to new cameras and controlled lighting, all this was changing; but then everything kept changing in the movie business, unlike life.
Caroline began the task of convincing herself that she would look absolutely “ravishing” in front of the altar, with the highest arc light full in her face. As always, even the thought of light, and her eyes began reflexively to tear. She suffered from “klieg eyes”: somehow, dust or light rays caused an inflammation of the eyes that could lead to temporary blindness. The make-up man, quick to see the tears, mopped them up. Should her eyes get worse, ice would be applied to tortured lids.
Tim and Pierre, a French actor who was playing a German officer mutely in broken English, joined Caroline at the altar. As befitted a professional movie actor, Pierre was small, with the obligatory large head, which had been so shaved that the painted white scalp looked like an enamelled Mont Blanc. He wore a monocle.
“Now,” said Tim, “this is where you find out that your son has been taken prisoner. Pierre, you are pleased with the situation. You sit, there—at your table below the altar. You’re writing dispatches. While she is pleading with you, you keep on reading and writing. Don’t look up. Then when she begs you to tell her what prison he’s in—we’ll follow the script. By the way, do you both know it?” Both claimed knowledge of the script. Caroline always learned her part while driving in to the studio. There had been a time when actors simply made up their lines as they went along, telling one another jokes or dirty stories that had nothing to do with the scene. But they had not counted on the ingenuity of the first audience that had been brought up on movies: many had become skilled lip-readers, who appreciated every nuance of the acting and were horrified whenever an actor betrayed them with nonsense or, worse, obscenity.
“Then you look up, Pierre. You see she’s beautiful. You stand up. You come round the table. To your right. You try to take her. She resists. You chase her to the altar. She seizes the crucifix—don’t worry, it’s very light wood—and she clubs you with it. You fall backwards. We end with a close shot of it, of Nurse Madeleine, holding the crucifix. Horrified …”
“Transfixed.” Caroline delighted in this sort of thing.
“Anything you can think of. Okay. Go to it.”
They took their places. At first the camera would be on Pierre. Then Caroline would move so that she was at the center of the picture and at the very edge of the traditional nine-foot distance between the acting space and the camera. In the original photo-plays, the camera did
not move. But now cameras could be put on automobiles or trolleys and the actors were less constrained.
“Okay!” Tim’s voice was authoritative.
“Quiet on the set!” said the assistant. The six-man orchestra was in place back of the camera. The conductor said, “What will it be, Miss Traxler?”
“Die Meistersinger.” Caroline had already worked out the sort of music she would need to inspire her to heroism.
“German,” an unidentified voice sounded.
“Shut up,” said Tim. Then the command that started filming, “Interlock.”
“My son … they say you would know. Where, Colonel von Hartmann, where is he? Now.”
“Name?”
They went through the standing-sitting part of the scene. Then Caroline made her move into the bright discomfort of the klieg light that conferred, along with burning eyes, glory. Fortunately, glory was not mixed this time with unscripted tears. She delighted in the power of the great light, even as it began to melt the white greasepaint on her face, even as Wagner began to melt her brain.
“You Americans will never learn to fight. Never. Germany will triumph over your mongrel race.” Caroline wanted to smile—the French-accented English was ludicrous coming from what looked to be a Hun straight from hell.
“We will—all of us—do our duty, as my son did his,” Caroline declaimed into the camera.
“Go on,” said Tim.
“I don’t have any more words.”
“Make them up. Both of you, after he gets up from the desk.”
“Henry Adams,” Caroline began in her best society-hostess voice, “felt that you Germans were essentially heathen, and your wars are always against Christianity.”
“Is interesting,” said Pierre, leering up at her. “It maybe expliquer why they like to break down the churches. I have only one lung, madame. Otherwise I fight for la France.”
The Hun colonel rose from his table; placed his monocle securely in his eye; smiled a slow lascivious smile. “You is very beautiful, madame.”
“That is what all you Huns say.”
Pierre rose to his full Napoleonic height, an inch shorter than Caroline. “In my script it say now I rape you, madame.”
“In my script, too. Rest assured that I will resist like a tigress. I am incredibly brave.”
“Is because you never have real man before.” Pierre was now in front of her, a foot closer than she to the camera in order to appear taller. He had made more than a hundred photo-plays in Europe.
“Who is Henry Adams?” he murmured gutturally.
“A beloved friend, who died this spring.”
Pierre sprang at her; she pushed him away. “Old?”
“Over eighty.” She shrank from him. “He was the wisest man I ever knew.” Caroline bared her teeth—a tigerish effect, she prayed. The Meistersinger was driving her to heights never before attained by mere woman.
“Very good on German character.” A Hunnish leer made Pierre’s face positively alarming. He reached for her neck. She backed away, toward the altar, terror mixed with resolve in her face. “You should read his last book, The Education of Henry Adams.”
With a lunge, Pierre tore her dress at the neck, exposing her collarbone. “My English is not so good enough,” he hissed.
At the altar, they were back into the script. “No. Never!” Caroline shouted.
“If you want to see your son alive, you must.”
“How can you?”
Pierre thrust her back onto the altar; his eyes glittered; he was ready to rape.
“Oh!” was what the script required and “Oh!” was what Caroline said as she turned, saw the crucifix, picked it up and then, holding it worshipfully high, as if in prayer, counted to three and slammed the crucifix down on Pierre’s shaved pate. He staggered backward; crumpled to the floor, unconscious or dead—the script did not specify since Caroline would soon be escaping through the horrors of Belleau Wood, where she would meet the American Marines who had, single-handedly, defeated the entire German army, or so the Creel-inspired title cards would instruct the audience.
Tim was ecstatic. “You were wonderful—both of you.” He included Pierre, who was now on his feet, rubbing his head. Caroline smiled gallantly at Tim through the dead white mud of her make-up, which was now streaming down her face and into sensitive eyes. The make-up man was upon her with a sponge.
“You didn’t mind our chat while I was being raped?”
“I’m afraid I was so excited watching, I didn’t listen. You didn’t keep to the script?”
“Script ran out,” said Pierre gallantly. “We talk books.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Tim had picked up the crucifix. “You were both moving too fast for anybody to read your lips. Anyway, it looked great.” He held up the crucifix.
“That always has an effect on you Irish,” Caroline observed.
“Well, we are Catholic.”
“No, you’re not. I’m Catholic, darling Tim. You’re Irish. It’s not the same.”
“One more shot.” Tim was concentrated only on the film. Caroline moaned, as the white make-up was again brushed onto her face.
“Am I to be raped again?”
“No. That was perfect. I want a close shot of you. At the altar. When you turn, pick up the crucifix, turn back to camera. I’ll be very close on you then.”
“Never say no to a close shot.” Caroline repeated movie wisdom through clenched teeth, as bluish lip rouge was applied.
“Then,” Tim turned to Pierre, “we get your reaction. When you see the cross, you are, suddenly, horrified at your own evil. You look from cross to the face of the woman you were about to rape …”
“Good. I like.”
“Will all that be on the card?” But Tim ignored Caroline and returned to his place beside the camera. In due course, the word “interlock” was said, and Caroline did become if not another person another self, as she stood at the altar and did what was required of her.
Meanwhile, in real life, the German army was everywhere triumphantly on the move, even as they were demonstrating otherwise in Santa Monica, trying to obscure for millions of people all around the world that at the time this particular photo-play was being filmed in July of 1918, German armies had occupied more of Europe than anyone had ever held before, including Napoleon Bonaparte. The Germans were fifty miles west of Paris. They were the masters of northern Italy, the Balkans, Poland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine; and they had encircled Holy Russia’s Holy City, Kiev. More than ever, it was necessary for the Allies to pretend that they were winning. So, if not in the field, on film American Marines kept on destroying the Huns and a simple American mother, armed only with her virtue and her haunting photogenic face, with the odd crucifix to hand, was able to save herself from the carnal lusts of the bestial Hun. This was more potent than newspapers, thought Caroline, as she watched Pierre in his “reaction shot,” eyes wide with horror, hands raised to ward off the terrible blow. As always, Hearst was right. But what to do with so novel a means of—what? George Creel would say propaganda. But that was too simple and eventually the audience would learn all the tricks. Even now, at the beginning of movies, the public’s passion to know everything about the stars would eventually inspire skeptical curiosity about the what and the why of so powerful a means of entertainment. In a sense, the Allies could actually lose Europe with the average American, three thousand miles away, persuaded that all was well, and the Hun stopped in his tracks by Caroline Sanford, known in art, as the French would say, as Emma Traxler, the newest, least-known photo-player in Hollywood.
As Mrs. Sanford, Caroline was known and courted by the already startlingly inbred world of movie people. Although Hollywood was simply one of a series of small villages strung out along the Pacific from Culver City to Santa Monica, the name had come to signify “movies,” and those who worked in the movies were referred to by the bewildered natives as “movies,” implying people who moved restlessly about, at great speed, shat
tering all ten of God’s commandments.
Actually, Caroline had found the famous photo-players somewhat on the dull—not to mention overworked—side. They lived in comfortable Spanish-style houses along Franklin Boulevard or at the beach or in the high canyons that fissured the wild Hollywood Hills. Since it was an article of faith that the American public could not fall in love with a screen star who was married in real life, many a father of five, like Francis X. Bushman, was obliged to pretend to be a virtuous bachelor, living alone, waiting, wistfully, for Miss Right to leap from the darkened audience onto the bright screen to share with him the glamour of his life. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bushman and the children were hidden away from the public’s gaze.
Mrs. Smythe received Caroline and Tim in what was known to the fan magazines as her sumptuous drawing room, atop a hill with a view of miles and miles of orchards, and the brown Pacific in the far distance. Mrs. Smythe was small and nervous, and swathed in magenta silk. The voice was more Liverpool than intended Mayfair; but she knew a lot of the world. She had moved to Southern California for her health. Mr. Smythe was president of a firm that made soap. While he gallantly stayed in war-time England, Pamela Smythe had “come out” alone. In no time at all she had established herself as an important hostess, thanks to her alleged wealth and allegedly titled friends. The movie people loved titles, largely, in Caroline’s view, because they were obliged to impersonate so many grand people in photo-plays. Now, with the fall of the Czar, White Russians were everywhere. All were titled and balalaikas were played at the drop of a blini and Mary Pickford invariably wept as she listened to yet another lament for the far-off river Don, and serfs aplay.
Dinner parties began at six-thirty because the stars must be in bed by ten unless it was a Saturday night, in which case there might be dancing at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and heavy drinking and gambling at one of the few late-night places, or receptions at gracious homes like this one.
“Caroline!” Mrs. Smythe had fallen into the new world’s habit of first names. Caroline responded with a “Pamela” that sounded like three names quite worthy of her sister-in-law’s slow delivery. Tim was given a radiant smile. “All old pals tonight.” Montana was now mingled with Liverpool-Mayfair.