Climb over the side and shinny down the rope.
Not so easy.
Not duck soup. More like ostrich soup.
“Now just shinny down the rope!” Mr. Corrigan’s voice boomed up through the megaphone.
I looked down the dangling rope. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t all that far, not really. Not so different from my practice sessions with my brothers in the tree at home, but this time there was no Bill waiting to catch me if I fell.
I grabbed tight to the rope and put a knee over the lip of the basket. This orphan girl had better get back to her sister.
I wrapped my legs tight around the rope and, heart pounding, lowered myself inch by inch, hand under hand. Sometimes my hands slid a little and I felt the rope burning into them. But I squeezed as hard as I could, ignoring the sting in my palms. Better to lose a little skin than a whole life. I found I had to angle my head just so or else the rope rubbed against my cheek. I was figuring out a lot of things in a hurry up here in the wild air.
When I got to the bottom of the rope, I was still dangling six or seven feet above the ground. Mr. Corrigan was shouting instructions to me through his big megaphone. I could hear him a lot better now, but I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. He was telling me to let go of the rope and jump the rest of the way. While looking like a fearless and determined orphan girl, of course. I think I got the determined part pretty well, but I don’t know about fearless. I hoped the camera wouldn’t capture the terror I’d been feeling since I climbed over the side of the basket.
My feet hit the ground and the air whooshed out of my lungs. My heart was hammering so loudly I could hardly hear a thing at first—and then I caught the cries swelling up from the crew and all the onlookers. The townspeople crowding the street beyond the square cheered. Gordy cheered so hard he almost knocked over his camera. Of course, my brothers whooped loudest of all.
Papa didn’t cheer. He just scooped me into his arms and squeezed tight.
When he finally let me go, I took a step and almost keeled over—my legs were noodles. But I figured that was a good sign. Better noodly legs than broken ones.
“What’d I tell you?” Mr. Corrigan demanded, sweeping his arms wide. “She’s the nerviest girl in the world, our Pearl.”
I caught sight of Mary in the throng. She was staring at me, but this time I couldn’t find a single dagger in her eyes—just a smile.
All this time, all these pictures, and I’d still never seen a single reel. Before Flying Q came to town, there wasn’t any way to watch a moving picture in Lemon Springs. You had to go all the way to San Diego. After Mr. Corrigan and company had started filming in our neck of the woods, a mania for going to the pictures had swept across town, and now there were a few small makeshift nickelodeons—places where you could pay a nickel to watch a picture—in storefronts around Straight Street and Avocado Avenue. But I’d been so busy acting in pictures that I hadn’t managed to talk anybody into taking me to see one! It was comical, really.
After the balloon stunt, the movie mania seemed to infect Mama and Papa, too. They decided we’d all go together just as soon as Papa could spare time away from the cattle yard.
When the day came at last, Mama surprised me. She told me to put my shoes on, which had to mean either going to Mass or going to the city. And I knew we weren’t going to Mass—not on a Tuesday afternoon.
We were taking the train into the city. Papa had decided that a rickety chair in a Lemon Springs storefront wouldn’t do for such a momentous event. We were going to a real nickelodeon theater in San Diego. All of us, this time—Mama, Papa, Grandma, my brothers—and at long last, me.
Do you know, I don’t remember one thing about the train ride? We might have been riding in the belly of a whale, for all I recall. It’s too bad; this was the first time in memory that my whole family had taken the train together. It might not have been a grand cross-country trip to Baltimore like Juniper Howard’s, but it was a pretty notable occasion.
I do remember the moment of walking up to the glassed-in booth outside a building, and a man in a red cap taking money from Papa and handing him tickets. We went through a big carved door, passing from blinding sunshine and street noise into a dim, cool, spacious place with rows and rows of plush seats, each one soft as a feather tick. A boy in a blue uniform led us to a row of empty seats, and we all filed in.
“Sit here, Pearl,” said Ike, guiding me to a chair between him and Frank. Frank clattered his boots on the floor in excitement. Bill handed me a big greasy paper sleeve of peanuts. A huge white screen, maybe a sheet, took up the whole wall in front of us. Below the screen was a piano. A man in a yellow suit sat on its bench, drinking a bottle of sarsaparilla through a straw.
I tried to remember every detail of that theater—maybe that’s why I lost the train ride; it was crowded out by the rustle of skirts and suits all around me here, the shuffle of dozens of pairs of shoes on the floor (carpeted in the aisles, hardwood under the seats), and a soft endless murmur of voices and throat-clearings and coughs, and a louder layer of kids fidgeting and giggling and drumming on seat backs.
Ike leaned over and squeezed my hand, which had a peanut in it, but neither of us cared about that at such a stupendous moment.
“Whaddaya think, Pearl? Grand enough for you?”
“The grandest!”
And then, suddenly, as if someone had given a signal: a hush. I saw that there had been a signal: the man at the piano had put his sarsaparilla bottle on the floor and turned to face the screen, his hands poised over the keys. Black dots appeared on the screen. The piano man began to play a jolly, lolloping tune. The screen went black, with white writing all over it—writing that flickered like the world going by outside a train window. THE PERILS OF PEARL, it read. A FLYING Q FILM COMPANY MOTION PICTURE.
My heart flickered, too.
The fictional town of Lemon Springs is loosely based on La Mesa, California, a small suburb east of San Diego, where I lived for eleven years. While there, I learned something that surprised me: for a short while in the early days of silent film, La Mesa was the home of a thriving movie studio. Today, we tend to think of Hollywood as the heart of American cinema. But for a brief period of time, it was La Mesa, when American Film Manufacturing Company sent a crew west to California. Known as Flying A Studios because of their winged logo, they pumped out more than 150 short films in just over a year.
The idea that an important chapter of cinema history unfolded literally in my backyard piqued my interest, and I began reading everything I could find about Flying A’s time in La Mesa. When I discovered that many of the cowboys in Flying A’s Westerns were real cowboys—ranchers and rodeo stars from San Diego County—I was hooked. Moviemaking was a brand-new endeavor, and our modern concept of professional stunt people was decades in the future. Director Allan Dwan recruited local cowboys because he needed fellas who could ride hard and fall soft. He also used professional actors—folks with theater and vaudeville backgrounds—for main roles. When I read about a group of rancher brothers who played bit parts in a number of Flying A films, a story began to take shape. But it was Pearl White, a silent-film star best known for The Perils of Pauline, who inspired me to learn more about the way movies were made in the earliest days of silent film.
At the turn of the twentieth century, film cameras and projectors were a breathtaking new technology. These days, when we can easily shoot video on our smartphones and tablet computers and share those moving images over the internet, it’s hard to imagine a time when moving pictures were a shocking new concept, dazzling audiences around the world. The Frenchman Louis Le Prince is credited with inventing the first motion picture camera in the 1880s, but a number of inventors around the world had helped pave the way with various technological breakthroughs.
A few years (and many other inventions) later, W. K.-L. Dickson, an employee of the famo
us American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, patented a machine called the Kinetoscope—a word that means “motion viewing.” At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, Edison introduced this technology to the American public, causing a huge stir. Kinetoscopes were large boxes with a peephole in the top. One person at a time could peer into the peephole and watch a short silent film. These first snippets of film didn’t entertain the public with stories: the attraction was the technology itself. Crowds flocked to Kinetoscope parlors to peep through the hole and watch things like a man sneezing or a pair of boxers slugging it out in the ring.
By 1896, Edison and other inventors realized they could make a lot more money showing films to big crowds all at once instead of one at a time. This took some more technological innovation, but before long, audiences could watch short moving pictures in stage theaters and music halls. In some places, temporary movie theaters were set up in storefronts or even tents. Soon new theaters were being built especially for moving pictures. One of the first of these theaters was the Nickelodeon, which opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. Its name came from the price of a ticket—a nickel!
In no time at all, nickelodeons were popping up all over the United States. The public’s enormous appetite for moving pictures sparked the development of dozens of film studios. Imaginative filmmakers began telling stories on film. Since there wasn’t yet any technology that could add sound to moving pictures, these stories played out silently, with text cards interspersed in the action to show the audience what the characters were saying. Actors had to show emotions in a big, broad way, with vivid facial expressions and gestures.
Audiences especially loved adventure stories full of danger and suspense. Often, a story would be told in short weekly installments, much like network TV shows before the days of Netflix and binge-watching. These were called cinemas, and The Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White, was one of the most popular, with twenty episodes. Each week, audiences flocked to the theater to see what kind of danger Pauline would find herself in this time around. The character of Pauline is a wealthy young woman whose guardian appoints his secretary, Koerner, to oversee Pauline’s inheritance until she marries. But Pauline isn’t ready to marry yet, and Koerner sees an opportunity to snatch her inheritance away—by getting rid of Pauline. Week after week, he devises a new way to off Pauline, and week after week, she manages to escape death in white-knuckle fashion. In the first installment of the film, Pauline winds up floating away in a hot-air balloon all by herself, with no way to land. Ever resourceful, she tosses the anchor rope over the side of the balloon’s basket and climbs down the rope in her ankle-length dress. To my astonishment, I learned that Pearl White actually did this life-threatening stunt herself! In that moment, a heroine of my own began to take shape in my mind.
My Pearl is named in Pearl White’s honor, but the balloon stunt is their only real overlap. Pearl White was younger than my Pearl when she got into the acting business, landing her first stage role at age six. Around age eighteen, she dropped out of high school to tour the Midwest with a theater company and went on to become a silent film star. Her adventure serials were wildly popular. And in those early days, Pearl White, like most other actors, was the one actually risking life and limb to perform jaw-dropping stunts—including racing cars and flying airplanes. Years later, the studio decided she was too valuable to risk and, from then on, a man in a wig did Pearl’s stunts.
Another real-life figure who inspired a major character in my book is Allan Dwan. Mr. Corrigan is loosely based on Mr. Dwan, and he was great fun to write. Allan Dwan didn’t set out to be a movie director—he studied engineering and worked for a lighting company before becoming a scriptwriter for a film studio.
The moviemaking business was in its infancy, and most early directors fell into the job rather than training for it. That was certainly the case with Allan Dwan. East Coast and Midwestern film studios had begun sending crews to California, where the balmy weather made it easy to film outdoors year-round. California was also far away from Thomas Edison’s infamous “patent thugs.”
Allan Dwan was happily writing scripts in Chicago when a Flying A film crew went radio silent for weeks. Dwan’s bosses sent him to California to track them down. What Allan found was a cast and crew sitting around in San Juan Capistrano twiddling their thumbs because the director had taken off for a spree in Los Angeles. Allan telegraphed the home office to say they’d better shut down the production and bring everyone home because they had no director.
The reply came back: YOU DIRECT.
Allan followed orders and began directing films. He moved operations to La Mesa Springs (later shortened to La Mesa) and explored the county for interesting scenery to use in the background of his films.
The La Mesa studio only lasted about a year. Eventually, Dwan felt he’d used up all the best locations and moved the studio up the coast to Santa Barbara, California. Flying A Studios filmed many, many more moving pictures there. In addition to filming around town, at the shore, and in the countryside, the company developed a studio where they could build their own sets.
This studio, the first of its kind, was located on a former ostrich ranch. Ostrich farming was a fruitful endeavor in the early 1900s! Besides being sources of feathers, eggs, and meat, ostriches provided light entertainment for locals, who enjoyed watching them swallow oranges whole. In some places, you could even ride in a wagon pulled by an ostrich!
Naturally this intrigued me, and I decided Pearl’s family needed to be in the ostrich-ranching business, as well as raising cattle and sheep. Ornery characters are fun to write, and ostriches are as ornery as they come.
The Donnelly family’s bell timber was inspired by a real bell and shipwreck timber at the Hubert H. Bancroft Ranch House, a historical site in Spring Valley, California, just down the road from La Mesa. My kids and I used to drive past the Bancroft House every time we went to the doctor’s office, so it was lots of fun to get to include it in a book. The bell post really was a timber salvaged from a shipwreck in 1856. Today, the house is a California Historical Landmark and appears on the National Register of Historic Places.
Allan Dwan went on to direct scores of films over the next several decades, transitioning from silent film to “talkies” when sound production came along. Some of his best-known works are Sands of Iwo Jima and Heidi, which starred Shirley Temple.
While inspired by real-life incidents like the Perils of Pauline balloon stunt, my account of Pearl Donnelly’s adventures with Flying Q Studios is entirely fictional. Mr. Corrigan films in town a lot more often than Allan Dwan did. La Mesa doesn’t have a Straight Street, but it does have a small mountain called Mount Helix, named after the spiraling shell of a snail, which inspired the name of my Mount Caracol.
A quote in Mollie Gregory’s fascinating book Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story provided the title of my novel. In her passage on silent-film star Ruth Roland, Gregory mentions that Ruth was “dubbed ‘one of the nerviest girls in pictures’ ” due to her willingness to perform dangerous stunts. The moment I read that quote, I knew I wanted to write about the nerviest girl in the world!
I’m indebted to Peter Bogdanovich’s biography Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer for its comprehensive study of this groundbreaking filmmaker.
Jim Newland of the La Mesa Historical Society was a tremendous help in pointing me toward resources about the history of La Mesa Springs and Flying A Studios. He even made it possible for me to watch one of Allan Dwan’s one-reelers—filmed right there in the San Diego County chaparral that I love.
I would also like to thank my La Mesa friends Deirdre and Matthew Lickona, who gave me their guest room for a much-needed research trip after I moved to Oregon. Thanks, too, to Ron, Larry, Finch, Timmy, and Mo, who, at various points in time, listened to me chatter about sundry delightful tidbits I’d stumbled across in my research.
My family was beset with our own reel of
adventures during the writing of this book, and I have deep appreciation for the small army of friends who helped us with our somewhat sudden interstate move. When I say we couldn’t have done it without you, I’m being quite literal.
I’m immensely grateful for the friendship and encouragement I found in Michael Nobbs’s Creative Circle. To all my morning planning-session pals: you’re the artistic support community of my dreams, and I love you to pieces, even if you’re bad for my art-supply budget.
To Helen McLaughlin—you were exactly what I needed. Thanks forever.
Special thanks to my wonderful agent, Liza Voges, and to my editor, Michelle Frey, whose keen insight, sound judgment, and unbridled enthusiasm are the biggest gifts a novelist could ask for.
Every book I write has my family threaded through and through. When I’m in my studio working, I’m listening to your laughter and banter on the other side of the door. Scott, my love—I hope you know how impossible all of this would be without you. Kate, Erin, Eileen, Steven, Kelly, and Sean: one million kisses, but nope, we can’t get an ostrich.
Every carefully researched work of historical fiction draws from dozens of sources. The following books and resources were especially informative:
Abel, Richard. Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914. Oakland: University of California Press, 2006.
Balshofer, Fred J., and Arthur C. Miller. One Reel a Week. Oakland: University of California Press, 1967.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer. London: Studio Vista, 1971.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.
Gregory, Mollie. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
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