The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  A second before she opened her eyes she heard the sound of 150 men sighing. There came an erotic murmur and a single Oh Christ, here it is from up the back. When she looked up at the screen she saw herself in the glass conservatory as a resplendent, middle-aged stranger. Who was she? She’d been carrying this allure like a ball of wax in her pocket since the age of thirteen, since the first time she’d run away to Paris, carried it as a burden and a gift, but seeing it captured on the first day of her fifth decade, on the morning after her fortieth birthday, she understood that it was a form of electricity, a pulse of magnetism. Edison had learned how to send a filament of lightning across the tiny cosmos of an incandescent bulb, but he’d merely channeled a universal spark, a source of energy that flowed everywhere, between lovers and strangers, and she saw it now in the gaze of this woman at the height of her sensual powers. For a hundredth of a second, she thought she would live for a thousand years and die at the height of her bloom. She smiled and leaned back into her armchair as the men whispered and quietly refuted what they were seeing in the shared darkness. Over on the Kimball pump organ, Angus played a melodic minor scale with an Eastern edge.

  * * *

  An overhang of maidenhair ferns and orchid tendrils, the camera low, her breasts glimpsed from the side, above the rim of the porcelain tub. She seems to be singing a serenade to the city, to the welter of smokestacks and water towers and box-hedged terraces that skew and buckle behind the walls of glass. A singing Amazon in a cube of light and air. She leans back and stares up into the lush canopy as if it were the night sky, luxuriating in a sea of soap bubbles, and then she sits up, grinning, one slicked arm along the side of the tub. The cameraman has said something funny or clever and she laughs before waving and blowing a soapy kiss in our direction …

  * * *

  The men cheered and blew kisses back at her, called her a French darlin’ and things she knew to be more vulgar but which she didn’t understand. They might have lingered, or asked to see it again, if it weren’t for the pigeon-chested boy in the loincloth walking out over the sea on a tightrope. The audience floated above him, a slight sway and jostle in their field of vision as he carried a pole lit at both ends. At the midpoint, he stood very still and let the flames kindle along his arms until he resembled a burning post. Then he dropped the pole and reached his arms slowly above his head. When he fell into a knifelike plunge, a contrail of smoke and fire shot out behind him until he hit the water.

  * * *

  In the cheering dark, Sabine turned to the projector stand and clapped for Chip Spalding, who pretended not to notice, and then she turned her attention to Claude, who was peering up at the screen. From her vantage point, he was braiding a silver rope of light from one spinning hand. She blew him a kiss—just like the one from the rooftop conservatory—and for a few seconds the next filmstrip jittered into slow motion as Claude’s hand slackened. Pavel leaned in beside her and said, He’s managed to trap real life, right down to the follicle, and Sabine knew it to be true.

  * * *

  Right as the dying sister appeared in the hospital room, Sabine decided she needed some fresh air. It was a mistake to follow the rousing of a man’s appetites with a reminder of his own mortality, she thought, moving into the aisle. She left Pavel staring up at the screen in a wordless, meditative funk, a single tear on his cheek, and as she passed the projector stand, she caught the bruised, abandoned look on Claude’s face. When she got to the doorway that led into the foyer, a workingman who’d been forced to stand at the back recognized her. She’d loosened the headscarf by now and some of her dark hair spilled down around her face. The man tilted his head slowly and doffed his billycock hat as she walked by. A second later, she heard him say from behind, Holy hell, it’s her, it’s the bathtub nude! He said it loud enough to bring dozens of other men scrambling from their seats.

  * * *

  Flossy Bender happened to be standing at the foot of the stairs that led to the apartment. She’d come down to see what the rabble-rousers were watching and to count the day’s earnings in the back office. Even if Hal had taken over the day-to-day, she still had a key to the metal strongbox, wore it on a chain dangling from her pinafore. She’d counted over two hundred dollars, including cake and pastry receipts, most of it in nickels and dimes. For that kind of money, she was willing to turn a blind eye and pretend that a woman’s anatomy could edify a bachelor and keep a married man from straying. Edison had filmed an eighteen-second kiss, after all, so the slipstream was moving along with or without her. When she saw the beautiful gypsy coming toward her, a red-faced man in pursuit, she ushered the woman upstairs and out of sight.

  * * *

  By the time the horde of curious men arrived in the lobby all they could see was Flossy Bender standing there in her housedress and carpet slippers. The workingman was still holding his billycock hat in his hands, apparently rendered delusional by all that kinked time and light. He pointed wanly up the stairs, toward the apartment and his celestial vision, and they all laughed.

  * * *

  The disruption had emptied half the theater so Claude stopped the projector. It occurred to him as he watched Hal walking out toward the lobby that Sabine Montrose had finally gotten even for the night he’d sabotaged her performance of Hamlet.

  * * *

  Hal came toward his mother on the stairs, braced for a moral scolding.

  —You’re just like Chester, for better or worse, Flossy said.

  There was a tone of resignation in her voice and he guessed that she’d seen the reel.

  —We made more today than we ever did with six months of kinetoscopes.

  —I know, she said, I counted the take.

  She held up the key to the lockbox between two fingers.

  —And there’s still one more showing, Hal said.

  —I’m making some dinner upstairs and there’s plenty for everybody. Invite the foreigners if you like. We’ll celebrate.

  It occurred to Hal that his mother had no idea who Sabine Montrose was.

  —I need to deliver Healy’s percentage after the next show.

  —He can wait, she said.

  She put her hands into the pockets of her pinafore and looked down at his feet.

  —What is it? he asked.

  —If you’d come to me I would have told you. But they lent you that money as if you were the head of this household.

  —Told me what?

  —I always thought Alroy Healy was the one behind it. Your father owed him more than I ever knew.

  * * *

  Hal watched his mother’s eyes come up from the floor slowly, by degrees, but they never made it to his face. She looked out toward Flatbush Avenue where the crowd milled and gossiped and rekindled certain scenes from The Haymaker for the incoming ticketholders. She kissed him on the cheek and turned to climb the stairs, still without acknowledging the desolation raking through him. He watched her go up, her hand along the railing, and it fell through him like a hammer that he’d made them all beholden to his father’s murderer.

  * * *

  All through dinner, after the final show, Hal kept looking up at the daguerreotype of his father. It hung directly above Sabine Montrose, the guest of honor at the head of the table. She sat between his two younger brothers, Angus and Michael, who were brimming with her attentions and blushing from her playful taunts. She taught them how to hold their knives while they ate, how to fold their napkins into a swan, how to say my cat is very sleepy in French. Flossy served them all roast beef and mashed potatoes and custard for dessert. She wore her good silver earrings and poured sherry from the crystal decanter. Already, there was talk of expanded hours, of the reels they would make together, the burning feats and rousing spectacles. Pavel, sitting between Sabine and Claude, was already brokering a new deal for the actress’s appearances. Hal looked up at his father’s portrait, a ghost grinning through mercury vapors, and thought about how he would have approved of all this com
motion, how there’d be a kick in his step and a whistle in his mouth if he’d lived to see the opening. Claude Ballard raised his sherry glass for a toast and they all looked at him as he smiled at Sabine. Here’s to everything that waits for us inside the viewfinder, he said.

  6

  The Lost Film

  Every Thursday morning, for four months, Claude waited in the lobby with his cameras, a canvas bag of foraged plants, and a new canister of footage. After breakfast at the diner, Martin took the reel to be restored—some of it too mottled and damaged to repair—and returned some weeks later with a duplicate. The originals and a master copy were placed in an archive drawer at the University of Southern California. In April, Claude showed up in the hotel lobby empty-handed.

  —There are no more films? Martin asked.

  —I don’t know that I’m ready for the next batch.

  * * *

  They walked to the diner, where Claude avoided the topic of his films and instead asked Martin about his upbringing, about how he came to the vanished silent era.

  —I was raised in the projection booth, Martin said.

  —How so?

  —After my parents died, when I was ten, I went to live with my grandparents, who ran an old movie house west of San Antonio. Every Sunday they showed a double silent feature for the matinee, my grandfather on the Wurlitzer organ, my grandmother in the lobby, and me up in the projection booth.

  Martin cut into his omelet and took a bite. He chewed, considered, looked out onto Hollywood Boulevard.

  —At one point, I was the youngest licensed projectionist in the state of Texas. I used to wear a little cap like a train conductor.

  —Extraordinary, said Claude.

  He wiped his mouth with the corner of his napkin and took a sip of coffee. His two cameras were on the table beside his plate and he gave each lens cap a quarter turn.

  —And what happened to your grandparents’ cinema?

  —Sold off when they passed. Now it’s a bowling alley.

  —Tragic.

  —I agree. But my trade came in handy. I paid my way through college as a projectionist at the local drive-in.

  —But you never wanted to make films yourself?

  —Not really. I just wanted to watch them in my dorm room on a little 16 mm projector. I used to drive my roommates nuts. They’d come home from a party and all the lights would be out and I’d be projecting Chaplin or Jean Renoir up on the bedroom wall.

  Claude could see this very clearly, Martin as a college freshman reclined on his bed, looking up at a marbled wall of images. He smiled thinking of it, then he thought of himself in Paris at nineteen, saw the tiny garret apartment where he projected his first test reels on the cinématographe in the days after his sister’s death. The impossibility of that time and that myopic kid from Alsace never ceased to amaze him.

  —You were born in the wrong decade, Claude said, maybe the wrong century.

  —During my senior year, I had a film professor who told me to go to grad school and become a film historian. So here I am.

  Claude watched Martin cut into the slice of orange garnish on the side of his plate. The American custom of putting fruit onto a savory plate of food had never made sense to Claude.

  —Why would they still teach ancient relics like me in film school?

  Martin nodded, poured some cream into his coffee, and took a sip.

  —You were the generation that made all the big breakthroughs—crosscutting, the montage, the close-up, the feature-length drama. Half the time, Hitchcock is just copying something D. W. Griffith did fifty years ago.

  Claude dismissed this flattery of the silent directors with a wave of his napkin.

  —We also took thirty years to work out how to synchronize sound with pictures. But I blame our slow progress, like many things, on Edison’s stranglehold on anything with motion, light, or sound. He couldn’t beat the French on a level playing field, so he bought up every patent he could and dragged us all through the courts.

  —After he formed the Trust?

  Claude saw that his own fists were now clenched in his lap. He felt a surge of blood pressure in his fingertips.

  —Christ, if it wasn’t for Edison’s Trust, Hollywood might never have happened. He drove filmmakers out here by the dozens. The weather was better for year-round moviemaking, but they were also on the run from Edison’s lawsuits.

  —But your studio stayed in New Jersey?

  —We fled to Europe to film the first war after what Edison did to The Electric Hotel.

  —What do you mean?

  Claude folded his napkin lengthwise and looked at the boulevard dimming under a bank of rain clouds.

  —Come, I’ll show you.

  * * *

  It was suddenly raining outside and they watched as Angelenos on their coffee breaks dashed along with newspapers and jackets spread over their heads. Under the awning of the diner, Claude removed an umbrella from his canvas foraging bag and opened it. Martin stepped in close beside him and they walked along the boulevard back toward the hotel. They passed the art deco facade of the Pantages Theatre, a movie palace from the 1920s whose ticket lobby resembled a mausoleum trimmed in black marble and gold. Every time they walked to the diner, Claude shuffled past it without ever looking over.

  * * *

  In the hotel suite, Claude took off his jacket, turned on the table lamps, and began digging through the rummage of papers and canisters. Every now and then a patch of wall or floor space would open up, the pale, nubby velvet of the wallpaper, or the gold-and-green geometry of the carpet. Eventually he went into the bedroom, and a short while later Martin followed. Claude was on all fours, pulling a battered metal trunk from under his bed. When he opened the lid, it gave out a damp, briny smell. Inside were more than a dozen rusting canisters, the labels flaking and foxed with age. There was also a sheath of letters, press clippings, publicity stills, and a bound copy of the photoplay for The Electric Hotel.

  —After Sabine betrayed me, I took everything I could from the studio and put it in a storage locker down in Edgewater.

  Claude began to carefully lift each canister out of the trunk and place it on the floor.

  —With some luck, there should be an intact print of The Electric Hotel in these reels.

  Martin kneeled beside the trunk, his breath thickening.

  —Christ, we all thought it was lost. In the film history books, they call it your lost masterpiece.

  —Hogwash. It’s never been lost. It’s just that no one has ever asked to see it.

  * * *

  Martin opened one of the canisters and held a frame up to the light so that they were both staring into the ghostly image of a zeppelin above a river. Martin set the reel down gently and took up a black-and-white publicity photograph from the trunk. It was captioned The Cast and Crew Relaxing on Lester Summers’s Yacht. Sabine Montrose flanked by men in white dinner jackets, her hair pulled up, her gaze directed at something beyond the camera. Martin pointed to a young Claude at her side, his hair slicked back, his big-knuckled hands banished to his trouser pockets.

  * * *

  Claude handed Martin a letter inside a creped, yellowed envelope.

  —You can consider this Edison’s wrecking ball.

  Martin removed the letter from the envelope and began to read it. It was from a Manhattan law firm. At the bottom, it was signed Thomas A. Edison, the left side of the T thrown up and over the other letters like a bullwhip uncoiling through the air.

  7

  Across the River

  It was the age of invention. The vacuum cleaner, air-conditioning, the radar. Edison had been riding the wave for decades, filing patents, assembling the future in his laboratories. He lit the filaments inside their incandescent glass bulbs and cut the grooves onto phonograph wax cylinders. But he’d come to motion pictures half-heartedly and late, trailing the French in projecting images into the collective darkness instead of through a viewfinder. By the time he caught up, h
e was determined to dominate by zealously filing and defending his own patents. He sent private detectives to rival film shoots to see if his camera or film copyrights were being infringed upon. It became standard practice, among early directors, to keep the cameras covered in case Edison’s men came around.

  * * *

  The inventor’s motion picture empire hinged, in part, on looping mechanisms and perforated film stock. Each Edison frame was four perforations long, the strip one-and-three-eighths of an inch across. Like a railway track, every filmstrip had a gauge, and competing widths were part of the cinematic battle. On a single day in 1886, tens of thousands of railway workers had pulled the spikes from the west rail of all the broad-gauge lines in the South, moved them three inches, and spiked them back into place. Practically overnight, America became a single-gauge railway nation—four feet, nine inches—and Edison wanted a similar coup in the world of celluloid.

  * * *

  For the first five years of the Bender Bijoux’s operation, Hal watched Edison put a stranglehold on the competition. The Lumières had already lost the war on format—their projector now ran celluloid with Edison-style perforations instead of the single-perforation format they’d invented—and by 1905, the Lumières closed their American operations and withdrew from the motion picture business altogether. Meanwhile, Edison was releasing dozens of reels a week to titillate the viewing public. He’d begun this campaign with the first kiss of the medium, back in 1896, an eighteen-second smooch in The Widow Jones, but now it continued with the electrocution of an Asian elephant at Coney Island after the animal killed a zookeeper, and the collision of two locomotives on a stretch of rented railway track. Edison might have showed up late to the motion picture party, but now he was swaggering through a crowded house like vaudeville’s hooligan younger brother.