Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair

by Unknown

  Meanwhile, Selig Pictures had purchased The Lad and the Lion in 1916; National Films, Tarzan of the Apes, in 1918, one of the first of the silents to gross over a million dollars: National Films, Romance of Tarzan, the same year; Universal, The Return of Tarzan, in 1919; Century, Adventures of Tarzan, in 1920; and West Brothers, Son of Tarzan, in 1922.

  Middle-westerners had already started moving west to their vision of Paradise. As they passed by his ranch, Mr. Burroughs began to feel that old urge to strike his pitch and begin selling things to the multitude. He subdivided Tarzana ranch into lots, and soon the pleasant township of Tarzana spread out beneath the sterile blue California sky. In 1923, deciding that book publishers’ practice of demanding 65 to 90% of the gross returns from authors’ brain-children was too much of a good thing, he organized the Edgar Rice Burroughs Corporation, elected himself president, and proceeded to publish and market his own literary wares and also to consolidate his real estate activities.

  • • •

  From 1923 to 1929 he sold Tarzan and the Golden Lion to F.B.O., Tarzan the Mighty and Tarzan and the Tiger to Universal; he also sold his Tarzana home to the Tarzana Golf Club, Inc.; obtained a Tarzana post office from the Government; assisted at the inauguration of the Tarzana Chamber of Commerce, which has regularly communed once a week ever since. He also limited himself to four hours a day before a dictaphone, uttering twelve eighty-thousand-word novels. Not one of them received a rejection slip, either from the magazines or from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

  Tarzan the Tiger was released in 1930 during the mournful demise of the silent films. The talking-picture came as no surprise to a gentleman who had already blandly written of the scientific marvels of interplanetary communication and travel. He found a small motion picture company which, delighted with the idea of a Tarzan learning to speak, purchased the sound rights to Tarzan the Fearless.

  • • •

  The depression stopped these plans; Tarzan the Fearless remained unproduced. But Mr. Burroughs has never been easily discouraged. He went to M.G.M.’s white-headed boy, Mr. Irving Thalberg, with Tarzan the Ape-man. When it appeared in 1932, starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, out of the entire industry only the author and the psychic Mr. Thalberg were prepared for the extraordinary run which followed.

  Immediately, Mr. Sol Lesser bought the rights to Tarzan the Fearless from the producers who had first obtained them from the trusting Mr. Burroughs. And, despite the acute embarrassment of the author, who had sold M.G.M. a sequel, Tarzan and His Mate, Mr. Lesser coldly turned his legal property into a rather muddy serial featuring Mr. Buster Crabbe. For the next half year, millions of nature lovers, to whom practically nothing comes amiss, were nevertheless faintly bewildered by the spectacle of two Tarzans bounding and screaming with equal verve among the branches of large studio trees.

  But now all is well. Mr. Burroughs recently disposed of his thirteenth Tarzan scenario. It has been taken by M.G.M. for a third Johnny Weissmuller thriller. . . .

  Mr. Burroughs does not care to leave his offices in Tarzana. He is furiously occupied with his various projects. Three years ago, for instance, he placed his eldest son, Mr. Hulbert Burroughs, in charge of a newly formed radio division of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; contracted with an independent radio producer to make a group of Tarzan records based on the Tarzan stories; arranged for his daughter, Joan, to play “Jane Porter,” the delicious heroine of the “Tarzan Radio Act”, as it is named; had Mr. James H. Pierce, a former cinema Tarzan who eventually wedded Miss Burroughs, return to service as the radio Tarzan; and, in two years, through the independent radio producer, had sold the “Tarzan Radio Act” to stations in every state of the union.

  This would have pleased a man of lesser clay; but Mr. Burroughs was not happy. He likes to keep Tarzan entirely in the family. Just as he did with his books, so he took over the entire radio business. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., announced to the trade: “The elimination of a middleman’s profit and overhead allows us to furnish this program at a very reasonable figure, while permitting an increase in the cost of production to insure the best act it is possible to offer.”

  So far, forty-one sponsors, including such well-known firms as the Signal Oil & Gas Co., Reed Tobacco Co., Royal Baking Powder Co., and the venerable H. J. Heinz Co., have sold merchandise by means of Tarzan records broadcast throughout the United States, Canada and Australia. In all his multitudinous activities Mr. Burroughs may be hell on the middleman, but his two organizations have exuded splendid dividends throughout the depression.

  Two years ago Mr. Burroughs had another brilliant idea. He contracted with a national newspaper syndicate to sell Tarzan comic-strips. By August of this year, one hundred and sixty daily papers were using the daily strip, drawn by Mr. Rex Mason from material based on the Tarzan stories; ninety-three Sunday newspapers were publishing a full page in color of Tarzan adventures, drawn by Mr. Harold Foster from original material by a ghost writer, under Mr. Burroughs’ supervision.

  Back in 1913, Mr. Burroughs had the foresight to register “Tarzan” as a trade mark. To date, he has licensed twenty-eight commodities to use the Tarzan name, the list including such items as Tarzan sweat shirts, Tarzan bread, Tarzan ice-cream cups, candy, masks, card games, rubber inflated toys, sponge balls, celluloid buttons, bats, bathing suits, gum, garters and coffee. Tarzan bill-boards advertise to the devout public that a new commodity has “The Strength of Tarzan”. One company received permission to develop a Tarzan club: 125,000 members were enrolled. “Every member a potential salesman”, declares a Tarzan broadside; this same document states that any business may receive “an official instruction book for the formation of the Tarzan Clan among boys and girls”—a valuable service which, of course, is not offered free by the Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

  From his vast experience, Mr. Burroughs has returned to one of his earlier vocations and again provides merchandising counsel to business men. One of his brochures states: “We have an organization that is prepared to assist in working out merchandising campaigns for sponsors; and as owners of Tarzan copyright and a wide range of Tarzan trade marks, we are in a position to make use of the Tarzan name in many lines”.

  He continues to write as diligently as when he started. His presses are always hard at work, turning out (1) his Tarzan saga, (2) a Martian epic, (3) a many-volumed account of adventures at the earth’s core, (4) a new saga of life on the planet Venus.

  This incredible activity seems to have no effect on him. He rides horseback, plays tennis regularly, learned to fly a few months ago, and now has his private plane. He is nearly sixty. He could pass for forty-five. He is brown and bald, stocky, has small, sharp eyes with a curiously genial squint, talks in short, quick sentences like a stock-broker with one eye always cocked at the tape, and allocates his time according to the second hand of a watch. He has sold his Tarzana home long ago. He works at his office in the pleasant Spanish-type building of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Corporation in Tarzana, but lives at Malibu near the motion-picture stars.

  Finally, having exploited Tarzan as diligently as would the owner of a tooth-paste or washing-machine factory, he is making certain that his Tarzan saga will continue beyond the span of the founder. He is setting up a Tarzan dynasty.

  Mr. Hulbert Burroughs, a young man of twenty-five or so, is already in active charge of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. He is being trained to step into his father’s position. Modestly, Hulbert Burroughs admits that he “will carry on with Tarzan”.

  A few weeks ago, Mr. Burroughs organized a second corporation—Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises, Inc.—and put Hulbert Rice Burroughs in charge of that, too. Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises, Inc., will film a new series of Tarzan epics with authentic scenic background. The first will be called Tarzan in Guatemala; it will follow M.G.M.’s still untitled Tarzan romance. Although the new Tarzan pictures may eventually be produced in darkest Africa, Mr. Burroughs, Sr., doesn�
��t think he will go. He hasn’t ever been there.

  THE GRAND GUILLOTINER OF PARIS

  JANET FLANNER

  FROM MAY 1935

  Anatole-Joseph-François Deibler, Grand Guillotiner of France, is one of the few high officials who hasn’t been shifted from his job in the recent Parisian political shakeup. He is seventy-two years old, a handsome, humorless, taciturn, well-to-do suburbanite, the third generation in a hereditary dynasty of executioners. Owing to a custom that pre-dates the execution of Louis XVI, he is called Monsieur de Paris. Owing to a custom that post-dates the execution of Marie-Antoinette, La Veuve Capet, the guillotine is called The Widow. The aides who assist Monsieur de Paris and The Widow in their fatal work are called The Valets. And while, as elsewhere, the death penalty in France is the property of the State, the guillotine is the private property of the Deibler family and is handed down (with repairs) from father to son.

  The current Monsieur de Paris owns two Widows—a heavier machine for executions in Paris, and a lighter, more up-to-date model for use in the provinces. Both are equipped with every humane improvement—wheels on which the knife descends faster than in the old-fashioned soaped grooves, and modern shock-absorbers. But in her general set-up, The Widow hasn’t changed since the French Revolution.

  In the dim dawn of a city street, the guillotine still looks like a tall and narrow window, set up in the wrong place and giving onto nothing. The wooden side-posts which compose the frame weigh seventy-five kilos each and are one and a half times the width of a man’s neck apart. They stand approximately fifteen feet high, and are topped in the crossbar by a trigger-set weight of forty kilos, into which the seven-kilo blade is fixed at the last minute before an execution. The weight and blade are sent rushing down by a turn of the déclic—a kind of door-knob set in one of the side-posts and connected by pulleys with overhead springs which sustain the weight. Since it sends a man off on his final journey, this weight is termed the sac à voyage, or travelling-bag. The blade itself is obliquely edged, and is made of steel and bronze in Langres, the cutlery center of France. When not in use, it is kept in vaseline; and as a result of such solicitous treatment it lasts for many years, and is never honed.

  The guillotines used to be stored in an old barn on the outer boulevards. Now, they are kept nearer at hand in the Prison de la Santé, not far behind the Café du Dôme, in Montparnasse. By French law, executions are theoretically public, taking place at dawn, the legal hour, in deserted streets or town squares. For a Paris beheading, the large Widow is trundled out of the Prison about three hours before dawn, around the corner to the Boulevard Arago, in a little old black van that looks so much like a Punch and Judy wagon that it is nicknamed le guignol. This van is horse-drawn on iron-rimmed wheels and is lighted by a swinging petrol lantern.

  It takes about an hour to set up the guillotine. Each piece is numbered, and the whole is so perfect, mechanically, that it can be assembled in complete silence without even the blow of a hammer. As Deibler is now an old man, his first Valet superintends the job; but, as chief, and despite his age, Deibler fixes the knife to the sac à voyage at the last minute, and hoists them both—a weight of about a hundred pounds—to the crossbeam. Occasionally a trial decapitation is made with a roll of hay, to make sure that everything is working smoothly.

  About ninety minutes before dawn, Deibler and his first and second Valets drive back to the Prison for their victim. The prisoner does not know that his last hour has come, until they enter his cell with his lawyer, a priest, and the prison warden, who says, “Ayez courage.” He is given a glass of rum, and a prayer is said.

  The condemned man is then led outside to the guignol. He is usually clad in his best trousers, silk socks, and well-shined shoes. His shirt is cut away in back over his shoulders, his neck clipped of hair, and his hands tied tightly behind him—the knot being looped vertically to the looser one which binds his feet. A little later, in the Boulevard Arago, this will make him walk his last few steps toward The Widow with his head high, the proud pose being ironically the easiest at his ending.

  As he stumbles out of the guignol toward the guillotine, the priest marches in front of him, fantailing his black skirt so as to hide the horrid instrument from the prisoner. The Garde Républicaine, drawn up on horseback in a square around the machine, raise their sabres in a final salute of honor for the soon-dead man. Behind the Garde, the lines of policemen begin to cross themselves. In the background, a crowd of citizen onlookers keeps an intuitive silence, although the vital happening of the execution is invisible to them . . . A murderer is beheaded, and he will be buried, according to law, in an unmarked grave in ground supplied by the State. Monsieur de Paris has done his job.

  • • •

  The Deiblers are one of the two famous executioner families of which France has been proud. Curiously enough, the origin of neither family was French. The Sansons, who chopped their way to fame for six generations from 1664 through the Revolution, and until about 1850, were Italian in origin, and of little character-interest. The Deiblers, who succeeded the Sansons, were German, but the facts of their three generations would make up a Turgenev trilogy.

  Joseph Deibler, the clan founder, was a farmer, born in Bavaria in 1783, who drifted to France in the Napoleonic era. In 1820, finding himself penniless, he became Valet at Dijon to Desmouret, chief executioner of Burgundy. Slightly mystical, and with a farmer’s imperviousness to butchery, he apparently decided that he had been appointed by God to a perpetual Valetship, since, thirty-three years later, at the age of seventy, he turns up again as Valet to the chief executioner in Algeria, Rasseneux. Rasseneux had no son (as much of a misfortune for an executioner as for a king), but he had one daughter, Zoë. A marriage was made for Zoë and Louis Deibler, Joseph’s son and heir. Louis was timid, club-footed, and only thirty years old. But he was obedient and ambitious, and was consequently named second Valet and heir-apparent to Rasseneux, his father-in-law.

  Old Joseph Deibler had, therefore, founded what he considered to be the divine Deibler dynasty. As proof of its divinity, God (and Napoleon III) appointed him, five years later, at the age of seventy-five, to be chief headsman of Brittany—or, Monsieur de Rennes, Rennes being the principal city of Brittany. Chief executioners had been city-titled since about 1778, when the seven Sanson brothers—head-choppers all over France—began calling themselves Monsieur de Versailles, Monsieur de Blois, etc., to avoid confusion. As Monsieur de Rennes, Joseph Deibler’s Teutonic haughtiness finally flowered; he decapitated his French victims with the scorn of an avenging angel. He despised his neighbors’ horror of him—their horror of Louis, now his father’s Valet, and their horror of Louis’ wife. And he knew he was right when God sent Louis and Zoë a son, Anatole-Joseph-François, Grand High Executioner of All France today.

  As successor to his father at Rennes, Louis Deibler was a sinister buffoon. Sensitive about his deformity, and at the same time conscious of his own good education, he suffered beneath the ostracism that was put upon him, his wife, and his children. When he went forth to conduct an execution, he dressed like a morbid scarecrow, in his battered plug hat, disreputable redingote, and with the giant umbrella which he used as a cane. What he liked to do was to stay home and model little clay figures of dancing women.

  So, for nearly forty years, Louis Deibler limped around France, dealing death with no esoteric conviction that he had been appointed by God. Though a clumsy executioner—he lacked the swift, sure style of his father and his son—he was, to his surprise and all the other provincial headsmen’s fury, named Monsieur de Paris in 1871. And at this time, moreover, the economizing Third Republic put an end to all local executionerships, making the office national.

  In Paris, Louis Deibler took to playing cards in Auteuil cafés and later to religion, always putting on his gloves to take Communion, where other men took theirs off. In 1898, when executing the “toadstool murderer,” Carrara, he suddenly screamed
for water, crying, “I am covered with blood!” He had succumbed to the dread-of-blood delusion that frequently seizes butchers and surgeons and is now known as hemophobia. Lady Macbeth had called it “Out, damned spot!”

  On New Year’s Day of the following year came the Chancellery’s appointment of Louis’ son, Anatole, as Monsieur de Paris. Louis, though never cut out for the work, had assisted at more than a thousand executions, had performed one hundred and eighty as chief. He died in 1904, bequeathing to his son 400,000 gold francs and the family guillotine.

  Anatole Deibler, still the incumbent today, is in no sense an eccentric. He divides his time between cinemas, travel, motoring, trout-fishing at his small country place on the Cher, and rose-gardening at his even smaller Paris home at 39, rue Claude-Terrasse, near the Porte St. Cloud. He has spent his life hoping to be treated as other men are treated, although doing what they are forbidden to do.

  After finishing school al the Rennes Lycée, he tried to dodge his fate by working in a Paris department store. He persuaded the State to let him undertake military service, though headsmen’s sons had been exempt since 1832. Four years of suffering as the barracks’ butt brought him the nickname Chin-Chopper. Embittered, he went to Algiers and took up the family burden, becoming Valet to his old grandfather, Rasseneux. (Executioners are peculiarly long-lived.)