One Summer: America, 1927

by Bryson, Bill

  Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization.

  De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation.

  One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.”

  Despite Hall’s enthusiastic praise, the Vitaphone technology was actually already obsolescent. Vitaphone’s sound was recorded onto discs, as on a record album, and one motor turned both projector and phonograph together, which kept them in sync so long as the disc and film were both positioned exactly right and started at precisely the same instant, which was always easier said than done. Where the system shone was in providing rich, vibrant sound with enough amplitude to fill the largest auditorium, and that was what audiences found miraculous.

  Vitaphone sound itself was soon overtaken by better sound systems, all of which were based on De Forest’s original concept of imprinting sound directly onto film. Had De Forest been more focused, he would have died a much wealthier man.

  The Jazz Singer was by no means the first sound movie. It wasn’t even the first talking picture—but that was a nicety lost on its adoring audiences. For most people, The Jazz Singer would be the picture that made talking pictures real.

  The Jazz Singer was originally a Broadway play by Samuel Raphaelson called The Day of Atonement. Warner Bros. decided to make it into its first talking production because they had the eager participation of Al Jolson, then one of the performing world’s greatest stars.

  Jolson was born Asa Yoelson, the son of a rabbi, in Lithuania, in 1885 or 1886 (he was never clear about this) and came to the United States with his family when he was about four. At the age of nine, he ran away from home and worked at odd jobs, including in a circus. Eventually juvenile authorities found him working in a bar in Baltimore, and deposited him in the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys—the same school that would become home to Babe Ruth the following decade. Unlike Ruth, Jolson stayed just a short while.

  Jolson was not an adorable person. His idea of a good joke was to urinate on people, which may go some way to explaining why he had four wives and no friends. But he had a wonderful voice and, by all accounts, a powerful stage presence, and he became America’s most popular performer. Warner Bros. knew it was lucky to get him.

  It has often been written that Warner Bros. was so broke before the making of The Jazz Singer that Al Jolson had to lend the company money to pay for sound equipment, but that seems not to have been the case at all. Warner Bros. was a small studio but not a destitute one. In fact, in 1927 it had the biggest star in Hollywood after Clara Bow—the performing dog Rin Tin Tin. This beloved German shepherd starred in one successful movie after another—four in 1927 alone—and in one poll was voted the most popular performer in America. According to Susan Orlean in her popular biography of the dog, Rin Tin Tin was also voted the Academy Award for best actor before the new motion picture academy had second thoughts about what that said about the talents of its human stars and insisted that the award go to a person, Emil Jannings.

  The great irony of all this is that apparently Rin Tin Tin wasn’t one dog but many. In 1965, Jack Warner confessed to a reporter that his studio, fearful of the loss of the real Rin Tin Tin, had bred eighteen look-alikes and had substituted them freely in the making of the movies. It was also said by many of those who worked with him that the original Rin Tin Tin was the most ill-tempered animal they had ever encountered. At all events, whether Rin Tin Tin was one dog or several, the franchise made Warner Bros. wealthy.

  The Jazz Singer did, however, represent a considerable gamble. It cost $500,000 to make and, at the time of its filming, could be shown in just two theaters in the world. Jolson, for all his star quality, was himself a gamble. He had never acted in front of a camera before. There was no point. He had no talent that suited silent movies. But now he shone.

  The Jazz Singer took four months to shoot. The sound portion of the filming was all done in just two weeks between August 17 and 30. It took such a short time because there was so little sound to be recorded. Altogether the movie had just 354 spoken words, nearly all coming from Jolson. The dialogue was not terribly polished, to say the least. A sample: “Mama, darling, if I’m a success in this show we’re gonna move from here. Oh, yes, we’re gonna move up in the Bronx. A lot of nice green grass up there and a whole lotta people you know. There’s the Ginsbergs, the Guttenbergs, and the Goldbergs. Oh, a whole lot of Bergs, I don’t know ’em all.” (Accounts vary as to whether Jolson’s words were spontaneous or scripted.)

  As Jolson was filming his talking sequences in Los Angeles, four hundred miles to the north, in Sacramento, Buster Keaton was filming what may be the single most memorable scene in any silent film—certainly one of the most perfect comic scenes, not to mention most dangerous. It was the scene in Steamboat Bill Jr. in which the front wall of a house falls onto Keaton, but he survives because he is standing in the space of an open window. To make the scene maximally thrilling—and it truly is—the window was made just two inches wider than Keaton on either side. Had the wall warped or buckled slightly or the point of impact been fractionally miscalculated, Keaton would have been killed. Perhaps nothing says more about silent movies and those who performed in them than that actors routinely risked their lives for the sake of a good joke. That didn’t happen in talking pictures.

  Steamboat Bill Jr. was one of Keaton’s finest movies, but it was a failure at the box office. By the time it came out, people were already abandoning silent pictures. At the time he filmed Steamboat Bill Jr., Keaton was earning well over $200,000 a year. By 1934, he would be bankrupt.

  Talking pictures were the salvation of Hollywood, but that salvation came at considerable cost—in anxiety for stars and producers, in new equ
ipment costs for studios and theaters, in job losses for thousands of musicians whose accompaniments were no longer needed. The greatest fear for the industry in the beginning was that sound movies would prove to be a passing fad—an unnerving possibility given the amount of investment necessary to get into talking pictures. Every movie theater in the country that wanted to show sound movies had to invest between $10,000 and $25,000 in equipment. For the studios, a fully equipped sound stage cost a minimum of half a million dollars—and that was assuming the studio could even get the necessary recording equipment since demand very quickly outran supply. One desperate producer, unable to acquire sufficient sound-recording equipment, seriously considered filming his movie as usual in California but with the sound recorded, via telephone line, on equipment in New Jersey. Luckily, he managed to get hold of some sound equipment and didn’t have to discover, as he most assuredly would have, that his long-distance scheme could never result in a decent reproduction.

  Once equipped, studios often discovered that they had to find new, quieter locations and quieter working conditions within those locations. “When a scene is to be shot, the carpenters have to suspend their hammering, and the scene painters must stop singing at their work,” explained one observer earnestly. Delivery trucks couldn’t sound their horns or rev their engines. Doors could not be slammed. Even the most carefully muffled sneeze could spoil a scene. At first, many pictures were shot in the dead of night to minimize the complications of background noises.

  Another mighty blow was the loss of foreign markets. More than a third of Hollywood’s income came from abroad. For a silent movie to be sold overseas, it simply needed new title cards inserted, but, pending the invention of dubbing and subtitles, sound movies could only be shown where people spoke the language in which the movie was made. One solution was to make multiple versions of a movie, using a single set but with up to ten different troupes of actors from different language groups filming one version after another.

  All of these problems were of course overcome, and talking pictures quickly enjoyed success beyond anyone’s wildest hopes. By 1930, virtually every theater in America had sound. Movie audiences jumped from 60 million in 1927 to 110 million in 1930. Warner Bros.’ worth shot up from $16 million to $200 million. The number of theaters the company owned or controlled went from one to seven hundred.

  Talkies at first were often called “speakies,” though sometimes they were also called “dialogue pictures.” For some time, what exactly constituted sound movies was a matter of uncertainty. Eventually, a consensus arose. A picture that offered recorded music but no talking was said to be “with sound.” If it additionally had some sound effects, it was said to be “with sound and effects.” If it had any recorded speech at all, it was a “talking picture.” If it was a proper movie, with a full range of speech and sounds, it was an “all-talking picture.” The first true all-talking picture was The Lights of New York in 1928, but such was the sound quality still that it came with subtitles as well.

  Variety in the summer of 1927 noted that some four hundred aliens were working as actors or in other creative positions in Hollywood, and that more than half of all leading roles were taken by performers of foreign birth. Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, Lya de Putti, Emil Jannings, Joseph Schildkraut, Conrad Veidt, and many others from Germany or central Europe were big stars, but only so long as the public couldn’t hear their accents. Universal and Paramount were both dominated by German stars and directors. Universal was said, only half in jest, to have German as its official language.

  A few European actors—Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo—adjusted to or even thrived in the new sound regime, but most actors with foreign accents found themselves unemployable. Jannings, winner of the first Academy Award for acting, returned to Europe and spent the war years making propaganda films for the Nazis. Behind the scenes Europeans still thrived, but on-screen movies were now a thoroughly American product.

  Though the significance of this wasn’t much noticed in America, globally the effect was profound. Moviegoers around the world suddenly found themselves exposed, often for the first time, to American voices, American vocabulary, American cadence and pronunciation and word order. Spanish conquistadores, Elizabethan courtiers, figures from the Bible were suddenly speaking in American voices—and not just occasionally but in film after film after film. The psychological effect of this, particularly on the young, can hardly be overstated. With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American humor and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.

  * * *

  * A little-noticed fact was that the Roxy was sold almost at once to the Fox film company for a whopping $15 million. The purchase contributed significantly to Fox’s bankruptcy in the following decade.

  24

  Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people. A well-groomed, silver-haired man with a pipe and a thoughtful, learned air, he might in other circumstances have been a college professor. He certainly had the brains for it. Instead in 1926, at the age of fifty-three, he became America’s top executioner.

  Elliott grew up in a prosperous family on a large farm in upstate New York. He studied mathematics and physics at Brockport Normal School (now the State University of New York at Brockport), but his passion was electricity and he decided as a young man to become an electrical engineer. This was at a time in the late nineteenth century when electrical transmission was an exciting new technology. Elliott was employed setting up municipal lighting plants across New York and New England when he was sidetracked into the challenge of electrocuting criminals. This, too, was a new thing, but it wasn’t going well.

  Electrocution seemed, on the face of it, a quick, humane way of putting people to death, but in practice it proved to be neither neat nor straightforward. If the voltage was too low or not applied long enough, the victim was often dazed but not killed, and merely reduced to a gasping wreck. If a more ferocious jolt was given, the results tended to be unpleasantly dramatic. Blood vessels sometimes burst and, in one gruesome instance, a victim’s eyeball exploded. At least once, the subject was slowly roasted alive. The smell of cooking flesh was “unbearable,” recalled one of those present. Electrocution, it became clear, was a science that required careful, professional management if it was to be done efficiently and relatively humanely. This is where Robert Elliott came in.

  Called in as a consultant for an execution in New York State, and having read about the suffering and failures so far, Elliott realized that the trick of a successful execution was to adjust the application of electricity continuously and judiciously throughout the process, rather as an anesthesiologist controls the flow of gas to a surgical patient, so that the subject was rendered first unconscious and then lifeless in a progressive and comparatively peaceful manner.

  He performed his first two executions in January 1926, and proved so adept at it that soon states all over the East were commissioning him. It wasn’t that Elliott found any satisfaction in killing people—quite the reverse—but that he had an ability, more or less unique, to dispatch them gently. In 1927, he was executing people at the rate of about three a month, at $150 a time, and was in all but name the official executioner for New York and New England.

  Because of the lack of specialist equipment, Elliott had to make his own. Each victim was fitted with a piece of headgear that Elliott adapted from leather football helmets bought at his local sporting goods store. It is a macabre image, but an accurate one, to think of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti going to their deaths dressed in the style of Red Grange.

  For all the fuss and heartfelt lamentations among protesters and editorial writers about the unfair trial and unjust fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, the evidence suggests that the majority of Americans thought the two men were probably guilty, and most of the rest didn’t really care. According to the
author Francis Russell, by 1926 most people couldn’t have said whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive or not. The newspaperman Heywood Broun was certain that the average man “cared nothing about the issue.” He despaired that his own newspaper, the World, carried more coverage of the Snyder-Gray case than it did of Sacco and Vanzetti. Even those who supported Sacco and Vanzetti weren’t always terribly sympathetic. Katherine Anne Porter was shocked at one protest when, in passing, she expressed hope to a Communist named Rosa Baron that a pardon would be granted, and Baron snapped back: “Alive—what for? They are no earthly use to us alive.”

  Somewhat surprisingly, Sacco and Vanzetti were not the most notorious inmates in Charlestown Prison in the summer of 1927. That distinction belonged to a fellow immigrant who had rather faded from the news but whose name has, ironically, lived on more powerfully than those of Sacco and Vanzetti. He was Charles Ponzi, and eight years earlier he had attracted the world’s attention, and made himself an eponym, by devising a scheme designed to make people a lot of money very quickly.

  Ponzi was a dapper and diminutive fellow, barely five feet tall. Originally from Parma, Italy, he came to the United States in 1903 at the age of twenty-one and worked at various jobs, from busboy to office clerk to vegetable wholesaler. But in 1919, while living in Boston, he concocted a scheme—in itself perfectly legal—to make a profit by trading in international postal reply coupons. These coupons were invented as a way to help people or businesses send or receive letters or parcels from abroad. The system was meant to facilitate small-scale exchanges between countries. Ponzi realized that he could buy coupons in Europe with depressed European currencies and then redeem them in America for booming U.S. greenbacks. For every $1.00 invested, he could get back up to $3.50.