American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  Giant Powder that afternoon churned with activity. People had lined up to make purchases, and an annoyed Billy had to wait before he got someone’s attention. When he was finally able to speak to a salesman and identify himself, the man was impressed and became quite excited. Billy’s reputation was well known in this city; there was even a squat, derby-wearing red-haired detective in the San Francisco Examiner funny pages named “Hot Tabasco Burns.” The manager was summoned, and then he was joined by the secretary of the company. They were all eager to help, to cooperate with the famous detective. The order books were sent for and swiftly reviewed.

  And there it was. On September 16 a large order had been placed for 80 percent dynamite. Bruce McCall, the clerk who had made the sale, was summoned. He remembered the circumstances quite clearly.

  The day before the sale, McCall began, he had received a phone call from a man representing the Bryson Construction Company of Sacramento. He needed the 80 percent explosive. Could Giant handle the order? McCall told the men to come by, and it all would be arranged.

  When the customer appeared the next day, McCall immediately grew suspicious. The buyer introduced himself as Bryce. I thought you said on the telephone the name was Bryson? challenged the salesman. No, the customer insisted, you must have misheard me.

  Bryce went on to explain that his company had been trying to uproot some stubborn tree stumps on a job in Auburn, California. After a couple of stump-pulling machines had been broken in the process, it was decided that blasting would be the only way to get the job done.

  The salesman cut him off. Eighty percent is way too powerful. It’s used for demolishing rock formations. You can buy something cheaper and still get your job done.

  Bryce, though, was insistent. He had a contract with a man named Clarke, and the contract specified 80 percent gelatin. Either you sell me what I want, he announced indignantly, or I’ll take my business elsewhere.

  Fine, McCall thought. Customer wants to spend more money than he has to, well, that’s not my problem. He told Bryce, We don’t have 80 percent in stock, but give me a day and we can make some up. The price was $82.10. Pay now and you can pick up the dynamite at the company’s factory on the other side of the bay. You got a boat? the salesman asked.

  We’ll take care of it, Bryce assured him, and asked for directions. Bryce took a flat package from the inside pocket of his coat pocket and removed four twenty-dollar bills. That caught the salesman’s eye.

  “You don’t see paper gold certificates too often here in San Francisco,” McCall told Burns. “I figure Bryce has to be from out of town, maybe back east. Right?” he asked.

  People were always doing that to Billy, trying to show him that they could play the master sleuth, too. Sometimes he’d throw out a bit of praise and pretend he hadn’t thought of that, exuding, “You know, that’s good, damn good bit of detecting.” This afternoon Billy was in no mood to play games. The case was too important. He simply kept a guarded, noncommittal silence.

  After a moment, the salesman picked up his story. The rest of the money was paid in silver. But, he concluded, there was something “wrong” about the entire transaction. “I didn’t like the look in his eye,” he said.

  Billy had let the salesman tell his story without interruption. When a witness was eager to cooperate, when his memory was sharp, the rule was, you sat back and listened. But now that McCall’s account was finished, Billy posed the one question he had been waiting to ask. Any chance you can recall, he wondered with a casualness that was all disguise, what this Bryce looked like?

  Once again the salesman was a perfect witness. Bryce was thirty-two or thereabouts, five foot ten perhaps, maybe 190. Lots of wavy, sandy hair, blue eyes, or sort of grayish. And dressed like a gentleman, in a sack coat, with a four-in-hand tie.

  It wasn’t McGraw, Billy realized at once.

  And if he wasn’t McGraw, who was he?

  And where was McGraw?

  The puzzle grew even more complicated when Billy went to the Giant manufacturing plant. The big box of a building fronted the bay near Oakland. Bryce, he learned, had not come to pick up the order. Two other men had arrived with a letter signed by Bryce authorizing them to accept the delivery. One of the men did most of the talking. His name, Billy learned, was Leonard: dark hair, even darker eyes, about five foot ten and thin, perhaps 160, and wearing a derby hat. The way he talked, his entire manner, suggested he was educated, possibly a college man. Said he had killed a lot of jackrabbits while blowing stumps with dynamite; he seemed to know how to handle explosives. The other man was short and swarthy, with jet-black hair parted in the middle and sharp, distinctive cheekbones. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, he had an accent. Asked where he was from, he said he was Spanish. His name was Morris, only he pronounced it Mor-rice, with the accent on the last syllable.

  Neither of them, a frustrated Billy realized, could have been J. W. McGraw. The descriptions were too far off. So who were they? The bomb in Peoria and the bomb recovered in Los Angeles were identical. The planting of two identical devices within about a month was not a coincidence. How many people were involved in this? First McGraw. Then Bryce—or was it Bryson? Then Leonard. And Morris. What had he stumbled into? How large was this conspiracy? Who was behind it, paying the bills, choosing the targets?

  Billy found the stock clerk who had helped Leonard and Morris carry the crates of nitro down the dock. He had also helped the two men load their boat. In answer to Billy’s question, the clerk said sure, he remembered the boat. Just the kind he’d want to own someday. At least a twenty-six-footer, he said, with a twelve-horsepower engine. A beauty.

  The name? Billy, full of patience, wondered. Think you can remember?

  The clerk thought for a moment.

  “The Pastime,” he said finally. “Yes, the Pastime. That was it.”

  SEVENTEEN

  ______________________

  AS BILLY BEGAN searching the docks around San Francisco Bay for the Pastime, D.W. was also looking for a boat. In his director’s eye, the opening frame of Enoch Arden had taken shape: sailors boarding a tall-masted sailing ship as they prepare to set out for a long voyage, the vast gray sea stretching into the distance in the background. Finding the proper ship would be as difficult—and as crucial—as casting the actor to play Enoch. That first shot had to convey grace, majesty, vulnerability, and a bit of the magic of a bygone era. Movies, D.W. understood, were a series of pictures, and like a painter he was fastidious about the details. He hunted up and down the southern California coast for his perfect ship.

  On these excursions he was often eager for company, and he looked to the Biograph actresses to join him. D.W. did not, however, extend invitations as much as he made demands. He felt it was his director’s right, and he began to exercise it with a promiscuous authority.

  His wife Linda was a member of the company, and they shared a suite at the Alex, but nevertheless in California many women caught the director’s eye. A building tension was unavoidable. “There was hell to pay,” his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, observed. But D.W. was undeterred. Success, D.W. had discovered, was liberating. It provided him with a justifying logic that the once-struggling actor could never have understood. The scouting trips for the sailing boat grew more and more frequent, and he found many willing and convivial companions.

  _____

  After Mary Pickford abruptly left the Biograph studio, D.W. had sent a telegram to Blanche Sweet offering her forty dollars a week to join the troupe for the California trip. She had acted in movies when she was younger, but she had missed the thrill of a live audience and soon returned to the theater. D.W. remembered her as a slim, girlish actress, her talents modest, but he hoped she could replace Mary as his screen ingenue—and that her dewy adolescent beauty could assuage the intense loss he felt by Mary’s sudden departure. But the actress who arrived in California was not the girl he had once directed. Blanche at once realized his disappointment. She also understood its cause. Sh
e had become more womanly, “grown in all directions,” she frankly conceded. D.W., she had perceptively intuited, preferred his leading ladies to project a child’s innocence and vulnerability. The director wanted victims, not heroines. From the day Blanche appeared at the Alex, they clashed. “I was always a rather independent child,” she said without apology. “I was rebellious. I wanted to do what I wanted to do and he was a very dominating man.” D.W. soon went looking for companionship elsewhere.

  DorothyWest was more to his liking. In close-ups, her face did not have the riveting attraction and energy of Mary’s or even Blanche’s. Her actress’s power was also more ordinary. When Dorothy joined the troupe two years earlier, she had been cast in supporting roles—a ghetto child, a frail Italian peasant maid. But in time D.W. saw something in “little Dorothy,” as the players took to calling her, that affected him. In The Golden Supper he cast her as the beautiful princess.

  “Aren’t you taking a chance?” he was asked. “I can make them all beautiful,” D.W. answered, full of a self-satisfied confidence. Dorothy realized his transforming power, too, and was deeply grateful. The director had given her the most wonderful of gifts. He had made her a star, and she reciprocated with her love.

  D.W.’s relationship with Harriet Quimby was more complicated. It was respectful, full of passionate admiration. She was a journalist, had published theater criticism, and had flown a plane across the English Channel. In 1911 alone she wrote four screenplays that D.W. went on to direct. The director was less imperious, less domineering in her presence. When she gave him a ring that winter in California, D.W. wore it proudly.

  In San Pedro, D.W. finally found the old, tall-masted ship he had envisioned. He had the antique towed up the coast to Santa Monica. By the time it arrived, Linda had made a discovery, too. She had stumbled on a love letter that her husband had received.

  The writer of the letter has long been forgotten. And in truth, her identity was unimportant even at the time. It could have been composed by any of D.W.’s many companions, or perhaps it was dashed off by an aspiring actress whom he had briefly met while casting a film. But the letter was tangible, heartbreaking evidence. Linda could no longer delude herself. Her humiliation was complete. A rageful anger coursed through her. She confronted her husband.

  But D.W. refused to apologize or even yield. He was defiant, not contrite. Linda did not want to leave him, to walk away from their exciting life, but his imperiousness left her no choice. With regret, Linda announced the marriage was over. She wanted a legal separation.

  D.W. showed no sympathy. Unrepentant, and fearful that Linda might have a change of heart, he attacked. He wrote her a letter that he said was “the solemn truth.” But it was truth dipped in acid. “Turn your face to your own future,” he advised. “After your discovery of that letter written by a certain other woman I have not been able to see how we could possibly live together any longer.” Relentlessly, vindictively, he kept twisting a razor-sharp knife: “There were others before her, and there are sure to be others just as objectionable in every way after her . . . I am better off morally, and all ways, outside of marriage and so will you be . . . Don’t think there is some other woman in this case. It is not one, but many.”

  And so D.W. moved out of their suite in the Alex. But not out of the hotel. He simply found another room, on another floor.

  Like his life, his work continued with little apparent disruption. The costumes had arrived from San Francisco, and the sailing ship was in place, so D.W. moved forward with Enoch Arden. For a week the company shot exteriors on the beach in Santa Monica. They arrived at dawn and rented a shack from a Norwegian fisherman to use as a dressing room. The days were long, but D.W. did not seem to notice. He was consumed by the movie he was making.

  D.W.’s vision was disciplined and uncompromising. Each of the many characters was introduced with a close-up. Every frame was meticulously arranged. The lighting was executed with great precision. The opening backlit shot of Enoch and the rest of the crew going off to sea on their doomed voyage had a solemn beauty. With this film D.W. was intent on proving that he was an artist, and that a film could be a work of art. He had begun to understand his talent, and now he wanted audiences to appreciate it, too.

  He shot the film in two reels, an unprecedented indulgence. But if he were to tell the important, complex, and affecting stories that were taking shape in his mind, films would need to be longer. The exhibitors complained, but since it was D.W. they reluctantly agreed to show one reel on Monday, the second on Thursday. The demand to see the entire film was so great, however, that theaters soon began screening both reels on the same program. D.W.’s vision had triumphed.

  Linda’s performance in Enoch Arden was masterful. With an actress’s long-practiced discipline, she found a level of professional detachment and played one of her final roles for her husband. She was cast as Enoch’s long-suffering wife, Annie Lee, and received praise for her “sea eyes.” She had no trouble evoking the melancholy of a woman left behind.

  Like D.W., Darrow was growing restless. His settled, undemanding life was squeezing all the energy out of him. He felt separated from any feeling of love, for Ruby, for his work. His will was deadened.

  He missed his Mary.

  Guilty yet desperate, he took a train to New York. Mary was sharing an apartment with Ida Rauch, the actress who had founded the Provincetown Players. The two women had become part of a lively intellectual circle. Their friends were artists and activists caught up in trying to shape the new century: Theodore Dreiser, the novelist and journalist; Max Eastman, the editor of The Masses; the reformer Frederick Howe; the sculptor Jo Davidson. In their presence, with his Mary, Darrow’s spirits lifted.

  But in time he returned home. He was too old to start a new life. He would live with the compromises he had made. “I miss you all the time,” he wrote to Mary. But he stayed with Ruby in Chicago, certain that this time he would not leave, or see Mary again.

  EIGHTEEN

  ______________________

  WHERE WAS THE Pastime?

  Billy had been searching the bay docks for the motor launch but without success. He had reviewed the city licenses, only to find no registration record for a boat with that name. He had hoped the Pastime would be the clue that would lead him to the three mystery men who had purchased the dynamite. He had left Los Angeles convinced he “was getting nearer to the heels of the men.” But now he was stymied.

  Where had he gone wrong? He forced himself to review all he had learned since arriving in San Francisco. Perhaps there was a clue, a hint, he had missed. Methodically, he ran the interview at the Giant Powder Works through his mind—until something the salesman said took on a new significance. You don’t see paper gold certificates too often here in San Francisco. I figure Bryce has to be from out of town.

  Bryce, Billy suddenly realized, wouldn’t own a boat. He didn’t live in San Francisco. He’d have rented one.

  Billy immediately concentrated his investigation on boat rental agencies. But this, too, seemed to be a dead end. He found no record of a rental launch called the Pastime. Yet Billy was tenacious; he felt he was on the right path. His busy days in San Francisco had left him charged. He never considered abandoning the chase. And finally at a rental dock in Oakland, the detective found the boat he was looking for.

  Only it wasn’t the Pastime. This boat was called the Peerless.

  Yes, Billy learned from the dock manager, three fellows had come by to rent a boat near the end of September. They put down a deposit of five hundred dollars cash—imagine people willing to hand over that kind of money, he gushed, still impressed. The next day they had returned the boat. He could give only a vague description of the trio, but there was nothing in it, Billy noted, that would rule out their being Bryce, Leonard, and Morris. But what really interested Billy was what the manager had discovered after the launch had been returned. The bow and stern had been freshly painted. Even the name had been redone. Why on earth woul
d someone do that? the manager wondered.

  Maybe we can find out, Billy suggested. If he could scrape away some of the new paint, he’d pay for the boat’s being painted once again.

  The manager was bewildered but intrigued. He agreed, and very carefully Billy began to remove the new letters. Slowly, a letter at a time, a faint palimpsest was revealed. It was a single word: Pastime.

  When the men signed the rental contract, Billy asked, did they include an address?

  Let me check, the manager agreed. Then he walked down the dock to his office.

  Billy waited impatiently by the boat. A cold wintry breeze was coming off the bay. Yet he hardly noticed. He was consumed by his hope that at last the case would finally be moving forward.

  You’re in luck, the manager announced when he returned. He had the contract in his hand, and he offered it to the detective. Directly below the renter’s name was an address in San Francisco.

  The address was a vacant lot. It took all of Billy’s discipline to control his disappointment. The bay wind continued to blow, and a stiff chill ran through him. But Billy stood on the sidewalk staring out at the empty space for quite a while. He remained as motionless as a statue, and all the time his mind whirled with activity.

  Frustrated, he tried to put the pieces of the puzzle into place. The men were from out of town, yet they were familiar enough with the city to know the precise address of a vacant lot. That meant they knew this area. Why? Perhaps, he speculated, they had holed up in a nearby rooming house. Yes, that would make sense, Billy told himself. The neighborhood was near the docks, near where they’d have unloaded the launch. It’d been too risky to travel across San Francisco carrying cases of dynamite. They’d have stayed close. The more he thought it through, the more he grew convinced. Yes, Billy decided, the trio would have gone to ground somewhere not far from where he was standing.