American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  It was called A Martyr to His Cause, and it began like a fairy tale. Which was appropriate since it had just as much relation to reality.

  Once upon a time a boyishly handsome seventeen-year-old J.J. left his doting parents’ loving home to go out into the world. He promises, the opening title card reports, “to be a good boy and to play fair in all that he does.” He finds a job as an ironworker, and we see actual footage—the impressive documentary touch inspired by the realism in D.W.’s films—of men fearlessly balanced on beams hanging high in the sky and matter-of-factly passing red-hot rivets to one another. J.J.’s remarkable journey continues, and “through his industry and sobriety,” another title card explains, he is promoted to foreman and is subsequently elected secretary of the union.

  Then disaster strikes. Management declares war against the unions. The courts and police join in, acting, a new card states, “contrary to the laws and traditions of our republic.”

  The film makes no mention of the Times bombing. As if he were simply the victim of cruel fate, J.J. becomes a blameless casualty of the unprovoked warfare. A rotund, striped-pants capitalist orders a hulking, snarling Burns to steal union property and then kidnap J.J. to stand trial. Burns obeys his master’s command and happily gives J.J. a ferocious beating in the process.

  The final scene is a tearjerker. The saintly gray-haired mum sits alone, weeping the tears of immense sorrow as she reads the letter her son has sent from his prison cell. “I am innocent of any infraction of the law,” J.J. insists with steely defiance. He asks that his mother and the rest of the nation refrain from passing judgment “until a fair and full defense has been afforded.”

  The two-reel film, produced by the W.H. Seeley Company, was advertised as “The Greatest Moving Picture of the Twentieth Century.” Still, Frank Morrison, the AFL secretary, felt compelled to admit to Darrow in a letter that “the story of the picture as it is ready for exhibition, and the story from which it is taken, very often differ materially.”

  But Darrow did not mind. The film opened in Cincinnati, and in its first week 50,000 people went to see it. Then it moved on to play to crowds all across the country. The hope was that the film would earn $100,000 for the defense fund, perhaps more. Either way, it would be a shrewd return on the $2,577 that the union had paid for the twenty-scene film.

  The film made Billy livid. He hated the way he was depicted. A fearsome bruiser? A torturer? How could anyone twist the truth with such guiltless agility? he wondered with the facile innocence of the self-righteous. But Billy was also astute. His first meeting with D.W. Griffith had been prompted by his recognition of the affecting power that a film could have on a murderer’s shaky mind. Now he began to consider other possibilities for the moving pictures. Martyr showed him that a film could persuade. And what had worked for labor would work for capital, too. So he suggested to his biggest client, the American Bankers Association, that they commission a film to counter labor’s griping about low wages. It took some persuading, but the bankers eventually grasped the wisdom of Billy’s advice. For a moment they even discussed approaching the great D.W. Griffith to direct their film, but when they learned that the director was under exclusive contract to Biograph, they quickly dropped the idea.

  The Rewards of Thrift told the happy story of a conscientious worker who saved his money, avoided the temptation of alcohol, and was able to afford to buy his own home.

  The bankers were very pleased with the result and quickly made plans to commission more films. The fact that they stood to make a sizable profit from the production, the bankers agreed, was only further proof of the fundamental rightness of its message.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ______________________

  BACK IN NEW YORK CITY that same May, a riot erupted in a Brooklyn movie theater. D.W. had just returned from his long winter’s shooting in L.A., and when he read the story in the New York Call, it jolted him. It was as if he understood for the first time the potential in the flow of energy that was on the screen. He now knew: At his command was “a new force in the intellectual world as revolutionary as electricity.”

  Ironically, the film that had been shown at the Folly Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was not one of his. But given the audience’s negative reaction, D.W. quickly reminded himself, perhaps that was just as well. The Strike at the Mines was an Edison production. It had been advertised as an account of the famous coal strike in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. More than ten thousand men, women, and children had marched on the picket lines in often punishing weather and had stood up to the owners’ truncheon-waving goons. Week after week for nearly a year the bitter confrontation had dragged on. To workers across America, the strikers’ resolve was heroic. Yet the movie told a different story. On the screen hordes of thuggish union men go on a rampage, attacking defenseless scabs and then demolishing the mining compound with joyful abandon. When the film’s hero, an orphaned worker, atones for his brutal behavior and pleads with a kind-hearted mine manager to take him back, the audience in Brooklyn had seen enough.

  “Lies,” people shouted. “Lies.” Seats were broken apart and the pieces hurled in protest at the screen. As if one, the audience stood and stomped their feet in unison. A large angry noise thundered through the theater. It kept building until the projectionist, perhaps fearful for his own safety, stopped the film.

  When D.W. read this account, his heart leaped, and he might just as well have stomped his feet, too. His reaction, though, wasn’t prompted by an urge to show solidarity with the protesters. True, this was a film he would never have made. His sympathies were with the poor and the working class, and he turned out movies that, as much by instinct as design, condemned the greedy clique that he felt controlled America. But he was a storyteller, not an activist. It would be several years before he would be emboldened to write an article for the Los Angeles Citizen entitled “Motion Pictures Can Be Made to Help and Hearten Labor.” Nevertheless, he took great satisfaction in the audience’s uproar at the Folly Theater. It had crystallized his thoughts and at the same time reassured his nagging doubts about the importance of his new profession.

  For he had had doubts. Only “a matter of dumb luck,” D.W. knew only too well, had taken him on his rapid journey from the stage to the moving pictures. But after spending the three years exploring the new world where fate had landed him, D.W. had finally come to appreciate its richness. “Now he has a vision,” his friend Lionel Barrymore, the actor, recognized. “He really believes we’re pioneering in a new art—a medium that can cross barriers of language and culture.”

  D.W.’s commitment to this vision ran deep. In one of his rare bursts of temper, the director had lashed out at a Biograph ingenue whom he had overheard talking about the “flickers.” He reprimanded, “Never let me hear that word in this studio. Just remember,” he continued to lecture, “you’re no longer working in some second-rate theatrical company. What we do here will be seen tomorrow by people all over America—people all over the world. Just remember that the next time you go before a camera.”

  With a convert’s fervor, D.W. had come to believe that movies could do “more than entertain.” They were “a moral and educational force,” a way “to bring out the truth about unjust social and economic conditions.” What was on the screen could make people laugh or cry or even think. The tumult at the Folly Theater had proven to D.W. that a film had the strength to reach out and literally pull people to their feet. Had any storyteller in history, he wondered with pride and gratitude, ever been able to harness his muse to such a power?

  Yet even as a fortified D.W. charged toward new creative battles, he found himself, not unlike Darrow, facing old ones. Mary Pickford had returned. And with her arrival, the old torments and insecurities resurfaced.

  Mary’s marriage had been a mistake; “five years of despair,” she called it. Her brief contracts with IMP and then Majestic Pictures had also been unsatisfactory interludes. So she went to the Biograph Studio, and D.W., wit
h no apparent hesitation or resentment, signed her up.

  Mary was twenty-one. Her bundle of curls was still golden, and the passing of the years had blessed her face with a chameleon beauty. She could glisten with a coquette’s bright charm in one take; in the next, her big demon eyes would be fired up with a sharp womanly wisdom. And from the start Mary and D.W.—or “His Majesty,” as she now dubbed him—were once again locked in to their strained and disquieting relationship. He was obsessed by her, yet at the same time he knew Mary’s stiff-backed reserve made her ultimately unattainable. She resented the power D.W. had over her career, yet at the same time she knew his director’s skills enhanced her natural talent. And so he pushed and she pulled—until it was her turn to push, and his to pull.

  D.W. tried to make Mary jealous, or maybe he simply needed the comfort that comes with reciprocated affection. What is certain is that D.W. sent a telegram and a prepaid ticket to Mae Marsh in California. He wanted her to come to New York and appear in his films.

  Mae was just seventeen, the younger sister of the glamorous titian-haired Margaret Loveridge, who had joined the company the past winter in California. Mae had been hanging around the set, fascinated by her big sister’s intriguing world, when she caught the director’s eye.

  As it happened, Linda, recently separated from D.W. (their legal divorce would drag on for rancorous decades), witnessed this moment. Years later the scene continued to play out acidly in her memory: “Little sister was a mite: most pathetic and half-starved she looked in her wispy clothes, with stockings sort of falling down over her shoe-tops. No one paid a particle of attention to the child. But Mr. Griffith popped up from somewhere and spied her, and gave her a smile. The frail, appealing look of her struck him. So he said, ‘How’d you like to work in a picture?’ ”

  And so Mae’s moving picture career began; and in due course, so did her off-screen relationship with the director. She was young, vulnerable, and fatherless—all traits that pulled D.W. to her as though they were magnets. There was something else, too. “Your talking and giggling make me forget my worries for a time,” he confided to her.

  As soon as Mae arrived in New York, D.W. set to work playing her against Mary. The director was preparing to shoot Man’s Genesis, a story set in prehistoric times. Full of mischief, he offered Mary the female lead. With great indignation, she refused. As D.W. knew she would.

  Mary was too proper to wear the grass skirt that the role required. “I’m sorry, Mr. Griffith,” she told him, “but the part calls for bare legs and feet.”

  Mae, however, was untroubled. She possessed none of Mary’s icy demure. She took the part and had a good time showing off her shapely legs in the process.

  When the camera stopped rolling, D.W. assembled the company and made an announcement: “I should like to say for the benefit of those who may be interested that as a reward for her graciousness Miss Marsh will also receive the role of the heroine in The Sands of Dee.”

  Sands was Biograph’s important “literary” production of the season, an adaptation of a Charles Kingsley poem. The role of the girl who breaks with her father over her love for a painter had been coveted by all the company’s actresses.

  The director’s announcement left Mary, she freely admitted, “thunderstruck.” As D.W. knew she would be.

  Mary fumed. “Only a short while before Miss Marsh had given up a job at the lining counter of Bullock’s Department Store and had come without any previous training in the theater to Biograph.” Even Mary’s mother complained to D.W. about his poor judgment.

  Mary, however, was practical as well as ambitious. And she knew precisely how to get back at her nemesis.

  At the screening of Sands, she was the first to applaud Mae’s performance. But she also shared a “sudden” realization with the director: “If a little girl fresh from the department store could give a performance as good or better than any of us who had spent years mastering our techniques, then pictures were not for me.” She coolly announced that she wanted to return to the theater, “where years of study were a safeguard against the encroachments of amateurs.” Delivering another blow, she haughtily waved about a letter that the playwright William DeMille had written on her behalf to David Belasco, the celebrated man of the theater. “There will never be any real money in these galloping tintypes,” DeMille had pontificated. “And certainly no one can expect them to develop into anything which could, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, be called art.”

  D.W. was left reeling. As Mary knew he would be. All his previous uncertainties, all his insecurities about his achievement, rose up. He found himself forced to confront a harsh and self-incriminating memory: If he had succeeded in making a career for himself in the theater, he would never have become involved in the movies.

  Yet he remained on the surface a model of calm and politeness. He asked Mary to complete one final film, please, and then she could go to Belasco and Broadway. She graciously agreed.

  Once again caught up in his work, in the weeks before the filming of The New York Hat D.W.’s doubts gradually receded, and a new understanding took hold. The New York cultural scions would always look down their noses at the moving-picture business. The city belonged to the theater and the Belascos. If he were ever going to make the sort of large, transcendent films that were taking shape in his mind, if he were going to unleash the still-untapped power in his “new force,” he would have to leave New York. His future was in Los Angeles.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ______________________

  DARROW’S DESTINATION WAS the Los Angeles County Jail, a dull gray box of a building next to the Lincoln Heights police station. He sent Ruby on to the Alexandria Hotel, but he hurried to the prison directly from the train station. During the long, introspective trip from Chicago, the challenges he faced had grown larger and his responsibilities more daunting. And as soon as he arrived in Los Angeles, Darrow felt an urgent need to take measure of the two men whose lives, against all odds, he had been hired to save. Darrow needed to be reassured of the necessity of his unwanted and doubtful mission.

  His meeting that morning with his clients was brief, and Darrow carefully controlled the agenda. J.J. wore a gray suit for the occasion and struck Darrow as self-assured and full of open charm. His younger brother did not bother to shave and offered only curt, oddly defensive responses to the lawyer’s discursive and chatty questions.

  It was Darrow’s practice never to ask if his clients were guilty. Once he had taken a case, the only relevant question was how he would guide the defense. In fact, Darrow brought up nothing substantive at this first meeting, and the McNamaras, for their part, made no attempt either to explain or to dismiss any of the mountain of evidence the prosecution had piled up against them. Nevertheless, Darrow walked out of the prison satisfied. He had shaken hands with the two brothers, touched his flesh to theirs, and looked them straight in the eye. Seated across from them, hearing the sound of their voices, they were no longer the anointed symbols of millions of workers’ hopes and struggles. They were two living, breathing, mortal souls. He knew he could not allow the state of California to take their lives.

  But that same afternoon Darrow found he suddenly needed to go to the site of the crime. Perhaps, he would suggest later, he had been testing himself, gauging his own resolve. He stood in Ink Alley at the precise spot where the prosecution charged the bomb had been planted. The site of the Times Building was now a vacant lot. He stared into a terrible stillness, and his imagination filled in the empty space. Summoned, the tragic night took shape in his mind, and it was as if he were reliving the memory of a horrible dream. Only he knew it had been all too real. What must it have been like, the inescapable flames, the choking smoke? Abruptly Darrow willed himself to stop. Nothing could bring back the twenty-one dead. And nothing could convince him that any version of justice would be served by adding two more victims to the already sorrowful total.

  When he returned to the Alex that evening, a reporter was
waiting. Otheman Stevens from the Examiner asked, “Do you believe the men you will defend are innocent?”

  “I always believe in the innocence of the men I defend,” Darrow parried. But he might as well have added that he also tried not to think about their guilt.

  Work, Darrow hoped, would steady his seesawing thoughts and refocus his mind. Nearly an entire floor of offices had been rented in the Higgins Building on Second and Main, and Darrow, swift, purposeful, and with a surprising pragmatism, began selecting his defense team. They were an eclectic group, each man chosen with a knowing nod for the unique qualities he’d bring to the fray.

  Co-counsel LeCompte Davis carried himself with the gilded bearing of the Kentucky gentleman he had been before tuberculosis had forced him to seek the healing California sun. As an assistant district attorney, Davis had not hesitated to prosecute labor. But he had gone on to earn a reputation as a skilled criminal attorney, and no less valuable given Darrow’s despairing assessment of the case, he was an expert in the complex laws of California. If the facts gave little comfort, then legal nuances, Darrow tried to hope, would come to the rescue of his clients.

  Joseph Scott, another co-counsel, was chosen for strategic reasons that trumped any mere legal expertise. A former president of the Los Angeles school board, he had long been a vocal leader of the city’s Irish Catholic community. Put the well-known, ruddy-faced Scott at the defense table, and maybe the jury would think the McNamaras were cut from the same sort of solid, devout Irish stock.

  Cyrus McNutt, a former Indiana Supreme Court justice, was selected primarily because he was a legendary champion of labor. The AFL was paying the bills; it didn’t hurt, Darrow knew, to give them a co-counsel with whom they’d feel comfortable.