“So one’s a philanthropist, the other’s an English professor? I only know them through cards.”
“Well, people can be a lot of different things. You know that.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“They’re serious about the movie business, Mr. Grand. And these aren’t patient men. Thirteen thousand dollars isn’t nothing to these guys. Last month I seen Mr. Waldo slit a guy open like a fish over a seventy-dollar mistake he made on a ledger. He was white, too. A union man.”
“When are you seeing them next?”
“Bumpy I have a delivery with in Hoboken tomorrow night.”
“Can I trust you to relay a message?”
“Yup.”
“Tell him he wrote a good script,” Micah says, rising, brushing gravel off the seat of his pants. “Tell him I need time.”
SIX
Poles of light drop lines into the sky. Micah, in tails, as slick and well tuned as a piano keyboard; Izzy, if not quite as roguish-looking as his brother, feeling measurably improved in black tie, monochromatic requirements having relieved him of sartorial responsibility. Movie one-sheets—images of Till atop the Thunderbolt in Coney Island, arms waving overhead, Babe Ruth in miniature standing below on the ground, hot dog in hand—are everywhere. The posters are cased in light boxes and propped on easel stands, fluttering from flagpoles and bannered across the theater entrance, an Asian temple dropped into the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. It is the premiere of Quicktime.
“No invite for me, Ginger?” a familiar growl asks Micah as an arm locks with his and reels him in, forcing him into close physical proximity. Mr. Waldo’s face is puffy and matte, the result of four days’ car travel—all dirt roads and back streets, beef jerky and poor whiskey, splinters of sleep snatched in the front seat and, just this morning, a lousy shave in a colored-owned service-station restroom, all cold water and razor pull. “No seat at the table for Mr. Waldo?”
“Good Christ, man, what are you doing here?”
“We given you plenty of time—two months to finish your picture, get your house in order, and set up the next one—so don’t hand me the high hat.”
“No, I’m just surprised to see you here, that’s all.”
“We’re business partners, Mr. Grand. Come to support my business partner.”
“You came all the way out here for that?”
“I’m a serious man, Mr. Grand.”
“Yes, you’ve impressed that upon me.” The naked California sunshine animates something boyish and resplendent in Mr. Waldo. The citrus spray brushes away the gangster’s cobwebby obscurity and reveals new details: a fishhook scar stamped across the meat of his nose, a lotionlike thickness coating his tongue and the corners of his mouth, dry palms that look made of liquid silver with chalky scratch marks tic-tac-toe-ing his hands on the other side. He is wearing an ill-fitting bohemian-shabby brown suit, and the slant of his shoulders suggests he’s preparing to go charging into windmills.
“I come here today with a business proposal,” Mr. Waldo says, pressing into Micah’s hand a paper napkin from the Paradise Club. Over a garish cartoon of swaying palm trees, whorling seashells, and tropical shores is scribbled in child’s penmanship an IOU concerning his proposed stake in the Grand brothers’ upcoming slave epic.
“Twenty percent?” Micah asks, halting the pair’s progress.
“Figure five percent to relieve your debt, five percent interest, the other half for providing the inspiration for your next picture.” Dusting lint from the filmmaker’s shoulders like a Pullman porter.
“Keep it.” Handing the napkin back to him. “It’d never hold up in court.”
“Fair enough. Anyway, friends best not let paperwork gum up the works.” Tucking the slip back into his handkerchief pocket. “You here alone tonight?”
“My wife’s back home looking after the boys.”
“And your cocoa lady friend?”
“We’re through, but thanks for asking.”
“Woman spins your dreidel, you shouldn’t set her down,” he says as they stroll along the red carpet arm in arm, Mr. Waldo answering people’s gaze with a lifted regal chin.
“What about you?” Micah asks. “You bring your attack dog?”
“Bumpy? You needn’t worry about him. He’s a good boy, he’ll do as I tell him.… So when are we making our script?”
“My brother’s done some work on it.”
“We’re new to the scriptwriting game. I’m grateful for any piano tuning.”
“Izzy’s very fond of your pages, it’s got to be said.”
“But you’re the decider, Red. What’s your feeling on it?”
He looks at the man, reflecting on his sentimental weakness for members of the criminal element and his certainty that Mr. Waldo is made of finer, nobler stuff than himself. If he had this man’s discipline and calm, he’d be a king. “It’s good.”
“Thirteen thousand plus interest good?”
Micah looks at the man. He has weary eyes that have seen too much and lived too much and signal five or six things at once. In another life the man might have been mayor of a city, or a captain of industry, or the dean of a midsize southern college.
“Yeah,” Micah says. “It’s thirteen thousand dollars plus interest good.”
“Then we in the picture business together,” he says, the weary face beatific. Mr. Waldo takes Micah’s right hand, places it in his own eagle’s claw, turns it faceup, and traces with a crooked index finger the deep “7” that’s printed there. Marking their shared fate, he then spits in Micah’s palm, leaving the two of them to stare at the warm, bubbling gob. “Because, understand, this ain’t no bank, sonny boy. No credit’s offered in this motherfucker.”
Deep in the crowd, Marblestone marks Micah being accosted. Dressed in a tuxedo that looks stitched together from a couple of tarpaulins, Marblestone abandons his brood—a football-team bench’s worth of wives, sons, daughters, half cousins, in-laws, tenant farmers, and forgotten serfs—and begins making a terrifying beeline for the black man.
“Byron Marcus Waldo, what brings you out west?!”
“Little Artie Marbles, I haven’t seen you since you packed up the last of them nickelodeons up in Harlem. How you doing, baby?”
“Never better. Figures you’d know the golden boy.”
“Yes, sir.” Beaming with validation. “Mr. Grand here’s my newest business associate.”
“Can you get over this?” Marblestone asks, gesturing toward the assemblage. “Not bad for a little pischer hymie off the boat.”
“Like I explained to Mr. Grand here”—Mr. Waldo radiant in the California bloom—“bringing light to the infidels, that’s what pictures do.”
“So you got tickets to this smoke-and-mirrors show?”
“Y’know, I just misplaced them,” Mr. Waldo says, giving himself a comic patting-down.
“Come.” Marblestone exhales, bullying the three of them through the crowd, past the press line to the theater entrance, where an usher barely out of his teens, still rooting acne from his chin, stands taking tickets. “We need two good seats for my guests.”
“All the floor seats are reserved, sir.” Swallowing hard, eclipsed in the shadow of the mogul’s galactic bulk. “But there are still some seats left in the balcony.”
“Listen, applesauce, do you know who you’re talking to here? Arthur Marblestone, whom no less of an authority than Moving Picture World referred to as, quote, ‘One of the great pioneers and entrepreneurs of the motion-picture industry!’ end quote.”
“No coloreds allowed on the floor, sir,” the usher says softly to Micah, taking him for a sympathetic audience. “Theater policy’s balcony only. Premiere nights especially.”
“Mr. Waldo is not complaining.” The peer of the realm lifting his hand in dismissal, a relaxed gesture that informs everyone that he has heard and absorbed all pertinent information and will now be moving on to more important matters. “Mr. Waldo is delighted.”
“Very good, sirs.” The usher nods, handing Mr. Waldo a pair of tickets for the upper reaches of the auditorium. “Two for nigger heaven!”
Izzy navigates his way toward the theater entrance, stopping to remove a blotch of gum from the underside of his shoe.
“Boychick,” Marblestone grumbles, back in the sunshiny thick of it, having situated Mr. Waldo in the cheap seats, out of breath and leaning against an ancient stone temple dog, “there’s a business associate I’d like you to meet. He’s responsible for the kliegs, red carpet, security, the whole schmear.”
Marblestone’s man is a small, mischievous-looking character, shorter than Izzy, with shifting doll’s eyes wide set in a waxworks face, and oiled, centrifugally parted hair. His affectless expression blurs into fixity like a constellation viewed through a scope as he hands Izzy an embossed business card that reads:
SIDNEY BLOAT
Dealer, Red Carpets, Fine Antiquities
“And might you know the origins of the red carpet?” Bloat asks in an indeterminate European accent, his open mouth revealing gums that have encroached too far up the shoreline and a set of nubby, uniformly level teeth, the result of too much midnight grinding. “Der rote Teppich?”
“I remember hearing about this somewhere.” Izzy, always eager to demonstrate any nugget of knowledge that exists outside the picture industry. “Something about the railroads using them to direct people aboard, right?”
“Correct. But before its popular American usage, prior to the glamorous and fabulous red-carpet treatment, rote Teppich Behandlung?”
“Uh, no.”
“Well, you see, the red carpet was originally implemented as a weapon; rolling out the red carpet was a battle cry, the red-carpet treatment a signal for certain death from above.”
“Really?”
“Yes, because bundled inside said carpet, trundled inside said tapestry, rolled inside said rug, was a coterie of mercenaries, marksmen, private armies, jubilant assassins, soldiers of fortune, anarchist bomb throwers, a band of evil angels, and a collection of the worst, most rotten scoundrels the eighteenth century had on offer. The carpet was bad, bad, bad. And it was red.”
“Huh.”
“Hence the sanguine coloration.”
“Right.”
“And this”—opening arms wide to take in the red sea of rug—“this carpet which you walk over tonight so casually, which you traipse across with such impunity, is not just any red carpet but the world’s largest red carpet, over three miles long unfurled, witness to coups, revolts, successions, surprise attacks, and, most recently, the failed Beer Hall Putsch. This carpet, which your entertainment dignitaries traverse ever so gingerly, this carpet that you take such delight in stepping on, upon which you stub your American tobacco and imprint your Wrigley chewing gum with abstract Kandinsky decadence, has been dipped in the waters of a thousand years of Teutonic history, drenched in the blood of German brotherhood, borne across the backs of Bavarian peasantry, all to reach you here, tonight, to be unfurled for your Quicktime motion-picture festivities.”
“Well, Arthur always goes all out for premieres.”
“This is what we in Germany refer to as fancy-schmancy!”
“Indeed.”
“So Mr. Marblestone has mentioned to me plans of a potential Dark Continent adventure.”
“Nothing’s been finalized yet.”
“Given the primitive moral character of our dusky friends, one suspects the opportunity might present itself to make a wide variety of films. Perhaps you are familiar with the periodical National Geographic, the periodical that exists for the promotion of terrestrial knowledge?”
“Sure.”
“And have you never wondered what accounts for said publication’s popularity?”
“The exoticism?” Sign-languaging a guess with shrugged shoulders.
“Oh, the American people are an innocent people! I look forward to seeing you aboard the steamship.”
Inside, Micah has just thanked the cast and crew, read aloud a short telegram from Babe Ruth—who has just finished a World Series sweep and is enjoying a hero’s tour of the country—and introduces the picture’s star. Till rises from his seat to accept the rapturous sonic wave with no intention of wading in until an audience member shouts, “Say something, Henry!”
Micah nods across the auditorium to the puzzled actor, who, after a moment’s hesitation, negotiates his row, hops down the aisle, and joins the director at the front of the theater before the heavy velvet curtain.
“Talk, Till!” shouts another fan.
“Just thank them for coming, Henry,” Micah whispers through clenched dentistry. “No one’s expecting Oscar Wilde.”
“Well, I just want to thank everyone for being here tonight,” Till manages, finding a comfortable register that fills the front third of the auditorium. “We’re all very proud of this picture and hope you enjoy it, too.”
A murmur wends its way through the crowd. Till’s voice, while perhaps not as helium-high and ebullient as one might hope from his film appearances, nonetheless has a pleasant, oaky, midwestern resonance. Faces in the audience tilt toward Louella Parsons, Hearst’s horse-faced syndicated gossip columnist, who sits in an overhanging balcony box. She stares toward the front of the auditorium, holding her pen aloft like a monarch determining whether or not to sign some royal decree, nods her approbation, and returns to her little spiral reporter’s notebook.
“Nice speech, Cicero!” comes a cry from the back of the theater as the lights go down and Henry’s name comes up in the credits.
“We’re finished,” Marblestone whispers once Micah is planted in the seat next to him. “Do you know that sitting in this auditorium tonight are parties to whom I owe more than four hundred thousand dollars?”
“Jesus.”
“And those are only bankers.… I’ve not had my kneecaps broken in twenty years.”
“Let’s just try to enjoy the night, Arthur.”
But it was impossible. While most of the movies released that year were still silent, the three top-grossing pictures of 1928 were all sound films. Most woeful to Marblestone was Steamboat Willie, an eight-minute short starring an indomitable cartoon rodent created by Walt Disney that had caused a sensation. “Lemme get this straight,” Marblestone had thundered, slapping a copy of Variety on his desk after examining the weekend grosses, proceeding in a rage to rip his own shirt from his back, “we’re about to get run out of business by a fucking whistling rat?!”
The curtains part like a striptease. On the screen, written in silvery light, the opening sequence of Quicktime: a race between Till attempting to put a horseshoe on his pony versus an auto mechanic across the way changing a set of tires. It is delightful. It is technically brilliant. And it is antiquated, Till a commedia dell’arte figure from an already receding past. The work is in opposition to the momentum of its time; there are gales of laughter, to be sure, but they do not arrive in the thunderclaps that might have greeted these antics six months ago, or even three.
“You hear that?” Marblestone moans into the quietude. “That’s the sound of the icicles scraping the deck of the Titanic. We’re sunk.”
“Quit it, Arthur, they’re enjoying it,” Micah says, surprised at how well he can register his own murmured voice through patchy schools of laughter.
“My hands,” Marblestone says, looking at his thick, callused fingers and cracked palms. “I ever tell you how my father used to lift pickle barrels for a living? In the snow he’d do it. How my heart would twist like a bagel watching him lift those heavy barrels with his frozen hands. Frozen, frostbitten hands!”
“Well, lucky for us, moviemakers work with our feet.”
“If this picture fails, it’s back to digging ditches for me, boyo.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Worse.”
Christened in the blue-velvet dreamsong, Marblestone looks like a statue left outside on estate grounds on a cool night, something antiqu
e and forgotten that the world has passed by. Time. Work. Money. Family. Arthur. Waldo. Izzy. Rose. These the cards Micah wants to handle, the deck he wants returned to him.
“Arthur.” Holding the man’s sausage-link fingers in the dark. “We’ll do it.”
“Do what? Be clear. Say what you mean.”
“Africa.” Unable to renege now that the magic word has been unloosed. “God help us, send us to the jungle. We’ll shoot your goddamned scenery.”
Through inkwell blackness Micah can make out the contours of Marblestone’s jigsaw-puzzle face, radiant with tears. “You’re a good boy, Micah,” the mogul says. “You’re a good boy.”
Sitting in the outer vestibule, Izzy and Micah recall similar situations from twenty years earlier; scenes outside the principal’s or rabbi’s office and the almost sensual prolongation that came with awaiting official rebuke for some mischief Micah had plotted and Izzy had helped perpetrate (chalk, stolen; spitballs, launched; crib sheets, concealed). An enemy of authority anywhere, Micah impersonates a swimmer trying to prevent himself from drowning, his body language that of a man trying to wrest himself free from this bureaucratic imposition. He taps his shoes, he cracks his knuckles, he hoists himself in his seat and collapses, and he buttons and unbuttons his jacket. Contributing to the illusion that they are back in elementary school are a couple of truants seated beside the Grand brothers: a middle-aged mother and her adult son—an overgrown simpleton of a man, a Harry Langdon figure in baby’s bib and overalls—who are discussing their own upcoming African adventure.
Izzy and Micah’s London visit so far had been an enameled affair, rich in food and drink, ritual, and attention. (Though the Great War had ended years before, the Brits they encountered still showed some excitement about being in the company of Americans, especially a pair of Yanks who’d been dunked in fame’s poisoned well.) The brothers had been assured by Marblestone’s European fixer, Sidney Bloat, that obtaining the permits necessary to undertake the film project in the British protectorate was strictly a formality. And “formality” was the right word for it. Even this entrance hall has a weighted, forbidding complexity, Britishly ornate with stiff Chippendale chairs, giant gemstone globes, cracked maps, and a ceiling fan registering drowsy dismissal over everything.
O, Africa! Page 9