The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  “That’s why I’m so worried about the theater appearance,” Jean says. “That no one asks anything too hard.”

  “We’ve got that Jameson Collins doing the brief talk with her on stage,” Ben assures her. “It’ll go smoothly. There are no questions from the audience or the press.”

  “And then that’s it, right, Ben? No more appearances?”

  “Well, we’re still contracted to do a couple more ‘Dare to be 100’ spots.”

  “No,” Jean says. “No more. Let them sue us.”

  “I’ll talk with Xerxes,” Ben promises.

  “Maybe if I tell the Board that we just have the theater appearance, they’ll be okay.” She looks up at Ben. “We could be back in a week, right?”

  He nods. She settles back against his chest, closing her eyes. She can hear his heartbeat. How good it feels to be held like this. If things were different, she could imagine looking up at Ben now and finding his eyes, safe in his embrace, and kissing him.

  “Jean,” he says.

  She makes a sound.

  “You know I’m working on that … dramatic script.”

  She nods.

  “Well, you know, the stuff about Molly,” he says. “Well, some of it has to be conjecture because Flo isn’t telling us what really happened.”

  She looks up at him. “Why do it at all, Ben? I thought you wanted to portray Flo as she is today: a survivor, a woman who’s embraced life so fully.”

  “Well, I’ll have to at least reference Molly.”

  “No, I don’t think you have to.” Jean’s gotten stiffer in his arms.

  He laughs awkwardly. “Jean, you can’t just ask me not to do something in my own script.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I believe I can.”

  They hold each other’s gaze for several seconds. Then Jean rests her head back against Ben’s chest. She hears him take a deep breath and then heave a long, long sigh.

  The line to the theater stretches all the way up Castro Street and snakes around the corner down Seventeenth Street. It’s mostly gay men, chatting animatedly among themselves, laughing and carrying on, waving to friends farther back in line. There’s a local news crew in front of the theater, and Ted Casablancas from E! Entertainment Television is interviewing people in line, trailed by a cameraman. The crowd hoots when Mary Hart strolls by and waves to them like the Queen of England.

  Richard stands in the lobby. Sister Jean made sure he got a free ticket, but there was no backstage pass for him as there was for Ben. He’ll just have to watch the show by himself from the audience.

  He sure missed Rex. Rex would love this. All the hype, the old movie posters, the films themselves. But Rex was still doing the Barrymore show in L.A. Tonight was actually the closing; he was flying up to San Francisco tomorrow. Richard could hardly wait. He was struck by how much he missed him. After feeling so troubled those last few days in L.A., now all Richard could do was miss him. He even missed Rex scolding him about Ben. He’ll be glad I said what I did, Richard thinks. He’ll be proud of how I handled myself with—

  “Ben!” comes a voice.

  Richard turns.

  It’s a large man in a wrinkled pink suit, with a face as broad as a prairie and a wicked little smile playing around with his lips. He reminds Richard of that guy in The Maltese Falcon—what was his name? Rex would know—Sidney Something …

  “No,” Richard says, finding it amusing at long last to be mistaken for his brother. “I’m not—”

  The large man sidles up to him, ignoring his words. “You look magnificent,” he purrs in that way only large gay men can purr. “Had no idea you had such a body. Guess because you’ve always worn that unflattering leather jacket.”

  Richard grins. “I’m Richard Sheehan,” he says. “Ben’s brother.”

  “Oh.” The man steps back, looks him up and down. “Twin brother, I take it.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well. I see.” The smile gradually returns to his face. “I’m Sam Glick. Are you alone?”

  “For the evening,” Richard tells him.

  “Good enough for me,” Glick says.

  They shake hands. “How do you know my brother?” Richard asks.

  Glick seems taken aback. “He hasn’t told you?”

  “Um, no.”

  “I just bought his script.”

  Richard tries not to react. “His script? You mean his documentary about Flo?”

  “Oh, sweetheart, I wasn’t interested in any old documentary. Let him make that if he wants—but this is going to be a blockbuster mini-series! It’ll revive the genre!”

  Richard nods his head slowly, turning around to look into the auditorium at the drawn curtain. “Oh,” he says. “I see.”

  Glick snorts. “I hope I haven’t spoiled his surprise.”

  Richard smiles. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  Their eye contact is broken all at once by a voice. “Oh, my God! Richard!”

  He turns. It’s Scott. Of all people. Scott, rushing up to him.

  “Richard! I’ve been looking for you! I figured you’d be here.”

  He stops in front of Richard and Glick. He’s wearing a tight blue T-shirt and tan velvet pants. Richard notices Glick’s eyes open wide, his lips part slightly as he sizes Scott up and down.

  “What are you doing here?” Richard asks.

  “Well, you know how much I love Flo. I had to come.” He smiles seductively. “Plus, I figured I might catch you alone.”

  Richard suddenly feels like laughing. To think he was ever attracted to this empty-headed narcissist. He can just hear Rex’s catty appraisal of the velvet pants.

  “Oh, but Scott, I’m not alone,” Richard says, barely able to suppress his laughter. He turns to Glick. “Let me introduce Sammy.”

  Scott looks up into the enormous face of Sam Glick. Glick, for his part, falls easily into the role, much easier than Detective Lee.

  “Yes,” he purrs, slipping an arm around Richard. “Aren’t we the pair?”

  Scott sniffs. “You’re a pair all right,” he mutters. To Richard: “Your tastes have certainly changed.”

  Richard just grins. Scott slinks off into the crowd. All Richard can feel is amusement, even when Glick suggests they sit together “just to keep up the charade.”

  “Although,” he says with a leer, “why you’d want to give such a specimen as that the brush-off, I can’t imagine.”

  “I’ll introduce you to Rex someday,” Richard tells him. “Then you’ll understand perfectly.”

  The lights dim.

  “Oh, come on,” Glick urges. “The show’s starting.”

  They take their seats halfway up the orchestra section. Glick asks for the aisle. “To stretch my legs, you know,” he says. Richard marvels at the dexterity with which the man folds his large frame into the tiny seat.

  Jameson Collins walks out onto the stage to a scattering of applause. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are here tonight for an historic evening. A lost treasure has been found: the very first star of them all. The woman who jump-started the star system. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you … Florence … Lawrence!”

  The crowd thunders to its feet. Cameras roll down the aisles. But instead of Flo appearing on stage, the curtains open to the movie screen. An image flickers to life there. A jumpy image at first, but then it steadies itself, revealing an enormous iris of a woman’s face.

  It’s Flo, Richard thinks. Even eighty years later, I can see it’s her. Her eyes are the same. The way she smiles.

  It’s a Griffith close-up. Her face is simple, sanguine. In her eyes dance the incandescence of the master’s lighting. In her eyes, Richard can easily discern the magic of the medium—as well as the dreams of a young girl. This was before the pain, the disillusionment, the terror, before the enchantment she first created nearly ninety years ago turned into the excess and tawdry sensationalism they knew today. This was before the dream got out of hand.

  The crowd stays on
its feet, applauding. She bears down on them with grace and light, the first goddess of them all.

  And suddenly Richard gets it. Why they loved her. How she captivated a generation, the first generation ever to stare up in wonder and awe at the silver screen.

  This—this—was The Biograph Girl.

  Three short films are screened, each about eight minutes long. A live piano accompanist creates a lovely musical bridge between the scenes. The prints are pristine, projected at the correct speed to avoid the fast, jerky motion associated with silent films. “Not everyone walked like Charlie Chaplin,” Rex has told Richard many times.

  Next comes a clip of Flo on a barge up the Nile River in Egypt, part of a longer Lubin film. She looks distracted, weary, even sick. Following this, there are more clips, sometimes just seconds long, of Flo’s walk-ons at MGM. There she is, behind Myrna Loy’s shoulder. There she is, glaring at Gable. There she is, with opera glasses seated next to a pretty blond girl in Camille.

  The montage ends with a scene of Flo trapped in a burning building. Matt Moore rushes in to rescue her. Her hands are in her hair and she’s terrified—almost as if the flames were real.

  The crowd whoops as the lights come up. They begin chanting: “Florrence! Flor-rence!” They stand and applaud over their heads.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jameson Collins announces once more, shouting to be heard above the din. “I present to you—Miss Florence Lawrence!”

  Richard has to stand on his toes to get an unobstructed view. Flo is helped out on stage by Sister Jean. She can barely walk, all hunched over in a sparkling blue dress, an absurd tiara on her head. She seems dazed by the applause—not dazzled, as she had been that first day on the Rosie show. She doesn’t acknowledge the whistles and the cheers. She just passes from Sister Jean to Jameson Collins, who eases her down into a chair a stagehand has just provided.

  The applause goes on for at least five more minutes. Finally she manages to lift her chin and cast her eyes out into the lights. She smiles weakly.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Collins says for her.

  The cheering dies out into scattered pockets. Somebody yells, “We love you, Flo!” from the balcony.

  “And she loves you, I’m sure,” Collins says.

  He sits down in a chair opposite her. The last of the applause fades away. “Now, Miss Lawrence,” Collins says, “we have just seen some wonderful clips. What did you think of them?”

  The cameras at the foot of the stage bear in on her.

  She blinks into the lights and doesn’t respond right away.

  It’s the same glassy stare from the other day, Richard says to himself.

  “Miss Lawrence?” Collins asks again.

  “It was quite exciting to see them,” Flo says, her voice barely above a whisper, sounding coached by Ben.

  Glick turns to Richard. “She’s hardly as robust as your brother portrayed her.”

  “She’s not herself,” Richard tells him, his eyes steady on Flo.

  “Yes, so many wonderful scenes from the dawn of moviemaking,” Collins is saying. “You can’t rent these from Blockbuster!”

  The audience laughs. Flo just sits there.

  “Now, that last scene, Miss Lawrence,” Collins says, clearly a bit unnerved by her vagueness. “That was you and Matt Moore, in Pawns of Destiny. We saw him rescuing you from a wall of flames. But, in fact, as you would point out later, it was you who had to rescue him—isn’t that right?”

  She doesn’t respond. She just blinks a few times.

  Collins smiles in embarrassment. “I guess it was after the cameras were turned off? Is that right? The fire got out of control and—”

  “No,” Flo says.

  “No?”

  Flo’s shaking her head slowly. “It wasn’t.” She stops as if she’s forgotten what she was going to say. “The fire got out of control. So I had to rescue him.”

  She just reverted to her old well-rehearsed line, Richard thinks. What the hell have they done to her? Flo just stares off at nothing from the stage.

  “Well, yes, that’s what I’d read.” Collins clears his throat. “Let’s see what else here. Ah, yes. The first film we saw tonight was Her First Biscuits. You looked so lovely in that.”

  “Thank you,” she manages to say.

  “And that was Mary Pickford, wasn’t it? The small girl who does the spin after she’s eaten the bad-tasting biscuits?”

  “Is she here?”

  Collins looks surprised. “Pickford?”

  Flo nods.

  “No, no,” he says, terribly uncomfortable now. “I’m afraid Miss Pickford—Miss Pickford passed on a few years ago.”

  There’s a ruffle of programs from the audience.

  Glick says, “Is she daft?”

  Richard just shakes his head. “She’s … confused.”

  Collins clears his throat. “The last clips we showed,” he says, more to the audience than Flo, “were compiled after much diligent research, viewing hundreds of films over and over, to locate Miss Lawrence in the cameo parts she did at MGM.”

  “The scene from Camille,’” Flo says.

  Collins brightens. “Yes, Miss Lawrence. You’re right. That was indeed the opera scene from Camille. Do you remember making that?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. I saw it. I saw myself up there.”

  Collins is evidently delighted to be getting something out of her. Anything. “That was directed by George Cukor,” he says helpfully.

  “Yes. Mr. Cukor.”

  She seems to notice the audience in front of her for the first time, almost as if she’d just woken up. She squints into the crowd. Richard thinks he sees her sit up straighter in her chair.

  “It was made by Mr. Cukor,” Flo says, smiling. “He was very kind to me when he learned who I was. A good man.”

  “Yes. And an excellent director, too. What else do you remember, Miss Lawrence?”

  “I—I—” She seems to want to say something, but can’t frame the words. “I—up there—”

  “Hey, Flo!” someone calls from the audience. “Will you whistle for us?”

  The crowd hoots, laughs. Flo stops in midreverie and smiles.

  “They want me to whistle,” she says to Collins. The audience cheers.

  Collins seems flummoxed. “But—are you sure?”

  “Oh, I can whistle.” Flo beams. “I can whistle.”

  Richard’s on the edge of his seat. Sure you can, Flo. Sure. You can do it.

  Collins glances backstage. It appears he gets the go-ahead from someone back there. Ben? Sister Jean? He rises and then helps Flo stand shakily. He escorts her to the center of the stage as a prop boy sets up a mike. The audience cheers again.

  “Here, Miss Lawrence,” Collins says. “Into here.”

  He taps the microphone. It makes a thudding sound that ricochets through the audience. “All right,” he says with a little resigned smile. “Ladies and gentlemen, Baby Flo, the Child Wonder Whistler!”

  The crowd goes berserk. Baseball caps are tossed into the air. Flo smiles, looking out at them in wonder. She waits until they quiet down, then pulls her lips together, her face creasing into a thousand folds—

  —but nothing comes out.

  There’s a collective intake of breath from the audience.

  She tries again. A tiny little whistle emerges this time, a short, dissonant sound. Then another. Richard thinks she’s trying to whistle “Daisy, Daisy” as she did for him back at St. Mary’s. But it might easily be “Tell me what you want” by the Spice Girls.

  It’s clear she can’t do it. A few more twists of air into the mike and the audience, in sympathy, begins to applaud. Still she stands there, straining to make a sound. Collins comes up behind her, takes her by the shoulders, and gently leads her back to her chair. The applause grows louder.

  “Enough,” Richard says, struggling in his seat. “Enough, enough.” Where the hell were Ben and Sister Jean?

  Flo seems to shrivel in her chair.
The cameras draw in for a close-up. Collins looks up befuddled and glances off toward the wings.

  “I saw her,” Flo says, her tiny voice picked up by her clip-on microphone. “I saw her … Molly … up there.”

  “That’s it. That’s it!” Richard says, standing up and pushing past Glick’s legs out into the aisle.

  His first inclination is to head backstage and tell his fucking brother and that irresponsible nun guardian to get her the hell off the stage. But then he hears Flo start to cry. He hasn’t been able to get that sound out of his ears since he’d told her about Lester, and here it is all over again. He stops in the aisle, turning to look back up at the stage.

  Flo’s covered her face and she’s crying.

  “What are you doing?” Glick shouts as Richard makes a dash for the stage. The audience, showing its support for Flo, is now on its feet, in a standing ovation. Collins stands behind Flo, gesturing wildly to someone.

  Richard hoists himself up on the stage. A security guard attempts to follow, but stumbles backward. Richard reaches Flo as the applause becomes a roll of echoing thunder. He falls down on his knees in front of her just as Ben and Sister Jean rush out onto the stage.

  “Where the hell were you?” Richard shouts at them. “How could you let this happen to her?”

  He takes her hands in his. “Flo. Come on, sweetheart,” he says. “Come with me.”

  Her eyes find him. “Richard,” she says.

  “Sure, Flo. You know me. Come along.”

  “I saw her,” she whispers. “Up there. On the screen.”

  “Flo,” Sister Jean says, stooping down next to her now as well. “Let’s go, Flo.”

  “I saw Molly,” she says.

  “It’s going to be all right, Flo,” Richard assures her.

  But she’s shaking her head, more animated now than she was moments before. “‘This is why I left,” she’s crying, and suddenly ripe terror replaces the vacancy in her eyes. “This is what I was like before.”

  She squeezes Richard’s hands, her eyes now sharp and wide in his. Her voice is strong, commanding. “You’ve got to help me, Richard,” she tells him. “It’s happening just like before. I’ve become her again. Florence Lawrence.”

  He feels his heart break. “I’ll help you, Flo,” he promises.