The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  Finally he hunches down, pulls in his lips, narrows his eyes. “George Bailey, I own this town,” he cackles—Lionel as old Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.

  Flo claps her hands together. “Oh, yes! Yes, you have them down! Oh, how wonderful it is to laugh again. It sounds just like them, Rex. You’ve got it. I was there! I should know!”

  What she doesn’t know—what none of them know—is their waiter, realizing the old chain-smoking lady at his table is actually The Biograph Girl, has called a photographer friend. Who in turn let the information slip to someone else. And someone else.

  By the time they leave the restaurant, six photographers ring their limousine.

  “Aw, Jesus,” Richard grouses.

  “Miss Lawrence!” the photographers shout. “Over here, Flo!”

  The cameras snap like turtles. Flo recoils from the flash. Rex puts his arm around her, and Jean walks ahead of her, trying to shield her from the glare.

  “Why can’t you guys let up?” Richard shouts. “She’s just an old lady.”

  “Hey, Flo,” calls an overweight guy in a smiley-face T-shirt and backward baseball cap. “Did you hear Margaret Butz’s family is thinking of a civil suit against you? Wrongful death, they’re claiming. They want half of what you got from Waters. Any comment?”

  “No comment,” barks Richard.

  “What happened onstage at the Castro?” another photographer shouts. “Myrtle Pickles says it’s guilt taking over!”

  “Get out of our way,” Rex yells.

  The photographers push in. Anita gets up between them and Flo. She scuffles with them a bit, trying to get by. One of the photographers gives her a shove.

  “Hey!” Rex shrills suddenly. “Don’t touch her!” He jumps the guy who pushed Anita. They fall down into the pine needles and begin throwing punches.

  “Oh, dear!” Flo shouts.

  A couple of photographers are all at once upon her, cameras not three inches from her face, a steady lightning storm of flashes. She falls back up against the limo. Sister Jean lashes out, smashing one camera to the ground, as if it were some prehistoric predator.

  “If that’s broke, you’re payin’ for it, lady!” the photographer shouts.

  Flo is trembling, her hands clenched in front of her in tight white fists. The limo driver has opened the car door and Jean is easing her inside.

  “She’s a hundred and seven years old!” Anita is shrieking. “How can you be so goddamn barbaric? You’re hounding Flo to death like you did Princess Diana!”

  “Hey, people want to know if she did it,” the overweight guy in the baseball cap lashes back. “If she killed that girl.”

  Richard is separating Rex from the brawling photographer. “Get in the car, Nooker,” he commands. He pushes the other guy back into the bushes. “You’re lucky we don’t file an assault suit against you.”

  “Ah, fuck you!”

  They all manage to get back into the car and drive off.

  “Are you okay, Flo?” Richard asks.

  Jean has her arm around her. She’s shaking quite visibly.

  “Dear God,” she says. “Look at me.”

  Anita reaches over and takes Flo’s hands in her own to steady them.

  “Oh, this can’t go on,” Flo says. “My head—”

  “Is it a headache again, Flo?” Richard asks.

  She nods. “I don’t know why I should be surprised by all the fuss. Florence Lawrence created it, didn’t she? That day on the track in St. Louis. Now it just won’t go away. For anyone.”

  “Well, we’re getting you away,” Jean promises.

  “It won’t be that easy,” Flo says softly.

  Her eyes meet Richard’s.

  “This can’t go on,” she tells him.

  He nods.

  “You won’t forget your promise to help me?” she asks.

  He assures her he won’t.

  “I just wish there were another way—another way to—” Richard says back at their hotel. His voice cracks. He runs his hands across his hair. He can’t finish his thought.

  It’s quiet now. Jean and Anita and Rex are asleep. Flo and Richard sit alone, opposite each other, in her room. He leans forward in his chair, wringing his hands between his legs.

  “There’s no other way,” Flo assures him. She brings a cigarette, back in its old holder now, to her mouth. “God’s forgotten I’m down here. A hundred-plus years and still He hasn’t called me. I have to take matters into my own hands. It’s time.” She pauses, exhaling smoke. “Don’t you see I’ve got to do it before it happens again?”

  “Yes, but, Flo, maybe we could do something—something less—”

  “Dramatic?” She exhales smoke. “Come now, Richard. You know Florence Lawrence always enjoyed her theatrics.” She laughs. “No, this is the only way. I can’t think of any other way I’d rather do it.” She looks at him with a wicked little gleam in her eyes. “Indulge me.”

  “But maybe you could just—go away …”

  “What? And end up like Mae Murray, crazy as a loon? Or Pickford? Oh, she thought she was so smart, stepping out while the audience ‘was still applauding,’ or so she said. So much bull that was. She craved the spotlight. Always did. I know how she ended up, hiding out in her room, boozy and terrified. The press writing mysterious little blurbs about her. Not me, Richard. Not me.”

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  She smiles kindly. “Oh, Richard. You remind me so much of Lester.” She stubs out her cigarette. “But you know, it’s just going to keep getting worse, what with Ben’s film and who knows what else.”

  “I know.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  He can’t speak for several seconds. He just looks over at her. It’s almost as if she isn’t real, sitting there opposite him. It’s as if she were nothing more than smoke and mirrors, a figment of his imagination—of the collective imagination of the world. It was like Roddy McDowall said, that day in the cemetery: They were all part of the magic, the illusion.

  He asks, “This is what you really want?”

  She nods. She’s got all her senses back, all her power. At least, for now. “It is, Richard,” she says. “It’s what I want.”

  “All right then,” he says hoarsely. “I’ll help you. I gave you my word.”

  “Thank you, Richard.”

  They’re quiet for several seconds. They just sit there, feeling the enormity of the weight that has settled between them.

  Finally Richard says, “Flo, I need to ask you one more thing. In case, I don’t get a chance later.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I was never able to find a birth certificate for you. The Hamilton records weren’t complete.”

  “My birthday is January 1.”

  “I know.” He smiles. “But what year, Flo?”

  She smiles back at him. “I’m one hundred and seven. Do the math.”

  “I did. But, Flo”—he takes out a document from his inside jacket pocket—“this suggests something else.”

  “You’re always taking something out of your pocket, Richard.” She leans back in her chair. “What do you have for me this time?”

  “The 1900 Census, Flo. For Buffalo, New York. I found a listing for your grandmother’s house. You and your brother and your mother were living with her.”

  She nods. “That’s right. For about three years around the turn of the century.”

  “The census lists you as fourteen in 1900, Flo. So if I do that math …”

  She grins. Like the proverbial cat with feathers in its whiskers. “Oh, dear,” she says, not surprised, not in any way defensive or confused. “I guess that would make me—what? A hundred and eleven? Twelve? Somewhere around there.” She winks over at Richard. “A lady can still be coy about her age, can’t she?”

  He just gazes at her. “How do you do it?” he asks finally in obvious awe. “How? There really is something magic about you, Flo.”

  “Magic,” she says,
relishing the word. “Do you believe in magic, Richard?”

  “I’ve come to. Since meeting you.”

  “Magic is for the audience—or the readers, in your case—to discover,” Flo tells him. “It is no concern of ours.”

  “Maybe not, but your life has been—”

  “Magical? Yes, Richard. For it’s life that matters. You see, that’s why I must do what I need to do. I fought long and hard to find my way back to my life. What I realized—and what Florence Lawrence never could—was that life doesn’t start when Hollywood—or Lady Luck or whoever—starts paying attention to you. Nor does it end when they stop. Life is all the rest of it, all the crazy lot rest of it.”

  She sighs. “I brought her back to life. She was still there, down deep, all this time. And she hadn’t changed.”

  Richard shakes his head.

  “No, she hadn’t,” Flo continues. “Hadn’t changed one little bit. I should have known, of course. She always was a foolhardy girl. Weak and easily seduced by flattery. Vainglorious. Like a swan. She forgot all about Jumbo and—but I haven’t told you, have I?”

  She looks over at Richard with some mild surprise on her face. “I’ve never told you about the fair. I’ve told you all so much—but never about that. About the year the great Pan-American Exposition took over the town.”

  “No,” he says. “You’ve only just mentioned it in passing.”

  “Well, it deserves far more than that.” She smiles. “All right, Richard. Then I have one story left. Let me tell you about the fair.”

  September 1901

  There are times when I close my eyes, even to this day, and I see the radiant outline of the Electric Tower and all the buildings surrounding it, the brilliant white of two million lightbulbs configuring the fair against the purple night sky.

  The Pan-American Exposition left a big impact on a little girl. How old was I then? Does it matter? Twelve, thirteen, fourteen—somewhere in there. Take your pick. I was young and impressionable. Oh, I liked to think of myself as worldly and sophisticated—after all, I had been the Child Wonder of the stage—but in Buffalo, I was merely a schoolgirl, a fact that my brother Norman delighted in reminding me.

  “You think you’re so high and mighty, Miss Florence,” he had taunted as we walked home from school down the shady expanse of Delaware Avenue, past all the fine, stately homes that would never be ours. “Well, nobody cares anymore, Flo, because you’re growin’ titties.” He was eminently pleased with himself for having said such a nasty thing. “Baby Flo ain’t s’posed to have no titties.”

  I ignored him. I had gotten quite proficient in doing so ever since Mother and I had returned here to live in my grandmother’s house. My brother had been living here in Buffalo since my father died, and we barely knew each other. Even Mother looked at this tall, leggy boy with his wild hair and pockmarked face and drew in her breath. She had no idea how to deal with boys. None.

  Who could have predicted that Norman would end his days rocking next to me on the porch, riding around in my aquamarine Bel-Air? Surely not me. I despised Norman then and wanted nothing more than to find the courage to punch him square in the snout.

  But the summer of the fair gave us all a little truce. A dash of excitement dropped down in the middle of our humdrum lives. At night, from my window in Grandmama’s house on West Eagle Street, I would peer out over the angled roofs and red brick chimneys to catch a glimpse of the line of white light through the trees. On still nights, I could hear the music wafting over the roofs: the tinny carnival melodies of the carousel, the Negroes singing and clapping to their rollicking tunes. I could smell the pretzels being baked, too, and the pungent scent of burning oil from all the machines.

  We’d been to the fair several times already that summer. The old man at the front gate reminded me of Ducks, with his heavy mustache and broad face. He came to recognize us as local children and would wave us on inside. It was as if an entire city had sprung up in the center of Buffalo: roads, street signs, fireplugs, shops, and offices were all part of the expo, in a spiral of color and modern design. And the heart of it all was the Electric Tower—rising up from the splendor of the fair like a gigantic illuminated flower. “It shines as if it were made of diamonds,” I gushed to Mother after seeing it for the first time.

  But my favorite attraction was the Midway, where Colonel Bostock put on his animal show every day at noon. We’d sit wide-eyed on the wooden bleachers, sawdust at our feet, the smell of horse and lion dung in the air. Out would come the Colonel from the massive marble house followed by a white tiger or a ten-foot grizzly bear. I remember how all of us—even the strongest men in the audience—would pull back a little, stiffen our backs, clutch the hand of the person seated next to us. Once I took Norman’s hand—it was always clammy and damp—and he wouldn’t let it go until I bit him.

  But the biggest attraction was Jumbo. Nine tons of clamoring elephant. The ground shook—it really did—when Jumbo came out of the animal house.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Colonel Bostock barked, a whip in his hand. “I present to you—Jumbo! Decorated by Queen Victoria herself for meritorious service and unsurpassed bravery in the wars in Afghanistan!”

  Jumbo lifted his trunk as he had been trained to do. His ears flapped a little, and those in the front row laughed from a spray of water on their faces. The elephant’s saggy gray skin was even more wrinkled than Grandmama’s, hanging from his enormous body in great folds.

  “He looks sad to me,” I told my brother.

  “Sad? He’s not sad,” Norman said. “Why should he be sad?”

  “Because he’s kept in that smelly old house all day,” I said, “and then trooped out here so we can gawk at him.”

  We watched as Jumbo obediently walked back and forth on the runway, lifting his front leg when commanded, his tiny sad eyes seeming lost in a world he couldn’t understand. Of course, this day, people cheered with even more vigor than usual, because today was a great day at the fair: The President was here. The President of the United States.

  How people loved President McKinley. I wasn’t sure why, but they did. Nobody much remembers him today, I suspect, what with Kennedy and all—but a hundred years ago, they adored him as if he were some god—as if he were Harry Houdini—as if he were Eddie Foy, my favorite from my days on the stage. Buffalo was bedecked in red, white, and blue ribbons in honor of his visit. From every storefront flapped a flag. His portrait—I thought he looked like a rather somber old man—hung from all the street lamps and nearly every window.

  We took the trolley home from the fair. It was packed, with people hanging from the steps. Thousands of nickels must have been collected that day. Everyone was hurrying about, jostling each other, men in tall hats and frock coats, women in their Sunday bonnets and gloves—all because of the President. He was coming to speak at the fair tonight.

  There were fireworks in his honor. That night I climbed up on top of Grandmama’s roof to watch them explode in the night sky. Such a thing was a marvel to behold. You must understand that. Everything in life seemed to be breaking open, bursting with possibilities. Electric streetcars. Magnificent fairs with amazing rides that were lit up by night. And these—these pyrotechnics that discharged comets through the air. At four thousand feet, red, white, and blue shells exploded into an outline of the United States. The popping and booming and whirring of the bombs set a dozen dogs barking along the street. Rivulets of color streamed across the dark sky, falling back down to earth in burning spirals. Finally an image of the man himself—President McKinley—sparkled momentarily before shattering into a thousand tiny fireballs.

  The wonders of the new century, it seemed to me, knew no bounds.

  At school, the next morning, I sat beside the window. I could see the buildings of the fair at the end of Delaware Avenue, the Electric Tower shimmering even in the daylight. Miss Thornton went on with our lessons, scratching her chalk against the slate.

  But I allowed my mind to drift, to
wander out along the avenue. I hated school, thoroughly despised being there. I couldn’t wait to be back on the stage with Mother. I didn’t belong in Buffalo. I belonged in the footlights somewhere, curtsying left and right and center.

  Out on the sidewalk I spied a man, a gentle-looking old fellow in a black frock coat and tall silk hat. He seemed to be in no hurry as he walked, as if he had not a care in the world. He passed by the school, and to this day, I can still recall his deep, kind eyes, the soft white hair at his temples. He seemed to catch my gaze; he nodded discreetly at me. Then he passed by the school and was gone.

  I tell you this because I saw him again that day. Mother met me after school. She was done up in her largest hat and wore the most elegant dress she owned—the one that made her look like Lillian Russell. Or so I thought at least.

  “Come along, Florence,” she whispered. “Before your brother comes out.”

  “What is it, Mother?”

  “We’re going to go see the President,” she said. “The line is forming now. Come! Don’t tarry!”

  I imagine taking Norman might have slowed us down. Or he may have caused too much of a stir. It wouldn’t do to have to apologize to the President of the United States for an unruly, bad-mannered son. We hurried down Delaware Avenue, just the two of us, past all the elegant homes with their fine manicured lawns. It was a scorching-hot day; Mother’s cheeks were beaded with perspiration despite the shadow cast across her face by her large hat. At the gate, the friendly man who looked like Ducks winked and waved us through. But there was already a tremendous crowd.

  Mother set her jaw and was determined not to give up. Taking my hand she elbowed her way through the crush of people. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she cried. “My little girl needs to get to the fountain. She’s near to fainting.”

  That was Mother. How many crowds would she part for me in her life? People stepped aside, allowed us to pass. I couldn’t help but admire Mother’s pluck, even if the looks from some in the crowd embarrassed me. I kept my eyes on the Electric Tower, so tall and central it was never fully hidden from view. We approached the door to the Temple of Music. Here the crowd was thicker and more unyielding. We finagled ourselves a place in line and waited.