“Butter,” said Mother, who had set the flowers on the fireplace mantel and was now dusting with a steely efficiency that didn’t fool me for a minute. When she saw me, she paused, feather duster raised, and on her brow was that peculiar gleam I had noticed after the incident with Mack Sennett’s greased intersection. “Isobel, you’re needed in the kitchen to help polish the silver. You and Ranger can stay up for dinner tonight, but after that you’re expected to excuse yourselves and go to bed. It’s not a formal occasion, so your green organdy frock will do, the one with the violets around the neck…”
I glided past her, still in a daze. Pickford! Fairbanks! In this very house!
• • •
Sylvie had been packed off to the Theodore Cooper household to stay with Agnes of the ink-black hair. And, I suppose, to prevent any diving into laps or bruising shins. But after the sun set and the guests started to arrive, I had to wonder if she wouldn’t have fit right in.
Not that it seemed anything out of the ordinary at first. Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Porter arrived unfashionably early, while the extra help were still setting the table. They were followed shortly by another banker and his wife, whose names I quickly forgot. But then Miss Constance Talmadge swept in with a gaggle of other young people, and the big front room of the hacienda blazed with light. Literally, for Titus Bell had just turned up the gas in the two bronze chandeliers, but also figuratively. Other guests flocked to Miss Talmadge like moths to a flame, while Aunt Buzzy helpfully whispered to me that she was a celebrated comic actress who’d made a name for herself in Intolerance.
That revered title made me wonder where Ranger was. After a glance around the room I discovered him in the musicians’ corner, sitting by the piano. His expression startled me. He looked like the Great Stone Face or a shell-shocked veteran. I was about to go and ask him what was up—or down—when someone called, “It’s Mary!”
“Five bucks says they’re together,” Miss Talmadge said, laughing and raising a champagne glass.
Shortly after, Mary Pickford herself crossed the threshold with a swift step, smiling briskly while sliding a snow-white summer coat off her glowing shoulders. “Delightful house, Titus. And, Bea, how lovely to see you again. It’s been too long.” With her honey-colored curls pinned up and her feisty manner watered down, I didn’t recognize her. She seemed too quick, her eyes too sharp as she glanced around. And she was tiny—she stood barely taller than me as she took my hand and said, “Delighted to meet you, dear.”
There was a glitter about her that had nothing to do with the diamonds around her neck. I couldn’t say a thing in return.
Behind her, a man leaped into the room—or seemed to. Abruptly I recalled Miss Talmadge’s remark about They’re together, and took it to mean Pickford and Fairbanks. Together, though I knew they weren’t married. Not to each other, that is. Though Titus Bell towered over Douglas Fairbanks, they threw their arms around each other and laughed like hyenas. The next minute, they were trading punches.
“Doug!” Miss Pickford’s voice rang out. “Do stop cavorting and come meet Titus’s sister-in-law.” Her tone made it sound like they were married. To each other.
Mr. Fairbanks bounded over and took my mother’s hand with a bow. He started in surprise when he recognized me, but recovered with a quick wink and a swipe of one finger across his mouth, meaning his lips were sealed about when last we met. I saw Mother’s eyebrow rise, but before she could ask about it, she was being introduced to another guest. This was a short man whose wavy hair was streaked with gray, making me think he was old until I saw his face—a youthful, unlined face dominated by wide, dark-lashed eyes.
“…and this is her daughter Isobel,” Mr. Fairbanks was saying, as he steered the short man over to me. “Isobel, believe it or not, this sorry piece of work regularly outsells me at the box office.”
Without his busy mustache and bushy eyebrows, I didn’t recognize Charlie Chaplin at all. He shook my hand like it was a pump handle and muttered something about being pleased. He didn’t look pleased though. In the brief moment that our eyes met, I tried to see that character that made him so beloved: the Little Tramp, with his coal-black hair and ill-fitting clothes. But I couldn’t. The real Mr. Chaplin looked like a cheeky English schoolboy—and talked like one too.
I recalled Ranger telling me he was a limey: “Everybody knows that.”
A young lady was hanging on Mr. Chaplin’s arm, someone whose name I forgot as soon as I heard it, though I recall her wild, red hair and tinkly laugh. The house suddenly bulged with young men and ladies whose wild hair and flashing eyes and reckless laughter broke the evening into sharp, bright little pieces, tumbling in kaleidoscope patterns. Titus Bell boomed, Aunt Buzzy buzzed, my mother glowed, and the young people twittered. But the night belonged to the stars.
After a few drinks, Mr. Chaplin snapped out of his dark mood. He did something with two dinner rolls that had the company almost rolling on the floor. He stuck a fork in each of them and tucked his fists under his chin and made the forks perform a little dance. The rolls looked like huge feet, and his face became the character’s head, and it was so funny that I thought I might split a seam. (An old routine, according to Ranger, but Charlie did it best.) Mother laughed with a hand over her mouth, a rare sign of near-abandon.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Mr. Fairbanks was taking bets on his athletic abilities. He must have been, or why else would he have been doing handstands on his chair? Alcohol had nothing to do with it; so far as I could tell, he never touched a drop. Every now and then Miss Pickford would say, “Do sit down, Doug, and enjoy this splendid dinner.” And he would obey, but not for long.
I don’t recall eating any of the splendid dinner. As the dessert dishes were cleared away and the host was passing out brandy and cigars, Mother bent her eyebrow at me, meaning it was time for Ranger and me to excuse ourselves and go to bed.
We obeyed halfway: the excusing part but not the going to bed. For as soon as we departed through the west wing door, Ranger grabbed my hand in a viselike grip and pulled me around to the little side porch that opened directly off the front room. Here he dropped on a bench under the rose arbor and pulled me down beside him. The window was open, and a sparkly buzz of party conversation glowed like fireflies on the lawn.
“All right,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
He seemed to be having difficulty breathing. “The gig is up,” he croaked.
“What?”
“My scoutmaster called today. Right after Pa got in. They had a nice long talk.”
“Oh no!” Dire as this news was for him, I couldn’t dismiss the consequences for myself.
“He wasn’t going to tell me until tomorrow sometime. But I chased him down to ask if he’d invited Mr. Griffith to the party, or if he would, and that led to an altercation—”
“Why? Aren’t they friends?”
“They were.” Ranger’s heel thumped hard against the bench board. “Pa used to be a pretty big investor in Fine Arts. He made a pile with Birth of a Nation but lost money with Intolerance, and now they’re not speaking to each other. It’s just sour grapes, is all. Pa’s such a…philistine. All he likes are comedies and melodramas. D.W. has more craft in his little finger than Pa has in his whole…” Ranger paused and folded one crafty little finger into a fist. “I blew my last chance, Isobel.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was on probation, see? If I pulled one more prank, Pa swore he’d send me to military school in Palo Alto. To smack some discipline into me. So… I did, and he will.”
“Oh, Ranger!” Emblazoned on my memory was the time Aunt Buzzy had told me this. She’d asked me to be a friend and help him stay on the straight and narrow. Instead, I’d let him pick me up and carry me like a football down the twisty and crooked. “I’m so sorry. I—”
“Not your fault. By the way, I asked him not to t
ell your mother. It was all my idea, and you didn’t want to go along. He said he wouldn’t.”
“Oh—well, thank you.” This was a relief, though getting off scot-free didn’t feel entirely comfortable. Especially when I hadn’t been such a good guardian… But wait. Why should a twelve-year-old girl be given charge over a thirteen-year-old boy anyway? My thoughts were becoming thoroughly scrambled. “Did you get a licking for it?”
“Not this time—the school’s my licking. The school’s going to make me ‘grow up.’ He didn’t even seem all that mad about the scout episode. That makes it even worse, that he can be so blasted jolly about the whole thing.”
He gave the bench another savage backward kick. “If I could only finish the picture, it might… It might be my ticket to somewhere else. But without a camera, I don’t have a bat’s chance in hell of finishing anything.”
“Snowball’s chance,” I murmured.
“What?”
“A snowball’s chance in the flames of Hades is what you don’t have.” As bad as I felt for him, Sam’s problems seemed greater. “School might not be as awful as you think. Only a year or two of your life.”
He made a strangled cry and jumped to his feet, just as laughter burst from the front room. Through the gauzy curtains on the glass door we could see Mr. Fairbanks dancing a fox-trot with Aunt Buzzy—on the table.
“Is that what you call grown up?” Ranger demanded rhetorically. “It’s a game to them. They just want to have fun. I’d like to know where their parents were when they needed discipline.” His eyes narrowed as he stared through the window, and his next words sounded like they were directed at a single person. It wasn’t hard to imagine who. “I’m not going.”
“You have to.”
“I’m not! I’ll go down to San Pedro and stow away on a China freighter before I’ll get packed away to any puking military school.” He nodded fiercely to himself before he turned and took a running leap off the porch. I could hear him whacking hydrangea bushes on the way to his room.
The air stirred agitatedly at his leaving, then drifted soft as petals while music and chatter fell in bright patches at my feet. At least with our motion picture on the trash heap and our director shipping off to China, the rest of the summer would be a good deal more peaceful. But quiet days on the window seat with a stack of library novels didn’t have quite the appeal they would have had a few weeks ago, before Ranger had dragged me into the world of picture-making.
I stood up to go back to my room, pausing by the window for a last look. The party had broken up into smaller groups. One clustered around the piano where Aunt Buzzy was playing ragtime tunes, while another listened to Titus Bell explain how he acquired the jade Buddha on the mantel shelf. Three couples were dancing in the cleared space at the far end of the room.
Constance Talmadge was up for a round of charades. With the back of her hand to her forehead, she cried, “Ay me! All the perfumes of India…” until someone called out, “Sarah Bernhardt!” Then a man jumped up to imitate some equally celebrated ham.
I waited to see if Mr. Fairbanks would swing from the ceiling fans. Perhaps he would have—I wouldn’t put it past him—but something else happened first.
The door to the porch opened, and my heart jumped up to my tonsils. There was no time to run and very little place to hide. With a pounding heart, I backed against the wall, shielded by darkness and twining vines, hoping that the intruder had only come out for a breath of fresh air.
“Ah, smell the roses,” said a man’s voice. “Pity I hate roses.”
Then a woman’s laugh, with a comment I couldn’t make out. To which he replied, “We’ll fix that. Smoke?”
Though he spoke softly, there was a vigorous quality in his voice that strode out from under the arbor. It strode with an accent, which I could not place until the sudden flare of a match picked out the piercing dark eyes of Charles Chaplin. The flame glided to a woman’s soft lips with a small, vertical scar, pursed lightly around a cigarette.
I didn’t even know Mother smoked!
My heart was beating so hard that I couldn’t hear anything else at first, but gradually their voices came clearer to me, especially when Mr. Chaplin burst out: “Mack Sennett? He’s low class. Barnyard comedy. I worked at Keystone until I couldn’t take any more. What’s a lady of your quality doing in a Sennett picture?”
“Oh my.” My mother’s voice had a peculiar lilt that I could only describe—with a squirmy feeling on my insides—as flirtatious. “What kind of ‘quality’ are we speaking of?”
“Mrs. Ransom…may I call you Matilda?”
“No, Mr. Chaplin.”
“Or not yet?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Then allow me to say, as your disinterested admirer, that you’re too good for Keystone.”
“And allow me to say that you’re making far too much of it. It was only in fun. And you won’t see any more of me than my hat.”
He muttered a response, and she laughed. The banter went on in light tones that seemed to mean more than I could figure out. It reminded me of some of those long conversations between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester (which I usually skip), where more seems to be going on than meets the eye or ear.
Then he said, “Here’s what I’m thinking. Come down to the Triangle studio next week. See what I’m working on. I have an idea about a part for you.”
(Gasp from Mother.) “What do you mean, ‘a part’? I’m a doctor’s wife on holiday, Charlie, not an actress.”
I was relieved to hear “doctor’s wife,” but the “Charlie” didn’t sit well, and his answering voice had a peculiar warmth that pricked like walnut shells: “I don’t need an ‘actress,’ Matilda. I need someone with regal bearing and a quiet center. There’s something about you: a vulnerable strength. That little scar—how did you get it, may I ask?”
“You may ask, but I will not tell.” Her cigarette glowed fiercely, and the scar seemed to pulse in the limited light. I had never been brave enough to ask that question, but I’d put it to Father once while he was gently rocking a photographic portrait of her in his developing tank. He had cleared his throat and changed the subject.
“A woman of mystery, eh?” Mr. Chaplin teased. “Who could blame you? But about the part—it’s just a small bit in couple of scenes. Come on, do say yes!”
No, no, no! I was saying for her. I felt a certain nervous quiver in the air and hoped it was Mother’s discomfort with the situation. She tossed down the cigarette and ground it out among the geraniums.
And when she spoke I could hear my mother again, using the same tone that might be asking Sylvie how she had mistaken rouge for finger paint. “You’re a silly man. And I’m a chilly woman, or fast becoming one. Shall we rejoin the company?”
His teeth flashed in the dim light. They were a bit large for his face. On the screen, I recalled, he showed them only in an occasional smile that was smarmy and cocky at the same time. “I don’t give up so easily, you’ll find.”
He extinguished his own smoke and held the door open for her. Once they were inside, I let go of a long breath, feeling dizzy and only partly relieved. For she hadn’t said no.
Chapter 11
Chips and Blocks
After a restless night, unsettled by dreams of being chased through the Keystone Studios by the Little Tramp, I was still in bed at eight fifteen the next morning. But not for long, for that is when a resolute set of knuckles rapped on my door. “Who—?” I called out irritably.
“Me,” came the reply. “Can I come in?”
I sat up and reached for my wrapper. “You may. If you must.”
Ranger flung open the door and flopped down on Sylvie’s empty bed without ceremony. “Sam just phoned. He wants us to meet him in the projection room at Vitagraph, eleven sharp.”
“What?”
“No, the q
uestion is why, not what. He didn’t say, but he sounded just a little bit excited, and if you know Sam, that means a lot excited.”
I pulled my hair out from under my collar, trying to wake up. “Do you think it’s about the picture?”
“Sure, it’s about the picture. What else?”
“Well…a lot has happened since last we met, as you recall. And last night—”
“I know. But something’s up. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got a hunch it could change everything.”
Never was a hunch more totally proved out. When we arrived at the stuffy little projection room off Prospect and Talmadge, Sam answered our knock with his eyes almost all the way open.
“What’s up?” Ranger demanded without even saying hello.
“Not much,” Sam lied. “Just some film I wanted you to see. Have a seat.”
Inside that placid exterior was a barely contained, jackrabbity excitement. There was also, I noticed when he turned toward the projector, a rather livid bruise high up on one cheekbone. I took a seat in the front row, and Ranger dropped next to me while Sam flicked a lever on the projector.
Scratches of light appeared on the screen and then, so overwhelmingly that it knocked us back in our seats, the picture thronged with marching men. They seemed to keep coming on and on. The Lasky Home Guard wasn’t that large, but the camera made it seem like legions.
“Sam!” Ranger exclaimed. “How’d you manage to loop the film?”
“Not now,” Sam replied. “Watch this.”
Looping the film (whatever that meant) was not all he’d managed to do. We watched with growing amazement as the camera caught hordes of feet swinging smartly around a corner, rows of helmeted heads swinging by the reviewers’ stand, and even a view from above, booted feet striding proudly out from under the helmets in a way that reminded me of Mr. Chaplin’s roll dance.
Then Ranger himself appeared on the screen, a rifle on his shoulder and a face like flint. It was as if the camera had crouched on the sidewalk, lain on the street, dodged near, backed away, and popped up like a hovering dragonfly, all in the space of a couple of minutes. Ranger had been popping up with exclamations the whole time, but I nearly fell out of my chair with the next scene—it was me! Weeping into a handkerchief in front of the broken-down picket fence on the way to Daisy Dell. I’d forgotten that scene, but here it was, smoothly “cut” into the rally.
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