by Howard Fast
The first screening of The Waif, cut and assembled, took place in the ice house on the improvised screen they had used to project their daily takes. The audience consisted of Max, Freida, Ruby, Benny, Sally, Freedman, Feldman, Stein, Snyder, Bellamy, and most of the cast. In spite of the fact that most of them had seen each piece of film many times, they were moved. They wiped their eyes, clapped, cheered, and when it was over, they sat in respectful silence. It was hard to believe that this incredible thing was their creation.
But the silence didn’t last. It was shattered by the resonant tones of Julia Schwartz, demanding, ‘Since when have I become Joan Ashley? After fifty-five years of being Julia Schwartz, with triumphs in Berlin and Paris, not to mention Warsaw, on real stages in real theatres, suddenly I am Joan Ashley?’
‘Not to mention Thomas Morton!’ Isadore Melchik roared. ‘It ain’t enough that Melchik plays Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, not to mention my own translation into Yiddish of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, in which Melchik plays Julius Caesar, and suddenly I’m Thomas Morton, who don’t even exist. Either it’s Melchik, or I personally will get an injunction!’
‘Please,’ Max begged them, ‘please. Don’t I know you are great actors? If Shakespeare was alive, he’d go to Second Avenue. I have no doubt about that. And go to anyplace in New York, even with the classiest uptown critics, they will tell you how great Julia Schwartz and Isadore Melchik are. Don’t I know that? But the success of this moving picture will be when it plays in every nickelodeon from Maine to Minnesota, and not to mention such places as South Dakota and Oklahoma – which, believe me, will be the end of the nickelodeon and the garbage they show, or maybe not the end but a new era. But what I am saying is in such places they never heard of a Yiddish Theatre, and if you say Second Avenue to them, they don’t know what you’re talking about, and they see names like Schwartz or Melchik or Massoni, they also don’t know what you’re talking about, not to mention how they feel about Jews. So please, please, please regard this as the beginning of a great new career in a hundred Max Britsky films –’
The argument went on, but in the end Max prevailed. But later, Sally said to him, ‘How is it, Max, that you’re not worried about the name of Britsky?’
He stared at her for a long moment before he replied, ‘I guess I’m used to it.’ But unspoken, his response was: To hell with them!
The next day, sitting in his office with Fred Feldman and Jake Stein, Max said to them, ‘Sometimes you talk and you don’t listen to yourself.’
‘Whatever that’s supposed to mean,’ Feldman agreed.
‘I’ll tell you what it’s supposed to mean. Yesterday when I’m trying to get Melchik to agree to be Thomas Morton, I became passionate. I absolutely outdid myself.’
‘It was a good argument,’ Stein agreed.
‘Stop agreeing with me. The hell with that. I’m not talking about an argument, but listen. I said to Melchik what a success this picture is, playing in every nickelodeon from Maine to Minnesota or whatever.’
‘You’re very persuasive,’ Feldman said. ‘Only it won’t be playing in every nickelodeon anywhere except in the ten theatres we got, and maybe not even there if you blow a fortune on a big party at Rector’s, like you’re planning.’
‘Stop crying about the money, Freddy. I’ll tell you something. You go into a place like the Chase Bank and ask them for twenty, thirty thousand dollars, right away they know you’re a bum with your hand out. You come in for half a million, they respect you, and that’s what you and Jake are going to do tomorrow, turn up a half a million.’
‘Max, you’re out of your mind.’
‘Yeah? You don’t hear me, like I don’t hear myself. I said to Melchik in every nickelodeon from here to Grand Rapids, and you tell me to stop dreaming because we don’t have no nickelodeons or theatres in Grand Rapids or anywhere else except here and in Brooklyn. That’s just it. We’re tossing pennies for gum wrappers, like the kids down on Henry Street. We got something that nobody else in this country has got. We got a ninety-minute moving picture called The Waif, and there ain’t a moving picture house anywhere in America that wouldn’t give both balls to show it, and we sit here tossing pennies into our lousy ten theatres.’
‘They’re not so lousy, those ten theatres,’ Jake Stein protested. ‘They’re damn good theatres.’
‘Wake up! Listen to me! I’m not burning our theatres. I’m just saying that there are a thousand other theatres that would give blood to show our moving picture instead of the garbage that National feeds them.’
Feldman was staring at him thoughtfully.
‘You follow me, Fred?’
‘Yeah, but it’s big enough to scare the hell out of you, Max.’
‘Penny business, penny business – I’m sick of that. Where does it say in the Bible that National and Edison and a couple of others got a patent to sell their ten-minute junk and nobody else? Suppose we set up a percentage scheme instead of the kind of rental National uses. Suppose we tell the guy who’s got three nickelodeons in Oklahoma City that we’ll give him three prints and he gives us fifty percent of the box office take. You’re telling me he don’t jump at that?’
‘Max, Max,’ Stein said, ‘you’re dreaming, and it’s nice to dream, but me, I got to balance the books. At the lab, it costs us five cents a foot for the print, and that comes to a little over four hundred dollars for each print of The Waif, and that’s twelve hundred dollars in Oklahoma City alone, and you want a thousand prints – four hundred thousand dollars?’
‘Something else,’ Feldman put in. ‘The only lab we can count on is Tucker’s, over in Hoboken, and that’s only because we own half the place, and Tucker’s takes a week to give us one print if they drop everything else. All the other labs are tied in with National and Edison and Movie-land, and there isn’t the chance of a snowball in hell that they’re going to take work from us. Don’t think that the ice house is such a secret, Max. Every newspaper in town’s been snooping around the place, and the other operators are just waiting to see what happens. If The Waif is a big hit, they’ll all start making ninety-minute pictures, now that we’ve shown them how it can be done.’
‘Are you listening?’ Stein begged him. ‘Please, Max, are you listening?’
‘I’m listening. Not learning, just listening. You want to cry on my shoulder, I’ll give you a handkerchief.’
‘We’re trying to be realistic’
‘Yeah? Let me tell you what’s realistic. Realistic is that nobody does a goddamn thing until somebody else shows them how. I already told Sam that I want the production out at Tucker’s doubled and doubled again and then doubled again.’
‘With what?’
‘I gave him a check for twenty thousand dollars. That’s to buy the other half. I don’t want nobody turning up and telling us we can’t use Tucker’s. Then I told him to go ahead and hire whatever we need to make it the biggest lab in the country.’
‘Max,’ Stein whispered, ‘you’re crazy. You gave him twenty thousand dollars. We ain’t got twenty thousand dollars to give him.’
‘You don’t listen to me,’ Max said. ‘Tomorrow, you and Freddy here are going to see Mr Alvin Berry at number One Seventy-seven Broadway, at the Chase Bank, and you are going to hit him for half a million dollars. You are going to hock everything we got – the theatres, The Waif, the lab out in Hoboken, and if you got to throw in the two brownstones we got up on Sixty-sixth Street, do that, and give him a pint of blood if he needs it for his stinking Yankee collateral – but you don’t walk out of there without five hundred thousand dollars, because while you are doing that, I am hiring two salesmen to start working their way around the country selling The Waif and three other pictures –’
‘Wait, wait, wait. Please, Max. What three other pictures?’
‘You can’t tie up a house with one picture. They play it a week, and what then? They go to National, and National says fuck off. You want to do business with Britsky go do business w
ith Britsky. So what do I tell them – buy our print and go out of business? So this morning I had a meeting with Freedman and Sally, and I told them to start right in with three more pictures.’
‘What do we use for money?’ Stein wailed.
‘You know something, Jake, you and Freddy work that out. Because in ten days from now, we are going to open The Waif. One theatre first, and then the next day in the others, but first an opening night at the Palace on Twenty-third Street, and it’s going to be as classy as a real theatrical opening, and we’re going to have the mayor and maybe the governor and whoever else Murphy thinks should be there, and after the opening, where we run the picture just once, I’m going to give a party at Rector’s for three hundred people. We got a goose that’s going to lay golden eggs like nobody ever dreamed about.’
Richard Britsky was three years old. His sister, Marion, was a year and seven months. Both of them had their father’s blue eyes; both of them were healthy, round-faced children. They had a nurse to take care of them, a Mrs Berger, a German-Jewish widow whom Sarah Britsky hated and who taught the two little children to call Sarah Omar, a word Sarah hated; and since Mrs Berger served as an antidote to her mother-in-law, Sally tolerated her rigidity and took comfort in the fact of her ethnic origin. On the other hand, the situation of the nurse or governess in the brownstone with the two beautifully dressed children was never quite real to Sally. As for Max, he accepted it as a matter of course, a natural development. When he had time for the children, he admired them; playing with them was beyond him; but he insisted that their lives should be the absolute opposite of what his had been.
Freedman played with the children, Sally noted. The nurse was off for the day and Sally had the children, but, as Freedman put it, ‘Max says we can’t lose a day. He’s really terribly insistent.’
‘Yes, Max’s world consists of things he wants done yesterday. That’s because nobody else is like Max, thank God.’
‘Well, he is unusual.’
‘If you keep looking at me like that, Gerry, we won’t get much done.’
‘Which way? Oh, you mean with cow-eyes. But it’s not just that, but I saw a painting in the museum and it was so like you, that dress with the stripes –’ He took off to catch up with Richard. Marion began to cry. Sally picked her up and rocked her.
‘They’ll nap soon. Then we can talk.’
Richard began to cry. Freedman made faces and stuck out his tongue.
‘I know it annoys you if I talk about how I feel about you,’ Freedman said, ‘so I’ll try not to, and actually –’ Richard howled.
‘I think they both want a nap,’ Sally said. ‘I’m not the best mother in the world or I wouldn’t put them into the hands of that dreadful German. But she’s so efficient.’
They carried the children up to the nursery. The children had stopped crying and were gurgling with laughter. They enjoyed having Gerry around. He sang little songs to them and made faces at them and swung them up and down in his arms. ‘You should have children,’ Sally said to him. ‘You absolutely should be married and have children, you’re so good with them.’
‘Only because they’re your children.’
‘Well, there you go again. You mustn’t keep doing that, Gerry.’ He stood watching, listening, while Sally sang to the children, and when they were asleep, he and Sally tiptoed out of the room.
Sally was very businesslike. ‘You know what Max is like when he sets his mind to something. He wants to start photography in ten days, and then he wants to start a second picture two weeks after that.’
‘He wants the moon, doesn’t he? He’s also a little crazy when it comes to such things. We have to tell him that it can’t be done that way.’
‘Well, perhaps. I’m not sure. You know,’ Sally said, ‘the feeling that it’s impossible makes it so much more exciting, and last night I lay awake for hours, just thinking about all the marvelous things we can do with that camera. I was thinking about that dreadful General Slocum tragedy; it was so heartbreaking, so awful. If we made a moving picture about it –’
‘Oh, no, Sally – all that suffering and horror!’
Sally had referred to an incident that had happened four years ago. There was a prosperous, vital community of German immigrants located between Tompkins Square and the East River, just to the north of the sprawling Jewish community. Each year, St Mark’s Lutheran Church, located in the center of their area, organised a Sunday school picnic, and this time, in June of 1904, the community hired an old side-wheeler excursion boat to take the mothers and their children to Locust Grove, on Long Island Sound. Very few men went along; it was for the most part mothers and their children, and 1400 of them were packed into the old boat. Steaming up the East River, the ship caught fire, turned into a blazing inferno, and caused the worst maritime tragedy in the history of the port of New York. Over a thousand women and children died on the General Slocum, tearing the heart out of the German community and plunging them into a period of mourning and despair from which they did not emerge for years.
‘Oh, yes, yes,’ Sally agreed. ‘It was horrible beyond imagination, but isn’t that the substance of so many books and plays? I don’t mean to repeat what happened on the General Slocum, but a film about a ship on fire – it’s so close to all of us in the city. I would want to save most of the people.’
‘I don’t know, it’s so recent.’
‘But you suggested the war in Cuba.’
‘Yes, I guess you’re right. I suppose that if you want to excite people, you show them terrible and exciting things. Do you have a story worked out? We could talk about it.’
It became the second Max Britsky production, The Tragedy of the Lucy Gray.
Meanwhile, Max planned the opening of The Waif. Fred Feldman worked out a letter as follows: ‘As a theatre critic, you have perhaps ignored the world of the moving picture, the nickelodeon, the storefront projection booth. Certainly, if you happened to wander into any theatre playing what is euphemistically called a motion picture drama, you found good reason to continue to ignore such places. However, I do believe that we have created a moving picture that breaks all the strictures of the past, that establishes a new arena of entertainment, and that has no precedent. It is the first of its kind and is thereby of historic importance. I am enclosing two tickets for the opening night and with them an invitation for you and your companion to a party at Rector’s, to follow the showing of our great motion picture, entitled The Waif.’
Max signed the letter, which was sent to the theatre critics on the New York Times, the New York Tribune, the Sun, the Journal, and the Herald. Feldman was dubious about calling it a great motion picture, but Max insisted on inserting the adjective. ‘We are not hiding lights under any bushels,’ he said.
Boss Murphy introduced Max to Stephen Allison, who functioned as a sort of link between Tammany Hall and the Social Register, and Allison provided the names of two dozen luminaries who were numbered among the Four Hundred – as the social elite were called, there being, supposedly, only four hundred people worthy of social recognition in the city – and who would almost certainly attend the opening as well as the party to follow. Invitations were also issued to the political elite and to leading people in the Yiddish and English-speaking theatre. Max spent money as if it were going out of style, taking large advertisements in all of the local newspapers to announce the opening at the Palace and then, a day later, the openings at the nine other theatres. He also hired two hundred sandwich-board walkers to parade through the streets of the city. The Palace was sold out days before opening night, and such was the excitement generated that he had to sell advance tickets in the other theatres as well. At that point, every dollar had been exhausted, and Max was borrowing from Bert and Snyder and anyone else he could hit for hard cash. Fortunately, the loan from the Chase Bank came through two days before the opening: half a million dollars to the credit of Max Britsky Productions.
Meanwhile, Max’s mother and his three sisters
had been running up their own share of the indebtedness – gowns made to order, new shoes, new wraps. Sheila was married to a young man to whom Max had given a job, one Donald Greenway, whom Max had generously termed ‘Donald the schmuck,’ and there too the accouterments were charged to Max, as were the trappings of Ruby’s wife, the former Kathy Sullivan, whom Sarah avoided like the plague. But Max was indifferent to the expenditure of money. In itself, it had no meaning or lure for him; it was important only as a means to an end. Perhaps his own past made it almost impossible for him to ask what anything cost. In hiring the actors for The Waif, he never quibbled about their pay. He gave them what they asked.
And whatever the opening of The Waif cost Max, it turned out just as he had planned it. The crowds of onlookers filled Twenty-third Street to the point where the police had to clear a path for the carriages. The gas company had installed special mantles that bathed the street in white light; and one after another, carriages intermixed with automobiles drove up to discharge their elegantly clad occupants. Max himself, in tails that had been made for this occasion, stood at the entrance to the theatre. Most of the people were strangers to him; still, he bathed in the glow of the occasion, and in his mind a process took place that was to repeat itself over and over during the years to come namely, that this thing, The Waif, was his creation, aided and abetted by Sally and Freedman and Snyder and a cast property men, electricians, carpenters, but only aided and abetted by all such, and mainly and mostly his own creation, Max Britsky presents. ‘So all of you marching into this theatre, just take note and remember, Max Britsky presents –’