But Florence did not need his advice: she was finally doing work that met her high standards. Her first major film was The Loves of Letty, produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed by Frank Lloyd. The star of the movie was Pauline Frederick, a seasoned stage actress who had made her film debut in 1915. Florence had been cast as her best friend, Marion Allardyce. Frederick was openly jealous of her, but Florence liked her part, and Lloyd was, she told Max, just lovely.65 Only one copy of the Loves of Letty has survived, and although it is in rather poor shape, Florence’s acting has lost none of its appeal.66 She looks stylish and graceful, if slightly somber and, indeed, pale, her heart-shaped face glowing in the mostly dark rooms where the action takes place. Tall and slim, she towers over the shorter Frederick. Her dark eyes burn themselves into the viewer’s mind; ultimately they make her character more inscrutable than Frederick’s rather transparent Letty. The Loves of Letty occupied a special place in Florence’s portfolio: “There is never a moment I look strange like I sometimes did in Vitagraph pictures,” she said after she saw the finished production: “I always look like myself.”67
In August 1919 Florence moved into an apartment at 1824 Highland Avenue, the “prettiest little” place, with a porch and more space for herself and her mother, who had joined her.68 While Max buried himself in the stacks of the Columbia University library or retreated to the privacy of his Croton house, deploring, quite unhumorously, the slow progress of his book and the interruptions caused by his editorial responsibilities, Florence sought public recognition in Hollywood. She tried to keep up with Max’s life in the East, reading the New York papers—“childish with their red terror”—as well as Scripps’s Los Angeles Record for the labor news.69 Max and his friend Marie Howe sent letters to people they knew in Los Angeles to help Florence settle in, including the painter and writer Rob Wagner, the wealthy socialite and patron of left-wing causes Kate Gartz, and the labor organizer Joe O’Carroll.70
But Florence’s Big Break never came, not then, not afterward. She did get a few roles in films now considered lost, and out of the little she made she kept sending money to Max, a fact that almost seems to have turned him on.71 “At this studio they think of me as a lovely sweet girl,” she complained to Max, “and only want to cast me in sympathetic parts.” Her “big fight” to get the lead in a movie based on The Perch of the Devil failed when the author of the book, Gertrude Atherton, personally intervened and said she was certainly beautiful enough but much too young.72 In August 1919 she was cast in The Cup of Fury, directed by T. Hayes Hunter and based on a novel by Rupert Hughes, who melted when he met Florence and told her she was “one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen.”73 Goldwyn did invite her to have dinner with him and other executives in the business, among them Frank Joseph Godsol, the “eminence grise” at Goldwyn Pictures. Everyone liked her, and Florence’s beauty was compared to that of Mona Lisa, as she proudly told Max. But money remained scarce all the same.74
If Florence was fighting to establish herself as a Hollywood actress, Max back in Croton was also trying to figure out what to do with himself. Sharing his small Croton house with the “blundering” George Andreytchine didn’t help. Once his impulsive housemate lopped off the lower branches of the trees that formed Max’s hedge, and Max blew up. “Now they stand there all trimmed up like long-legged chickens,” he lamented, surveying the damage done to his trees. Gone was “the sweetness of seclusion and the beauty of all that I have watched and watered for those four years since I planted them.” Andreytchine was entirely apologetic and, with tears in his eyes, offered to make amends. “It’s too bad that I have this interior revolt against intimacy,” observed Max.75 In the same letter Max included one of the longest, most coherent stories he shared with Florence, and the care with which he narrates it suggests it had hit a raw nerve.
A few days before, he was driving around uptown with Floyd Dell and George in the car. They had just picked up the poet Claude McKay in Harlem when Max found himself on 153rd Street, on the wrong side of the bridge over the Harlem River. He turned around. Since the street was empty, he was driving faster than usual. He was chatting animatedly with his passengers, just as he had always told Florence not to do. Suddenly a little boy, “just about the size of Dan when I left him,” seemed to appear right in front of the car. The situation was surreal, a complete reversal of the sane order of things. Running “from clear across the street,” with his head down and his arms pumping, the little boy was coming toward them at a fast clip, as if he was determined to get hit. “He was running toward death in the same haste that one would run away from it.” Dell uttered a surprised “Why look at this!” Max knew that hitting the brake would accomplish nothing, since the car would slide into the boy and probably kill him, so he abruptly jerked his steering wheel to the right. Swinging the vehicle up the curb, he smashed it, with a loud crash, straight into a tree. The Ford’s mudguard just grazed the boy, who fell on the pavement, scraping his shoulder and elbow. Max got out and picked the boy up and carried him to where he said his home was. Once there, Max was in for another surprise. He found an apartment swarming with “a thousand other kids” and an overwhelmed mother who took only a mild interest in Max’s account of the tragedy he had barely averted. When Max returned to his smashed Ford, the full extent of what had happened began to dawn on him. He had to hire a truck so that the “tin remnant of our long suffering Ford” could be dragged away from the street. Everyone was relieved, however, that the kid had survived. Drifting off to sleep in his bed at night, Max was playing through the scene again in his mind: “I guess I could never have slept if I had hurt him.”
If this had been a dream rather than a real experience, Freud would have had a field day with it. At any rate, Max’s behavior before, during, and after the accident proved he was quick on his feet in an emergency and not afraid to act if necessary, something that couldn’t fail to impress Florence as she was slowly drifting away from him into a new world where Max feared he no longer mattered. But the story also cast cold water on the demands of the traditional family structure: while the boy’s mother didn’t much care, Max had shown himself ready to sacrifice his car and perhaps the lives of himself and his friends in order to protect the life of a child not his own. Max might have failed as a biological father, but by protecting that strange little boy, he had, if only for a moment, become everyone’s father.
The very next day Max challenged fate again. Going out in his boat on the Tappan Zee with Claude, Eugen Boissevain, and George on board, he ended up in the middle of a great big storm. Claude and George were convinced they were all going to die, as was Dudley Malone on the shore, who kept saying Ave Marias for them while his wife, Doris, was running around the house repeating to herself, “They are drowned, they are drowned.” At the helm of the boat, Max, however, was “wildly happy.” It was a fantastic sight: “The boat rolling half over, the sail creaking and booming, dipping in the water and flying into the sky, sheets of water from the sky and great waves crashing over the boat drenching and pounding us, the river so full of white caps that it looked like a grave under the black wind, and great cracks of lightning rending the sky with terrific thunder no further off than the top of the mast.” Giving orders in a steady voice, Max got them out of danger. “I enjoy being a hero,” he said to Florence. But he also admitted that, being an experienced sailor, he knew they were relatively safe. “If we had been way out at sea, I would have been sick with fear.” Max, the limited liability hero.76
The topic of Max’s editorials in the August 1919 issue of the Liberator just so happened to be the importance of courage. Taking aim at President Wilson once again for violating his promise to the American people to keep them out of the war, Max imagined how Wilson would be heckled by courageous protesters at public appearances, something that would be unthinkable in the United States but more than possible in Europe, where there was a tradition of social and military courage. And Max slammed Wilson’s secret campaign—a private war
without an actual declaration of war—against Soviet Russia, reprinting the intercepted cable he had read at Madison Square Garden. Even if there was no tradition of social courage in the United States there was plenty of room for personal bravery—such as Max’s.77 Florence bought her copy of the Liberator in Hollywood, “the finest number I ever read.” She liked the cover, a drawing of Crystal by Maurice Sterne, and the “lovely poetry,” but above all she admired Max’s editorial, so “brilliant and witty.”78 Indeed, Max’s confidence was on the rise again, politically, personally, intellectually, and he kept postponing his long-planned visit to Hollywood, pointing out that he had to wait for Crystal to come back from her trip to Hungary. Inside his study he was, he said, “slinging Plato Aristotle Hegel Bergson Voltaire Schopenhauer and many more pompous professors around my head and through my legs and up over, twirling and turning them like a juggler.”79
Incidentally, the “lovely poetry” in Florence’s Liberator issue included a handful of works by Max’s new friend Claude McKay. Max rarely allowed men to get as close to him as Claude did. Claude was smitten with Max and Max’s life from the moment he visited him in his Croton house. As far as he was concerned, even the storm on the Tappan Zee that had nearly capsized their boat was part of the beautiful existence Max had created for himself: “I love your life!” Max became a mentor of sorts to the younger man, reading his work and offering suggestions for improvement.80 In the Liberator Max celebrated the “fine clear flame of life” he had found burning in Claude’s work. But in the best-known poem of the series, the sonnet “If We Must Die,” that fine flame threated to become a conflagration. Alluding to Longfellow’s famous injunction, in “A Psalm of Life,” not to go through life “like dumb cattle,” McKay exhorted his black brothers not to die like hogs in the battle for survival, “Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot / While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs.” Unsurprisingly, the concluding couplet, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back,” put McKay on the radar of the Justice Department.81 Later that year he left the United States for England.
Max arrived in Hollywood on September 28, a visit heralded by a flurry of telegrams, as if he were the Queen of Sheba. After sending her mother back to New York, Florence had found a new apartment at 6220 De Longpre Avenue, just one block away from Sunset Boulevard. They lived on the ground floor, surrounded by palm trees, overlooking green meadows. The house is still there today, though Hollywood, of course, has changed considerably, as indicated by the gated windows and the “No Trespassing” signs that are now attached to the house. But the huge palm trees fanning the desert winds might still be the same, and the mild smell of marijuana lingering over De Longpre serves as a reminder of a different era of social experimentation. This is where Max and Florence met again and where they spent their nights, the windows open to the soft air.
After they had been separated for so long and by so many miles, kept apart by a “great cold wall,” as Max put it, they were hoping they could simply pick up where they had left off.82 But Max had waited too long, for a thousand different reasons explained in many letters and, when he had the money, telegrams. An even greater mistake was to introduce Florence to Chaplin that fall. Unwittingly, he had become the agent of his own destruction as Florence’s lover. Soon both he and Florence were spending evenings at Chaplin’s house, participating in charades that got ever more complicated, expanding from cues for speeches picked out of a hat to themes for one-act plays, improvised at a moment’s notice with costumes pilfered for the occasion from the wardrobes of guests who had come to stay for the night.
Neither Max Eastman nor Charlie Chaplin got much work done that fall; both Chaplin’s The Kid and Max’s The Sense of Humor suffered as a result. It’s unclear how much their competition for Florence’s favors played into the frenzied energy the two friends put into their charades, as if a life of play would keep the looming storm at bay. In Heroes I Have Known (1942), Max called Charlie an “actor of one role only,” a man unknowable yet somehow predictable, too: beautiful to look at but without any principles to speak of. Chaplin has, wrote Max, “no unity of character, . . . nothing in his head that, when he lays it on the pillow, you can sensibly expect will be there in the morning.” Leading so many people to believe he was their “intimate friend,” Chaplin in fact kept everyone at arm’s length. Never sorry for what he did, the Chaplin Max re-created for his readers was an essentially amoral creature: instinctive, rapacious, self-involved. He was his mother’s son: deeply unhinged, she had been charming enough to convince immigration officials she was sane and should be allowed inside the country. If Charlie had any integrity at all, it lay in his art. Harder to live with than “Lord Byron or a kaleidoscope,” as Max brilliantly put it, the chameleonic Chaplin treated women the way one buys and then immediately throws away a cheap pen. Too busy with himself, Chaplin had never given the world the full measure of his talents and had poured them instead into that one little creature with baggy pants, oversized shoes, and the too-tight jacket familiar from the screen, a predatory child, as bewitching as he was dangerous. Chaplin was Max minus the remnants of religious scruples. It is obvious that Max’s portrait of him, for all the self-conscious literary posturing, was shaped by deep affection as well as by envy and a long-suppressed desire to take revenge on the guy who had taken his girl.83
Max celebrated the end of his Hollywood stay by accidentally taking Florence’s car keys with him, leaving her stranded at the train station, at the mercy of a dubious mechanic who took the vehicle apart, strewing sundry parts over the floor, before admitting he couldn’t start it. Interestingly, he didn’t have the tools either to put it all back together again, so Florence had to hail a cab and arrange for her car to be towed. Having no money at all, she wrote bad checks right and left. Notably, she never once berated Max for the inconvenience he had caused her. Instead, she baldly stated the facts and then wrote about her longing for him: “I shall hold you in my arms close to me and keep you warm, and won’t mind the lions roaring and the winds howling.”84
As Florence was wondering where he was and why he wasn’t writing, Max found himself in San Francisco in the arms of an admiring “girl poet” he had felt compelled to visit. That poet was, although Max doesn’t reveal her name even in his almost-tell-all autobiography, Genevieve Taggard, who would go on to acquire some reputation as a poet in her own right. Not classically beautiful, she reminded Max of another hero of his: “I declare you could dress her up in a beard and take a picture of Walt Whitman.” A perhaps more potent aphrodisiac for Max was that she adored his work: “She made me very happy by showing me a volume of my poems almost all worn out, and the passages marked that I know best.” Concluded Max, “It was wonderful to find that my poems were to a stranger who read them just the same thing they are to me.” He didn’t tell Florence he also slept with Taggard.85
His dalliance with Taggard over, he exchanged her embrace for that of another admirer, his “stormy-haired love” from his earlier visit to the Bay area, Vera Zaliasnik. As he was bedding Vera, Max wouldn’t stop babbling about Florence, so much so, in fact, that he afterward apologized, unnecessarily so, as Vera felt: “I am not hurt when you talk to me of Florence.” Her love for Max, she said poetically, was “so absolutely clean and beautiful, so almost heavenly in its calm, love, that I cannot relate myself or a single of my thoughts of you to pain and a sense of unpleasantness.” But when Max’s train pulled out of the station in San Francisco, Vera was seized by a powerful impulse to throw her body before it so that it could not take her lover of one day away from her: “And I will never forget the lovely image of your waving to me from the observation, just as I was running away from the unbearable scene of separation.”86 Anyone still baffled by Max’s serial philandering might want to remember that the shadow of Elmira’s Park Church was still looming over him—and that Florence, in the preceding months, had also freely mentioned men that interested her, from the
screenwriter Louis Sherwin to a movie director she had gone swimming with and, finally, an unidentified man she thought she “might like.”87
Max returned to a New York gripped by hysteria. On January 2, 1920, vowing to rid America of its “moral perverts,” federal agents carried out the so-called Palmer Raids. Under the direction of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, they raided pool halls, restaurants, and private homes in thirty-five cities and, without warrants, arrested more than six thousand alleged radicals. In faraway California Florence read about the commotion in the papers, hoping that the jails could not hold all those taken into custody. But that was not the case: many of those arrested were held for weeks or months without access to legal counsel, sometimes in deserted army encampments. Among the federal agents who participated in the Palmer raids was a young J. Edgar Hoover.
Max’s work on the Liberator had become even more important now. Rather inconveniently, Crystal had, Max felt, pretty much abandoned him. As a coeditor, she was forever in a position of inferiority—the brilliant writing was his, and that’s what the public cared about, he observed. “Restless, insatiable girl—self-assertive, yet utterly dependent on others.”88 Florence might have taken that rather smug characterization as applicable to herself, too. The new film in which she had gotten a part, Dollars and Sense, directed by Harry Beaumont, bored her to no end.89 She knew she was not the only one in Hollywood who was disappointed with her situation. Other “movie people” felt exactly the same: “There is absolutely no poetry or beauty in their lives. . . . There is no artistic reward or material.”90 This wasn’t art but business.
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