by Peter Davis
Nils tired of repeating himself. Unlike Houdini he was not a great showman craving adulation nor would his disease allow him to top himself with physical feats. But there was another form of magic Nils was certain he could do.
The magic of a magician was mundane compared with the magic of film—what is a severed rope restored to a single strand or a vanishing dove when stacked against prehistoric monsters or a leap from the wing of one airplane to another?—which is why Nils became a moviemaker. “Magicians like to believe they can defy the Creator by doing things no human has ever done,” Nils said, “but a filmmaker becomes the Creator by constructing his own world. It just takes him a little longer. Six days becomes twelve weeks or so.” Instead of imitating his former hero, Nils used the magic of the screen itself—cross-cutting, montage, close-ups, fade-ins, dissolves, special effects—to make people howl, to scare and amuse and reassure them, to make them weep over the salvation of an orphan or the redemption of a scapegrace. He began making pictures in the last days of the silents and managed a seamless transition to talkies.
After a successful adaptation of a hit play, Nils fumbled and made a few attempts at what he intended as intellectual pictures. An explorer goes to Tibet and finds his journey is philosophical rather than geographical. The dictator of a small country begins with ideals and is corrupted by power and privilege until his son, home from college in America, literally does not recognize his grossly bloated, bemedalled and brutal father. This was a decent moment but the picture itself, which Nils made for Jubilee, was a failure, stumbling over its own pretensions to political significance and moralizing. Louella Parsons, among others, brought Nils back to earth: “One of the brightest boys in our constellation of directors,” she wrote, “likes to go around town proclaiming that if pictures can talk they might as well say something. Fine and dandy, but he should remember the ringing declaration from the founding fathers of filmdom—if you want to send a message, take it to Western Union.” That was a message Nils heeded. A long time later Mossy told me had planted the item by calling Parsons himself. True or not, from then on Nils made entertainments.
When Nils finished disclosing his path into pictures to his fellow directors, Largo Buchalter, who hated to have anyone else hold forth, could only say, “Well la-di-da.” Nils realized Buchalter was about to start a new story about himself, belittling others. “I think,” Nils concluded slowly as he looked Buchalter in the eye, “that what meant the most for me in terms of freedom was to be famous and rich and still so young.” The bully braggart in the director’s cluster had suddenly been outbullied and outbragged. Nils wasn’t quite through. “Frank,” he said to Capra, “will you give me back my four of clubs?” He went around the circle naming the card each director had picked earlier. When he finished, Nils handed the deck to Largo Buchalter and told him to keep it. “Just in case you think it’s marked.” To me, Nils was virtuous glamour.
A royal moment. The prince of melody descended the stairs. Dapper, double breasted in blue serge, dark hair lightly brilliantined. Teet Beale was at last intimidated—no ta-ra-ra-booms for this guy, any lyric would fall dead at his feet. Beale humbly bowed and said, “It’s an honor to have you here, Mr. Berlin.” Irving Berlin nodded with a wisp of a smile and went to greet Palmyra. “Mr. Berlin,” she said, “I wish I were your sister in song, but I’m only your fourth cousin at least twice removed.” “Music is music, my dear,” said Irving Berlin, “and I’m happy to have you anywhere in the family.”
Blinded by my betters, I was wondering why Mossy was a phantom at his own party when suddenly I was slammed on the back. It was not Mossy, who did not do such things. Seaton Hackley, Mossy’s henchman who played his part in Joey Jouet’s final hours, was praising the Doll’s House work I turned in that afternoon, which felt like the previous century. “A humdinger script,” he called it, forgetting it was only a treatment. He must have received it from Gershon Lidowitz already—Littlewits himself—and shoveled it up to Mossy, from whom he may have detected a passing blink of approval. “Love the way you solved the third act. Always had a soft spot for Torvald myself. Nice to give him the drinking problem, automatically makes him more interesting and justifies the wife leaving home, even taking the kiddies to her mother’s while old Torvie promises to get off the sauce. She’s not really abandoning her home that way. Leaves us with morality in the saddle and the prospect of a reunited family. You think Fred MacMurray is ready for Torvie?” Maybe, but he’s not ready for Garbo, I didn’t dare say. Garbo was the star they wanted for Nora though I’d heard Pammy was hoping she’d get the part.
Hackley’s praise made me proud, with no inkling of how much more Ibsen would hate me than the other writers who did nothing worse than change his ending while I had triumphantly destroyed everything he meant in the play. I looked around for Lidowitz. Not here. He somehow didn’t rate, yet I did. My moment of strut. Woozily, I took out my car keys and jingled them. Just to make some noise.
Haloed beneath a chandelier, with the self-possession of a nested starling, Pammy greeted people alone. Her honey-gold hair was now in a twirled mound at the top of her head—she re-coiffed in the powder room?—while the green diaphanous gown was both French and ancient Greek. She was classical and romantic. Was it possible?—yes, she’d begun working her way toward me. She must have heard about my coup at the studio; surely Seaton Hackley wouldn’t have praised me without a nod from Mossy, a nod that had made the rounds. A disobedient strand of her upswept hair, straying from the rest of her coiffure, caught more light at the back of her neck. What would she say to me? Or I to her? Why could she come to me like this but I couldn’t approach her? Or could I? The way of the pecking order: a junior screenwriter speaks when spoken to, ready with a bon mot. I wasn’t.
I’d say, “You’re looking even more ravishing than usual.” Naw, that’s what a flit would tell her. Likewise I couldn’t say how much I loved her in The Many Lives of Theodosia, a negligible effort by all concerned. Palmyra was getting nearer, greeting friends but drawing unrelentingly closer to me. How about just going with “Mossy really knows how to live, ha ha, you should see the main house.” Death. I was terminally abashed. Here she is. In two seconds I’ll have to say something. No, oh.
In the last tenth of an instant, like a car swerving to avoid a crash, Palmyra angled—she had almost bumped into me—to kiss and embrace Simone Swan Bluett, who did her costumes on Autumn Nocturne. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,” said Simone to Palmyra. Had Pammy been heading for her the whole time, then, or had she changed her mind as she approached me, deciding late in her sashay that her dresser was worth her time and affection while I was not?
“I told you, it’s just dues,” said the reappeared Sylvia Solomon, patting my shoulder. Maternally, sisterly? I turned to her and said, “It’s discouraging and I’m embarrassed that you noticed.” “Look,” she said, “be thankful you don’t have to sleep with anyone to get around this town. It wasn’t so easy for me. Though come to think of it, it wouldn’t hurt if you found your way into the right bed here and there.”
How do you get into the right bed anyway, I did not ask as we were joined by Yancey Ballard and other writers. The angular Yeatsman stooped to my eye level. “Feeling isolated? It’s good for the soul. I myself look forward to becoming a sixty-year-old smiling public man some distant day.” We screenwriters huddled, indeed grumbled, in a corner filled with a reproduction of Rodin’s Thinker and another of a Greek god entwined around a goddess. Some of these writers were Hollywood notables making three thousand or more a week, some were notorious, some disappointed, some permanently hopeful, most suspecting they would be better people if they did something else. Novelists, playwrights, journalists: they’d all had what they now thought of as honest, if not sufficiently gainful, toil. Now they were in harness, overpaid, feeling they were debasing themselves before illiterates prior to being replaced by another of their species who would, in turn, also be replaced. Or else they were trying
to be hired to be overpaid, debased, and replaced. Self-respect was not an attribute many of them had in excess.
A cocky thickset writer junior even to me, Mark Darrow, began babbling, perhaps from nervousness or drink. “I always start with a twist, a guy’s told he has a fatal disease, or it’s the night before a battle,” he said, “then I decide who should be in that plot point—a thief, surgeon, bunch of salesmen looking for dames.” Mark’s wife grabbed his elbow and said, “Honey, please, these men have so much more experience.” But Yeatsman said, “That’s fine, fine, but I like to start with someone I’m interested in, flawed of course, I think what’s improvable about him, then I go further and think only what’s provable. When I get to the provable I can start to write, and things will happen to him.” “No, no, no, that’s entirely wrong,” said Mark Darrow as if he were his famous uncle Clarence rebutting the prosecution in a courtroom. “You have to have the gimmick first,” he went on, “like a coat hook so you can hang everything on it and the good guys—”
But now Yeatsman interrupted, having heard enough of Darrow’s nonsense. “You know what’s too bad?” he said. “What’s too bad is the kids of this country being brought up by our pictures to believe crime doesn’t pay or you shouldn’t have sex till you’re married, or—” And he was in turn interrupted by Sylvia Solomon, who said, “Now here’s what we could do, folks, that the Hays Office morality police in charge of protecting youth from reality couldn’t object to—we could make a picture about a hateful Hollywood executive, excuse the redundancy, who throws a party where everyone present loathes him for one reason or another and finally he is murdered while the party is still in progress—”
Yeatsman said, “And after the cheering stops, for the rest of the movie Bill Powell and Myrna Loy have to figure out who did it, and no one wants them to solve the crime.”
At that very moment, cued by Sylvia and Yeatsman, Amos Zangwill descended the stairs into our midst and promenaded his ballroom. “Speaking of the unholy ghost,” said Sylvia. “Cuchulain himself,” said Yeatsman.
Decades later I still see him entering now in his dark suit with his half smile, regal, not arrogant. Where did that smile come from, an executioner’s smile but also the grinning rictus of his dispatched victim? Trim, almost small, creating a lagoon of space one could violate only at the peril of being repelled like a clumsy pirate hurled to the sharks off a galleon. A small cortege followed as Mossy nodded to his guests.
“What a night!” Largo Buchalter bellowed as Mossy passed the directors. “We’re all having the time of our lives, Mossy!” “Glad you’ve been elected spokesman, Largo,” Mossy said as he smiled at Nils Matheus and Capra but not at Buchalter.
Mark Darrow, drunkenly on the make, broke from the writers’ kennel. His wife tried to pull him back to safety, but he elbowed her aside. He seized what he must have felt was the main chance as Mossy passed an elaborately framed Picasso drawing. In the drawing a male abstraction was inserting part of himself into an opening in a female abstraction. “What a genius he is with a phallic symbol, isn’t he Mossy?” Darrow ventured. He pronounced it fay-lick. Yeatsman groaned; there was too much silence in the room and everyone had heard.
“Phallic it is,” Mossy replied with the correct pronunciation, “symbol it’s not.”
“Oh sure, AZ,” said Darrow, obviously unaware that Mossy hated being called by his initials as if he were LB Mayer. Mossy’s temperature seemed to rise a little as he considered “AZ” and how he might discipline its user; we were seeing the studio head as padrone reproving one of his villagers. “I’ll tell you what is a phallic symbol, Marky”—“Oh god,” Sylvia whispered, “he only does that to your name if he hates you”—“when you stick your pencil in your mouth, Marky, and rotate it the way you do in story conferences so it blackens your lips and looks as if you’d really like to be sucking someone’s cock instead of yessing my every belch, that is when the pencil becomes a phallic symbol. Am I right, Mel?”
This last was tossed over Mossy’s shoulder to the family psychoanalyst, Melvin Baron, who followed in Mossy’s train. Dr. Baron obediently nodded as fast as he could. “Yes absolutely definitely, Mossy, I couldn’t have put it … ” But Mossy slashed him with a gesture and moved on. Mark Darrow faded wordless into the burled woodwork, smiling bravely as he may have imagined Sydney Carton did on the steps to the guillotine.
“See?” Sylvia said leaning toward me. “At the next party you’ll be welcomed by all as one of the happy band of brothers and sisters present for the execution of Mark Darrow. While young Mark himself will be lucky if he ever gets invited after this to the opening of a tin can. Did you catch the glare Marky’s little wife gave him?”
By this time Mossy had again disappeared upstairs into his library with King Vidor and Nils Matheus Maynard. There had been talk that the directors might try to form a guild as the writers were doing, and we all knew Mossy would want to head off any such insubordination. He was vaguely apolitical on the right, but many writers called him fascistic, an adjective we threw around promiscuously when discussing studio heads.
With Mossy upstairs, Palmyra reigned. The producers fell over themselves courting her for their next pictures. She was able to fly away, a brightly feathered songbird, telling them all they were too kind.
Teet Beale, the crier, announced midnight supper, “Ladies first, s’il vous plaît.”
As wives and actresses streamed past us toward the buffet table, a writer next to me began to swear. “Fuck it all, what I hate most here are the women’s perfumes,” said Poor Jim Bicker, a former hobo who sold a magazine story to Jubilee and was now on his third screenplay. He made eight hundred a week, more than twice my salary, but he still had the nickname Poor from his days riding the rails. Even tonight in his relative prosperity, he had torn cuffs, unpressed pants, and he looked as if he had just arrived from a brawl, which was a possibility. “You could use a little education,” he said to me.
“Why the perfume?” I asked.
“I prefer the body stench of bathless hoboes,” Poor Jim answered more to his highball glass than to me. “Yeah, a hobo’s honest smell is better than these women with their artificial scents all swimming together like rare tropical fish in this dazzle of a tank. Like to take a pick-ax to the tank, let all the water run out. They couldn’t survive without their privilege. Their scents and the sloppy paints on their faces cost more than I saw in a month before I was bought out and became part of this vulgarity. Some say they’re Reds, can you beat that?” Poor Jim threw up his hands. “Maybe I’ll fuck me one of them later.” He sniffed, scorning and lusting after the extravagantly adorned women.
The Canadian director of Westerns, Walter Heatherington, was telling an ancient man with blue hair, who was addressed as Monsieur Le Comte, about the death of his best friend as they advanced along the line in France in 1918. “My mate Lorne was pushing along in the mud next to me one moment, and the next his head was at my wrist, blown clear of his trunk, and the sergeant told me to keep moving.”
“Ah, mon Dieu,” said the very old blue-haired man, who had been involved with the Lumières in devising early film projectors and cameras, “De temps en temps I think all of us should have died in the trenches. In my own first war with the Bosch, in 1870, I was wounded in Alsace and they thought I would die of blood poisoning—how you say gangrene in my leg. I was evacuated to Lyon to die in hospital. A nurse was posted there, une jeune fille, comment s’appellait-elle, ah Danielle. I recall how she brought me around when I could lie only on my back and she came in the night to wash me again in my helplessness. Danielle’s spécialité de la maison was the upside down backward squat, to this day there are mornings when I think of nothing but the muscles in her back as she rose and fell. Danielle broke my heart and left the nursing to become a nun. Then I wish I died in Alsace. But it never gets any easier, relations sexuelles, does it?”
I asked M. Le Comte what that was.
“Call it the seduction, my boy. Half the
people here are working so hard hoping they will be coucher with the other half by two a.m., and not a few will succeed. Some of us will be dead, still aching with desire in our final breaths, dying to love a little more as we die. Meanwhile, I recollect Danielle. Long dead herself, of course, unless she is a retired mother superior. Sex and death, they play with each other, unwilling partners who always win and always lose. You think the cinema is about sex, but it is really all about death, and someday you’ll see why.”
I didn’t, though, not for many years, until I arrived at my own version of what he was saying. All the people in the movies of his early days with the Lumières, like most of us at Mossy’s party, those who wrote and directed and produced the pictures, and especially those who acted in them, are dead. Le Comte himself is of course long gone. Looking at old movies is simply looking at dead people, at death itself. The ancient French film pioneer was prophesying that motion pictures were going to last even though their makers would not. Wedded to death: what an art form.
“The shock of the war behind, the pull of a war to come,” said M. Le Comte. “Alors, we are always between two magnets.”
“Ta-ra-ra, Darryl Zanuck, He puts us in a panic, The whole town’s in his box, Whether he’s at Warner’s or Fox.”
“Monsieur Zanuck enters the fray,” said M. Le Comte, “your Napoleon I believe.”
Teet Beale was quickly silenced and a clamor arose for Palmyra to sing. Mossy came out of his library to stand at the crest of the six steps leading down into his ballroom. Esther Leah Zangwill, a compact bundle of nerves who had spent much of the evening ordering around the kitchen staff, made an appearance beside her husband. Mossy was a bullet of a man with eyes that did not see so much as penetrate their object. Esther Leah fidgeted, never leaving anything—a piece of furniture, her hairdo, a child’s clothing—alone. When a writer asked Mossy, “How’s Fussy?” it meant he knew Esther Leah well and was in Mossy’s good graces due to a script that was shootable. “She tolerates me,” Mossy would answer. “No one knows why.” If Esther Leah found a servant smoking in the kitchen or heard an underling criticize Mossy, although she did both of these things herself, repeatedly, the offender was banished.