by John Jakes
Schurz snorted. “They’re engineering it. Hearst, Pulitzer—that lot.”
“Even so, if war comes, I want to serve. And I’ll ask you for whatever help you can give. I’ve never asked a favor before.”
Schurz was silent a moment. “How does Ilsa feel about this?”
“She’s opposed. Adamantly. Like you, she’s opposed to a war. That’s immaterial, however.”
Carl Schurz gave his friend a long, quizzical stare. Then he laughed. “Hartnäckig Deutsch!”
“Stubborn? Yes. A privilege of old age. Will you help me?”
“Of course. I can oppose a war, but I can’t ignore friendship. I will do all I can, for old times’ sake.”
79
Paul
IZ PFLAUM SHOWED “THE Wabash Cannonball” on a Tuesday night, after the variety bill. Paul, Shadow, and Jimmy were squeezed into a booth rigged from curtains at the back of the house, praying the prototype Luxograph projector wouldn’t fail. Mary fidgeted in the last row, just in front of them.
Iz Pflaum personally introduced the picture, stepping before the curtain in a suit of tails. He warned the sparse audience that any person with a feeble constitution should hold tight to his or her seat or, alternatively, leave.
This produced snickers and jeers. No one rose to go, however. In the booth, Shadow threw the switch and crossed his fingers. There were gasps and cries as the improvised cloth screen lit up with an image of an onrushing train.
The Cannonball grew and grew, seeming to hurtle straight for the audience. Now the cowcatcher detail was clearly visible—the flag emblem above it—even the railroad’s painted slogan. “Oh my God!” Mary exclaimed as patrons jumped from their seats and kicked and pushed and screamed in the aisles, frantic to escape. Three were unable to leave because they fainted.
“That was sensational, did you see how it emptied the house?” Pflaum said after he’d revived the three faintees with sal ammoniac and they had all staggered out.
Shadow said, “But that isn’t the sole purpose of—”
“Great chasers, Colonel. I want your pictures—minimum of ten, within one week. I’ll lease the projector, you train my nephew Herk to run it. See me at eleven tomorrow, we’ll write up the contract.”
The four members of the Luxograph group went back to the Levee and, to celebrate, drank far too much beer.
Next morning, with an aching head, Paul asked Shadow, “Where will we get all these pictures so fast?”
“We’ll make ’em, for Christ’s sake. Why do you think I hired you and Jimmy, as fucking ornaments? Stop frowning, kid. These are what I call happy problems. We’re on the way. We’ll have Iz Pflaum yelling so loud for Luxograph pictures, he’ll pee his pants—and open his wallet wide.”
Never in his memory had Paul spent such a frantic week. While Mary tended the peep show parlor, he and the colonel and Jimmy rushed from one end of the city to the other in a rented wagon. They photographed “Summer Shower in Jackson Park” and “Troops Drilling at Fort Sheridan.” They photographed “The Elevated Rounding a Curve” and “Professor Milo’s Dancing Dachshund.” On the roof, using the fake brick backdrop, they photographed “A Packet of Sneeze Powder,” with Mary doing the sneezing. She had a nice comic talent, Paul thought; she also performed quite gracefully for “Dance of the Butterfly Maiden,” a completely respectable effort in which she wore a three-layer costume and showed nothing more titillating than her knees.
With Jimmy and a Levee damsel as the players, they filmed “Lips Aflame,” a direct imitation of one of the biggest Edison hits, forty-two feet of continual kissing by Broadway actors May Irwin and John Rice. Out in Elgin they photographed “At Work in the Watch Factory,” and on Clark Street, “Here Comes the Trolley.” As Paul set up the camera beside the tracks, Shadow ran to press money into the hands of two policemen who had stopped all other traffic but the approaching streetcar. On the curb, Jimmy was chatting up a couple of racy-looking girls, telling them what a great dancer he was. “Get over here, Daws,” Shadow shouted.
Jimmy ambled into the street looking resentful. Shadow stamped his boot. “Move your ass! I don’t pay you to line up your pussy willows on my time.”
Scarlet, Jimmy said, “You want me to crank?”
“Dutch’ll do it, he’s steadier. You hold the tripod down. Now, f’Christ’s sake, now, here comes the God damn streetcar!”
The first bill of chasers was a hit, even though they were shown from a single projector with a two-minute wait between each one. Iz Pflaum asked for more—five new pictures every second week. And where there was one opportunity, there were sure to be others. Shadow leased the peep show parlor to a couple of middle-aged entrepreneurs from the Levee. He personally pulled the cards from the machine showing “A Chinese Dream” and closed the back room. He wanted no coppers or vice crusaders interfering with his vision—a new, larger photographic empire in which penny-ante pornography had no place. He reincorporated as the American National Luxograph Company.
Riding the tide of opportunity, Shadow drove himself and his employees to unprecedented effort. He found a commercial studio that could handle roll film. He set them up to process his negatives and strike prints. Still, there weren’t enough hours to travel to locations to shoot one-minute actualities, as the colonel had taken to calling them, and at the same time build a second projector in the cellar because he had a line on a variety house in Indianapolis that had heard of Pflaum’s success and wanted to match it.
Throughout the summer and early fall, Paul lived in a constant haze of exhaustion. He slept four hours a night, five if he was lucky. They staggered out at six every morning to film until the light disappeared at dusk.
At one or two in the morning they drew up lists of possible film subjects. “Parade of the Wheelmen.” “Park Police, Mount and Drill.” Paul had read about a Lumière film, “Grand Canal, Venice,” shot from a gondola, and “Niagara Falls Gorge,” an Edison subject filmed from the observation car of the Niagara Gorge Railway. From these came “On the Lagoon,” a pleasant glide over the sunlit waters at Lincoln Park. To forestall protests from Jimmy, Paul said he’d man the oars while Jimmy cranked the camera at the prow of the rowboat. Jimmy himself came up with one subject—“Making Soap Bubbles”—which Shadow said privately was pretty simpleminded, but which audiences enjoyed and applauded. Shadow’s genius was responsible. On the roof on a windless day, he’d set his camera so that the sun made the bubbles glisten and shimmer. For a man self-trained, he had a remarkable eye. But who in the world could have trained any other way for this new craft?
Paul learned by observing his ruthless and profane mentor. He tried to imagine what would make a good, pleasing backdrop, then introduced the factor of motion. He lay awake when he should have been sleeping, visualizing camera setups.
Competitors were resorting to short reenactments of current stage plays. This prompted Paul to think of Fritzi and the authors she admired. At one of their late-night brain sessions, he put forth the word “Shakespeare?” almost diffidently, and Shadow went wild. “I don’t like stories but that guy’s in a class by himself. I heard all about him from actors I know. Let me think, let me think.” He massaged his temples. “What’s the show where the darkie kills his wife?”
“I believe it’s Othello.” Jimmy folded his arms and looked away.
“We’ll try it.”
They recruited a black man, William Soames, who did janitor work at several Levee barrooms. Soames was about forty, sweet-natured and shy but commandingly built, with wide shoulders and powerful arms. Shadow also hired a neighborhood whore named Katie Favors, a little thing with blond curls. At first she wasn’t keen about associating with a colored man, but she changed her mind when she heard the purpose was creation of one of those new flicker pictures.
On the roof, wearing a dressing gown to which Mary had stitched ropes of secondhand Christmas tinsel, the Moor from Chicago nervously chatted with the equally nervous Desdemona from the whorehouse. Katie Fa
vors wore a pale gray nightgown with a lace-edged collar that left her white throat bare. She actually looked quite fetching in it; almost innocent, Paul thought. The backdrop was the brick wall repainted with Arabian Nights arches. The sole prop was Paul’s bed.
“Choke her!” Shadow cried as they started to crank.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Miss Favors,” William Soames said as he gingerly put his right hand on Katie’s neck. He bared his teeth; she fluttered her eyes. They swayed back and forth rather tentatively. Finally Soames pushed his victim onto the bed. She clutched her forehead and expired.
Shadow stepped back. “Terrible. For Christ’s sake, Willie, you act like you’re handling a china doll. This bitch betrayed you. Got in the kip with some other fella—right, Paul?”
“Well, he thinks so. Actually—”
“You’re burned up about it, Willie. Shake her around! Roll your eyes! Snarl! Film costs money. Make it right this time or you don’t get paid.”
With that inspiration, William Soames delivered a performance that made everyone applaud. He choked Katie Favors with both hands and whipped her from side to side so forcibly, she uttered blue oaths in a strangled voice. William rolled his eyes and gnashed his teeth as instructed. A gob of spit formed on his lower lip, sending Shadow into ecstasy. Then Katie Favors gave it extra effort, doing a series of leg jerks and bodily convulsions on the bed before breathing her last.
When Paul stopped cranking, William Soames knelt beside Katie, chafed her hands, and apologized for treating her so roughly. She sat up, rubbing her red neck. “Oh, that’s okay, a little lotion will take care of this. I got into it myself. Kinda fun, wasn’t it?”
When “The Death of Desdemona by William Shakespeare” showed at Pflaum’s for the first time, it created a sensation. Women hid their eyes and cried out. Men jumped on their seats shouting, “Lynch that dirty nigger!” Frightened but proud too, the mild-mannered Soames had to be smuggled out a side door.
The constant rushing about, passing out bribes to get into places that would otherwise have barred them, thinking up subjects, working against the deadlines Pflaum imposed, created an atmosphere of perpetual crisis that only a young man, or a driven older one like Shadow, could survive. For Paul it helped dull the memory of the scene outside St. James Church, and the accounts of the reception afterward, which the newspapers had printed in hurtful detail. He wore himself out purposely, and as the days passed, some of the pain abated.
But not all. Nor would it, ever.
Gradually, and quite without any conscious plan, Paul became the senior member of Shadow’s crew. The colonel asked questions of Paul but not of Jimmy. When Paul and Jimmy helped in the cellar, building the new projector, Jimmy malingered—went out for a smoke or rested—whenever he could get away with it. He just wasn’t interested. Paul, sensing that Jimmy resented their changing status, marveled at the contradictory behavior of human beings. Jimmy engineered his own loss of favor, and he blamed someone else.
When the colonel jumped on a train to lease his second projector in Indianapolis—a third was half finished—Paul took charge of filming for two days; they didn’t dare fall behind. He and Jimmy bought their way into the baseball park, and from a position near the White Stockings bench filmed the home team losing to its opponent. The stands were filled with people wearing McKinley or Bryan badges and ribbons. Once again Paul found himself doing most of the work. Jimmy spent a lot of time leaning over the rail of a box to chat up a homely but well-dressed woman with a large bosom.
As the game ended and the shadows lengthened, they folded up the Luxograph tripod and boxed their gear in the silent, empty park. Paul said, “You don’t like this job much, do you, Jim? Why do you stay?”
“Got to, I’m out of circulation for a while yet.”
“What does that mean, circulation?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Let’s say I’m staying till I find something better.”
“How could any job be better than this?”
“This nickel-and-dime shit? Jesus, Dutch, you’re strange.” Then he nudged Paul, grinning. “Hey, did’ja see that woman? She’s married, it’s her husband who has the box over there. He couldn’t come today. She says he don’t give her much of what a woman needs. I’m gonna tell Shadow I got a bellyache, can’t work in the cellar tonight. I’m taking the lady out to dance, and then I’ll take her to Buxbaum’s Hotel and dance her a different way. Till she’s in heaven.”
Paul knelt to latch the. box, keeping his face turned to hide his dislike of the bragging, and the braggart.
On the sunlit porch, Mrs. McKinley sat in a large wicker rocker. The porch door opened. Out stepped the Major, followed by a second gentleman. Whistles and applause from the audience greeted the appearance of the candidate.
“That other one’s McKinley’s secretary, George Cortelyou,” Shadow whispered from the next seat.
The Major examined telegrams informing him of his nomination. Appearing pleased, he returned the telegrams to his secretary and took off his hat. Out of his pocket came a large white handkerchief. Paul sat spellbound in the dark, the silver images flickering on his face.
The Major mopped his brow and cheeks. The picture flashed off, leaving a blank screen. A scalloped velvet curtain dropped from above. The auditorium lights came on, the applause sputtered out, and the audience rose to leave.
“Major McKinley at Home” had lasted slightly more than one minute. Election day was Tuesday. Presumably the film would be withdrawn after that. Paul and Shadow had come back to see it a second time, to study the technique. There wasn’t much technique to study. The camera shot from a fixed position on McKinley’s lawn. Still, the reality fascinated Paul.
Shadow too; as they went up the aisle he said, “That’s the genius of flickers, Dutch. Actuality. Faces and places never before accessible. That French outfit did ‘The Coronation of the Czar of Russia.’ Edison’s bunch did ‘Arrival of the Chinese Viceroy at the Waldorf Hotel.’ Everybody’s into actualities.”
“I wish we could have filmed that picture.”
“Not a chance. It was a Biograph deal all the way. The candidate’s brother Abner has shares in the company. So does ex-President Harrison. The owner of this theater’s a Republican. Maybe we should have done our own version of McKinley—” Shadow was eyeing a well-endowed cashier who had just come out of her booth with a tin cash box. “Found some gent who’s a ringer for the Major, set him up at a nice white house on the North Shore and called it Canton—listen, excuse me. Don’t tell Mary where I went.”
The colonel swooped over to the cashier, bowed, and flourished his sombrero, then began to whisper. The cashier giggled. He took her arm. Paul walked home alone, amused by Shadow’s cheerful immorality. It was odd that he could overlook it in the colonel and despise the same trait in Jim Daws. He wished Jimmy would get back into circulation, whatever that was. Was he hiding from someone? Paul wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
William Jennings Bryan had stormed back and forth across the hustings like a Nebraska cyclone, thrilling thousands with his delivery of The Speech. William McKinley sat on his porch in Canton and let others stump for him. Including a surrogate—a Doppelgänger on a strip of celluloid yanked through a lighted box one frame at a time. No one could say to what extent the election was influenced by repeated showings of “Major McKinley at Home” in large cities for almost three weeks before November 3. Only the outcome was unequivocal. Bryan lost by six hundred thousand popular votes. America returned control of both the Senate and the House to the Republicans. Respectable folk could sleep soundly again. The dragon of bimetallism was slain.
November brought dark clouds and chill rain. Paul and every other Chicagoan smelled winter on the wind.
Shadow’s mad pace never slackened. He reeled from camera to cellar to railway station with a glazed eye. He dashed from city to city, hunting for picture outlets, haggling over deals, fighting off competitive companies doing the same thing. The biggest
was Edison Vitascope, headed by the team of Raff and Gammon, men who had expertly marketed Edison’s peep shows nationally.
Shadow placed a third projector in a variety house in Louisville and contracted for a fourth in Milwaukee. He rented an empty haberdashery in Peoria with the intention of running his own store show. He explained to Paul that he’d hire a local operator-manager at a low salary, and all the profits would belong to the company. Assuming people showed up. The variety houses already drew substantial audiences, and Shadow received a small percentage of every ticket sale when his films were showing. But it might not work out so favorably in locations without vaudeville acts; the ledger for Peoria might be decorated with red ink. But he wanted to try:
“You rest on your heels, you get no place. And this company is going someplace, believe me.”
“I do,” Paul said.
For the local audience, they filmed “His Honor, The Bath” in December. It was a crisp winter day, with diamond-hard sunlight; the day of the First Ward Ball at the Seventh Regiment Armory.
Presided over by Coughlin and Kenna, the Ball was the principal fund-raising event for the spring election campaign. Everyone who did business in one of Chicago’s vice districts had to buy tickets. All night long gamblers and cadets, madams and their stock, would socialize in the midst of balloons and confetti, dance on a waxed floor, drink and engage in other pleasures in private boxes furnished with greens, patriotic bunting, advertising placards—and curtains.
The Bath turned up outside the Armory in the special wardrobe he’d chosen for the night’s festivities, due to begin at eight. Paul wished for film that would reproduce color, because the Bath was a peacock spectacle in a tailcoat of billiard-table green, a dove gray waistcoat, lavender trousers and necktie, pink gloves, yellow pumps, and shiny black top hat.
Shadow introduced his crew. The Bath peered at Paul, then Jimmy. “I’ve met you lads before.”
“At the racetrack,” Jimmy said.