by John Jakes
“How can it be? She sailed there on a friendly visit.” Paul had read every word of every recent dispatch from Key West and Cuba. The Maine had left a berth in the Dry Tortugas and steamed to Havana almost three weeks ago.
“Oh sure, perfectly friendly,” Shadow said with a roll of his eyes. “But there’s all that fighting still going on. Maybe our consul, that old Reb Fitzhugh Lee, had some notion about showing the Spaniards the heavy guns on a U.S. warship, did you stop to think of that?”
“Even so, the papers said the Spanish officials gave the American sailors a reception that was”—he pulled the English word out of his memory—“cordial.”
“They fucking blew her up. That’s cordial?”
“Is there proof the Spaniards did it?”
“Hell no, it just happened. But the spies are responsible, I’d put money on it.”
“When exactly did the ship sink?”
“Around nine-thirty, nine-forty last night. The telegraph dispatch says she was at anchor, everything quiet. Then—bang! I’m with Mr. Hearst, we should whale the tar out of those fucking Spaniards and throw ’em the hell out of this hemisphere.”
Mary’s slippers scuffed on the linoleum. She sat down next to Shadow with brimming cups of coffee. Her cleavage was white as milk, and not adequately hidden by her red robe. She dabbed her eyes. “Those poor sailor boys. How many were lost?”
“Nobody knows yet. Maybe two hundred.”
“Oh my God, Sid, that’s awful. Think of the grieving mothers and wives.”
Suddenly the atmosphere changed. Shadow dropped the paper. His eyes gleamed.
“Think of the picture possibilities.”
The Maine disaster came at a time when America was in no mood to be tolerant of the government in Madrid. Earlier in February, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, Spain’s ambassador to the United States, had sent a personal letter to a Spanish newspaper editor who was in Cuba gathering material. Somehow the letter fell into the hands of the revolutionary junta in New York. The junta passed it to the eager editors of William Randolph Hearst’s Journal. A facsimile of the letter appeared on the front page, together with a translation. President McKinley was characterized as weak and catering to the rabble by supporting Cuban independence, however reluctantly. He was a low politician desiring to stand well with the jingoes of his own party. Hearst’s headline writers called it THE WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY.
As details of the Maine disaster came in, there was little else on Chicago’s front pages.
EXTRA! EXTRA! TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-THREE ARE DEAD.
Wreck of the Battleship Maine
Is the Worst Disaster That Has Ever Befallen
the Navy of the United States.
CHICAGO BELIEVES IT TREACHERY.
PATRIOTISM ON ALL TONGUES.
Spain Must Prove Innocence. SPANISH DONS SHOW THEIR TEETH.
Made Threats of War to General Lee
When Told the Maine Was Coming to Havana.
Commander Knew He Was in Danger
of Treacherous Attack but Duty
Obliged Him to Face It.
WAR SPIRIT AT CAPITAL.
ALL THE OFFICIALS ARE ASTIR.
Roosevelt Regrets That Entire Fleet
Is Not Now at Havana.
PRESIDENT MCKINLEY ASKS PATIENCE.
AN INQUIRY HAS BEEN ORDERED.
Whether the Battleship Was Sunk
by Spanish Treachery or by Accident
Will Be Ascertained by Naval Experts.
When Facts Are Known They Will Be Dealt With
As the Dignity of the Nation Requires.
READY TO GO TO CUBA!
SEVENTH REGIMENT ILLINOIS NATIONAL GUARD
AGAIN RESTORED TO FULL STRENGTH.
Irish Boys Receive the News with Enthusiasm.
Say They Would Be Glad to See Service.
Two days after they saw the first Tribune extra, Shadow nailed a two-foot flagpole to a wooden base he’d knocked together. The pole was cut from a thick dowel, with a newel post knob mounted on top. Paul rushed out for a small can of gold paint and slapped it on the pole while Mary completed a small replica of the Spanish flag. American flags were easy to find; they were being hawked on street corners all over the city, together with cardboard-mounted photographs of the Maine before she became sunken twisted metal in the shadow of Morro Castle.
They shot the picture on the roof on a freezing, windy day. Shadow set up the fixed-focus camera to frame the bare flagpole but not the stand. Jimmy grumpily manned a brazier improvised from a skillet resting on bricks. In the skillet Paul ignited kindling and lumps of charcoal, then spattered kitchen grease on the fire to create smoke.
Shadow told Paul to take the crank, then dropped to his knees beside the stand, out of camera range. “Smoke, give me smoke!” Jimmy worked an old fireplace bellows. Mary waved a pillowcase over the brazier, forcing the noxious clouds of smoke toward the pole and driving Jimmy into a fit of coughing and tears. “Jesus, Jesus, that’s awful.”
“Shut up, work that bellows!” Shadow tugged on a pulley line Paul had rigged. The crude Spanish flag rose to the top of the pole. “All right, here we go!”
“I’m ready,” Paul cried, cranking.
Shadow’s bare wrist and powerful hand shot to the top of the pole; in the finished picture it would look like the hand of a giant. Mary had basted the flag’s grommets with just a few threads. Shadow seized the Spanish ensign and with one jerk ripped it down.
“Still cranking?” he shouted without looking around.
“Cranking.”
Shadow snapped the American flag to the pulley line and ran it up. Jimmy wildly pumped the bellows. Mary madly waved the pillowcase. The winter wind caught the stars and stripes and snapped the flag out straight.
“That’s beautiful!” Paul exclaimed. “Perfect.”
And when the audiences at Pflaum’s saw the one-minute flicker called “America’s Answer to Despots!”, the response was riotous—people spilling into the aisles, people shouting and brandishing fists, people standing on their seats, cursing the spies and baying for war. Iz Pflaum feared he’d have to phone for a police wagon.
In the kitchen, they broke out the bourbon and the bottles of Crown’s to celebrate what was sure to be a big money-maker. Even Jimmy was proud of the little picture. Shadow waved Mary’s compliments aside. “Nothing compared with what I have in mind. A real extravaganza. We’ll start buying and making the props tomorrow.”
The final death toll in Havana harbor was two hundred and sixty-eight. The yellow press thundered “Remember the Maine!” Masses of Americans suddenly took up the banners only the jingoes had carried heretofore. On March 8 and 9, Congress speedily passed a fifty-million-dollar war appropriations bill. McKinley signed it, although he was known to be unhappy about the prospect of a war and unenthusiastic about taking any stance that would provoke one.
A Naval Court of Inquiry convened to investigate the sinking. The issue could be framed in a single question. Was the disaster caused by a Spanish mine or by spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker? At the end of March the inquiry board delivered its report to Congress. The Maine had probably been sunk by a submerged mine, set by persons unknown.
The red line on the war fever thermometer took another upward jump. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt said war was inevitable, and the President ought to show some backbone. Hundreds of thousands of common and ordinary Americans endorsed that view, as did some uncommon ones, among them Buffalo Bill Cody and the retired outlaw Frank James.
On the roof, Colonel Shadow created his extravaganza called, with less than stunning originality, “Remember the Maine!!!” The added exclamation points were the colonel’s personal creative touch.
He and his assistants built a wooden frame; a large rectangular box without sides. They fitted it with a heavy canvas lining that Mary sewed. Into this lining they would pour water (Havana harbor). On one of the long sides
they tacked a cardboard backdrop, which Paul painted with a blue watercolor wash and Jim decorated with clouds made of drugstore cotton.
At the lower edge of the backdrop, near the waterline, they pasted pictures of buildings with tile roofs, cut from postcards of Lisbon, Portugal. A cardboard-mounted magazine engraving of El Morro was positioned at one side. Mary fashioned a few skimpy palm trees from wire and brown and green crepe paper. These were poked into holes in the backdrop so that they appeared to be growing in front of the buildings. Paul thought the effect was ludicrous and would fool no one. Shadow cheerfully predicted it wouldn’t matter a damn, and would he please keep such comments to himself?
Jimmy sawed small rectangular blocks of wood. Mary cut out a large cardboard-mounted photograph of the Maine. They’d bought three of these from street vendors; the extras were insurance. Using carpet tacks, Paul fastened the picture of the Maine to one of the wooden blocks. To smaller blocks he nailed smaller postcard cutouts of shrimp boats. (“Do they have shrimp boats in Havana harbor, Colonel?” “Dutch my lad, do you think the uneducated wops and polacks who just got off the boat and wandered into Pflaum’s will know the fucking difference?”) To the shrimp boats Mary attached fine sewing thread, which would allow them to be pulled through the water.
With all in readiness, they waited for a sunny, cloudless morning, then rushed to the roof in a state of nervous excitement. Paul carefully laid four pinches of gunpowder on top of the wooden block to which the Maine cutout was tacked. Then, behind the backdrop, he placed a bottle of alcohol, a long wire with the tip wrapped in cotton, and matches.
Shadow rubbed his hands and surveyed the arrangements. Jimmy was again fanning the charcoal brazier with the bellows. “We’re going to need more smoke than that.” Shadow fished in his coat and handed Mary a cigar. “Light up.”
“Sid, I don’t smoke.”
“You do now. It’s for art, remember.”
“Oh God, I’ll die.” Shadow ignored her.
Paul emptied bucket after bucket into the canvas liner until the water was even with the bottom of the backdrop. “Tie down the battleship,” Shadow ordered.
Holding two bent pins, Paul stuck his arm into the water, to his shoulder. He planted the pins in the bottom of the canvas, like fishhooks. The effect was quite nice; threads running from the pins to the battleship cutout kept it bobbing gently. He hoped water wouldn’t leak out too rapidly through the pinholes.
“Here we go, I’m cranking!” Paul fancied that people a block away heard Shadow. The colonel seemed to equate screaming with creativity.
“Smoke, God damn it!” Jimmy worked the bellows like a madman. Mary puffed and exhaled, puffed and exhaled.
“Shrimp boats!”
Paul crouched at one end of the tank, unwrapped two threads from a nail, and pulled two cutouts across the tank in back of the Maine.
“All right, they’re out of range, let ’em go.”
Paul ran to the rear of the tank. Shadow kept demanding more smoke. Mary was moaning and swaying. She looked sick but she kept puffing. Working fast, Paul immersed the cotton end of the wire in the alcohol, then lit it. He thrust his arm through a prepared hole in the backdrop, praying the burning cotton would find the pinches of powder.
With a flat report, the Maine blew up.
“Oh my God, sensational!” Shadow screamed and immediately stopped cranking. He grabbed Mary’s waist with both hands and waltzed her around.
Mary moaned, “Oh, Sid, stop, stop or I’ll puke.” She reeled to the cornice, sat down and held her head.
They turned the Maine cutout on end, rigged new threads, and restarted the smoke. Paul was responsible for pulling the battleship down into the water, bow first. He’d worked a little too fast setting the hooks for new threads, and the canvas had torn. The water level of Havana harbor was dropping rapidly as the Maine “sank.” Shadow assured them the effect was so fantastic, no one would notice. “Trust me, trust me.”
Paul went to bed that night wondering if all people in the living picture business were crazy. If so, he was now a crazy person himself. He laced his hands under his head and reflected on how much he enjoyed it. In fact, he was coming to love it.
“Remember the Maine!!!” created a sensation in the trade and block-long lines at Pflaum’s Music Hall. Although clearly recognized as a fake, and presented without music, it thrilled audiences. Paul went back to Pflaum’s three times, to sit in the silvery flickering dark and ponder.
Every trick and deception in the picture was unbelievably crude. Only a small child or an idiot would think the cutout ships and backdrop real. Yet there was undeniable magic up there on the thirty-foot screen. The scene lived because it moved. The water rippled in the sunlight—never mind that the Maine sank after 9 P.M. on a winter night. The smoke billowed across the frame, and the cutout ship vanished under the water with an abruptness that was startling.
At the end of the footage, a card Paul had lettered repeated the picture’s title: the exhortation to remember. Audience reaction never varied. People howled, stamped, pounded and sometimes damaged Iz Pflaum’s seats in a patriotic frenzy.
Paul was still dissatisfied. He compared the Maine picture with the film of the hurtling Wabash Cannonball. One was a trick and a cheat, one was honest and real. People were not so stupid; they saw the differences and when the novelty of living pictures wore off, they would begin to object to anything fake. How very much better it would have been for the Luxograph camera to have been on the esplanade of Havana harbor that night.
Of course it was impossible to predict a disaster. And the sinking of the Maine couldn’t possibly have been photographed with existing film because of the darkness. But what about some larger event, spread over a long period? Many Americans thought there would be war; indeed, they were actively promoting it. If war broke out, why not take the Luxograph camera there and film real action?
The possibility excited him. Hadn’t Shadow preached that very thing, the night he hired Paul and drunkenly sat him down to listen to a visionary speech about the spectacular possibilities for living pictures?
Of one thing he was sure. If the living pictures continued to depend on fakery, never sought to depict real places and events, Iz Pflaum’s prediction would undoubtedly come true. Flickers would remain chasers in cheap vaudeville houses forever.
Colonel Shadow had no time to discuss such philosophical niceties with his help. He was overworked and harried as a result of the sensational box office for the faked picture. He dashed around the Midwest, signing up fourteen new theaters to exhibit Luxograph programs; six of the theaters belonged to the prestigious Orpheum Circuit. These already had Edison projectors, but Shadow had signed his agreement with the great man and thus was free to supply pictures without fear of retribution. He could also continue to open his own store shows, with Luxograph projectors, in other cities. This he did in Cincinnati and Milwaukee, hiring a manager-operator for each.
In Chicago he frantically searched for additional real estate. He rented an old livery stable half a mile south of the Levee headquarters and took out a bank loan to install woodworking equipment. He hired a middle-aged Swede named Gustav Wennersten, an expert carpenter who was slow to speak but marvelously quick to understand the design and construction of Shadow’s projection machine. Gus Wennersten took charge of building new projectors. Paul helped him when he wasn’t filming for Pflaum’s and Shadow’s growing list of outlets. Jimmy did some of the heavy work for Wennersten—shifting and sawing lumber, nailing the cabinets together—though he did it clumsily and with loud complaints. After two weeks Gus Wennersten had enough of Jimmy. He said he would quit unless he could hire a qualified assistant. Shadow stormed and cursed and said he’d go bankrupt, but allowed Gus to hire a man as cheaply as possible.
Then a new problem arose. The manager of Shadow’s store show in Peoria was remitting suspiciously small sums every week. One week he sent nothing. Shadow wired an old pal who lived near Peoria, a man he’d
known in his minstrel days. The man telegraphed back to say he had covertly observed the colonel’s store show on four successive nights. Each night there was a reasonable crowd; ten or fifteen people at each of the first two showings, five or six at the last one. Shadow scribbled some computations on a sheet of paper, came up with a total, and asked Jimmy to take the train to collect what was owed. Jimmy came back two days later with a satchel full of money and the backs of his hands badly discolored.
“I had a real good talk with that chump, Colonel. I showed him the chain on my holy medal, but that didn’t impress him so we got serious. I dunno how he’ll explain black-and-blue marks and a broken arm to his wife and three kids, but if you want to keep him on, he won’t cheat you any more, ’cause I promised to call again if he did.”
“Excellent work. I will keep him, he’s a good man if you disregard his cupidity. I trust the trip wasn’t too tiring?”
“Nah,” Jimmy grinned. “It was a pleasure.”
All of them continued to work sixteen, eighteen hours a day. One evening when they were hurrying through supper at ten-thirty, Shadow stuffed half a bun in his mouth and said, “Mary, you’re starting night school on Monday.”
“I am starting what?”
“A bookkeeping course. I’m up half the God damn night writing down all the figures. It’s time to distribute the load among all the toiling bees.”
At the stove, where she was frying thick slices of ham, Mary pointed to her iron skillet. “I’m going to distribute this load on your damn skull, Sid. I hated school.”
“Mary—” Shadow took a generous swig from his bottle of whiskey. “If you don’t help me out, I’m going to lose my mind and probably hang myself.”
“Oh no, not Sid Shadow, Sid Shadow told me nothing would stop him from making his million.”
“I don’t want to argue, I’m starved. We’ll go to bed and talk it over.”
She gave him a look as she brought the skillet to the table with a towel wrapped around the iron handle. “We’re going to discuss this in bed?”
He ran his hand over her rear while she served the ham. “The way I’m feeling, we may have to discuss it three or four times.”