Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  He slid a box from the bottom of the pile. A note was attached to the red satin ribbon: Dear Mary, Forever, Burt in spidery script.

  He guided Mutter to the seat of a wide fauteuil near the fake fireplace and placed the box in Mutter’s anxious fingers. There was a tenderness, a reverence in Lon’s gaze, as he watched the muscles jump in Mutter’s temples as he chewed. It was a lover’s touch that lifted the brim of Mutter’s cap, a movement so fluid, so full of purpose, it barely stirred the silence.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said in a gravelly whisper. “You glorious son of a bitch.”

  He was a connoisseur of the wrecked.

  “Mortar shell?”

  “Verdun,” I said.

  Lon’s fingers tripped the condyles of Mutter’s bolts with a soothing brush.

  “He’s a masterpiece. You have to get this on film.”

  “I have,” I said.

  He paused, his sketchpad almost quivering on his lap.

  “You what?”

  “That’s why we are here.”

  “You made a picture?”

  “The Toymaker. We make in Germany. They are distributing it, Universal.”

  “Distributing? You didn’t come here to act?”

  “I directed the picture, but I have the misfortune of not having my name on it.”

  “I know the feeling.” He grinned, his face rippling into what seemed like thousands of dry furrows.

  “I am serious,” I said.

  “You directed? How old are you?”

  “How old?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Does this matter?”

  “No. But if it’s true, I’d bet you’d be a first.”

  “Then finally I am first at something.” And I tried to smile. Which seemed to charm him. He put his hand on my knee.

  “You’re very unusual, kid. Keep that.”

  He gave us assurances. Told us our “situation” would be handled with the swift and ruthless rectification only fame could motivate. And all during these fatherly growls, he sketched and Mutter laid waste to two more boxes.

  Upon saying good-bye, Lon handed us two cards, business-size, a publicity photo of himself rendered in line with the words Don’t Step on That Spider! It Might Be Lon Chaney! in emergency red beneath it.

  These were our studio passports, our all-access passes to every inch and offering at the studio’s disposal, good for a cup of coffee, a three-course meal, or a rubdown at the administration building’s exclusive Emperor’s Club. So armed, we were set loose onto the backlot until that evening, when Chaney promised to meet us for dinner. I have since seen such little slices of ephemera sell at auction for a yearly wage. But then, on that dry and overbright day, their value was more immediate, as they were the only pieces of paper in our possession that the studio might consistently honor.

  CHAPTER 23

  The backlot was a haiku of half sentences, a communication of remembered time and borrowed place for supreme insiders who need not bother with completing a thought. Scene painters sneaked nips of gin in the shade of a massive drawbridge that floated unmoored in the dust. A whole street of plaster and timber facades ran like a madman’s rhyme to nowhere, twisting into hapless alleys and dead thoroughfares, great vaguely European husks of dream villages empty as walnut shells. And next to this a wattle and daub reconstruction of my own village, complete with plywood pillory and whipping post. A castle in one-eighth scale compressed the distance as it sat on the valley end of the Santa Monica Mountains. And below this, in actual size but severed like a shark-attack victim at the waist, were the massive arches of Notre Dame’s cathedral. The detail was impeccable, the saints’ faces only just beginning to flake in the dry wind. It was up these steps that Chaney had played his gruesome hunchback and herded in the age of the blockbuster. We had hours yet to burn before dinner, and Mutter seemed tired, crashing finally from his massive influx of white sugar, and so we sat on the cathedral steps and stared out onto the amputated streets linked by light cables that snaked blackly in the dirt, waiting for that night’s shoot. There was something brutal in all this excess, something that demanded reckoning from its size and breadth alone. It was America, I suppose. Before I even knew what that meant.

  When the miraculous becomes common, the common becomes untenable.

  We watched the sunset through the false fronts of Dodge City and ambled back to the main lot. At the commissary, we flashed our cards and were shown to a private dining room sectioned off with a heavy swath of medieval tapestry complete with heavy oak wainscoting and crossed broadswords over a false fireplace. There was the blue smell of ice and spilled booze in the air, far laughter and disembodied moans, the desert-fire scent of marijuana, roast meat, and gratin cheese, anonymous bodies. We were brought two miniature tureens of turtle soup. Mutter was served a tankard of dark beer. Chaney showed up for the meat course, a slab of bloody beef loin and two crisp squabs, their startled heads still attached. Chaney spoke as he cut and chewed the steak.

  “That was one helluva picture you got there, kid. You’re a more than fair actress.”

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly. “It was necessary with our budget.”

  “You could write your own ticket with this waif act you got going. What is your problem anyway? Weak glands?”

  “I do not wish to act, Mr. Chaney.”

  “My kid, Creighton, says he’s got the bug but he simply doesn’t have the paste. But you could really be something. Pickford won’t live forever, you know.”

  Yes, but I suspected I would. And I could hardly see mincing around in front of a hand-cranked box, forcing my way through numerical emotions, as a fitting tribute to eternity.

  “I do not wish to act,” I said again.

  “That’s right. So you told me,” he said, staring at me, chewing distractedly. “Very effective picture. I wasn’t quite sure how you achieved that effect of such claustrophobic dread.” He continued to stare at me. “Quite a trick.” Was he testing my authorship?

  “That was achieved with single-frame intercuts, roughly twenty to the foot, I believe.” Volker had insisted I shoot a whole B-roll of extreme close-ups. Rats, wide staring eyes, mouths stretched in silent screams. The idea was to slip something past the audience’s attention, without their consent. To give them the feeling of being “voluptuously invaded,” as he called it.

  “Those images fly by so fast you can’t actually—”

  “See them. Yes, Mr. Chaney,” I said. “I know they are there only because I put them there. Are you now satisfied? Or would you like to know what stock I shot on and at what speed?”

  He said nothing for a moment. Just grinned his warm and decaying grin.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” he said, still smiling. He seemed to enjoy being impressed.

  “My father,” I said with a touch of fear and even less longing.

  “He still in the business?”

  “We’ve lost touch.”

  “You say you cut your picture?”

  “I never said it. But it could be reasonably implied. Yes. Took goddamned days to assemble ten seconds of film.”

  “How do you feel about working up?”

  “You mean like Lubitsch? Like Lang?” I said sarcastically.

  “Those boys got directing credit, kid.”

  I was silent. My soup had cooled to a green muck.

  “I know Lois needs an assistant,” he said finally. “That is if you could stomach this mug for the next couple of months.”

  “And what would I be doing? Soaking rushes and binning footage? I’ve made two films, Mr. Chaney. Two.”

  “Let me make this easy on you. Germany doesn’t count, kid. America’s the only market that counts. You don’t see Clarence Brown or Billy Wellman bucking for work in Berlin. But you’re in good company. The promise of this country is that you can always start over. Every day, if you have to. In fact, this country loves nothing more than a comeback. The underdog, the shill, some poor dope bleeding on the ropes—American
s eat that stuff up. You go one round and win, headline. But you have your ass handed to you ten times before finally wearing the belt, they’ll love you till the trumpet sounds.”

  “And if I don’t wish to be loved?”

  “If you don’t wish to be loved you’re in the wrong business, sister. That or your name is Joe von Sternberg.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I met Lois well past her apogee, past her tenure as Universal’s highest-paid director, past her second marriage and her mental collapse, past her moment of ultimate martyrdom when she appeared flayed as a flapper Christ before Uncle Carl begging for any substantial scrap. I met her there on the bench, over the rolls and rolls of someone else’s shots, someone else’s visions, hoisting the blade, making the slice in time, stopping the moment, freeing the next, cleaning up messes. She was bloated from antidepressants, her fingers yellow from nicotine. Her hair, infused with an unruly gray, resisted the ministrations of pins or nets or spit. In the dark, as we cut, she bit the bodies of her Pep O Mint Life Savers so hard they threw sparks from her open lips. It was clear to me from the first day that she resented my presence. In the near dark, I didn’t bother pretending to breathe. And this, with my natural furniture stillness, let her tolerate me, let her believe she was still alone.

  Lois worked with the editor’s door wide-open. She hated the smell of developer, the gamy stink of the rabbit-skin glue. She associated these smells with labor. And she missed having power. She knew what power smelled like: fresh leather upholstery, a hand-rolled Upmann, fresh ink. So she made me do the wet work, and she never once wondered why my bare fingers never blackened in the nitrate baths.

  “This is Sisyphisian,” she would slur some days. “Sisyphisic. Sissy-shit.” She pulled openly from a gin bottle during lunch breaks, swallowing hard in response to my offer of my useless sandwich. “You know why this horror crap will never catch on?” she might say. “It’s the waiting. You have to wait too damn long for something to happen. The whole engine of the thing is designed to produce a thrill. But if you stack the thrills too closely you desensitize the viewer. So you’re left with your thumb up your ass for a reel and a half until something pops out at you. You don’t understand a thing I’m saying. You’re too young. But this horror crap is just math. Just humorless algorithms.”

  I resented her slurred dismissals. There were no equations that could sum up dread, no quotient that consistently equaled fear. The heart of horror is loss, the languid asphyxiation of hope. Not bug-eyed men in bald caps. And Lois knew loss like the smell of her stale sheets. But she was active when her pictures still said something, still had social relevancy. Women in the workplace. Female ambition. Abortion. These were her themes. She just couldn’t shrink herself to fit on the trolley through the dark ride.

  “Look at her. Looks like she just got goosed on a bad date,” she would ramble on. “I mean, Jesus. How hard up was poor Mary to agree to this shit? Now you got falling chandeliers and ol’ Lonny boy looking like my last husband’s hard-on in a string tie. You have that binned by the way? See what you can do with this shit. I’m goin’ to Little Persia.”

  Little Persia was the back room where a few old rugs had been stacked. She created a kind of burrow back there and each day, usually an hour after our day had started, she would retreat there. Sometimes I would hear her laughing quietly beneath a tannic stink or hear the slosh of a bottle. What was she doing? Smoking opium? Drinking wood polish? I hadn’t the faintest idea. But when her absence began to coalesce into half a day, I took her at her word and began to monkey with the footage.

  Volker.

  Anticipation, the flesh on sharp and frozen hooks. Then a chill. This would be the time he would make his entrance, when he would assume the strings and fill me with such capable dread. But nothing came. No voluptuous panic, no violating whisper as my joints engaged his will. Nothing. I was merely one. The distance over water had stilled him. Completely. And I mourned him. I mourned his fullness and the dank coil of his confidence. I missed the first tremors of despair as the rot of his mouth filled the cavity of mine, as his stiffness filed backward and darkly through the bones of my lap. I missed these sensations because of the promise that had always followed. The insight. The talent. And so I thought perhaps the promise might flower if the sensations could be replicated. This is why I reached for the pencil, rejected it as too gentle for the task. The knife. The dull one we used to scrape the glue residue. It had heft and girth, but most important, it harbored the cold. And the cold was necessary. I slipped it under my skirt and stabbed. The pale girth of my thigh gave with a dull rasp. I struck my belly, my hip, the cold sealed lips of my sex. Nothing. The ceremony sent no signals across the sea, revealed nothing more than cadence. Cadence. Stab. Progression. Stab. The crude accumulated code of invasion.

  How did it go?

  It was trust. As when eyes might meet and something kindred might become stone and fall and ripple there. Then tingle. As the ripples enter beneath the flesh with no less resonance, no less delight. Then fear. As the ripples, now inside, loose promise, loose consent, but not their terrible motion. A fugue of violation. Congealed pieces of me fell in dry gobbets to the floor. Trust. Then tingle. Then fear. Violation.

  Trust. You see the Phantom in his mask, his horror hidden from view. He takes a genuine if violently strident interest in Christine’s talent. He promises death if his demands are not met. The opera brass scoffs. Death comes.

  Tingle. The Phantom comes for Christine, takes her to his lair, his bed, his organ (which organ?). He plays for her. She is enchanted, enthralled, aroused.

  Fear. Her fear that he might not be a lover, a husband, a human under that mask. She gauges; she gathers; she slinks; she reaches. She must know his true face, the face of her angel and she . . . yes, she rapes him. She violates; she bares; she flays; she humiliates by removing his mask. Christ, where is that close-up? Cut to the goddamn close-up of Chaney’s face behind that organ—that poor, stripped, humiliated face.

  Surprise? Sure, horror even, but the Phantom is not the aggressor, not this time. She is, and we feel for him. The freak. The fiend. We pity him. We fear and covet him in one gesture, one shameful selfish gesture. Her gesture. His defeat.

  The rest is the denouement of coitus interruptus. Soul mates shunted by rural audience expectations and bad teeth. The picture will have only one real scare, but Pasadena housewives will wonder at the moisture at the crux of their girdles when the house lights come up.

  “What the hell is going on in here?” Lois stood there, the tips of her bob frayed and wet from the drool of her narcotic dreams. She must have been summoned by the dry sounds of my hacking knife. I see real wonder skitter across the blurred surfaces of her eyes as she watches the divots in my inner thighs fill like the throats of croaking toads. She sees the dull knife still with its dusting of pink, still in my hand. She smiles.

  “I knew this place was a kind of purgatory,” she slurred, “but I’ll tell you this, girl. I’ve never seen that particular brand of penance before. You get the cut? No pun intended, sister.”

  “Yes, Ms. Weber,” I said, still pinned by the shock of my exposure.

  “Good. Give the footage a cure. And be sure to rinse that knife.”

  CHAPTER 25

  But even before I met Lois, I had left Mutter our very first day, with the simple assignment of finding a place to live. The task was far less daunting than it sounds. Uncle Carl’s plan for a studio was to create a kind of jovial labor camp where employees could live, eat, play, and work all within the confines of the studio’s several sprawling acres. There were barracks with washrooms, a bunkhouse attached to a working ranch that, when not used for exteriors, produced a fair share of beef, milk, and eggs. Hammocks for the gaffers were strung treetop-high in the fly system of the stages. Portable trailers came furnished with four-poster beds. Pup tents and campsites proliferated, not to mention several other options. Mutter had only to flash his man-of-a-thousand-faces passport to attain ac
cess to any of these. So I straightened his cap and reminded him where the commissary was and didn’t bother to watch which direction lured his attention.

  He was without his cap, a thin line of red ochre drawn at the intersection where metal meets flesh, his row of bolts equally embellished. He took my small hand, happy in his role as guide. And aren’t we grand, the two of us, leaving “work,” strolling on the evening “streets,” walking “home.” What had he chosen for a nest? Cots behind the castle battlements? A hayloft in the boomtown barn?

  “You seem rather pleased with yourself,” I couldn’t help saying, noticing Mutter’s crooked grin.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What’s all that on your head?”

  “Paint.”

  “Yes, paint. But what for?”

  “Tonight.”

  “What happens tonight?”

  “We come home.”

  He led me through those self-consciously tortured streets to near the shins of the Santa Monica Mountains, at the most outward stretch of the backlot. I smelled this “home” before I saw it. Thin tendrils of blue smoke broke the low rise of a hill and there was the village. An Indian village. Black-haired children with seal-pup eyes, bodies as brown as lacquered furniture, ran naked behind spinning hoops, then stopped when Mutter appeared, ignoring their toys and running to him, little legs churning under their fat little bellies. The women dropped their cooking. The men stilled their horses and all moved toward us in a fragrant, heavy wave of welcome. It was a salad of nations. Navajo sheepherders, Comanche horse ranchers, Sioux and Cheyenne who had spent years barely breathing in tar paper shacks on agency land remembering nothing but where they’d stashed the bottle. They had all come here Anglicized, hair shorn over the ears like white men, shod in hard-soled shoes, choking down Jesus with dairy products and soap. But here they had to assume historical precedent, had to morph into the public’s romantic image of them, so they grew their hair long. Worked shirtless until they were as dark as the anthropological record. Learned the language and crafts that had been beaten out of their parents at reservation schools. They became “Indian.”