by Anne Nesbet
“I’ll try,” said Darleen, and she felt herself smiling again. “You’re really very onionish still.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” said Victorine. “Maybe that’s what friends are for: to help us keep one eye at least on what’s true. And also to stand in windowsills on our behalf when necessary. Wouldn’t want to forget that!”
Truth is, friends make many things in life easier: even knowing when not to keep our feet on the ground.
Out on the ridge of the roof, the moonlight danced and was not sad. It was here for now, and for now not afraid of flying away.
THE DANGERS OF DARLEEN, EPISODE NINE:
THE MYSTERIOUS BALLOON
Darleen and Victorine stood together for a while, admiring the advertisement in the window of the Fort Lee movie theater.
“Well, shall we go in?” asked Darleen’s Papa.
They were all three of them, one way or another, in disguise: incognito.
Nobody would recognize a man from the Matchless laboratories, so Darleen’s father was safely anonymous, whatever he might wear.
Darleen had plaited her hair and was wearing a simple sailor dress that was as far as possible from anything Daring Darleen would ever wear.
And Victorine was in the sort of practical but comfortable outfit that a Miss Bella Mae Goodwin might be able to afford (with her father’s knife still secretly tucked up against her leg). No one would look at Victorine and think she was the heiress to one of the greatest fortunes in New York City (a fortune now being held in trust). No, she had crossed the Hudson River and left luxury behind. And to tell the truth, she was as happy as she had ever been — at any rate as happy as she had ever been since her Grandmama’s death had thrust her into sorrow, adventure, and (eventually) an entirely new life.
In short, nobody turned a head or raised an eyebrow as the three of them entered the movie theater. It was a lovely feeling to be so successfully anonymous.
And then the picture started!
The girls were soon in agreement: Episode Nine of The Dangers of Darleen was quite possibly the most wonderful photoplay that Matchless studios had ever made. The brilliant title card at the beginning, with the kidnapper’s scowling face so cleverly framed in a newspaper! The drama in the attic! The heartrending look on Daring Darleen’s face as she imagined her Royal Papa reaching out to her. And the way the exiled king’s image was right there in the attic with her, letting us see what Daring Darleen must be imagining. That was brilliantly done. And then there was that amazing moment when the enormous air balloon seemed to land right in front of an express train!
Dar and Victorine let themselves shriek a little, they were so caught up in the excitement of the picture.
A child turned around in a seat ahead of theirs.
“Don’t you worry,” he said. “Our Daring Darleen’s very clever. She’ll be all right.”
And then came the visit to the old mansion, where the Salamanders and their entourage were having a masked ball.
More muffled shrieking ensued from Victorine and Dar.
“There you are!” said Darleen. She whispered so that they could hang on to their anonymity. “Look at you! You’re so good!”
Victorine had been the smallest of the extras, but her footwork in the dance was by far the most elegant. It was a pleasure to watch Victorine dance.
On screen, Daring Darleen pushed her way through the dancers, looking for her lost Royal Father.
“Through that door!” suggested Victorine aloud, quite as caught up in the action as the boy in the seat in front of them clearly was.
The movie Darleen did exactly that: went in through the door. And then she was in the very room where they had been keeping her Royal Papa prisoner, and there he was — her long-lost Papa, with the forged will spread out like a menu in front of him. But he had taken an awful blow to the head in Episode Eight, and he didn’t recognize his own daughter, not at all.
And of course Daring Darleen didn’t know why her Papa wouldn’t acknowledge her, and then, just as he was dragged out of the room, after having been banged on the head again — by chance — you could see the light come on in his eyes.
And Daring Darleen grabbed that fake will from the desk and leaped beautifully right out the window —
“TO BE CONTINUED” said the title (and the girls read aloud the words together, with such satisfaction and joy), “IN EPISODE TEN of THE DANGERS OF DARLEEN: THE DEADLY GIFT.”
“I can’t wait! Can you?” said the boy in the seat ahead of them, turning around.
“Can’t wait!” agreed Dar and Victorine.
“That was very good, girls,” said Darleen’s Papa, as he ushered them out of the theater. “And now we’d better get some rest, because you know what tomorrow brings.”
The beginning of work on Episode Ten!
And eventually, one day, perhaps some tomorrow would even bring . . . California.
The girls had a pact now. They would learn how to be the heroes of their own lives. And while they learned, they would savor the miracle and sweetness and promise of those three most wonderful words, which are as much about the adventure of life as about any story or photoplay:
TO BE CONTINUED!
Although Daring Darleen, Queen of the Screen is a work of fiction, it is based on the thrilling true story of the rise of the film industry. In the mid-1890s a number of inventors in several countries had figured out how to make photographs seem to move by recording many pictures per second and then running those images quickly and precisely through a peephole system or, eventually, a projector that would allow films to be screened for larger and larger audiences.
By the time our story begins in the early spring of 1914, cinema was becoming a big business. Between late 1912 and about 1917 a new type of movie was all the rage: the serial adventure film, where “cliffhanger” endings brought audiences back in week after week to see their favorite heroines (most of these films starred courageous and athletic young women) triumph over villains by performing great feats of physical danger. Jumping off bridges, climbing up the sides of buildings, clinging to the outsides of moving trains — nothing seemed impossible for the intrepid stars of these serials.
I teach film history, and the idea for Daring Darleen came to me quite out of the blue one morning as I was walking to class to talk to students about the young women who starred in silent adventure serials, and who not only often performed all their own tricks but were also often asked to take part in publicity stunts out in the real world. I thought, And what if the publicity stunt happened to be a fake kidnapping? And what if it went quite terribly wrong? And what if the whole adventure had something of the flavor of a silent film? And then I was happy, because I could feel a story beginning to take shape — a story into which I could pour my silent-film-loving heart.
Darleen Darling and her adventure serial, The Dangers of Darleen, may be fictional, but Darleen’s role in this story and the title of her film series are based on the work of real silent film stars: Kathlyn Williams in The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913 – 1914), Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Exploits of Elaine (1914 – 1915), and Helen Holmes (later replaced by “Helen” Gibson) in The Hazards of Helen (1914 – 1917).
And where were these serials filmed? In many cases, in Fort Lee, New Jersey! In those early days Hollywood was not yet the undisputed epicenter of American film. As early as 1907 and 1908, New York City filmmakers started crossing the Hudson River to the little town of Fort Lee, where the woods, rustic streets, and rocky cliffs of the Palisades provided the perfect scenery for every possible photoplay. Soon elaborate studios started being built in Fort Lee, and although none of those studios bore the name Matchless Photoplay, my fictional studio is based on a number of real Fort Lee companies: Peerless, Champion, Eclair . . . and Solax.
Yes, Solax is entirely real, and so is that incredible pioneer of early film history Madame Alice Guy Blaché. She was not only the first woman to run a film studio, she was one
of the first filmmakers ever. Born in France in 1873 to parents who tried — and eventually failed — to run a bookselling business in Chile, Alice Guy had to find a way to support herself and her mother after her father’s early death.
Alice was an enterprising and modern young person, to say the least. She learned the then-high-tech skills of typing and stenography, and found herself a position as a secretary in a photographic company. This was a stroke of luck and good timing, because in March 1895, Léon Gaumont (one of the people running the company) invited Alice along to see a demonstration of the Lumière Brothers’ exciting new invention, the cinématographe, or moving photography. Alice immediately saw cinema’s potential for storytelling. She asked for permission to try her hand making short films. These were so successful that between 1897 and 1906, Alice Guy was the head of film production for what was by then called the Gaumont Company. She made every kind of film: funny films, trick films using double exposure or reverse motion, fairy-tale films, dance films, even films synchronized to sounds recorded on wax cylinders (decades before “sound film” became the norm).
In 1907 she married another Gaumont studio employee, Herbert Blaché, and they were sent to Cleveland, in the United States, to try (without much success) to whip up American enthusiasm for early sound films. By 1910, now with a toddler in tow, the Blaché family had moved to New York, and Alice Guy Blaché decided to leap back into filmmaking by founding the Solax Company. Her films for Solax were so successful that in 1912 she built an elaborate, state-of-the-art, glass-walled studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where she produced many much-praised photoplays.
With World War I — and ensuing shortages of coal for heating and power — warm, sunny Hollywood finally replaced Fort Lee as the center of American cinema. Alice Guy Blaché made her last film in 1920 and lived the rest of her long life quietly. She was one of the great artists of early film history, however, and deserves to be remembered.
If you would like to learn more about Fort Lee, early cinema, or Madame Alice Guy Blaché, here are some sources I can recommend to you:
• Richard Koszarski’s wonderful Fort Lee: The Film Town (Rome: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), filled with primary sources that bring early-twentieth-century Fort Lee back to vivid life.
• The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, translated by Roberta and Simone Blaché and edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1986).
• Alison McMahan’s Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York and London: Continuum, 2002).
• There is even a lovely picture book now about Madame Blaché: Lights! Camera! Alice! The Thrilling True Adventures of the First Woman Filmmaker, written by Mara Rockliff and illustrated by Simona Ciraolo (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2018).
As I worked on Daring Darleen, I read many issues of the New York Times and Moving Picture World (a publication dedicated to film news, ads, and gossip) from 1912 to 1914. Old newspapers and magazines are a wonderful way to get to know a different era, and both of these publications are available online. The Strand Theatre really did hold its grand opening on April 11, 1914, and there really was an article about “mercurial poisoning” on the front page of the New York Times for April 12, 1914. Check it out!
Sample episodes of The Hazards of Helen can be found online, as can some of Alice Guy Blaché’s films. You might enjoy her Falling Leaves (1912), for instance, in which child star Magda Foy tries to stop time and save her ailing older sister by tying leaves back onto tree branches.
Oh, and take a look at the film William K. Dickson made in 1894 for Edison’s Kinetoscope: Annabelle, Butterfly Dance. That was my model for “Loveliest Luna Lightfoot,” and I think you can see why that little film might make Darleen’s heart ache and Madame Blaché’s artistic imagination take fire.
Working with Kaylan Adair on Daring Darleen’s thrilling adventures was one of the most satisfying creative experiences I’ve ever had. Those winter weeks where we were powering through the line edits together! Pure joy! What a gift it is to work with someone who is determined to make every page as perfect as possible.
Ammi-Joan Paquette makes being daring seem like a reasonable life choice. My life is wider, deeper, and more sparkly because of her. Thank you a thousand times over, Joan!
Erin Murphy has turned one special corner of the literary world into an oasis. How is that even done? I remember with particular gratitude one June evening when I was feeling completely stumped by revisions, and a bunch of brilliant friends took me into the next room and had me talk about Darleen until water had refilled the well. Thank you, thank you, to Janet Fox, Janet Carey, Elizabeth Bunce, Jillian Coats, Nancy Day, and Vicki Lorencen, and to all the other minds and hearts who helped bring this story into the world.
Everyone associated with Candlewick is both kind and phenomenally talented. Daring Darleen owes so much to everybody who helped turn this manuscript into a lovely object: Mary Lee Donovan, Pam Marshall, and Maggie Deslaurier, who kept the creative ship from crashing into icebergs or hidden reefs. And of course the designer and the artist who created the cover (which for a writer always seems simply miraculous), Matt Roeser and Brett Helquist. Thank you also to the interior designer, Lisa Rudden! I feel particular gratitude to Anne Irza-Leggat and Phoebe Kosman for taking such good care of authors and their books.
My friends and family make life worthwhile. Thank you to Eric, Thera, Eleanor, and Ada for being such a source of love and support. I am so lucky. Jayne Williams, Roo Hooke, Will Waters, and Sharon Inkelas have a way of keeping the world bright with creative potential. Darleen Young is my real-life hero. My students (especially those in Film 25A: The History of Film, Part One) remind me every year how exciting it can be to discover the past, over and over again.
I would like to acknowledge that the location where most of this novel is set — now called Fort Lee, New Jersey — is part of the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. This place contains many stories beyond the one I am telling here.
This book is dedicated to my dear friends and colleagues in the U.C. Berkeley Department of Film and Media, with whom I have watched thousands of silent films over the years at the great annual festival in Pordenone, Italy (the Giornate del Cinema Muto), at the Pacific Film Archive, in many classrooms in Dwinelle Hall, and at our various homes. You have been such a central and inspiring part of my life, with your bright minds and warm hearts. Thank you!
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2020 by Anne Nesbet
Cover illustration copyright © 2020 by Brett Helquist
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2020
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2020902571
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