The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  Chip walked back up the hill toward the hotel facade, the mob of men now with their torches lit. He was grateful to be in a pair of flesh-colored sandshoes, that Claude had allowed the widow to plunge to her death without heels. As he walked, he could taste wool fat in his mouth, could feel his heartbeat marauding his chest and ears. He got into position ten feet in front of Lester’s double, Nash Sully peering into the mounted camera. One of the Bowery men let out a full-throated, baritone belch, a few others snickered, then Claude yelled camera rolling through the bullhorn, just as daylight seamed the sky behind Manhattan. Nash Sully yelled Go! and Chip took off running.

  * * *

  The velvet dress weighed a thousand pounds, thick and heavy as a stage curtain, and he could feel his emollient skin rubbing against it all the way down the slope, hear the slicking noise of fabric on glycerin. He tried to run like a woman, to approximate Sabine’s high-arched gait, but in his adrenalized mind she existed only as a bounding panther, had perhaps always been that way, her shoulders and haunches loose and forever uncoiling. He sprinted for his life, under the weight of the dress, turned back to see his attackers, Lester’s double out in front with a full grimace.

  * * *

  The Bowery men had fallen into staggered ranks, some of them roaring like Vikings and others wheezing, bent over, flailing. A few of them sat in the dewy grass or in slicks of mud, clutching a bung knee or inspecting a broken shoe. One man seemed to have had a close call with his woodcutter’s beard and a lighted torch, because he was pawing at his own smoking face as he ran along. All the while Claude and Hal and Nash kept yelling for Chip to keep running, down the strait and into the gondola. Come on, Chip! they cheered, and for a second he heard his own father, drunk and yelling himself hoarse from the sidelines of a school carnival, the one domain where his father’s pride was unabashed and Chip’s shame was undiluted, the annual young Spalding rort of blue ribbons and athletic trophies. Another proof of imminent death, Chip half thought, his chest and feet pounding, your father yelling at you across the decades and hemispheres.

  * * *

  All he had to do was crawl into the metal frame, one hand over another, while Jimmy kept it in position and eddied the big floating cow stomach out over the edge. The crew and the spotters would handle the rope ladder, the burning fuse, and the actor who would briefly dangle from the lower rungs. He kept his head down, stayed low, felt the cold metal rails against his gelled-up hands as he climbed in, and then he was untethered and floating in air.

  * * *

  He saw the double drop a few feet from the rope ladder with his torch, thought the actor should have held on for a few more seconds, but now the river came into view between his feet. The Hudson had changed from a ribbon of black ink into a light box, a canyon of streaming silhouettes. He counted off the seconds, the little engines whirring then going silent when he cut them to shed some altitude.

  * * *

  They’d painted the cliff face with a black line to mark 100 feet. Years ago, a Dutchman had survived a bridge dive from almost 200 feet, Chip knew, but the truth was any time he tried his own luck above 120 he’d ended up with a broken wrist or rib and a concussion. He felt for the Ronson flint lighter in his dress pocket, the little pouch where he’d sewn it in for good measure. He watched the fuse burn up along the rope, counted down the last few seconds, and took a sight-line reading against the black mark on the rock face, then down at the target below. He was higher than he wanted to be, but he crouched down behind the muslin screen to light himself regardless, touching the yellow lighter flame to his feet and hands and torso. He kindled and ruffled with fire just as the fuse line made contact with the flammable muslin. He batted at the air in front of him—the camera always liked that—and straightened into a scrambling dive.

  * * *

  Two and a half seconds was never long enough to hold on to anything like thought. The shattering glass of the river, the bruising of his fingertips, the battering of his rib cage and lungs, each was so overwhelming that it extinguished whatever came in the seconds before. Time didn’t dilate or stop during a high burning dive in Chip’s experience; it continued on its arrow-like grudge, slicing away at eternity like a knife paring skin from an apple. He remembered vibrations, sounds, shards of color, bile burning like molten copper in his throat, but nothing like actual thought.

  * * *

  And then the first sign that he was still alive was a sensation of being swallowed by a great maw of pain and cold and the sound of his extinguishing skin. He was always surprised that his skin hadn’t been peeled clean from his body. Then a constellation of underwater stars as his lungs ballooned him back to the surface. When his head broke up out of the water that August dawn in the summer of 1910, he heard an enormous inhalation. It was the epic surprise of air.

  18

  The Premiere

  For a week, the widow’s kohl-rimmed eyes floated above Manhattan from the side of an airship. Her pale, lavender-powdered face could be seen in subway cars and on lampposts and billboards. As part of a publicity campaign, Hal arranged to have special matchbooks made up and handed out in saloons so that each time a man struck a match Sabine Montrose stared back at him through a veil of sulfurous fumes. The Widow Awaits, said the caption, and from the other side of the matchbook a tiger glowered up at the smoker.

  * * *

  They rented out a cavernous Broadway theater with 1,016 seats and an orchestra pit that could accommodate a hundred musicians. The venue was typically used for operas and touring symphonies, but the Saturday night before Halloween in 1910 it would house Claude Ballard’s grand cinematic experiment. Movie palaces and a steady stream of feature-length films were another five years away, and the average New Yorker had never seen a film spanning more than twenty minutes. America’s cities and towns were still full of storefront theaters and nickelodeons and vaudeville houses that showed reels as a sideline. D. W. Griffith, whose three-hour epic The Birth of a Nation wouldn’t come out until 1915, released more than half a dozen titles in 1910, including the first film to be made in Hollywood, a seventeen-minute reel called In Old California. All this is to say, Claude would remind interviewers in later years, that we were ahead of our time.

  * * *

  But there were no red carpets, limousines, or photographer flashbulbs on the night of the premiere, just a thousand people clogging the sidewalk on West Forty-second. Advance ticket sales had secured the entire house, allowing Bender & Ballard to extend the film’s run on Broadway and into smaller theaters in all five boroughs and New Jersey. If Hal’s projections were correct, the movie was going to turn a profit within a month.

  * * *

  When the moviemakers pulled up to the sea of people in a touring car, there were Sold Out placards in the ticket-booth windows and ten ushers standing abreast at the big glass doors in their epaulets and brass buttons. The crowd parted for Sabine Montrose in her red cochineal dress, Pavel at her side in his embroidered waistcoat and twin fob watches. Chip got out and squinted at the crowd, shaking his head, followed by Hal and Claude. As they stepped onto the pavement, neither of them spoke or looked at each other, for fear of piercing the fabric of what they’d conjured together.

  * * *

  As Claude moved toward the Beaux Arts facade he felt the buzz of the crowd in his fingertips. Chip, walking at his side, said, Can you believe it?, and Claude was surprised to discover he’d always imagined this night as a kind of inevitability. He’d been led here, he thought, by an unbroken chain of events, by a series of maladies and fixations from his own life, his childhood fever in the attic and his mother’s death, his myopia, his sister’s consumption, the move to Paris, the audition for the Lumières, the tour as a concession agent, the rooftop conservatory, his lovelorn obsession with Sabine, all of it somehow cascading and buffeting him to this cavernous theater and this blaze of lights. Even the carpeted staircase and the flocked wallpaper as they followed the usher up to their seats seeme
d part of some elaborate, auspicious plan, the embossed green parrots and pomegranates and tulips beckoning with Eastern promise.

  * * *

  The usher led them to a balcony box, where five name cards had been placed on the red velvet opera chairs: Claude and Sabine in front, Hal and Chip in the second row, Pavel in the rear. Helena was back at the cottage with the children. Claude had come earlier in the week to inspect the equipment, to make sure the long throw from the projector to the oversized screen still allowed for adequate illumination, but he hadn’t seen the auditorium from this vantage point, the chasm of raked seating, the vaulted, domed ceiling that seemed to float without support from the marbled columns.

  * * *

  He watched the crowd bustling in, half of them in tuxedos and pearls and the other half straight from their day about town. He studied the deep recess of the orchestra pit, caught the glint of French horns and the slant of violin bows. They had commissioned a custom-made Excela Soundograph, an air cabinet that housed fifty sound effects, and an apprentice prop master had been employed to pull its levers and push its buttons during the screening. Hal and Claude had agreed that merely having a sound effects man with thunder sheets, wind whistles, and horse-hoof coconuts was unthinkable.

  * * *

  Claude noticed that Sabine was staring up at the blank screen, at the acre of white silk, an empty champagne flute in hand, ashen-faced with nerves. He reached for her hand but it lay limp and cold beneath his. Claude felt his mind slacken in the final seconds before the house lights went down. He knew every frame and angle of the film by heart and yet he couldn’t imagine what was about to unfold. His champagne glass shook gently and he tried to calm his breathing. Sabine suddenly clenched his hand but did not look at him as the canyon below bloated with darkness. Music drifted from below the lip of the stage, a fog of oboes and cellos and violins.

  * * *

  The fade comes in above the Palisades and we’re floating across the dark river, descending over a ravaged garden with a yew maze. A gothic hotel facade comes into view, a single light shining from a round attic window. We glimpse a menacing silhouette prowling across the front porch. In the pall—a large cat, a tiger, lying across the front entranceway like some guardian to an ancient crypt.

  * * *

  The prop boy at the Excela Soundograph launched a tiger’s snarling roar into the auditorium and Claude watched it ripple through the crowd. It pinned heads to the back of seats, hurled gasps up at the stratospheric ceiling. He watched the exhilarated moviegoers settle into the blue-gray twilight, the ones who leaned toward the screen smiling and the ones who leaned back, the armrest white-knucklers and the nervous spouse whisperers. A woman’s shaken voice asked the darkness What on earth was that? and received a gentle shushing from her neighbors. When the first title card appeared on-screen—THE ELECTRIC HOTEL, starring MADAME SABINE MONTROSE—scores of people shifted in their seats to point or wave up at the high-altitude box seats and Sabine gave them a brief flourish of her hand. It reminded Claude of a monarch’s aloof wave, an austere gesture from a stateroom balcony as an ocean liner pulls out to sea.

  * * *

  We see the rooms in profile, stacked like boxes. The widow stands in her long black gown in front of the mirror, in her elbow-length white gloves, brushing her hair in her attic bedroom. A four-poster bed behind her. She shudders and coughs into a white monogrammed handkerchief and a close view reveals an island of blood.

  * * *

  Claude was dismayed to see that on a screen the size of an Olympic swimming pool the tiny island of blood was more like a continent and that the first third of the theater had their heads turned to the side. It was too much, even from the high seats, and he regretted the decision to insert the close shot from the second camera.

  * * *

  Then he watched them all being lured back to the celluloid with every subsequent shot of the opening—the glimpse of the children in their bedroom, the zigzagging descent through the house, the rooms cutaway like a diorama, the widow and the tiger walking out to the cliffs under the moonlight. And when the dirigible descended into view, looming above the darkened river with the slight churning of propeller blades and a lone clarinet rising from the orchestra pit, he saw their heads lift and their mouths open.

  * * *

  A rope ladder descends from above and the widow carefully climbs up toward the airship in her gown, one foot after another, rising out of the frame. Now we see the airship floating across the Hudson toward Manhattan’s tessellations of window-light.

  * * *

  For the next hour, Claude shifted his attention between the screen and the thousand moviegoers immersed in his celluloid dream. Every cut and effect was seamless. The stranded motorist arriving in the middle of the night, disheveled and covered in mud, who watches his suitcases ascend the stairs as if by magnetism. The flickering light bulbs when the widow walks through a room. The children’s dollhouse animated with moving figures and furniture. The tiger lurking in the shadows, its mangy hide and painted stripes invisible to the camera.

  * * *

  The illusion was to make it all feel alive and unfolding now, to feel as causally connected as the flowing branches of a river, when in fact it was sixteen lies per second, the slipstream of frames that caused the human eye to imagine perpetual motion. In the early days, a forty-five-second reel of a sailboat leaving a dock in Marseilles or a white-frocked baby tottering above a goldfish bowl in Lyon, viewed in a hotel basement, was enough to rouse an audience because no one had ever seen a projected image shimmer with life in every corner and plane. Each view was a silver-skinned mystery, a transcribed minute of existence.

  * * *

  Now they were all aficionados of the human drama, the grocery clerk and the banker’s wife and the businessman, laying everything out on a mental wire of juxtaposition and suggestion. It was the viewer, Claude knew, who provided his own narrative powers to complete the picture, who placed one thing against another. A traveler staring up wantonly at a woman’s silhouette in an attic window and then the same man in a darkened stairwell, clutching a candle, moving toward a widow’s lofted bedroom, were not inherently connected. They were two strips of celluloid nitrate glued together, filmed on separate days, in fact, the actors not standing within shouting distance of one another, and yet they were unfolding, irrevocably, at this moment in time. It was a fiction without seams.

  * * *

  During the bedroom seduction scene, when Sabine sipped her absinthe cocktail and placed her diamond earrings into Lester Summers’s open palms, as she lifted his chin for a long, stupefying kiss, a consortium of the morally offended looked up toward the balcony of moviemakers. Claude watched Sabine as she glanced down into the valley of accusation, refusing to linger, and returned her gaze to the screen. When he saw society women in the expensive seats preening their gloves and giving little shakes of their heads he realized he’d collapsed their world into the widow’s. They judged the widow, and therefore Sabine Montrose, no differently than if she were a fallen acquaintance they saw flitting along the storefront windows on the other side of the street. In the theater, every actor walked onstage at the end—villains and heroes and torchbearers alike—to take a bow and relinquish their roles and therefore the audience in the full brunt of the floodlights. In film, for better or worse, there was no renunciation of the conceit.

  * * *

  Claude watched the audience relax into the final sequence, confident that the vengeance they’d been craving since the lingering attic kiss was now at hand. Chip Spalding, doubled as the widow, ran toward the Palisades in the dawning light, a brooding Grieg composition playing at his heels. The horde of Bowery men, some of them holding torches, others wielding flintlocks and pitchforks, came running and silently roaring down the hill, an army of the deranged and the besotted in pursuit of the widow. The Soundograph played a battle cry, a tribe of clansmen descending on their enemies.

  * * *

  She makes it to
the cliff’s edge and scrambles into the gondola of the airship, one of her pursuers dangling briefly from a rope below. A sputtering flame kindles and wicks up the rope as the dirigible eddies out over the river. We see the widow float away from the cliffs, the city glinting in the morning light behind her. She crouches, stands, bursts into flame …

  * * *

  Sabine’s prerecorded phonographic scream shattered the hemisphere of plaster and gloomy air above their heads. It shot out of the Soundograph as the widow batted at the space in front of her and dropped into a scrambling high fall. The airship erupted into flames while she fell, raking at the river as it rushed to meet her, and she hit the Hudson with an epic splash and a flume of smoke. The sound of a boulder hitting a body of water came an instant too late, Claude knew, but then the whole auditorium was underwater and no one seemed to care. For good measure, the auditorium surged with the sound of river rapids and gushing water.