Box Office Browning

by Peter Corris

  Helen's job was to take photographs of the scenes before they were shot so as to ensure that costumes, hairdo's and such were consistent in consecutive scenes. This was unusual professionalism for Kelly and a little out of place given the other shortcomings. I appear on a grey while galloping up a hill and on a chestnut when coming down it – my mistake, I admit, but no-one picked it up.

  I kept a couple of the pictures Helen took, they knock mine into a cocked hat, and it brings it all back to me to see the troopers on their horses (me, heavily bearded, in the middle); Godfrey Cass, his knees buckling under the weight of the ploughshare armour; Harry Southwell as Sergeant Steele, bending over the fallen outlaw with a mind to blow his brains out, which would have made a better ending in my opinion.

  We filmed the sequence where the outlaws attempted to de-rail the train full of troopers on a stretch of track just outside Melbourne. It was lucky that the de-railment failed, I doubt if Harry's budget would have run to the real thing. I had to jump a horse out of a box car and I did it after making damn sure of a soft, level landing. The crew whooped as I landed and I feared for a moment that I might have to do the stunt again but Harry was beaming as I rode up.

  Terrific, Dick, you looked as if you really meant business.' It was a knack that came in handy often, appearing resolute when I was terrified to death.

  That was almost the end of my duties. I helped to dint the armour but after that I was at a loose end and I own I was not always sober around the set. Helen and I used to sneak away occasionally and I think Harry was on the point of firing me when a chance came for me to boost my stocks with him. We were using a pub out along the Geelong road to do the early Glenrowan Hotel scenes and the moment came for the troopers to open fire and break a few windows. Do you know that not a man on the set could be confident of putting a bullet through a window at a hundred yards? It was child's play to me; I loaded up the .303 and peppered the windows from top storey to bottom while the cameras ground and the crew cheered.

  Then it was into the pub for a few celebratory drinks and a bottle to keep us merry in the coach back to town to film the scenes in which the hotel burned down. A special wall with two windows had been built out from the back of the main building where the interiors had been filmed. The plan was to set a fire at the base of this wall on the inside, get some flames licking up and take some shots in through the windows. Then the 'interior of the hotel' scenes – where the outlaws ranted about injustice and drank themselves silly – could be intercut with shots of the burning wall.

  I was given the job of setting the fire; God knows why because, after the pub and the coach, I was in no fit state to do anything. Maybe after the shooting episode they thought I had the necessary steady hand or perhaps, as a forty plus a day smoker, it was just that I always had a match. Whatever the reason, I was given the job and I couldn't get the fire to start. Maybe the wood was wet. I'm no bushman as I said, so I resorted to the townsman's trick of splashing a little kerosene around. This did the trick; the fire flared up most satisfactorily and the cameraman got the footage he needed of burning boards and tongues of flame licking at windows.

  When the filming was over I beat the fire out where it had taken hold on the walls, mostly on the fresh paint, and stamped it out at the base. I wandered off to find Helen while Harry was attending to a few last details; the actors were getting their make-up off and so on. When movie people assemble you can bet there will be one life-of-the-party type who'll be able to lift the company's spirits up to hilarity and beyond. On Kelly this was Sam Kerr, a roly-poly, white-bearded actor who played a couple of genial parts in the film by dyeing his beard and wearing and not wearing a hat. Sam had been to the pub, got some bottles and was giving out with spritely tunes on a harmonica. I grabbed Helen and put into practice some of the steps Annette Southwell had taught me on the boat. Pretty soon what would now be called a 'wrap' party was underway.

  More bottles were procured and people drifted in from the streets. A fiddler arrived from somewhere and Harry was persuaded to give him a few bob to do his stuff. It was bush dancing at which some of the actors and others were uncommon good. I picked it up quick enough (jigs and reels sum it up pretty well; you'll find it anywhere drunken Celts gather), and whirled Helen and others, male and female, around and jumped and shouted with the best of them. It's a pity the camera wasn't rolling; some of that action would've livened the film up considerably.

  I don't know whether someone smelled something or whether 'flames shot into the night sky as the inebriates cavorted' (I'm quoting the newspaper report from memory now), but the music stopped and everyone started to yell 'Fire!' and to run. My instinct was to head for the street but Helen pulled me towards the fire. The free-standing wall was engulfed and the flames had spread to the main building which was roofless with a lot of light timber and tar paper lying about. The up-draught was terrific and the place was going up like a bonfire.

  Harry had to be restrained from rushing into the building and only stopped struggling when a cameraman told him there was no film inside. Harry jumped up and down on the spot screaming at the fire.

  'Bastard,' he yelled. 'Son of a bitch!' Suddenly he stopped and whipped around. 'Is anybody getting this?' he shouted.

  Nobody was; a great fire went to waste along with a lot of costumes, props and greasepaint. Two fire engines arrived with a clanging of bells and a lot of shouting through a loud hailer. The horses calmly backed and filled until the machines were in position and the firemen got busy with the hoses. Before long the Southwell Screen Plays studio was a blackened shell emitting little hisses as drops of water fell on hot ashes.

  'Any idea what could've started it, Captain?' Harry asked the fireman with the most buttons on his coat.

  The man twitched his mountain sheep moustache and looked disapprovingly at the gang of film folk who were standing around. Most of us were holding glasses or bottles; we had cigars and cigarettes in our dirty, sweaty faces and some of us weren't standing too straight. He sniffed loudly and spat, walked back out of the lantern light and returned with a tin can. 'Yes, I have got an idea,' he said. 'Some idiot has been splashing kerosene about.'

  19

  The fire episode terminated my relationship with Harry Southwell. My name was omitted from all credits which I thought a bit vindictive given my sterling efforts with horse and gun, and there was even talk for a while of a prosecution for negligence or something such. I knew that horse wouldn't run, but I had to leave the Fitzroy house, which had been a comfortable billet, and move in with Helen Hawes. This was something I'd been trying to avoid for weeks but my expulsion after the fire ran me out of excuses.

  Not that Helen wasn't an obliging and easy woman to live with. She had plenty of money for one thing which was agreeable. Harry hadn't paid me all he owed me (something I got used to in the film business, but I was mightily put out then), so my pockets had plenty of air in them.

  What would you like to do, love?' Helen asked me one morning. We were lying in bed in her loft in Carlton. From the window I could see out across more tree tops than roofs. Melbourne was in the grip of a January heatwave; the night had been scarcely cooler than the day and we were very sweaty after the morning grapple.

  'I don't know. Go to Hollywood and get into films?'

  She laughed and pulled a cotton nightgown over her head. You're a funny creature. You say I don't know and then come out with something quite specific. Do you think before you speak, Dick?'

  'No. Does anyone?'

  I do. I'm going to make coffee. When I come back well have a serious talk about the future.'

  What she meant was that she would have a serious talk about the future, first to herself, then to me. That's how it was when she came back with the coffee.

  She opened with: 'Why don't we go into partnership? You can take photographs. I've seen them.'

  Opening with a question and an assertion, you see. Out on the court; I win the toss; my serve.

  Yours make mine l
ook silly,' I said.

  'True. But I could teach you to be good enough to do the society stuff, or some of it.'

  'What d'you mean, some?'

  'Have you ever had a good look at my society portraits?'

  I slurped down some coffee; she made very good coffee, too. 'Hmm,' I said.

  'Notice anything?'

  I ran my mind's eye over an album she'd shown me.

  'Moustaches,' I said.

  She leaned across and kissed me. I like the smell of coffee on a woman's breath in the morning, it arouses me.

  'Hands off. Clever boy, Dick. Men, mostly men.'

  'Men have the money.'

  'That's not why I get the work. Follow me?'

  I looked down at the rumpled bedclothes and up at her fine breasts sticking through the thin cotton. I couldn't help it.

  Used goods, I thought, very used.

  'Shocked, Dick?'

  'No. You mean I could . . .?'

  'Exactly. You see, society people are divided up two ways: there are rich old men with young wives and rich old men with old wives.'

  I was shocked. Here she was telling me that I should bed down the young wives and grab the portrait fees while she did the same for the old buffers. What she failed to consider was male solidarity; imagination may not be my strongest suit, but I could easily conceive myself as an older man taking good care of a young wife or as having a wife who was a bit past it. Helen's proposition didn't attract me and I laughed it off. She looked puzzled but she'd got used to my easy-going ways and no doubt thought she'd return to the attack again.

  Have you ever noticed how women set about trying to change men about as soon as the shoes are together on the floor under the bed? You were strong and masterful at first, or funny and a tonic to the flagging spirit, but after a while this becomes domineering and irresponsible. The woman who's drunk with you and screwed with you from dawn to dusk and back to daylight becomes a mass of problems which are all, somehow, your fault. Oh, everything will be all right, if you'll just change into a male version of her!

  Well, I had other ideas. I could see myself spending what remained of the summer pleasantly with Miss Helen Hawes of Carlton and Brighton (she had a nice little seaside place a few miles out of Melbourne), but after that I'd get a bank together somehow and be off to Americky, quick smart.

  So what was I doing a month later, tossing around in bed in a Toorak mansion with Gwendoline Cavendish, wife of Sir Thomas of the same name? Well, I told you I was given to lust and laziness. Helen wore me down by putting her idea to me at every opportunity and, truth to tell, this helped me to get a little tired of her faster than I ordinarily would have done. The remedy for jaded lovers, or one of them, is fresh bodies. Anyway, since she as good as said she slept with every greybeard who commissioned a portrait it would've have been priggish of me to shy away from the under-attended wives.

  Helen instructed me in camera technique so that I got reasonably proficient at the portrait. This was useful in my later brief stint as a private eye in Hollywood – for real I mean, not in the movies – and taught me enough so that I could get by at developing and enlarging. She also arranged the meeting with Lady Cavendish, who was an under-attended wife if ever there was one.

  I presented myself at her front door one hot February morning and was told to go around the back by the morning-suited servant. Perhaps I'd had an early morning bracer and was feeling brave or perhaps the servant was smaller than me, I can't recall. Anyway, I stood my ground and insisted on seeing 'Lady Gwendoline'.

  One of the first things she did was put me right on that. (Sir Tom just being a baronet and her not the daughter of a peer, she was just Lady Cavendish.) I didn't see why, or why it mattered, but jumped-up judies like Gwen are very strong on that sort of thing. After a bit of a fracas Gwen arrives wearing a dress that made her look something like a mushroom – it was all billowing, layered silk, very fetching, and eminently photographable and peeloffable. As it turned out, Gwen was game for both. She soothed the servant and escorted me across the green lawn (lawns everywhere else in the city were brown) to a sort of pavilion at the end of the garden.

  She was a pleasure to watch – not tall but beautifully made and a lovely mover. Contrary to what you might think, the real aristocrats slouch and mooch along mostly and it's only the people who've had to make something of themselves that study movement. Gwen was a graduate with beautiful carriage of her finely shaped, blonde head, big firm breasts and just a suggestion of ladylike movement of her behind.

  Another servant followed up with a tray on which there was champagne in an ice bucket and some food I don't remember. She scarcely looked at me while the servant was there but when he'd gone she turned her big, blue eyes on me and parted her lips.

  'Let's do the photograph quickly,' she said.

  As I discovered, that was the only thing she had a mind to do quickly. I set the camera up, arranged her by a table with some flowers, ducked under the cloth and got a couple of quick exposures without any hitches. She was starting to drop parts of the dress almost as soon as I got my head out into the light. I barely had time for a gulp of champagne before she was clawing at my loose artistic tie and trying to get her hand inside my shirt.

  'The servants?' I gasped.

  'No,' she said. 'Not for hours.'

  She was right; we got down to it right there, on and around a padded cane lounge with the sunlight flooding in over us and an occasional frond or leaf getting in the way. She was a mobile, active lover who liked to make use of all the fittings on hand. It must have been three quarters of an hour before I could draw breath.

  She lay back on the lounge, naked except for a black velvet band around her throat, and held out her glass for champagne.

  'You are splendid,' she said. 'It's rare to find a man with stamina.'

  I nodded modestly and poured. To tell the truth I was having a little difficulty, not in performing, but in finishing off if you get my meaning. Very unfamiliar situation – titled lady, servants, house like a castle – it was holding me back, but Gwen wasn't complaining. I got down a glass or two and wondered how the business end of things had been arranged.

  'Er, should be a fine portrait, Lady Gwendoline.'

  She burst into laughter and that's when she set me straight on the title. 'Sir Thomas is seventy-three,' she said. 'He can't satisfy me.'

  I almost said something like: 'He's probably been at it forty years longer than you, nothing to be ashamed of,' but I just did some more nodding and pouring. I was still in fine fettle, you see, and she wasn't really interested in small talk.

  'Come here,' she said. I went across and she found a new use for champagne.

  Some time later she was sitting in a big wicker chair tearing the petals off a rose. 'Of course, there will have to be other sittings.'

  'Eh?'

  'More sittings. I'm not sure that this place is the right setting. Some interiors perhaps. You can do interiors, can't you, Richard?'

  'If the light is right.'

  'There's wonderful light in the master bedroom.'

  There was, too, as I found out a few days later and confirmed on another couple of visits. She must have fixed the servants good and properly because a blind butler and a blind deaf mute maid couldn't have failed to understand what was going on. I enjoyed it well enough – the four-poster bed was another novelty – but I remained a trifle nervous. There were a few portraits of the master of the house around and he looked like a pretty capable old gent, seventy plus or no. Added to which, Gwen wasn't really much of a conversationalist: she'd worked in a teashop before catching Sir Tom's eye, and clothes and society gossip occupied her mind when it wasn't on sex.

  She was selfish about sex, too, only caring for her own pleasure. After our second indoors bout I suggested to Helen that the job was done. We weren't on good terms by this time; I think she was jealous or perhaps just annoyed at the exhausted condition I'd presented in.

  'Very well,' she said. 'I recei
ved the fee today. She appears to be very satisfied.'

  That decided me. I was happy to bed a woman in lieu of payment for a meal or a warm coat or to worm my way into a place to lie low, but this was different. Outright whoring it felt like, not for Browning. The problem would be how to discourage the lady. I mulled it over but I couldn't exactly ask Helen for advice. As it turned out, the cold back she presented to me in bed, three nights in a row, helped provide the solution.

  The next time I presented at Toorak Gwen had come up with the idea of a session in the billiard room. This raised my nervousness level considerably; the walls were lined with hunting trophies and other evidences of Sir Tom's abundant manhood. When Gwen draped herself across the green baize in stockings, that neck band and garters she'd had sent from Paris, well; I was nervous and I'd been denied for three nights. I advanced ardently enough, too ardently. The partly clothed female form has always had a powerful effect on me and this time I reacted too powerfully, much too soon.

  She'd dropped her head back on the table; she raised it now to see what was holding me up, although that's the wrong expression. Her big blue eyes went wide in disgust.

  'Get out!' she hissed. 'Get out!'

  I collected my clothes and camera and got. I was driving a smart Chevrolet at the time, parking it in the street near the entrance to the house. As I was unlocking the car a Rolls came down the road and made a stately turn at the gates. I caught a glimpse of the man in the back. It was Sir Thomas Cavendish, sitting straight and tall. I could see the jut of his jaw; I could almost hear the clink of his medals. I started the Chewy and got out of Toorak in record time.

  I thought about it on the drive back to Carlton. The traffic was light, still horse-drawn a lot of it, and driving was still relaxing. People actually went for drives to think and relax. It's hard to believe. It seemed unlikely that Cavendish's arrival was a coincidence. The man worked like a fiend and Gwen had said that it would take an earthquake or the declaration of war to get him away from his desk.