American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (36 page)

The ad was a celebration of all D.W. had accomplished in the five years—an implausibly brief time—since he had so casually been given the opportunity to direct
The Adventures of Dollie.
It publicly identified D.W. as the “producer of all great Biograph successes,” the films “revolutionizing motion picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art.” It was D.W., the ad boldly insisted, who had invented the close-up, the long shot, crosscutting, and “restraint in expression.” And it listed, incredibly, 151 of the most famous Biograph films he had made.

What self-promotion! D.W. had proclaimed to the nation that he was a director, an artist, and the inventor of a new industry. He had declared himself the biggest star in the moving-picture business.

Yet, it was inspired. There was more than a megalomaniac ego pushing D.W. The director understood fame. The man who had created the Biograph girls, Pickford, and the Gishes grasped the country’s easy infatuation with celebrity. And he realized it would now be essential to establish his image, too, in people’s minds. For he was contemplating a creation on a scale unprecedented in the art of America. He was ready to throw himself into it without hesitation, but at the same time he shrewdly began working the levers of celebrity in the hope of commanding the audience’s support even as he took the first preliminary steps.

He had an idea for a new movie. “A big movie,” he told people. Frank Woods, who wrote scenarios, had suggested to the director that he take a look at Frank Dixon’s best-selling novel
The Clansman.
D.W. read the book—an odd, sour, and disturbingly racist reinterpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction—and it took an immediate hold over his filmmaker’s mind. Its fraudulent mythology of gallant white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan riders defending the downtrodden southern gentry from the nefarious clutches of libidinous former slaves reinforced the saga he had invented to explain his own Kentucky family’s sad decline. From the start D.W. saw the opportunity to create an American epic. Large, magnificent screen images started appearing to him as if summoned from a trance. “Now I could see a chance to do this ride-to-the-rescue on a grand scale,” he explained. “Instead of saving one poor little Nell of the Plains, this ride would be to save a nation.”

As D.W. worked the movie out in his mind—he never used a formal script—its message and visual power grew not just out of his southern childhood but also from his recent years in Los Angeles. He wanted to make a movie that was a “a true history” of the Civil War, but many of his ideas were inspired by the near second civil war he had lived through in that city, the raging battle between capital and labor that had culminated in the crime of the century.

D.W.’s ambition was to show audiences how the war had brought the South down low, leaving the white plantation gentry victimized and powerless against the carpetbaggers and unscrupulous former slaves. Crushed to near despair, its women threatened, the only hope for the southern white man was to fight back. And therefore, as D.W. creatively (and rather disingenuously) spun the tale, the Ku Klux Klan came into being. Galloping through the night, white sheets flying in the wind, the Klan were avengers. Men on a mission. Violence, D.W. believed, was the only possible response by proud men to their oppression.

It was a complexity—logic as paradox as well as moral justification—that had first taken shape in the director’s mind as he sorted through the uproar and trial surrounding the bombing of the
Los Angeles Times.
Labor, he had come to believe, had no choice but to fight back against the powerful forces grinding the workingman down. It was war, and dynamite was a cruel but necessary weapon. Like Steffens, D.W. had come to accept “justifiable dynamiting.” He, too, felt that a conspiracy of capital had left labor with no choice but to turn violent. And like Scripps, he mourned the twenty-one dead but nevertheless sympathized with the argument that those killed were “soldiers enlisted under a capitalist employer whose main purpose in life was warfare against the unions.”

D.W.’s South was only a distant childhood memory, but the events in Los Angeles were more recent, more affecting, and more involving. They held center stage in his thoughts. And as D.W.’s vision of the past took shape, as the movie he wanted to make began to play out in his mind, it was all filtered through his understanding of the McNamara case. A combative, retributive urgency, powered by the same exaggerations of sentiment and desperation that had led reasonable men to resort to terror or to bribe jurors, now fused through the director’s consciousness and energized his creator’s vision. And he saw a story of tremendous power, filled with magnificent images, a movie unlike any that had ever been made.

D.W. had Aitken acquire the rights to Dixon’s novel for the colossal price of $25,000. Then he returned to Los Angeles and threw himself into making
The Birth of a Nation.

D.W.’s intent was to rewrite history. In the process the director, like Darrow, like Billy, would help America—its art, its ideals, its imagination—move into the modern world. It was a confident time. So much had been accomplished, yet there was the untamed promise of still grander gifts. D.W. felt certain that his great success, and the nation’s, was still to come.

EPILOGUE

____________________

THE ALEX

EPILOGUE

____________________

T
HE THREE MEN DID
, in fact, meet. The detective, the lawyer, and the director found themselves at the same moment one spring evening in 1912 in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel.

It was just days after Billy and Rogers had come to blows in the courthouse corridor.

D.W. was sitting on a brown leather couch in the high-ceilinged lobby. It was his habit to smoke an after-dinner cigar before returning to the studio projection room to review the day’s rushes.

Darrow, as it happened, was making his slow, ponderous way to the bar. Steffens had returned to town to testify about his earlier role in the McNamara settlement negotiations; that the talks had been so far along that Darrow’s bribing a juror would have been unnecessary. The writer had checked into the Alex that afternoon and now was waiting in a booth in the bar.

And Billy was striding across a large reddish Oriental carpet on his way to the dining room. Since finishing up on the witness stand, he had stayed in Los Angeles to meet with Mayor Alexander and several of the M&M officers in the hope of persuading them to release the city’s share of the reward money. But the conversations had not been encouraging, and he had made plans to return to Chicago.

As Billy headed to the dining room at the rear of the lobby, D.W. noticed his old acquaintance. The director rose and took a couple of long, looping strides toward him. Billy saw the tall, thin man approaching and veered to greet him. And at the same moment his route intersected with Darrow’s.

All at once they were standing together: D.W., Billy, and Darrow.

The lawyer took one look at the man fate had put in his path, and for a moment he seemed too stunned to speak. “Mr. Burns,” he managed at last, the words sounding flat and hollow. Then without another comment he continued across the long lobby on his way to meet Steffens in the bar.

D.W. asked Billy if that was who he thought it was.

Indeed it was, said the detective.

The director made a small, amused face. Then he focused all his attention on Billy. He had read about the fight with Rogers, D.W. began. And he had a question.

Billy frowned. He had grown weary of discussing the McNamara case and more recently the bribery trial. Everyone hoped to hear the inside story. There was even a New York theatrical manager who wanted to book a lecture tour. He had promised a thousand dollars a speech. Billy needed the money, but the prospect of night after night re-creating his manhunt, the arrests, and sharing stories about the many intrigues during each of the trials, left him low. He wanted to busy himself with new cases, new challenges. He did not want to live in the past. So it was with little interest and even a bit of impatience that Billy waited to hear the director’s question.

“What did you hit him with, Mr. Burns?” the director asked.

Billy laughed out loud. This was not the sort of question he had been expecting, he told D.W.

D.W. explained that on the set he often had to keep people in line with his fists. Extras were one problem, but the actors were another. One time Charlie Inslee refused to get into makeup and came at him with a beer bottle. D.W. had had no choice but to knock him out with a punch. Since then he made sure to get in some shadow-boxing each day even if he had to do it between takes. “A man must perspire once every day to keep in reasonably good health,” he was fond of saying. His curiosity, he went on, was strictly professional. He repeated the question: “What did you hit him with?”

Billy didn’t answer. He showed him.

The detective hunched his broad shoulders, clenched his fists, brought his arms up high, and let loose with a flurry of punches.

Full of mischief, D.W. joined in. The director shot his long arms into the air in a very precise and elegant left-jab, right-cross combination.

It was all done with smiles, and people in the lobby stopped and watched with amusement. They realized they were fortunate to be witnessing a unique performance, and caught up in the high-spirited moment, they applauded the two celebrities.

Darrow heard the commotion and, curious, turned. He found himself staring at the spectacle of D.W. Griffith and William J. Burns trading mock punches in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel.

D.W. called to him. “Got to fight for what you believe in. Right, Mr. Darrow?”

“Indeed you do, Mr. Griffith,” the attorney called out.

“I’ll second the sentiment,” said Billy. “Sometimes fighting is the only way.”

And then as abruptly as it had begun, the exhibition stopped. Darrow went off to meet Steffens in the bar. Billy went on to the dining room. And D.W. returned to the studio.

The three fighters never met again. After the McNamara case their lives took different paths.

Darrow was forced to remain in Los Angeles despite his acquittal in the bribing of George Lockwood. The district attorney wanted a second chance, and this time he indicted Darrow for bribing Robert Bain. The second bribery trial was fought by both sides without much conviction. By now everyone was drained, even the jury. On March 8, 1913, they voted eight to four for conviction—still not the unanimous verdict needed to find Darrow guilty. The district attorney considered trying the case again, but in the end he didn’t have the will. He extracted a promise from Darrow that he would never again practice law in California. Then Darrow and Ruby left for Chicago.

Darrow had made his peace with the settlement of the McNamara case. Jim would spend his life in San Quentin. J.J. would be released in fifteen years. But Darrow felt he had made the right decision. He had saved their lives. If he had taken the case to the jury, he knew, both of the brothers would have hanged.

Darrow would never discuss his bribery trials in any meaningful way. In
The Story of My Life,
his chatty autobiography, he recounted a conversation with Lincoln Steffens. It offered, at best, an opaque denial of the charge: “I told him that if any one thought I had done anything in connection with the jury or any other matter he should be left free to prosecute.”

Yet Darrow found the philosophy to live with his guilt. The bribery trial—the entire McNamara case—had transformed him. He had traveled without enthusiasm to Los Angeles, a man reluctantly pressed into service. But in the course of the trial, in the intensity of the fight to save two men’s lives and to validate Labor’s mission, the crusader’s passion had retaken hold of his spirit. He had been reckless; he had privately acknowledged his deep shame to Mary. He had come perilously close to ending his life. But in the final, struggling moments of decision, he had recovered a deeper understanding of his purpose. He now saw the wasteful foolishness in trying to step aside, in immersing himself in the suffocatingly banal intricacies of corporate law. The country was rumbling into a new century, and Darrow knew he had a duty and a responsibility to help lead the way.

His summation to the jury was genuine: a plea for the opportunity to be allowed to live his own important future. When he spoke with earnest poignancy about the need to create “fundamental changes” in the nation, he was sharing his own redemptive plan for the rest of his life. The statement he released after his acquittal in the first trial was no less of a vow: “I shall spend the rest of my life as I have that which has passed, in doing the best I can to serve the cause of the poor.”

Darrow returned to Chicago and to a life that used the law as a weapon and as a conscience to transform the world around him. He went on to fight for John Thomas Scopes’s right to teach evolution, to crusade against the death penalty in the Leopold and Loeb case, to work for tolerance and justice. By the time he died on March 14, 1938, his excesses in Los Angeles had become a distant episode in another man’s life.

Billy moved on to take new cases and make new headlines. He grew rich and opened offices in Montreal, London, Brussels, and Paris. But even after he finally collected $80,000 in reward money (only the city of Los Angeles, at Earl Rogers’s urging, still refused to pay the $20,000 it had promised for the arrest of the men responsible for the
Times
bombing), the McNamara case stayed with him. He personally brought McManigal to testify at the federal trial in Indianapolis, and when the jury in 1913 found that thirty-eight union officials shared guilt for the bombings, he celebrated. But Billy could still not close the case. Caplan and Schmitty, the two anarchists who had helped Jim McNamara obtain the dynamite for his bomb, the two men Billy had hunted in the Home Colony, were still at large. He pledged that they would “be made to answer to the charge of murder.”