Max (31 page)

‘I'm sorry,' Freedman said.

‘For what? For laughing?'

‘For being in love with you, I guess.'

‘Is that a joke?'

‘Does it sound like one?'

For a long moment Sally stood and stared at him, then she turned and fled from the dressing room. Freedman followed her more slowly, and back on the set, said to her, ‘I've been thinking about it, Sally, and I don't think it makes so much difference what they say – I mean, even if Manfred says it in Italian.'

‘What?' Her thoughts were elsewhere. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean what we were talking about, the lip reading. Nobody reads lips. Anyway, tomorrow morning we're photographing on Fifth Avenue and the side street. Max has fixed it with Boss Murphy, and they're closing off the avenue and we'll have fifty cops taking care of things. You have to hand it to Max. He does things right.'

‘Yes, he does,' Sally said shortly.

Fred Feldman pressed Max for a meeting, and Max avoided him. Feldman and Jake Stein discussed the matter, and they went over the books together. Bert Bellamy, together with Ruby Britsky, had arranged the sale of the nine lecture halls that Max had converted into moving picture theatres. Five of the halls had been sold to the Jessup Nickelodeon Company, and there was the regular real estate deduction, with checks made out to Cynthia Collins, agent for the transaction, with an address on William Street. Miss Collins was an attractive woman of about forty or so, and drawing up the papers for the sale, Feldman had no suspicion that Miss Collins was anything other than she claimed to be. However, when he tried to find her a few weeks later to discuss a small change in the contracts, he discovered that she had never occupied the premises at William Street – or, indeed, any other premises that he could find. The commissions had amounted to almost five thousand dollars. Feldman discussed the matter with Jake Stein.

‘I know,' Stein said.

‘What the devil do you mean, you know? What do you know?'

‘I spoke to Hymie Brockman. He's in the business, and he knows every real estate broker south of Fourteenth Street. There ain't no Cynthia Collins. There never was no Cynthia Collins.'

‘What!'

‘Just like I say.'

‘Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell Max?'

‘Look, Freddy, I love Max. Even when he's a son of a bitch, which is fairly frequently, I am loving him. He's good to me. My wife had to go up to Keppleman's Mountain House in Sullivan County, and I needed five hundred bucks. Max didn't hesitate. He gives it to me and he still don't let me dock my pay. Ruby's had his hand in the cashboxes for years. He makes a deal with the ticket sellers. They take out two dollars a night – a dollar to Ruby, a dollar to the ticket man. Not much, but it adds up. Then little brother Benny gets in on the graft, just a little bit, here and there. Max knows, but the couple of times I try to talk to him about it, he takes my head off. Now it's possible that Bellamy's in on it, and who's Bert? Only Max's best and oldest friend in the world, since they were kids together working at the penny arcade. So what do we do? We tell Max that his brother and his best friend are crooks?'

‘About Bert, we just don't know. You say possibly – that's not good enough. But if Max finds Out –' Feldman shook his head.

‘How does he find out, Freddy? It's a few thousand lousy dollars. Leave it alone. The way Max is moving these days, he's spending twice that each day. That's what you got to talk to him about. If we don't finish this moving picture in another week, we can all go on vacation.'

But to sit down with Max for a meeting was not easy. Feldman and Stein might be worried about money, but Max had his huge toy, the ice house with its sets and lights and cameras and actors. He was happier than he had ever been before, probably happier than he would be again, and when at last Feldman cornered him in one of the dressing rooms, Max said, ‘Freddy, stop crying. Tomorrow we photograph the cards, and then we paste it all together, and then all we need is ten thousand dollars for the prints, fifty thousand for advertising and
tumeling
, and another five thousand to hire Rector's for the opening night, and to throw the kind of a party this town won't forget. So do we have a lousy sixty-five big ones still in the till, or do I have to go begging?'

‘We got about fifty-two thousand, and you don't do the begging. I'll do it, and I'll get it from Chase, where you got your teeth into them already. I'll squeeze another mortgage out of the theatres. But God Almighty, Max, suppose the whole thing fizzles?'

‘Then we're all out on our asses, right?'

They spent the next week, as Max put it, pasting it all together. Sam Snyder, together with a young man named Martin Kellogg, whom he had hired away from Edison, devised a sort of enlarger that magnified the film and enabled them to roll it back and forth as they worked on it. No one in the group – not Sam Snyder or Sally or Freedman or Max – had anticipated the specific difficulties encountered putting the film together. The trained, practiced film editor was far in the future; then they had to invent, guess, and hope.

The consensus was that the entire motion picture should run for one hundred minutes, but they found themselves with one hundred and eighty-three minutes of film, not including the dialogue cards. What to leave in? What to take out? There was a scene of a small, dirty street child weeping. It had little to do with the story and had come about accidentally, and Sally loved it. She wept when it fell to the cutting room floor, the beginning of millions of feet of film, unused, unseen, that would accumulate through the years on the floors of a thousand cutting rooms. There were bitter arguments, screaming confrontations, pleading – as much emotion as had gone into the making of the film itself – but finally it was done, and there had come into existence a feature-length motion picture called
The Waif
, starring Feona Amour and Warren Heart. The supporting cast of Yiddish Theatre actors had also been transmuted into an Anglo-Saxon nomenclature, the list of actors including Thomas Morton, James Spalding, Oswald Smith, Joan Ashley, Alice Henderson, and so forth and so on. But Max bristled at the suggestion that his own name might be changed. ‘With actors, it is one thing. But Britsky remains Britsky. They don't like it, they can shove it up their ass.'

The first screening of
The Waif
, cut and assembled, took place in the ice house on the improvised screen they had used to project their daily takes. The audience consisted of Max, Freida, Ruby, Benny, Sally, Freedman, Feldman, Stein, Snyder, Bellamy, and most of the cast. In spite of the fact that most of them had seen each piece of film many times, they were moved. They wiped their eyes, clapped, cheered, and when it was over, they sat in respectful silence. It was hard to believe that this incredible thing was their creation.

But the silence didn't last. It was shattered by the resonant tones of Julia Schwartz, demanding, ‘Since when have I become Joan Ashley? After fifty-five years of being Julia Schwartz, with triumphs in Berlin and Paris, not to mention Warsaw, on real stages in real theatres, suddenly I am Joan Ashley?'

‘Not to mention Thomas Morton!' Isadore Melchik roared. ‘It ain't enough that Melchik plays Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, not to mention my own translation into Yiddish of George Bernard Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra
, in which Melchik plays Julius Caesar, and suddenly I'm Thomas Morton, who don't even exist. Either it's Melchik, or I personally will get an injunction!'

‘Please,' Max begged them, ‘please. Don't I know you are great actors? If Shakespeare was alive, he'd go to Second Avenue. I have no doubt about that. And go to anyplace in New York, even with the classiest uptown critics, they will tell you how great Julia Schwartz and Isadore Melchik are. Don't I know that? But the success of this moving picture will be when it plays in every nickelodeon from Maine to Minnesota, and not to mention such places as South Dakota and Oklahoma – which, believe me, will be the end of the nickelodeon and the garbage they show, or maybe not the end but a new era. But what I am saying is in such places they never heard of a Yiddish Theatre, and if you say Second Avenue to them, they don't know what you're talking about, and they see names like Schwartz or Melchik or Massoni, they also don't know what you're talking about, not to mention how they feel about Jews. So please, please, please regard this as the beginning of a great new career in a hundred Max Britsky films –'

The argument went on, but in the end Max prevailed. But later, Sally said to him, ‘How is it, Max, that you're not worried about the name of Britsky?'

He stared at her for a long moment before he replied, ‘I guess I'm used to it.' But unspoken, his response was: To hell with them!

The next day, sitting in his office with Fred Feldman and Jake Stein, Max said to them, ‘Sometimes you talk and you don't listen to yourself.'

‘Whatever that's supposed to mean,' Feldman agreed.

‘I'll tell you what it's supposed to mean. Yesterday when I'm trying to get Melchik to agree to be Thomas Morton, I became passionate. I absolutely outdid myself.'

‘It was a good argument,' Stein agreed.

‘Stop agreeing with me. The hell with that. I'm not talking about an argument, but listen. I said to Melchik what a success this picture is, playing in every nickelodeon from Maine to Minnesota or whatever.'

‘You're very persuasive,' Feldman said. ‘Only it won't be playing in every nickelodeon anywhere except in the ten theatres we got, and maybe not even there if you blow a fortune on a big party at Rector's, like you're planning.'

‘Stop crying about the money, Freddy. I'll tell you something. You go into a place like the Chase Bank and ask them for twenty, thirty thousand dollars, right away they know you're a bum with your hand out. You come in for half a million, they respect you, and that's what you and Jake are going to do tomorrow, turn up a half a million.'

‘Max, you're out of your mind.'

‘Yeah? You don't hear me, like I don't hear myself. I said to Melchik in every nickelodeon from here to Grand Rapids, and you tell me to stop dreaming because we don't have no nickelodeons or theatres in Grand Rapids or anywhere else except here and in Brooklyn. That's just it. We're tossing pennies for gum wrappers, like the kids down on Henry Street. We got something that nobody else in this country has got. We got a ninety-minute moving picture called
The Waif
, and there ain't a moving picture house anywhere in America that wouldn't give both balls to show it, and we sit here tossing pennies into our lousy ten theatres.'

‘They're not so lousy, those ten theatres,' Jake Stein protested. ‘They're damn good theatres.'

‘Wake up! Listen to me! I'm not burning our theatres. I'm just saying that there are a thousand other theatres that would give blood to show our moving picture instead of the garbage that National feeds them.'

Feldman was staring at him thoughtfully.

‘You follow me, Fred?'

‘Yeah, but it's big enough to scare the hell out of you, Max.'

‘Penny business, penny business – I'm sick of that. Where does it say in the Bible that National and Edison and a couple of others got a patent to sell their ten-minute junk and nobody else? Suppose we set up a percentage scheme instead of the kind of rental National uses. Suppose we tell the guy who's got three nickelodeons in Oklahoma City that we'll give him three prints and he gives us fifty percent of the box office take. You're telling me he don't jump at that?'

‘Max, Max,' Stein said, ‘you're dreaming, and it's nice to dream, but me, I got to balance the books. At the lab, it costs us five cents a foot for the print, and that comes to a little over four hundred dollars for each print of
The Waif
, and that's twelve hundred dollars in Oklahoma City alone, and you want a thousand prints – four hundred thousand dollars?'

‘Something else,' Feldman put in. ‘The only lab we can count on is Tucker's, over in Hoboken, and that's only because we own half the place, and Tucker's takes a week to give us one print if they drop everything else. All the other labs are tied in with National and Edison and Movie-land, and there isn't the chance of a snowball in hell that they're going to take work from us. Don't think that the ice house is such a secret, Max. Every newspaper in town's been snooping around the place, and the other operators are just waiting to see what happens. If
The Waif is
a big hit, they'll all start making ninety-minute pictures, now that we've shown them how it can be done.'

‘Are you listening?' Stein begged him. ‘Please, Max, are you listening?'

‘I'm listening. Not learning, just listening. You want to cry on my shoulder, I'll give you a handkerchief.'

‘We're trying to be realistic'

‘Yeah? Let me tell you what's realistic. Realistic is that nobody does a goddamn thing until somebody else shows them how. I already told Sam that I want the production out at Tucker's doubled and doubled again and then doubled again.'

‘With what?'

‘I gave him a check for twenty thousand dollars. That's to buy the other half. I don't want nobody turning up and telling us we can't use Tucker's. Then I told him to go ahead and hire whatever we need to make it the biggest lab in the country.'

‘Max,' Stein whispered, ‘you're crazy. You gave him twenty thousand dollars. We ain't got twenty thousand dollars to give him.'

‘You don't listen to me,' Max said. ‘Tomorrow, you and Freddy here are going to see Mr Alvin Berry at number One Seventy-seven Broadway, at the Chase Bank, and you are going to hit him for half a million dollars. You are going to hock everything we got – the theatres,
The Waif
, the lab out in Hoboken, and if you got to throw in the two brownstones we got up on Sixty-sixth Street, do that, and give him a pint of blood if he needs it for his stinking Yankee collateral – but you don't walk out of there without five hundred thousand dollars, because while you are doing that, I am hiring two salesmen to start working their way around the country selling
The Waif
and three other pictures –'