The Book of Illusions (11 page)

Hector was the subject of four profiles written between August 1927 and October 1928. The first one appeared in Kaleidoscope’s monthly
Bulletin
, the publicity organ of Hunt’s newly formed production company. It was essentially a press release to announce the contract they had signed with Hector, and because little was known about him at that point, they were free to invent any story that served their purposes. Those were the last days of the Hollywood Latin Lover, the period just after Valentino’s death when dark, exotic foreigners were still drawing large crowds, and Kaleidoscope tried to cash in on the phenomenon by billing Hector as
Señor Slapstick, the South
American heart-throb with the comic touch
. To back up this assertion, they fabricated an intriguing list of credits for him, an entire career that supposedly predated his arrival in California: music hall appearances in Buenos Aires, extended vaudeville tours through Argentina and Brazil, a series of smash-hit films produced in Mexico. By presenting Hector as an already established star, Hunt could create a reputation for himself as a man with an eye for talent. He wasn’t just a newcomer to the business, he was a clever and enterprising studio boss who had outbid his competitors for the right to import a well-known foreign entertainer and turn him loose on the American public. It was an easy lie to get away with. No one was paying attention to what happened in other countries, after all, and with so many imaginative possibilities to choose from, why be hemmed in by the facts?

Six months later, an article in the February issue of
Photoplay
presented a more sober view of Hector’s past. Several of his films had been released by then, and with interest in his work growing around the country, the need to distort his earlier life had no doubt diminished. The story was written by a staff reporter named Brigid O’Fallon, and from her comments in the first paragraph about Hector’s
piercing gaze
and
lithe muscularity
, one immediately understands that her only intention is to say flattering things about him. Charmed by his heavy Spanish accent, and yet praising him for the fluency of his English, she asks him why he has a German name.
Ees very simple
, Hector answers.
My parents was born in Germany, and so too
 
I. We all emigrate to Argentina when I was a leetle baby. I speak
the German with them at home, the Spanish at school. English
come later, after I go to America. Steel not so hot
. Miss O’Fallon then asks him how long he has been here, and Hector says three years. That, of course, contradicts the information published in the Kaleidoscope
Bulletin
, and when Hector goes on to discuss some of the jobs he held after arriving in California (busboy, vacuum cleaner salesman, ditchdigger), he makes no mention of any previous work in show business. So much for the glorious Latin American career that had turned him into a household name.

It’s not hard to dismiss the exaggerations of Hunt’s publicity department, but just because they ignored the truth doesn’t mean that the
Photoplay
story was any more accurate or believable. In the March issue of the
Picturegoer
, a journalist named Randall Simms writes of visiting Hector on the set of
Tango
Tangle
and being altogether astonished to find that
this Argentinian
laugh machine speaks flawless English, with scarcely the
trace of an accent. If you didn’t know where he was from, you
would swear that he had been raised in Sandusky, Ohio
. Simms means it as a compliment, but his observation raises disturbing questions about Hector’s origins. Even if one accepts Argentina as the place where he spent his childhood, he seems to have left for America much earlier than the other articles suggest. In the next paragraph, Simms reports Hector as saying:
I was
a very bad boy. My parents threw me out of the house when I
was sixteen, and I never looked back. Eventually, I made my
way north and landed in America. Right from the start, I had
only one thought in mind: to hit it big in pictures
. The man who speaks those words bears no resemblance to the man who spoke to Brigid O’Fallon one month earlier. Had he put on the heavy accent for
Photoplay
as a gag, or was Simms intentionally mangling the truth, emphasizing Hector’s proficiency in English as a way to convince producers of his potential as a sound actor in the months and years ahead? Perhaps the two of them had conspired on the article together, or perhaps a third party had paid Simms off—possibly Hunt, who by then was in deep financial trouble. Could it be that Hunt was trying to increase Hector’s market value in order to sell off his services to another production company? It is impossible to know, but whatever Simms’s motives were, and however badly O’Fallon might have transcribed Hector’s statements, the articles cannot be reconciled, no matter how many excuses one makes for the journalists.

Hector’s last published interview appeared in the October issue of
Picture Play
. On the strength of what he said to B. T. Barker—or at least what Barker would have us believe he said—it seems likely that our boy had a hand in creating this confusion himself. This time, his parents are from the city of Stanislav on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Hector’s first language is Polish, not German. They leave for Vienna when he is two, stay there for six months, and then go to America, where they spend three years in New York and one year in the Midwest before pulling up stakes again and resettling in Buenos Aires. Barker interrupts to ask where they lived in the Midwest, and Hector calmly replies: Sandusky, Ohio. Just six months earlier, Randall Simms had mentioned Sandusky in his article for the
Picturegoer
—not as a real place but as a metaphor, as a representative American town. Now Hector appropriates that town and puts it in his story, perhaps for no other reason than that he is attracted to the gruff and lilting music of the words.
San-dus-ky, O-hi-o
, has a pleasant sonority to it, and the smart, triple syncopations scan with all the power and precision of a well-turned poetical phrase. His father, he says, was a civil engineer who specialized in the building of bridges. His mother,
the most beautiful woman on
earth
, was a dancer, singer, and painter. Hector adored them both, was a well-behaved religious little boy (as opposed to the bad boy of Simms’s piece), and until their tragic deaths in a boating accident when he was fourteen, he was planning to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer. The sudden loss of his parents changed all that. From the moment he became an orphan, he says, his only dream was to return to America and begin a new life there. It took a long string of miracles before that could happen, but now that he is back, he feels certain that this is the place where he was always meant to be.

Some of these statements could have been true, but not many of them, perhaps not a single one. This is the fourth version he has given of his past, and while they all have certain elements in common (German-or Polish-speaking parents, time spent in Argentina, emigration from the old world to the new), everything else is subject to change. He’s hard-nosed and practical in one account; he’s cowering and sentimental in the next. He’s a troublemaker for one journalist, obedient and pious for another; he grew up rich, he grew up poor; he speaks with a heavy accent, he speaks with no accent at all. Put these contradictions together, and you wind up with nothing, the portrait of a man with so many personalities and family histories that he is reduced to a pile of fragments, a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces no longer connect. Every time he is asked a question, he gives a different answer. Words pour out of him, but he is determined never to say the same thing twice. He appears to be hiding something, to be protecting a secret, and yet he goes about his obfuscations with such grace and sparkling good humor that no one seems to notice. The journalists can’t resist him. He makes them laugh, he amuses them with little magic tricks, and after a while they stop pressing him about the facts and give in to the power of the performance. Hector goes on winging it, careening madly from the cobbled boulevards of Vienna to the euphonious flatlands of Ohio, and eventually you begin to ask yourself if this is a game of deception or merely a blundering attempt to fight off boredom. Maybe his lies are innocent. Maybe he isn’t trying to fool anyone so much as looking for a way to entertain himself. Interviews can be a dull procedure, after all. If everyone keeps asking you the same questions, maybe you have to come up with new answers just to stay awake.

Nothing was certain, but after sifting through this jumble of fraudulent memories and spurious anecdotes, I felt that I had discovered one minor fact. In the first three interviews, Hector avoids mentioning where he was born. When asked by O’Fallon, he says Germany; when asked by Simms, he says Austria; but in neither instance does he provide any details: no town, no city, no region. It is only when he talks to Barker that he opens up a bit and fills in the blanks. Stanislav had once been part of Austro-Hungary, but after the breakup of the empire at the end of the war, it had been handed over to Poland. Poland is a remote country to Americans, far more remote than Germany, and with Hector doing everything he could to downplay his foreignness, it was an odd admission for him to have named that city as his birthplace. The only possible reason for him to have done that, it seemed to me, was because it was true. I couldn’t confirm this suspicion, but it makes no sense for him to have lied about it. Poland didn’t help his case, and if he was intent on manufacturing a false background for himself, why bother to mention it at all? It was a mistake, a momentary lapse of attention, and no sooner does Barker hear this slip of the tongue than Hector tries to undo the damage. If he has just made himself too foreign, now he will counteract the error by insisting on his American credentials. He puts himself in New York, the city of immigrants, and then hammers home the point by traveling to the heartland. That’s where Sandusky, Ohio, comes into the picture. He plucks the name out of thin air, remembering it from the profile that was written about him six months earlier, and then springs it on the unsuspecting B. T. Barker. It serves his purpose well. The journalist is sidetracked, and instead of asking more questions about Poland, he leans back in his chair and begins reminiscing with Hector about the alfalfa fields of the Midwest.

Stanislav is located just south of the Dniestr River, halfway between Lvov and Czernowitz in the province of Galicia. If that was the terrain of Hector’s childhood, then there was every reason to suppose that he was born a Jew. The fact that the area was thick with Jewish settlements was not enough to persuade me, but combine the Jewish population with the fact that his family left the area, and the argument becomes quite convincing. The Jews were the ones who left that part of the world, and beginning with the Russian pogroms in the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking immigrants fanned out across western Europe and the United States. Many of them went to South America as well. In Argentina alone, the Jewish population increased from six thousand to more than one hundred thousand between the turn of the century and the outbreak of World War I. No doubt Hector and his family helped add to those statistics. If they hadn’t, then it was scarcely possible for them to have landed in Argentina. At that moment in history, the only people who traveled from Stanislav to Buenos Aires were Jews.

I was proud of my little discovery, but that didn’t mean I thought it amounted to much. If Hector was indeed hiding something, and if that something turned out to be the religion he had been born into, then all I had uncovered was the most pedestrian kind of social hypocrisy. It wasn’t a crime to be a Jew in Hollywood back then. It was merely something that one chose not to talk about. Jolson had already made
The Jazz
Singer
at that point, and Broadway theaters were filled with audiences who paid good money to see Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice, to listen to Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, to applaud the Marx Brothers. Being Jewish might have been a burden to Hector. He might have suffered from it, and he might have been ashamed of it, but it was difficult for me to imagine that he had been killed for it. There’s always a bigot around somewhere with enough hatred in him to murder a Jew, of course, but a person who does that wants his crime to be known, to make use of it as an example to frighten others, and whatever Hector’s fate might have been, the one certain fact was that his body was never found.

From the day he signed with Kaleidoscope to the day he disappeared, Hector’s run lasted only seventeen months. Short as that time might have been, he achieved a certain measure of recognition for himself, and by early 1928 his name was already beginning to crop up in the Hollywood social columns. I had managed to recover about twenty of those pieces from various microfilm archives during the course of my travels. There must have been many others that I missed, not to speak of others that had been destroyed, but scant and insufficient as those mentions were, they proved that Hector was not someone who tended to sit around at home after dark. He was seen in restaurants and nightclubs, at parties and movie premieres, and nearly every time his name appeared in print, it was accompanied by a descriptive phrase that referred to his
smoldering
magnetism,
his
irresistible eyes,
or his
heart-stoppingly handsome
face
. This was especially true when the writer was a woman, but there were men who succumbed to his charms as well. One of them, who worked under the name Gordon Fly (the title of his column was
Fly on the Wall
), went so far as to offer the opinion that Hector was wasting his talents in comedy and should switch to drama.
With that profile
, Fly wrote,
it
offends one’s sense of aesthetic proportion to watch the elegant
Señor Mann put his nose at risk by repeatedly bumping into
walls and lampposts. The public would be better served if he
dropped these stunts and concentrated on kissing beautiful
women. Surely there are many young actresses in town who
would be willing to take on that role. Sources tell me that Irene
Flowers has already had several auditions, but it appears that
the dashing hidalgo now has his eye on Constance Hart, the
ever-popular Vim and Vigor Girl herself. We eagerly await the
results of that screen test
.