The Englishman's Boy (2 page)

He and the blue horse began their descent then, down into the belly of a narrow coulee twisting through the scarred and crumbling hills. The other horses trickled down the slope after them, filling the coulee as water fills the bed of a river. One by one they dropped from sight, tails switching, heads bobbing, ghostly gleaming horses running back into the earth like shining, strengthening water.

The fire died amid the charred sticks, the moon grew pale. The stream of horses flowed north to Canada.

2
 

I
typed four names.
Damon Ira Chance. Denis Fitzsimmons. Rachel Gold. Shorty McAdoo.
I sat and stared at these names for some minutes, then I typed a fifth, my own.
Harry Vincent.

I did not know how to continue. It’s true that once I was a writer of a sort, but for thirty years I’ve written nothing longer than a grocery list, a letter. I went to the window. From there I could see the South Saskatchewan River, the frozen jigsaw pieces bumping sluggishly downstream, the cold, black water steaming between them. A month ago, when the ice still held, a stranger to this city would have had no idea which way the river ran. But now the movement of the knotted ice, of the swirling debris, makes it plain.

So begin, I told myself.

History is calling it a day. Roman legionaries tramp the street accompanied by Joseph and Mary, while a hired nurse in cap and uniform totes the Baby Jesus. Ladies-in-waiting from the court of the Virgin Queen trail the Holy Family, tits cinched flat under Elizabethan bodices sheer as the face of a cliff. A flock of parrot-plumed Aztecs are hard on their heels. Last of all, three frostbitten veterans of Valley Forge drag flintlocks on the asphalt roadway.

This is nearly thirty years ago, 1923 to be exact, and I am a young man standing at a second-storey window in the script department of Best Chance Pictures watching extras drift by in a yellow
light creeping towards dusk – shooting suspended for the day. I am waiting for a man by the name of Fitzsimmons, waiting anxiously because a visit from Fitzsimmons is not to be taken lightly. Returning from lunch today I found this terse message on my desk.

The office cleared out two hours ago and there is still no sign of Fitzsimmons. Even though I suspect the possibility of a practical joke, I stay put. For one thing, the letterhead (reading “Office of the President and Chairman”) appears genuine. I don’t intend to jeopardize a seventy-five-dollar-a-week job, not with the expense of keeping my mother in the Mount of Olives Rest Home.

History having disappeared from sight, my gaze turns to the jumbled vista of the studio lot, twenty-five acres of offices, workshops, streets of every kind – French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Wild Western. What I can’t see from my window, I know, having walked through it often enough.

All of this make-believe is held in quarantine by a ten-foot fence and a gate which trumpets in black iron scrollwork: Best Chance Pictures. When I first came to work here eighteen months ago the gate trumpeted Zenith Pictures, but then Damon Ira Chance bought it from Mr. Adilman and the name changed, along with a number of other things.

From the beginning, Damon Ira Chance was an enigma. Nobody knew anything about him. People assumed that the surname Chance had been adopted for the sake of the ringing phrase, Best Chance Pictures. If Samuel Goldwyn could steal a name for business reasons, what was stopping anybody else? Then one of the trade papers published a story identifying Damon Ira Chance as the son of Titus Chance. For over forty years Titus Chance’s name had been
mentioned in the same breath with the likes of Carnegie, Gould, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Mellon. Although not quite as rich as these plutocrats, his wealth was considerable, very considerable. During the Civil War the family textile mills had made a bundle supplying uniforms to the Federals, and when peace came, Titus Chance shrewdly reinvested war profits in oil, steel, railroads, banking. The old man survived well into the new century and at his death his money had passed to his only child, Damon Ira, an obscure figure, a middle-aged Henry James character who had spent most of his life living abroad in Europe. Unlike a Henry James character, however, Damon Ira Chance promptly took a large part of his inheritance and bought a movie company with it.

It is on this man’s orders that I am waiting for Denis Fitzsimmons in my dog-kennel office. There’s not much to amuse me here, a desk, a typewriter, a coffee can full of pencils, a three-shelf bookcase holding Dreiser, Crane, Norris, London, and back numbers of
The Smart Set
, which my friend Rachel Gold browbeat me into subscribing to because it is edited by her idol, H.L. Mencken.

Rachel has an office just a short way down the corridor, a much more magnificent office befitting a head writer. In it there is a long table for writing, a six-shelf bookcase, many ashtray stands, a cabinet with a broken lock holding bottles of bathtub gin, and a big sofa for thinking and napping on.

I tell myself five more minutes and then I’ll leave. Five minutes pass and then another five. As it grows dark outside, I see myself in the windowpane, a tall, thin, gangly, big-nosed, big-eared young man nervously smoking and fidgeting with his wire-rimmed spectacles. A very ordinary, common young man whose only uncommon feature can’t be detected in the glass at the moment. My limp.

I sit as minutes become hours, checking my watch, chain-smoking cigarettes. Then, sometime after ten, I hear a car pull up, followed by the creak of the stairs which lead up to the gallery that runs round the offices on the second floor, finally the tread of heavy feet outside my office door. Suddenly, Fitzsimmons is here, looming in the doorway without having bothered to knock. Six feet four, maybe two
hundred and seventy pounds, he stands there breathing heavily through an open mouth, all bulging shoulders, barrel chest, tree-trunk legs threatening to burst the stitches on an expensively tailored double-breasted suit. Seen up close, the meaty florid face breaks down into a riverine system of tiny red veins and spidery tributaries, a knob of mashed nose, a large, froggish mouth spiked with the kind of tiny baby teeth that belong to a six-year-old.

He draws a couple of wheezy breaths and says, “I got held up. Business.” Then he takes out a handkerchief and begins to mop his sweating face, his cranium of closely cropped hairs, orangey-red like the pelt of an orangutan. “Some fucking paradise, this California. Never had so many fucking colds in my life.” He blows his nose into the handkerchief.

“Drink orange juice,” I say. “It’s supposed to be good for whatever ails you.”

Fitzsimmons’s eyes scan my office; he doesn’t look at me. “If it isn’t colds, it’s the fucking clap. All these actresses got a dose of the clap. You telling me orange juice will cure the clap?”

I’m not about to tell this man anything.

“If it would fix the clap I’d ship a couple of boxcars back East. I got plenty of friends in New York could make use of it.” He laughs, a strange laugh that grates and pops explosively, like gravel being ground in the jaws of an adamantine mill. He stops all at once, as if he has forgotten why he’s amused. “Let’s go,” he says.

I follow him down the stairs, his bulk rolling like a storm cloud. We get into the waiting Hispano-Suiza and drive off. Aside from the sound of Fitzsimmons sucking his teeth, we wind through deserted streets in silence. Contrary to what you might expect, in the early twenties Hollywood was a ghost town after dark. For the original inhabitants, mostly retirees from the Midwest, a high old time might consist of a game of gin rummy, cranking your own ice-cream maker. The film colony was not much livelier. Most movies were filmed in natural light and that meant rising at dawn and shooting until dusk so as not to waste precious hours of sunshine. Early to bed and early to rise. Even as we pass down Hollywood Boulevard I can see that all
the stools at a lunch counter are empty, a lonely waitress staring out the window at our big car as it rolls by.

When I finally summon the courage to ask Fitzsimmons where he is taking me, all he says is, “To see Mr. Chance.”

This is a very big surprise. Nobody, or almost nobody, ever gets an audience with Chance. In the nine months since acquiring Zenith, he has earned the reputation of being a recluse,
Photoplay
dubbing him the Hermit of Hollywood. At his own studio he is merely a rumoured presence, rarely if ever seen. Now and then someone catches a glimpse of him standing at his office window on the third floor of the administration building, then the Venetian blinds snap shut and he is swallowed up from view. On very special occasions, some of the Hollywood aristocracy, a great star, or important director are summoned to his sanctum sanctorum for tea and cake, a decorous private audience. This is not the usual Hollywood practice; all the rest of the studio bosses are hands-on men, a presence on the lot. At Universal, Carl Laemmle is known as Uncle Carl, a chipper gnome who chats with property men, grips, electricians, stars, and directors alike. Louis B. Mayer is a man incapable of passing a pie without sticking a finger in it. He shows directors how to direct and gives acting lessons to great stars. Fall over and die like this. Roll your eyes like this when you drop. And lemme see the whites. Often he breaks down in tears, moved by the brilliance of his own performance. “The D.W. Griffith of actors” they call him at Metro, but only behind his back because Louis B. Mayer hits people. The illustrious list of people he has socked includes Erich von Stroheim and Charlie Chaplin.

But Mayer’s is not Chance’s style. He is aloof, patrician, resented. In nearly a year, the closest I have got to my boss is at his single recorded public appearance, the premiere of his first production. I had been the rewrite man for titles on
The Orphan Maid
and was vain enough to attend the picture’s opening to see just how much of my work survived final cutting.

I was having a cigarette outside the theatre when the plum Hispano-Suiza I am now riding in drew to the curb and Chance and Fitzsimmons stepped out. Pandemonium broke out. Flashbulbs
erupted. Reporters and cameramen began to jostle and shout, “Look this way, Mr. Damon!” “Hey, Hermit!” “Cheese please, Mr. Chance!” There he stood, a bewildered little man, weak eyes blinking, his thinning, wispy hair appearing to stand on end as the camera flashes throbbed epileptically on his starched shirt front and pale, stricken face. With reporters and cameramen nipping at his flanks, he looked like a penguin set upon by savage dogs, panicky, defenceless.

And then Fitzsimmons seized him by the elbow and started to thrust his way through newspapermen, to violently hack a path through the mob to the lobby. There were yelps and curses as the big Irishman shouldered people aside, trampled on their toes. I saw him slap a camera out of someone’s hand, heard it smash on the pavement. In seconds, the two were safe inside. Meanwhile, the disgruntled press swore and milled about on the sidewalk. Who the fuck does that big ape think he is anyway, pushing me? I got a press card. Nobody but a cop pushes a press card around. I’ll put the fix in on this picture. I’ll get his picture a write-up he won’t soon forget.

Damon Ira Chance did not forget.
The Orphan Maid
would be his last premiere for a very long time.

Nobody can quite figure the relationship between Chance and Fitzsimmons. It is an inexhaustible topic of speculation. Rachel Gold describes them as Jekyll and Hyde; fold their personalities together and you have Louis B. Mayer. It is her theory that Chance is the sentimental Louis B. dreaming pictures in his tower, while Fitzsimmons is the violent and ruthless Louis B. who hits and threatens people. Together, she claims, they might possibly make one successful movie producer.

She may be right. There’s no doubt Fitz frightens people. He is the trouble-shooter, the hands-on man at Best Chance Pictures who relays orders from on high, hustles technicians, reads the riot act to stars and directors. He need only walk onto a set, expensive brogues creaking ominously, and a fearful hush descends. I’ll never forget the day he took the director Bysshe Folkestone aside, one big arm laid across his shoulders like a cross, walking him from the eighteenth-century Devonshire cottage where Folkestone was shooting to a tract of the
Sinai on a nearby set. We all stood watching from a distance. It was like a silent movie without subtitles and musical accompaniment. After a few words from Fitz, Bysshe started to wave his arms; his face, in turn, registering outrage, innocence, perplexity, while all around the two of them work continued, trucks dumping sand and workmen with shovels and rakes scrambling frantically to mould desert dunes to recreate ancient Egypt.

Bysshe kept talking and Fitz kept refusing to look at him. Fitzsimmons stood trickling sand from one enormous hand to another, back and forth, back and forth, eyes riveted on the stream sifting down from his fist. And Folkestone ran on too, unwilling to see that the big Irish egg-timer was measuring how long it took for him to cook. After three or four minutes, Folkestone realized Fitz wasn’t listening and began to run down like a wind-up toy. His once emphatic and confident gestures became uncertain and tentative. In the end he shrugged half-heartedly; his arms fell to his sides; he fell silent.