The Englishman's Boy (3 page)

Fitz began to dust the sand from his palms, still without looking at Bysshe, contemptuously, one hand slowly wiping the other. Folkestone stood waiting. The cleaning of the hands went on and on. Even at a distance, from where we stood, you could feel the cold cruelty of this pantomime. Nobody could have stood it for long. The meaning was perfectly clear.

Folkestone broke away and began to stumble out of the desert, sinking to his ankles in the sand. Lurching out of Egypt and into Devonshire he kept going, sand leaking out of his pant cuffs on to the paper turf. We all suddenly became enormously interested in our cameras, our clipboards, our costumes. Fleeing around the corner of the papier-mâché stone cottage, Folkestone groped blindly for some support and brushed a painted canvas backdrop, shaking a slight disturbance into a mild English sky.

The next day a new director was at work.

The powerful Hispano-Suiza is now throatily purring up into hills which have been beset by a recent boom in house construction, a rash of thirty-room haciendas, Italian villas, and Tudor mansions
thrown up helter-skelter by Hollywood’s finest in the mad race to outdo their box-office rivals. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks have set the standard with their hunting-lodge home, “Pickfair,” run with a modest staff of fifteen servants. Now everyone else is straining to gain ground on the reigning King and Queen of pictures. Harold Lloyd has bought a sixteen-acre estate, “Greenacres,” with its own golf course and an artificial waterfall spotlit at night with coloured lights. And in the near future, John Barrymore will buy King Vidor’s “Bella Vista,” over the years expanding it into sixteen buildings and forty-five rooms, adding two swimming pools, a trout pond, a skeet-shooting range, an aviary, a library of first editions, and a trophy room housing the only dinosaur egg in private hands. His guests will also have two bars from which to imbibe – one an English tavern, the other a “Western” saloon dismantled and shipped down piece by piece from Alaska.

According to Rachel Gold, this lunacy is not like the inspired lunacy of Buster Keaton, who can frequently be seen driving a thirty-foot bus in an admiral’s hat – a bus expressly built for him by the Fifth Avenue Bus Company and equipped with two drawing rooms, an observation deck, and bunks for six. Keaton, she says, knows how funny bad taste can be; the rest of them don’t.

It is a very strange world into which Fitz is steering the Hispano-Suiza, a world half-wild, half-artificial. Rabbits scutter into the road and flicker in the headlights; coyote eyes glitter and slink in the ditches. Most of the hills are still undeveloped, bald and blank, overlooking nothing, just as the canyons open on nothing. And then the car headlights will suddenly pick out an unexpected expanse of stone wall, your eyes will jerk from the eyes glowing in the ditches to graze the roof of a Norman farmhouse, a turret, a Tudor chimney. Then the impression of Europe dissolves and you are back in a lunar landscape of parched hills where owls glide through swathes of incandescent light. The powerful car bores on, headlights fanning scrub, the dirt track behind us writhing with dust.

Suddenly, the hood swings left, noses through an iron gate, and the Hispano-Suiza rolls up a long drive. Ahead of us lies a Tudor
manor, its imitation thatched roof humped like a haystack against the sky, a few of its leaded windows showing light. This is “Mina,” the house which Howard Adilman named for his wife but never finished before Damon Ira Chance bought Zenith and, along with it, accommodations befitting a movie mogul.

Fitz draws up to the front of the house, turns off the motor, and motions me out. He uses a key to let us in the door. There is a long entrance hallway which leads into a barren reception room. Our footsteps echo as Fitz leads me to a staircase curving up to the second floor. As we go up it, over my shoulder I catch a glimpse through an open door of what appears to be a ballroom. It is entirely empty except for a single ladder-backed chair standing precisely in the middle of the marble floor under a huge crystal chandelier. I see no signs of servants, hear no off-stage noises – no phonograph playing, no doors opening or closing, no voices – the whole vast house is silent and still. We pass down a corridor lined with closed doors. The corridor is painted starkly white, just as all the rooms we have passed through have been painted white. So far I have seen no paintings, no rugs, no photographs, no furniture, except for the one lone chair stranded on that vast floor. My heart has begun to beat dully, heavily, and my mouth has gone dry.

Fitzsimmons stops, knocks softly on one of the doors. A voice calls to enter and we do. Chance sits on a sofa with his back to the door, facing a screen hung on the opposite wall. This is the first furnished room I have encountered in my passage through the house. One wall is filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a sliding library ladder; another is covered with maps of the western United States; the last has a huge leaded window looking out on to the night. There is a projector mounted on a trolley standing near the sofa, three armchairs covered in chintz, a gleaming oak floor, and a mahogany liquor cabinet behind whose doors bottles gleam.

Fitz says, “What was it tonight?”

Chance doesn’t bother to turn around when he answers.
“Judith of Bethulia.”
The voice sounds tired. Then he musters energy. “I want you to make a note, Fitz. In this movie Griffith put Bobby Harron in
a tunic. Big mistake. Harron has terrible legs. See to it that none of my directors puts a male lead into a short tunic until you’ve inspected his legs. Nobody else but you.”

“Got it.”

“Not a mental note, Fitz. A paper note.”

Fitz takes out a note pad and scribbles. “I brought Vincent,” he announces as he writes.

“Please introduce us,” says Chance, still not bothering to turn around. With Fitz’s hand on my elbow I find myself being steered to the front of the sofa where a man in a three-piece oatmeal tweed suit is sitting. His thinning hair is neatly brushed, the clothes are elegantly cut, his brown brogues are polished to a chocolate richness. He might be a professor at an Ivy League school – a professor of good family and substantial private means. His tailoring, his grooming are all that they should be. Only his grey complexion falls short of the mark, the unhealthy colour of a man who never sees much sun.

“Mr. Vincent,” he says, “how good of you to come and see me on such short notice. Please sit down,” he says, patting the sofa beside him. “Too bad Fitz couldn’t have got you here earlier, you could have joined me in viewing one of Mr. David Wark Griffith’s films – an older one, but then I don’t find that Mr. Griffith ages.”

Fitzsimmons says, “You ought to take a holiday from the Griffith. Look at something different for a change.” Towering over us, he sounds and looks a bit like a disapproving parent. “I want to get preached at, I go to church,” he adds.

“Fitz prefers the Keystone Kops, Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd,” Chance explains cheerfully.

“Fatty Ar buckle, that’s the guy who really makes me laugh.”

“Nobody is laughing at Mr. Arbuckle any more, Fitz. My word, no. The joke’s on Mr. Arbuckle now.”

What Chance is referring to is a sexual scandal that rocked Hollywood only the year before. A starlet, Virginia Rappe, died as a consequence of a drunken party in the comedian’s hotel room in San Francisco. Accusations were made that Arbuckle had raped Miss
Rappe with either a Coca-Cola or champagne bottle (some said an icicle) and ruptured her bladder, resulting in peritonitis and death. Much of America stirred with anti-Hollywood hysteria, pulpits rang with denunciations; there were reports of women attacking the screen when Arbuckle comedies were shown and Wyoming cowboys riddling them with bullet holes. Despite Arbuckle’s acquittal in a series of trials, Paramount cancelled the jolly fat man’s three-million-dollar contract and junked three of his pictures already in the can. Suddenly, Fatty Arbuckle had become Starving Arbuckle, a star who couldn’t get work.

“And thanks to Mr. Arbuckle we find ourselves saddled with that insufferable Hays,” says Chance. “Not the man I would have picked for the job, but then Messrs. Zukor, Loew, Goldwyn, Laemmle, Fox, and Selznick did not consult me. I am not part of their cabal.”

His dismissal of Hays takes me aback. Hays, the little man with bat-wing ears and rodent teeth, is uniformly detested by writers, actors, and directors, regarded as a tool of studio heads, a way of disciplining troublesome “creative” people. So it comes as a great surprise to hear a studio head disparage him.

Fearing possible government censorship of the movies in the wake of the Arbuckle scandal, industry leaders quickly hired President Harding’s former postmaster general, Will Hays, to clean up Hollywood’s image. What came to be known as the Hays Office immediately issued dictates prohibiting carnality on-screen or off. Morality clauses were soon a feature of studio contracts; unseemly private behaviour could get you fired, or the vague clause could be used as legal grounds to get rid of people causing other problems.

“I grant you,” says Chance, “that there may be a philosophical justification for censorship. If we claim that Shakespeare and Milton improve the mind, then it is only fair to assume that inferior goods may damage it. But censorship for business reasons is another matter. And if we must have it, I would prefer the censor to be able to distinguish between the good and the bad. Mr. Hays does not set my mind at rest on that point. As owner of my own movie company, I did not
expect to be dictated to by a small-town Hoosier whose aesthetics were formed by the Knights of Pythias, the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, the Moose, and the Elks. That is not why I came to Hollywood.”

Before I can stop myself, I ask him the question all of Hollywood has been asking behind his back. “Why did you come to Hollywood, Mr. Chance?”

“Why, to assist Mr. Griffith in his great work, Mr. Vincent. To make American movies.” He pauses, studies my reaction. “The look on your face suggests you are not sure what I mean. You are thinking, Aren’t all movies made in Hollywood American movies? They are not, Mr. Vincent. Think of Mr. Lasky returning from Europe to hold a dockside conference to announce he’s corralled the best writers England can boast – James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Compton Mackenzie, E. Temple Thurston, Max Pemberton. How can English writers author American movies? And then Samuel Goldwyn hires Maurice Maeterlinck to write pictures for him because Monsieur Maeterlinck owns a Nobel Prize for Literature. I hear Goldwyn keeps him on hand to introduce to distinguished visitors as, ‘The world’s greatest writer. He works for me.’ ”

Fitz abruptly says, “Who wants a drink?”

“Denis recalls me to my duties as a host. I have been remiss. As you see, I can get carried away,” Chance apologizes, offering a smile. “We have some very good Scotch that some of Fitz’s friends got us from Canada. Or perhaps you would care for something else?”

“Scotch and water is fine.”

“Soda with mine. As usual, Denis.”

He turns back to me as Fitzsimmons busies himself mixing drinks.

“You see, Harry … do you mind if I call you Harry? You see, Harry, I want to make pictures rooted in American history and American experience. Just as Mr. Griffith showed us how to. I’m tired of all these people making movies about Marie Antoinette. Prisoner of Zenda stuff. Chocolate-coated kitsch. Costume dramas, knights and castles, Robin Hood. Why not a film biography of George Washington instead of Henry VIII? Do you see what I mean?”

I nod. Fitz serves the drinks, then retreats to a chair in the corner. All but his shoes and pant legs vanish in shadow.

“That is what I mean when I say I wish to continue Mr. Griffith’s work,” Chance explains with just a touch of smugness.

It is hard to remember that Griffith only died in 1948, five years ago. I don’t suspect the name means much to anyone now, except the most avid film buffs. He died an alcoholic, guiltily ignored by the very business which he pioneered, a neglected, pathetically grandiloquent figure. But for about a decade he dominated movie-making in a way no one has since, or is ever likely to do again. He began to direct when movies were shot with a stationary camera as if they were stage plays, actors and actresses making exits and entrances. It was Griffith and his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, who take the lion’s share of credit for inventing the vocabulary of movies – close-ups (audiences wanted to know what had happened to the actors’ feet), rapid cuts from scene to scene and character to character, the “fade-out,” the “soft focus,” tracking cameras. He even used a variation of colour photography, printing night scenes on blue stock, day scenes on yellow. It was Griffith who first demanded that movies be regarded as art and Griffith who gave some credibility to the claim they could be. He produced some of the first Hollywood spectaculars with
The Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
, as well as small, intimate movies like
Broken Blossoms.
His pictures were a reflection of their maker, a mixture of bombast, hokum, sentiment, and high artistic purpose.

Griffith was an obsessive eccentric and one of his obsessions was history. He employed a large staff to research his period dramas and dunned archaeologists and historians for blurbs to advertise the “accuracy” of his movies. But his obsession with history went further. He argued that the motion-picture camera would end conflicting interpretations of the past. Eventually all significant events would be recorded by movie cameras and film would offer irrefutable proof as to what had really happened. Vast public archives of documentary movies would make history democratic; by viewing the evidence, citizens could check the facts, know the truth for themselves.

In the early years Griffith was always surrounded by admirers; people who never thought to laugh when the great man propounded his naive theories, or wore kooky straw hats with holes cut in them to prevent baldness, or declaimed ornately like a hillbilly Shakespeare. To them he was always Mr. Griffith, the Genius.

This is the man Chance begins to lecture me on in a style sounding a bit like an address to Congress. He says that he has made an intense study of Griffith’s films, pondered them, and drawn conclusions. Griffith is the man who has given America to Americans. America had cried out for bread and received stones until Griffith came along. It was
he
who had answered the cry for bread
with
bread, filled America’s spiritual emptiness
with
a vision of itself. He was able to do this because he was a simple, self-educated man who had never forgotten his roots in backwoods Kentucky, a man with similarities to that other self-made genius, Abraham Lincoln. If it had been Griffith’s misfortune to go to college, some half-baked professor would have made him ashamed of who and what he was, filling his head with Henry James’s traitorous nonsense about the ineffable superiority of Europe. Instead, Griffith had sat at his father’s, the old Colonel’s, knee, absorbing his stories of the Civil War, retelling them in
The Birth of a Nation
with all the passion of someone who felt he had been present at the great battles, the touching surrender at Appomattox. This primitive, rugged self-confidence had produced an American
Iliad
, and the American people had responded to it the way the Greeks did to Homer, responding to the poetry of
conviction.
Chance tells me this with a conviction which seems at odds with the rumours of his life spent abroad, as if a Henry James character were launching an attack on James himself.