The Englishman's Boy (4 page)

He breaks off suddenly, as if embarrassed by his passion and enthusiasm, gives me a sly smile. “And then there is something else Mr. Griffith taught us by example. How to make a profit from fact. No motion picture since has approached the profitability of
The Birth of a Nation.
It was pure genius on his part to advertise his motion picture as fact. Americans are a practical people, they like facts. Facts are solid, they’re dependable. The average American feels foolish
when he enjoys a made-up story, feels sheepish, childish, a mooner, a dreamer. But entertain him with facts and you give him permission to enjoy himself without guilt. He needn’t feel swindled, or hoodwinked, a hick sold a bill of goods by a carnival barker. He prefers to feel virtuous because he’s learned something useful,
informed
himself,
improved
himself.

“You mark my words, Harry, there’ll come a day when the public won’t swallow any of our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do. Truth is stranger than fiction, someone said. It may not be, but it’s more satisfying. Facts are the bread America wants to eat. The poetry of facts is the poetry of the American soul.

“Of course,” he qualifies, “the facts in picture-making must be shaped by intuition.” He pauses dramatically. “I learned that at the feet of Bergson. I am a Bergsonian,” he declares, a little like Aimee Semple McPherson might declare she is a Christian.

I haven’t the slightest clue what a Bergsonian is, but it sounds vaguely like Theosophy, or something worse. “A Bergsonian?” I say.

“Before the war I attended his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris. A mesmerizing philosopher. His lectures were packed to the rafters – society ladies, students, writers, artists. Admission was by ticket only. I was one of those privileged to be admitted. Bergson taught that received ideas, habit, routine, turn a man into an automaton, a robot. What distinguishes a man from a robot is not intelligence – presumably a machine might some day be constructed that could outperform a man in the rational faculties – but intuition. The intellect, Bergson says, is designed to apprehend the external world but cannot plumb the inner world of things. It’s the wrong tool, Harry. Intuition has its roots in our deepest being, a being we are scarcely aware of, and because we are scarcely aware of it, it remains our truest, most uncorrupted self. My intuition, my will, is the clue to my hidden self. Through intuition it is possible for me to penetrate whatever shares my fluid and changeable nature – other human beings, all art … history. Analysis puts a man outside the thing he studies, while intuition puts him inside. Analysis
therefore renders partial knowledge while intuition renders absolute knowledge.”

“Very interesting,” I say.

Chance scrutinizes me with a searching look. “Don’t gainsay intuition, Harry. After all, it led me to you.”

I shift uneasily on the sofa. “How is that, Mr. Chance?”

“I had a feeling about you. I used to watch you crossing the road. There was something about you.… One day I pointed you out to Fitz and asked, ‘Who is that young man?’ He didn’t know your name. I told him to find out and bring me your file. When I read it, everything fell into place. I learned you were a scriptwriter, that you knew shorthand, that you had worked on a newspaper.”

“That’s right.”

Chance turns to where Fitz sits in his dark corner. “Denis, bring the bottle and join us in a toast.” The shadows part as Fitz wrenches himself up out of the chair and into the light; the floor groans under him as he makes his way to the sofa and replenishes our glasses. Chance lifts his whisky tumbler. “To the picture I hope Harry is going to help us to make. To the poetry of fact.” Our glasses chime against one another, we drink. I don’t know what it is I’m drinking to and so I feel counterfeit, ridiculous, but it’s good whisky, not to be wasted. Chance stares down into his glass and says, “Fitz has heard rumours about an old man, an extra and bit player in Westerns. It’s said the cowhands regard him as a tin god, the last bull buffalo of the old West. There are a lot of stories afloat about him. If he’s the genuine article he could be the basis for my movie of poetic fact. If Colonel Griffith gave
The Birth of a Nation
to his son, this old man may give me the picture I want to make. I do not overestimate the potential. Think of Al Jennings,” he says.

I do. Al Jennings was an Oklahoma lawyer who had gone off the rails and taken to robbing trains and banks until captured by United States Marshal Bud Ledbetter in 1897. After his release from the big house, he parlayed a reputation as a rough, tough, and hard to bluff desperado into a career in Hollywood. Riding his new celebrity hellbent for leather he offered himself as a candidate for Attorney
General in his native state, running under the confidence-inducing slogan, “I was a good train robber and I’ll be a good Attorney General.” Failing in this campaign, he made a bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination where he made a shockingly good showing. Now, his political career on hold, he was back in Hollywood making more movies about – Al Jennings. And he wasn’t the only Western outlaw who had made hay with his notoriety. Emmett Dalton of the Dalton gang starred in
Beyond the Law
, a picture which in 1920 broke box-office records in New York and Los Angeles. Even the legendary Wyatt Earp had a walk-on in Allan Dwan’s
The Half-Breed;
but a one-eyed old man didn’t have much future in the acting business. He did, however, temporarily bask in a kind of reflected glory. Among his pallbearers at his 1929 funeral were the Western idols William S. Hart and Tom Mix.

“I see,” I say, “you intend to make this man the next Al Jennings.”

“Better. Al Jennings produced with money. Al Jennings turned into art.”

“All right,” I say, “but what do I have to do with Al Jennings and art?”

“You were a reporter. Reporters are supposed to be good at tracking people down.”

As a reporter on a small-town newspaper like
The Sentinel
I didn’t have much trouble tracking down the newsmakers. A walk down Main Street got you to the mayor; next door to the mayor was the office of the local constable. They furnished the newspaper with hard news. Nor did it take much digging to discover the woman who had grown the potato with the startling resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t say any of this, of course. It would sound flippant.

“I think what you want is a private detective. Not me.”

“No dicks,” Fitz growls. He has been quiet so long that this intervention startles me.

“I concur,” says Chance. “A man who sells information is not entirely trustworthy. He may sell it to somebody else. I would prefer to enlist a man who shares my ideals. Besides, there is more required than simply finding this man.”

“What else?”

“We’ll want his stories taken down. I understand you know shorthand, Harry?”

“Yes.”

“Part of your education as a reporter?”

I shrug. “I quit school when I was fourteen – to help my mother out. I went to work clerking in a grocery store. I thought night-school commercial classes were a way to improve my prospects – typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, that sort of thing.”

“Very good. When you find him I want you to interview him; I want every word taken down and delivered to me. And there are other things in which your good judgement and experience would be invaluable. Would he be an asset in a publicity campaign? Would the press and public take a shine to him?” Chance hesitates. “Is he cooperative? Co-operation will be important. You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And don’t forget, if we are successful, at some stage this raw material will need to be shaped into a scenario. Who better qualified to write the scenario than the man who got the story from the horse’s mouth? Up until now you’ve worked only as a title-writer. It would be a great opportunity for you, to write a big picture, wouldn’t it, Harry?”

We both leave that question unanswered because the answer is obvious.

“So who is it that I’m supposed to find? What’s his name?”

Chance raises a cautionary finger. “Don’t take what I’m about to say amiss, Harry. But before I divulge his name I need some assurances from you. A promise that what we have discussed here will remain absolutely confidential. This is a matter for the three of us in this room and no one else. I am aware of what my reputation in this town is. The pampered son of a rich man, dabbling in pictures, a rank amateur. For that reason, I prefer my affairs kept private. If what I’m up to were made public, my enemies would twist it to make me look ridiculous. I won’t be made a laughing stock.”

“I can keep my mouth shut,” I assure him. “But they’ll want to know what I’m up to in the office. It’s impossible to keep anything quiet in the office.”

“This job won’t require you to work in the office. Stay away from the office. At least for the time being.”

“That in itself will raise questions –”

Chance interrupts forcefully. “Fitz will arrange things in the office. None of that need concern you.”

“Fine. Let Mr. Fitzsimmons take care of it. But I still need to know who I’m looking for.”

Chance leans forward, picks up a can of film lying on the floor, waves it at Fitzsimmons. “Denis, put this in the projector for us. There’s a good fellow.” Fitz does what he is told, deftly and efficiently; in moments all is ready. “Out with the lights, Fitz. Let us begin!” Chance cries gaily.

The projector starts to whir, the lamp beside us is extinguished, the film begins to jump and twitch on the screen. What we are looking at seems to me raw, unedited footage of the dime-a-dozen Westerns that every studio in southern California churns out like sausage. None of the title cards have been inserted and this makes the story hard to follow. This is what I make of it.

There is a trial. An ill-favoured fiend is convicted of something on the testimony, of a beautiful young girl. A handsome officer of the law embraces her ardently as the villain is carted off to his cell, shrieking imprecations and struggling in the grasp of his jailers. Next, there are shots of a wagon train and of the lovely young woman sitting on a wagon seat, apparently singing, her lovely face tilted up to the sky. Then – a jailbreak! Gunplay, honest citizens shot down like dogs in the street, horses galloping, swarms of dust.

Later, the villain kneeling beside wagon ruts, shaking his fist, presumably swearing revenge to the same sky the heroine serenaded. Followed by night. The wagon train encamped in a circle, a blazing fire, a geyser of sparks, eerily luminous smoke shuddering up into the black sky. Three men saw soundless fiddles, a boy twangs a silent jew’s-harp, a mute concertina snakes back and forth
between hands. Men in big boots swing women in calico dresses and poke bonnets.

I can feel Chance stirring on the sofa beside me, his body tense with anticipation. I glance over at him. He is staring at the screen with such intensity that his soft, full face is as rigid as a granite Buddha’s. Suddenly he springs to his feet, gives a sharp, nervous tug to his trouser legs and skips to the screen. The hot white light of the projector glazes his features, giving him the queer, fixed look of a ceramic doll.

The camera cuts to a little dog, jigging on its hind legs. Round and round it hops, tongue lolling. An old man joins in the dog’s dance, capering in a spry, lock-jointed way, waving crooked arms above his head. The dog leaps against his legs, barking and barking, noiselessly.

“Him,” says Chance, holding a finger up to the face on the screen. Seemingly on his command, the camera cuts to a close-up. The old face swells, filling the screen the way a dream fills the mind. A huge, eroded face. He’s laughing now, the old man, the white stubble of his beard standing up like bristles on the back of an enraged hog, the deep eye sockets black and charred-looking, as if they had been burned into the face with a red-hot poker. “Him. His name is Shorty McAdoo. Find him for me, Harry.”

It is after three o’clock in the morning when Fitz and I leave Chance’s house. There are many things to discuss and plan. I am to have a car placed at my disposal. I am to have an expense account. I am to have an increase in salary from seventy-five dollars a week to one hundred and fifty dollars a week. I am to find Shorty McAdoo and get his story. I am to do this without revealing who I am working for.

When he bids me goodbye, Chance says, “My regrets at keeping you so late, Harry. But I do not sleep well. I sometimes forget that others are not accustomed to the same hours.”

“You’d get more sleep if it wasn’t for the speech-making in the middle of the night,” says Fitzsimmons disapprovingly.

“It is not speech-making,” Chance answers sharply. “It is thinking aloud. Thinking aloud, Denis.”

Fitz, reproved, shrugs.

Going down the long white corridor that morning, descending the long curved staircase, I feel the same anxiety I experienced earlier. In the midst of the silence, the starkness, I become too aware of myself. I watch my hand slide along the banister, my foot plant itself on the next step. Out of the corner of my eye I catch the ladder-backed chair isolated on the cold marble floor of the ballroom, the strangeness of its position.

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