The Englishman's Boy (6 page)

At last, one winter when I was ten, he neglected to come home to Saskatoon for the winter. We had been abandoned. My mother took this very badly; worry about money always made her desperate. She took work cleaning houses and we stumbled along from one financial
disaster to another, often rescued by municipal relief, or church charities. All this took its toll, and during the next four years her behaviour became increasingly erratic and odd. Often, when she should have been at work, I would come home from school to find her lying despondent on the couch, all the curtains in the apartment drawn, the place cloaked in stale darkness. If I talked to her, she wouldn’t answer; if I coaxed her to eat, she refused. I began to spend more and more time away from home, mostly in the public library where it was warm and the old-maid librarian treated me kindly. In the beginning, I read biographies of poor boys who had made good like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie, seeking to discover the key to the money that would rescue her. But in time, like her I too lost hope, and as an escape turned to reading Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.A. Henty.

By the time I turned fourteen, the writing was on the wall. My mother was no longer remotely capable of holding a job and I quit school to help support us. I started as a stock and delivery boy in a grocery, gradually working my way up to clerk. I liked school and resented leaving, but my despair was not total. Queen Victoria had not been dead so very long then, and the nineteenth century had wrapped a warm muffler of sentiment around the hearts of school-marms, Dickens having made cripples touching and lovable. I hated those female teachers whose faces went sweetly vacuous and temporizingly benign when they turned to me. Although they didn’t mean them to, those looks thrust me on the outside. Outside became a state of mind. Maybe that’s what Chance’s intuition detected in me, that, and a sense of grievance. Because of Chance, for the first time in my life I felt myself gratefully moving to the centre of something important, admitted to an inner circle.

In 1914 war broke out. If a bum leg ever had a silver lining, my luck was that being crippled preserved me from the slaughter in Flanders, probably saved my life. There seemed to be no luck that could save my mother. With every year that passed, her condition worsened, apathy and depression now alternating with periods of
wild, frantic activity. Returning from work, I would find all the furniture in the flat piled in the middle of the floor while she “house-cleaned,” scrubbing everything in sight with a crazy, fixed determination. One day I came home to discover the building in an uproar; she had let herself into a neighbour’s unlocked apartment and “house-cleaned” that, too, going so far as to burn some of Mrs. Kenzie’s dirty laundry in a barrel out back. The police were called, she was brought before a magistrate, and committed to the North Battleford Hospital for the Insane.

A year later, I left Saskatchewan, the doctors telling me her case was hopeless. On my final visit, as she sat on a ward surrounded by forty other female lunatics, she asked one thing of her son. To buy her a new dress so if I happened to lose the memory of her face I would be able to pick her out by her clothing the next time I visited.

I headed for the States in the winter of 1919, hungry for a future. For the next couple of years I drifted around the Pacific Northwest doing odd jobs, the longest of which was working on a weekly newspaper in a small town in Washington. Then
The Sentinel
went under and I hit the road again, making my way to Los Angeles. It was there that Rachel Gold tossed me a life jacket. I was living in the YMCA and limiting myself to one meal a day, bacon and eggs, the cheapest hot meal on the lunch-counter menu, when a woman climbed up on a stool beside me and struck up a conversation about the book I was reading, Jack London’s
The Iron Heel.
That in itself was unusual; back in those days, even in the Babylon which the American public presumed Los Angeles to be, women didn’t strike up conversations with strange men. It wasn’t long before I learned just how unusual a woman Rachel Gold was. She was the first “new” woman I had ever met, a woman on the pattern of Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker, wittily cynical, tough, intellectual, and very pretty. She came right out and asked what I thought of the book, a novel that predicted the destruction of the labour movement and a takeover of the United States government by a fascist organization. I said I found it farfetched. In seconds, she was contradicting me, squirming restlessly on the counter stool, tugging and twisting fistfuls of her lacquer-black
hair, cut short in the Clara Bow style, looking like a woman trying to shake, to wring ideas out of her brain. I didn’t argue, only laughed and shrugged. Who else did I read? she wanted to know. What did I think of Mencken? In minutes, we found common ground in an admiration for Dreiser and Norris. As she talked she radiated a kind of alertness, an electricity that made it impossible to take your eyes off her. She was small, quick in speech and gesture; her dark brown eyes were quick too, flashing her judgements a split-second before she spoke them. She was vulgar and funny; she made me laugh. Of Dreiser she said, “He’s the greatest American novelist not writing in English.” She mentioned her second husband, “A guy,” she said, “who always looked good spending somebody else’s money at the race-track.” She had no conception of privacy and when she asked me what I did, her charm prompted me to tell her the truth. I said I was out of work. At the end of an hour, she butted out her last cigarette, hopped down off the stool, and thrust a tiny white hand at me. “Rachel Gold,” she said. I gave her my name and we shook hands. She wanted to know where I was staying; I told her. “Well, be seeing you,” she said as she swung out of the lunch room, a little woman of five feet, owner of bewitching hips.

The next morning there was a note for me at the desk of the YMCA with an address – if I was interested in a job. This is how I became a junior scenarist at Zenith Pictures. As impossible as it sounds, things like this happened in Hollywood in those days. The whole business was shaking down into what it was to become, and while it did, everything was provisional, raw, sketchy. Plumbers like Fatty Arbuckle and laundresses like Mabel Normand became overnight stars. People learned on the job; there were no such things as qualifications, except knowing somebody. The person I knew – scarcely knew – was Rachel Gold, a scriptwriter who I had no idea was as respected, as sought-after in Hollywood as Elinor Glyn, Frances Marion, and Anita Loos, women who then wielded more power behind the scenes than any women in Hollywood have since.

On Rachel Gold’s say-so I got hired. But as she said, “Around here you get one kick at the cat and you better hit it square in the ass, or
you’ll be out of here tomorrow.” I became a protégé of hers, an unofficial assistant. It is often said of men that they divide women into virgins and whores and I believe Rachel Gold did something similar with men; to her they were either
mensches
or gigolos. A
mensch
was a man you could talk to but wouldn’t sleep with, and a gigolo was a man you could sleep with but wouldn’t want to talk to. Her first husband, a Jewish optometrist, whom she had married when she was seventeen, was a
mensch.
Her second husband, a Gentile from South Carolina, the man who impressively and caddishly decorated race-tracks and gambling dens, had been a gigolo.

In Rachel’s eyes, I definitely fell into the
mensch
category and that made it possible for her to work with me. A lot of my time was spent vetting books for her scenarios, horrifically bad melodramas she couldn’t bring herself to read. If I said a novel had potential, then she would read it. The rest of my time I wrote titles, the cards flashed onscreen to help the audience follow the plot of the movie. My first day in the writing department Rachel Gold gave me her crash course in the art of scenario-writing, delivered in the Menckenian rhetoric she often affected when talking about the movie business and the Booboisie it catered to. “There is only one principle of successful comedy-writing – Kick Authority in the Ass,” she declared. “When the Posterior of Power is clutched in agony, all the little people from Mobile to Minneapolis are convulsed with hilarity. So kick him, My Little Truth Seeker, kick him.” On writing subtitles for the historical epics then in vogue, her advice was, “For anything prior to 1600, be it Babylon or Tudor England, crib the King James version of the Bible. This satisfies the nose-pickers in Chattanooga who can read, although sometimes they get confused and believe they’re conning the word of God, which can later lead to confusion in tent meetings. For American historical costume dramas, the Declaration of Independence is an unfailing model for the speech of the quality. When it comes to frontier gibberish I merely reproduce the kitchen-table conversation of the relatives of my former husband. The Gentile one.”

“The true test of any scenario,” Rachel was fond of saying, “is to read it to a cameraman. Cameramen are invariably Irish and invariably
drunk. If they can grasp the plot, the moral, the
theme
of your simple tale through an alcoholic haze, you can be assured you have struck the proper intellectual level. If one of these sons of the Emerald Isle happens to weep upon hearing your masterpiece, what can I say except – El Dorado! A word to the wise. Never consult a story editor about your script. Story editors are people who once harboured higher literary ambitions – such as writing fiction for one of the better women’s magazines. A house divided against itself cannot stand, Vincent, and story editors are cracked from top to bottom, conscience-stricken souls who berate themselves for selling out for a mess of pottage. They are whores who delude themselves they only lent their cherries, not irretrievably lost them. I, on the other hand, know exactly who popped me, when, where, and for how much.”

I owe a lot to Rachel Gold. I owe her the seventy-five-dollar-a-week job that allowed me to bring my mother down from Canada, to place her in the Mount of Olives Rest Home. And now because of the train of events she set in motion I find myself more than a scenarist; I find I have become a detective.

5
 

A
fter a passage of thirty-two days, the riverboat
Yankton
made Fort Benton. When the mountain steamer hove round the bend, the whole town, warned by the smoke she had shown on the horizon, was turned out to greet her, to celebrate the breaking of the winter’s siege. For three weeks there had been no tobacco, no flour, no dried fruit, no molasses, no bacon to be had. Minnie Rifle Whisky, watered, and then revived with cayenne pepper, was selling a dollar a glass at the only saloon with stock. For two weeks the whole country, Indians, independent traders, trappers, mule-skinners, bullwhackers, had foregathered in Benton to await the arrival of supplies.

Now the cannon in the old adobe fort boomed a welcome which clapped and echoed in the river valley as young bloods whooped lathered horses up and down the riverbank, firing pistols in the air. On the levee, merchant dignitaries waited in a knot of sombre black coats and high-collared white shirts, Old Glory at their side, the flag doleful for want of a breeze. A French priest or two, a Methodist preacher, clerks, the better tradesmen, dowdy ravens flocked together in black. Ranged behind them, trappers and whisky-traders, bear-greased hair to their shoulders, bristling with guns, dressed in stinking linsey-woolsey shirts and buckskin trousers, boots and parfleche-soled moccasins, kit-fox caps and store-bought felt hats. Faro dealers and freighters, bar-keeps and crib girls, sin and civilization all met on a riverbank. And Frenchies, Métis from Canada, Creoles from the
mouth of the Mississippi, interpreters, oarsmen, cordeliers in hooded capotes and beaded moccasins, wide sashes cinched tight at their waists. And their wives, women of every Plains tribe, a few in the white woman’s calico dress with blanket leggings peeking out from under the hem, the rest in soft ivory buckskin, Boston shawls around their shoulders, gimcrack brooches pinned to their bosoms, moon faces shining. A little further to the rear stood Peigans from the big encampment which had gathered outside of Benton to trade winter buffalo robes, one hundred and fifty lodges sprawled out on the flats, ringed by vast herds of grazing horses, the cook-fires hazing the air with thin blue smoke and scenting it with the aroma of fat meat cooking, the nights throbbing with the firefly light of hundreds of lodge fires, pulsing with drumming and the piping of elk effigy whistles as young men paid court to girls of marrying age. To salute the
Yankton
, these bachelors had dandified themselves with their best weasel-fur fringed shirts and daubed their faces with ochre, white clay, bright Chinese vermilion. As the captain strode down the gangplank to shake hands with functionaries of the I.G. Baker Company and the passengers spilled off the boat in unseemly haste, wading through the river mud for the town, the Peigans watched the ceremonies of the white man with a dispassion bordering on contempt.

The last passenger to disembark was John Trevelyan Dawe, carried off on a blanket by three crew members and his boy. They slung him into the wagon bed of a teamster, packed his luggage tightly about him, and spread a coat over his face to keep the sun out of his eyes.