The Five Acts of Diego Leon (21 page)

“You look marvelous,” she said, taking his arm.

“Thank you,” he said. “You do, too. Let’s go then. Shall we?”

She wore a wrap around her shoulders, which she had sprayed with a lilac perfume, so every time she adjusted it, he caught the scent. They walked down Hollywood Boulevard, toward the dazzling and flashing lights of the new Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with its searchlights shooting bright blue beams into the hazy night sky.

“Grauman’s Chinese Theatre’s nice,” said Fiona, “but I prefer the Egyptian Theatre.”

“And why’s that?” he asked.

“It’s old,” she said. “Anything old—structures, cars, people—have an inherent quality that I admire. A sageness.”

They walked past the Chinese Theatre and strolled around inside the main courtyard of the Egyptian Theatre, immediately off the street. Inside, there were wide and impressive columns, intricate murals with hieroglyphics, and large gilded vases with lush plants. Near the main portico, toward the back of the courtyard, there stood a statue, about twelve feet high, of an Egyptian deity. The figure wore a gown and held a flail in the crook of its arm. Though the body was that of a human’s, the figure’s head was that of a dog’s.

“What an odd fellow,” Fiona said. “I don’t know anything about Egyptian culture.”

“That’s Anubis,” Diego said, approaching the figure, staring long and hard at its snout and pointed ears.

“Why, who’s that?” Fiona asked.

“The Egyptians believed he was the guardian of the underworld. The god of death and rebirths.”

“Well, that’s something else,” said Fiona. “How do you know so much?”

He laughed. “I was a good student.”

Through a side entrance off the main courtyard of the Egyptian Theatre was the Pig ’n Whistle restaurant, whose logo featured a dancing pig playing a small flute. Inside, they walked past a man holding an organ. The main dining room was lined with booths that were cozy and private, everything done in ornate dark woods, polished smooth and gleaming. There were stained glass windows, and the chairs were hand-carved. There was an exciting rush in the air, and the atmosphere was festive and lively with children running around the tables and the organ grinder piping out lighthearted tunes.

Fiona and Diego had a delicious meal, talking all through it, gossiping about the actors and actresses around the studio, filling each other in on what they’d read in the trade magazines, and speculating about the next big Frontier movie.

“A thing that never ceases to amaze me about Hollywood,” Fiona said as she sipped her after-dinner coffee, “is that we can be in ancient Egypt one minute then tumble into this whimsical restaurant with organ grinders and dancing pigs the next.”

“It’s disorienting,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“You don’t like it?”

“It takes some getting used to is all.” He sat back in his chair. “But I like it. You know what else I like?”

“What’s that?”

“Being with you tonight,” Diego said.

“I’d be crushed if you hadn’t. Why would you not want to join me for a night on the town? What other things have you got going on, dare I ask?” She placed her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hands, and leaned in closer. Her shoulders were bare and dotted with moles and freckles.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “It’s just that, well, I’m still not very good at going out, being sociable. Since I came here, my evenings mainly have involved sitting alone in my apartment with a good book and a pack of cigarettes.” He thought about Charlie and Javier back in Mexico. The friends he had lost.

“That’s a real shame if you ask me.”

“So,” he asked, wanting nothing more than to change the subject.
“I haven’t asked what brought you here. To the great and wild and possible west.”

“My mother.” She removed her elbows from the table and sat back in her chair. “She started getting awful pains in her joints. Her doctor said it was her bones. It would get really bad during the winter. You haven’t felt cold until you’ve spent a winter in Montana, let me tell you. Warm weather and sunshine was the solution, her doctor told us. So we packed up. Me and my folks and my two sisters. After I finished up high school I sort of fell into the show business thing. My friend Georgie got me in. I was doing real low-level stuff at first, mainly working in costuming, sorting out the inventory, repairing damaged corsets and outfits, stuff like that. I had always liked doing makeup, used to practice on my sisters when we were younger. I started helping the assistants, learning the tricks, and before I knew it, I was being asked to do it more and more. I’ve been at it for several years now. I like it enough, I guess. Though Hollywood’s a tough place if you’re a young girl like me.” She gave him a long and pleasing look and asked, “What about you?”

“It’s a boring story.”

“That’s all right. Let’s have it.”

He told her only bits and pieces, the important parts. How he left Mexico after having lived with his grandparents. How life here had been a series of challenges so far, how he’s been riddled with doubt and guilt about having left his grandparents alone, about whether there was even such a future for a person like him in films.

“I think there is,” she said. “We can do whatever we set our minds to do. I think my future’s bright, and so is yours. We are the makers of our own destinies. It was a very courageous thing you did, coming here like that, with nothing. You should be very proud.”

When they raised their glasses of water and toasted, Diego felt at home for the very first time.

October 1929–December 1930

B
LACK
T
HURSDAY
. H
E WAS REMEMBERING HIS FATHER THAT
twenty-fourth day in October of 1929. It was early morning, and he was at Joe’s, standing in the kitchen washing piles of dirty dishes, and thinking of his father, him dying alone, forgotten, penniless, when the first reports came in over the small radio the cooks kept on the shelf above the grill.

“It’s the end of days,” Jean said, reaching over to turn the volume up. They were alone in the diner. It was completely empty, and there was no one on the street at that hour.

“Come again?” Diego asked, his hands submerged in hot water.

“The stock market,” Jean said, clenching her fists, “just crashed. A whole lot of people are in a whole heap of trouble. And things are about to get ugly.”

The initial news was bad and, in the days that followed, things only worsened. Newspapers around the country reported that businessmen and financiers were leaping out of office windows because the money was now all gone. Factories went bust. Banks foreclosed on farms. Pantries across America went empty. The people of the great nation were suddenly out of work, destitute, vulnerable, confused, dying of hunger.

Diego had abandoned one ruined country for another. The winter of 1930, the bread and soup lines grew longer and longer day after day. More people were out of work, more men with startled looks on their faces could be seen darting across the street, the sidewalks,
wandering through the parks and alleyways of the city searching for work or, worse, scavenging through trash cans for pieces of moldy bread or bruised fruits and vegetables. “You should be thanking your lucky stars you at least got this,” Jean said one day.

“Yeah, yeah,” he responded.

“What?” she said, her hands on her hips. “You expecting to make it in pictures? Like all those other ones who are coming now by the hundreds since this crash?”

“I will,” he said. “Soon.”

“Then why don’t you just leave?”

She was right. Why didn’t he? The job paid very little anyway. He untied his apron, balled it up, and tossed it on the ground. “I’m quitting, Jean.”

“Hey,” she said, bending down to pick up the apron. “I was only teasing.”

“I know,” he said. “Still. I’m wasting my time here.”

She shook her head and smiled. “Yeah. You’re right.” Jean walked over, gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Good luck, kid. I’m gonna miss you.”

At least he had a contract now after building for himself a solid reputation as a dependable extra, thanks to his experience playing the part that should have gone to Charlie. Fiona, who had an in with many of the lesser-known directors at Frontier, began to spread the word throughout the studio about him, the tall Latin actor with versatility who was dependable. And though the parts weren’t anything major—a face in a crowd scene, a dancer at a costume party, a bank robber—the work kept him hopeful that he might, just might, make it. At least he was in the movies now, he reminded himself. By 1929, Diego was a contracted player for Frontier Pictures, the oldest movie studio in Hollywood. Yes, the hours were endless, tedious, the money only enough to keep him going, but it was what he’d come to do. He thought about this now as he left Joe’s after quitting, passing the men on the corners begging for spare change, the bread lines, the people combing the back alleys of restaurants and grocery stores or selling apples from wooden pushcarts. Everywhere he turned, it
was as though the whole country was on the verge of collapsing in on itself. But he had work. He had a signed piece of paper from the studio. He had Fiona, whom he’d been spending more time with. He had his
own
life.

The studios, like all other enterprises, had started to cut back. Fewer big epics. Rein in spending. Reduce, reduce, reduce. Diego read in the trade circulars and news columns how the studios were cutting their losses, firing people, eliminating entire departments. He was nervous a lot, worried he would be told he was being canned and that would be it. The end of his film career. Finished just as it was starting.

“If there’s one thing a studio needs,” Fiona told him, “is people like you and me. Extras and makeup and costume folks. We’re safe. We don’t cost much. It’s the bigwigs who should be quaking in their boots, if you ask me.”

“You’re right,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I’ll do my job and feel secure.”

“That’s the spirit.”

The “talkies” appeared at the Frontier lot gradually, in the form of large microphones, sound coils, and bizarre-looking contraptions. Over time, the wooden consoles that the “sound technicians,” as they were called, wheeled from studio to studio appeared more and more frequently. The trade magazines wrote about sound, about the death of films and the picture industry.

“I thought you said we’d be safe,” he asked Fiona one day as they watched two crewmembers attach a wired microphone to an actor’s lapel while on a shoot. The picture was about a nun in a convent in Brazil, and the actor was dressed as an affluent businessman. “These talking pictures are going to ruin our careers.”

“Or make them,” she said. “A lot of the silent film stars are being canned. That means more chances for us.”

So he followed it all, reading everything he could about this innovation. The first attempts were on wax discs, but it was hard to synchronize the sounds with the moving pictures because it had something to do, they said, with the speed at which sound traveled.
Once in a while the sound engineers would get it right, would be patient enough to match the sound of the voice with the image of the singer moving his mouth on the screen. These moments, few and brief, were enough to get people curious, were hailed as landmarks, triumphs in the evolution of moving pictures. The discs took too much time, though, they soon realized, and another way to introduce sound to films was needed, and that, they concluded, would be sound
on
film. So there was, in 1926,
Don Juan
, which starred John Barrymore and featured synchronized songs and sound effects. A year later, there was
The Jazz Singer
, Al Jolson singing to his mother at the end of the film. That same year there came
Fifi
, in which Marguerite La Salle recited a whole speech in French. There was the roar of exploding cannons during the famous battle scene in
A Darkened Heart
, less than a year later. Movie theaters were slowly being fitted with speakers and microphones to pipe in sound, and audiences got to hear their favorite stars speak, deliver their lines, sing like angels. As a result, anyone with a thick accent, with a speech impediment or a low and unappealing voice was finding themselves out of a job. Diego could sing, but what of his accent? Would it destroy his career?

Diego watched how, almost overnight, many of the studios underwent the change, crammed their lots and stages with sound, fired their silent film stars to make way for the new generation. Except for studios such as Frontier. It had done little to change with the growing trend. It was known that R. J. Levitt was wary of such a new invention, that he was skeptical, suspicious. Coasting more on its reputation as the first film studio in Hollywood, Frontier was still hobbling along with Levitt at the helm—stubborn, tough as nails, unflinching. He had become the underdog, the dark horse in an industry he had helped define and establish.

The tensions playing out at Frontier between Levitt and his partner, William Cage, over the talkies were gold for the columnists covering all that was worth knowing in Hollywood. Everyone knew that the shrewd old businessman mistrusted the new technology. But his young partner, the production manager of Frontier, saw it differently. Cage understood what was happening, understood that, if they were to be successful and compete with the other studios,
then they would have to follow suit and convert to sound. The rumored clashes between the two—the old lion and the young—left everyone curious to see what would happen.

Fascinated by these developments, Diego began reading the trade columns and articles with a passion that Fiona called “admirable yet unusual.”

“If I want to succeed in this business,” he said, “I must be well informed.”

They were sitting in his room. Past issues of
Snapshots
and
Cast Call
were strewn across his bed. She flipped though one and stopped at a feature article on William Cage. “Is Cage the real brains behind Frontier?” a line in the article read.

“Let me see that,” Diego said, snatching it from Fiona.