The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (62 page)

I told him that some day he would.

"And I don't mean some day, either; I mean right now.
That bushwa about Europe might go once, but not twice. I know better, and so
does everyone else. Now, what about it?"

I told him I'd have to consult Mike and I did. We were up
against it. We called a conference.

"Kessler tells me he has troubles. I guess you all know
what they are." They all knew.

Johnson spoke up. "He's right, too. We know better.
Where did you get it?"

I turned to Mike. "Want to do the talking?"

A shake of his head. "You're doing all right."

"All right." Kessler hunched a little forward and
Marrs lit another cigarette. "We weren't lying and we weren't exaggerating
when we said the actual photography was ours. Every frame of film was taken
right here in this country, within the last few months. Just how—I won't
mention why or where—we can't tell you just now." Kessler snorted in
disgust. "Let me finish.

"We all know that we're cashing in, hand over fist. And
we're going to cash in some more. We have, on our personal schedule, five more
pictures. Three of that five we want you to handle as you did the others. The
last two of the five will show you both the reason for all the childish
secrecy, as Kessler calls it, and another motive that we have so far kept
hidden. The last two pictures will show you both our motives and our methods;
one is as important as the other. Now— is that enough? Can we go ahead on that
basis?"

It wasn't enough for Kessler. "That doesn't mean a
thing to me. What are we, a bunch of hacks?"

Johnson was thinking about his bank balance. "Five
more. Two years, maybe four."

Marrs was skeptical. "Who do you think you're going to
kid that long? Where's your studio? Where's your talent? Where do you shoot
your exteriors? Where do you get costumes and your extras? In one single shot
you've got forty thousand extras, if you've got one! Maybe you can shut
me
up,
but who's going to answer the questions that Metro and Fox and Paramount and
RKO have been asking? Those boys aren't fools, they know their business. How do
you expect me to handle any publicity when I don't know what the score is,
myself?"

Johnson told him to pipe down for a while and let him think.
Mike and I didn't like this one bit. But what could we do—tell the truth and
end up in a strait-jacket?

"Can we do it this way?" he finally asked.
"Marrs: these boys have an in with the Soviet Government. They work in
some place in Siberia, maybe. Nobody gets within miles of there. No one ever
knows what the Russians are doing—"

"Nope!" Marrs was definite. "Any hint that
these came from Russia and we'd all be a bunch of Reds. Cut the gross in
half."

Johnson began to pick up speed. "All right, not from
Russia. From one of these little republics fringed around Siberia or Armenia or
one of those places. They're not Russian-made films at all. In fact, they've
been made by some of these Germans and Austrians the Russians took over and
moved after the War. The war fever had died down enough for people to realize
that the Germans knew their stuff occasionally. The old sympathy racket for
these refugees struggling with faulty equipment, lousy climate,
making-superspectacles and smuggling them out under the nose of the Gestapo or
whatever they call it- That's it!"

Doubtfully, from Marrs: "And the Russians tell the
world we're nuts, that they haven't got any loose Germans?"

That, Johnson overrode. "Who reads the back pages? Who
pays any attention to what the Russians say? Who cares? They might even think
we're telling the truth and start looking around their own backyard for
something that isn't there! All right with you?" to Mike and myself.

I looked at Mike and he looked at me.

"O.K. with us."

"O.K. with the rest of you? Kessler? Bernstein?"

They weren't too agreeable, and certainly not happy, but
they agreed to play games until we gave the word.

We were warm in our thanks. "You won't regret it."

Kessler doubted that very much, but Johnson eased them all
out, back to work. Another hurdle leaped, or sidestepped.

"Rome" was released on schedule and drew the same
friendly reviews. "Friendly" is the wrong word for reviews that
stretched ticket line-ups blocks long. Marrs did a good job on the publicity.
Even that chain of newspapers that afterward turned on us so viciously fell for
Marrs' word wizardry and ran full-page editorials urging the reader to see
"Rome."

With our third picture, "Flame Over France," we
corrected a few misconceptions about the French Revolution, and began stepping
on a few tender toes. Luckily, however, and not altogether by design, there
happened to be in power in Paris a liberal government. They backed us to the
hilt with the confirmation we needed. At our request they released a lot of
documents that had hitherto conveniently been lost in the cavernous recesses of
the Bibliotheque Nationale. I've forgotten the name of whoever happened to be
the perennial pretender to the French throne. At, I'm sure, the subtle prodding
of one of Marrs' ubiquitous publicity men, the pretender sued us for our whole
net, alleging the defamation of the good name of the Bourbons. A lawyer Johnson
dug up for us sucked the poor chump into a courtroom and cut him to bits. Not
even six cents damages did he get. Samuels, the lawyer, and Marrs drew a
good-sized bonus, and the pretender moved to Honduras.

Somewhere around this point, I believe, did the tone of the
press begin to change. Up until then we'd been regarded as crosses between
Shakespeare and Barnum. Since long obscure facts had been dredged into the
light, a few well-known pessimists began to wonder
sotto voce
if we
weren't just a pair of blasted pests. "Should leave well enough
alone." Only our huge advertising budget kept them from saying more.

I'm going to stop right here and say something about our
personal life while all this was going on. Mike I've kept in the background
pretty well, mostly because he wants it that way. He lets me do all the talking
and stick my neck out while he sits in the most comfortable chair in sight. I
yell and I argue and he just sits there; hardly ever a word coming out of that
dark-brown pan, certainly never an indication showing that behind those polite
eyebrows there's a brain—and a sense of humor and wit—faster and as deadly as a
bear trap. Oh, I know we've played around, sometimes with a loud bang, but
we've been, ordinarily, too busy and too preoccupied with what we were doing to
waste any time. Ruth, while she was with us, was a good dancing and drinking
partner. She was young, she was almost what you'd call beautiful, and she
seemed to like being with us. For a while I had a few ideas about her that
might have developed into something serious. We both—I should say, all three of
us—found out in time that we looked at a lot of things too differently. So we
weren't too disappointed when she signed with Metro. Her contract meant what
she thought was all the fame and money and happiness in the world, plus the personal
attention she was doubtless entitled to have. They put her in Class B's and
serials and she, financially, is better off than she ever expected to be.
Emotionally, I don't know. We heard from her sometime ago, and I think she's
about due for another divorce. Maybe it's just as well.

But let's get away from Ruth. I'm ahead of myself. All this
time Mike and I had been working together, our approach to the final payoff had
been divergent. Mike was hopped on the idea of making a better world, and doing
that by making war impossible. "War," he's often said, "war of
any kind is what has made man spend most of his history in merely staying
alive. Now, with the atom to use, he has within himself the seed of
self-extermination. So help me, Ed, I'm going to do my share of stopping that,
or I don't see any point in living. I mean it!"

He did mean it. He told me that in almost the same words the
first day we met. Then I tagged that idea as a pipe dream picked up on an empty
stomach. I saw his machine only as a path to luxurious and personal Nirvana,
and I thought he'd soon be going my way. I was wrong.

You can't live, or work, with a likable person without
admiring some of the qualities that make that person likable. Another thing;
it's a lot easier to worry about the woes of the world when you haven't any
yourself. It's a lot easier to have a conscience when you can afford it. When I
donned the rose-colored glasses half my battle was won; when I realized how
grand a world this
could
be, the battle was over. That was about the
time of "Flame Over France," I think. The actual time isn't
important. What
is
important is that, from that time on, we became the
tightest team possible. Since then the only thing we've differed on would be
the time to knock off for a sandwich. Most of our leisure time, what we had of
it, has been spent in locking up for the night, rolling out the portable bar,
opening just enough beer to feel good, and relaxing. Maybe, after one or two,
we might diddle the dials of the machine, and go rambling.

Together we've been everywhere and seen anything. It might
be a good night to check up on Francois Villon, the faker, or maybe we might
chase around with Haroun-el-Rashid. (If there was ever a man born a few hundred
years too soon, it was that careless caliph.) Or if we were in a bad or
discouraged mood we might follow the Thirty Years' War for a while, or if we
were real raffish we might inspect the dressing rooms at Radio City. For Mike
the crackup of Atlantis has always had an odd fascination, probably because
he's afraid that man will do it again, now that he's rediscovered nuclear
energy. And if I

doze off he's quite apt to go back to the very Beginning,
back to the start of the world as we know it now. (It wouldn't do any good to
tell you what went before that.)

When I stop to think, it's probably just as well that
neither of us married. We, of course, have hopes for the future, but at present
we're both tired of the whole human race; tired of greedy faces and hands. With
a world that puts a premium on wealth and power and strength, it's no wonder
what decency there is stems from fear of what's here now, or fear of what's
hereafter. We've seen so much of the hidden actions of the world—call it
snooping, if you like—that we've learned to disregard the surface indications
of kindness and good. Only once did Mike and I ever look into the private life
of someone we knew and liked and respected. Once was enough. From that day on
we made it a point to take people as they seemed. Let's get away from that.

The next two pictures we released in rapid succession; the
first, "Freedom for Americans," the American Revolution, and
"The Brothers and the Guns," the American Civil War. Bang! Every
third politician, a lot of so-called "educators," and all the
professional patriots started after our scalps. Every single chapter of the
DAR, the Sons of Union Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy pounded
their collective heads against the wall. The South went frantic; every state in
the Deep South and one state on the border flatly banned both pictures, the
second because it was truthful, and the first because censorship is a
contagious disease. They stayed banned until the professional politicians got
wise. The bans were revoked, and the choke-collar and string-tie brigade
pointed to both pictures as horrible examples of what some people actually
believed and thought, and felt pleased that someone had given them an
opportunity to roll out the barrel and beat the drums that sound sectional and
racial hatred.

New England was tempted to stand on its dignity, but
couldn't stand the strain. North of New York both pictures were banned. In New
York state the rural representatives voted en bloc, and the ban was clamped on
statewide. Special trains ran to Delaware, where the corporations were too busy
to pass another law. Libel suits flew like spaghetti, and although the extras
blared the filing of each new suit, very few knew that we lost not one.
Although we had to appeal almost every suit to higher courts, and in some cases
request a change of venue which was seldom granted, the documentary proof
furnished by the record cleared us once we got to a judge, or series of judges,
with no fences to mend.

It was a mighty rasp we drew over wounded ancestral pride.
We had shown that not all the mighty had haloes of purest gold, that not all
the Redcoats were strutting bullies—nor angels, and the British Empire, except
South Africa, refused entry to both pictures and made violent passes at the
State Department. The spectacle of Southern and New England congressmen
approving the efforts of a foreign ambassador to suppress free speech drew
hilarious hosannas from certain quarters. H. L. Mencken gloated in the clover,
doing loud nip-ups, and the newspapers hung on the triple-horned dilemma of anti-foreign,
pro-patriotic, and quasi-logical criticism. In Detroit the Ku Klux Klan fired
an anemic cross on our doorstep, and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the
NAACP, and the WCTU passed flattering resolutions. We forwarded the most
vicious and obscene letters—together with a few names and addresses that hadn't
been originally signed—to our lawyers and the Post Office Department. There
were no convictions south of Illinois.

Johnson and his boys made hay. Johnson had pyramided his
bets into an international distributing organization, and pushed Marrs into
hiring every top press agent either side of the Rockies. What a job they did!
In no time at all there were two definite schools of thought that overflowed
into the public letter boxes. One school held that we had no business raking up
old mud to throw, that such things were better left forgotten and forgiven,
that nothing wrong had ever happened, and if it had, we were liars anyway. The
other school reasoned more to our liking. Softly and slowly at first, then with
a triumphant shout, this fact began to emerge; such things had actually
happened, and could happen again, were possibly happening even now; had
happened because twisted truth had too long left its imprint on international,
sectional, and racial feelings. It pleased us when many began to agree, with
us, that it is important to forget the past, but that it is even more important
to understand and evaluate it with a generous and unjaundiced eye. That was
what we were trying to bring out.