The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 8

The President was enthusiastically cheered.

THREE.

1.

CAROLINE LAY TIED TO THE RAILROAD TRACK, the hot sun in her face while in her ears the ominous sound of an approaching steam engine. A high male voice called out, "Look frightened."

"I am frightened."

"Don't talk. Look more to the left."

"But, Chief, she's got too much shadow on her face. You can't see the eyes."

"Look straight ahead." The slow-moving steam engine was now within a yard of her. She could see it out of the corner of her right eye. The engineer stared down at her, hand on-what?-the brake, she prayed. A stone pressed into her back, just below the left shoulder blade. She wanted to scream.

"Scream!" shouted William Randolph Hearst; and Caroline obliged. As she filled the air with terrified exhalation, a man on horseback rode up to the railroad engine and leapt into the engine room, where he pulled a cord, releasing a quant.i.ty of ill-smelling steam from the engine's smoke-stack. As the train ground to a halt, he ran toward Caroline and knelt beside her.

"Cut!" said the Chief. "Stay right where you are, Mrs. Sanford."

"I have no choice," said Caroline. The sweaty young man-a cowboy belonging to Hearst's ranch-smiled down at her rea.s.suringly. "It won't take a minute, ma'am," he said. "He's got to change the camera so he can get a real close look at me untying you."

"Why doesn't he just show a card on the screen, with the information that two weeks after Lady Belinda's eleventh-hour rescue she was home again in London, pouring tea. I think I can do that rather well."

Hearst was now standing over her, his vast bulk mercifully blocking the sun. "That was swell. Really," he said. "Joe's rolling up the camera now. It won't take a minute. I never knew you were such a pro."

"Neither," said Caroline, "did I."

"Actually, there's nothing easier than movies," said Millicent Hearst, whom Caroline had known since she was the younger partner of a vaudeville sister act. "Either you look nice on the screen or you don't. If you do, they'll love you. If you don't you can act your b.u.t.t off and nothing's going to happen."

"You're certainly very effective on the screen." Caroline spoke brightly, still flat on her back, with the dusty cowboy to one side of her while, to the other, Mr. and Mrs. Hearst gazed down on her, observing the social amenities with a flow of good talk.

"Actually if Millicent weren't so old, I could make a star out of her." Hearst was his usual kindly, tactless self.

"I'm not all that much older than Mary Pickford." Millicent's voice had never ceased to be h.e.l.l's Kitchen New York Irish. "But it's a mug's game, acting, and the hours they keep here in the movies you wouldn't believe."

"But I do. In fact, one of those hours has pa.s.sed," said Caroline, "since I was tied up."

"We're ready," said Joe Hubbell, the cameraman, just out of Caroline's range.

"All right. Let's get started." The Hearsts withdrew. The cowboy and Caroline waited, patiently, to be told what to do. As they did, Caroline admired, yet again, Hearst's instinct, which had now drawn him to the most exciting of all the games that their country had yet devised. As he had invented "yellow journalism," which obliged reality to mirror not itself but Hearst's version of it, now he had plunged into movie-making, both amateur like this film and professional like the Hearst-produced The Perils of Pauline, the most successful serial of 1913. Now in summer residence at San Simeon, a quarter-million-acre ranch to the north of Hollywood, the Chief was amusing himself with a feature-length film in which he had gallantly starred his houseguest, Caroline, who was several years older than Millicent, and by no means as conventionally pretty. Once Caroline had accepted George Creel's a.s.signment to be the Administration's emissary to the moving-picture business, she had started her emba.s.sy by paying a call on her old friend Hearst, who disapproved of the war in general and Wilson in particular. Nevertheless, he was most lavishly a host not to mention meticulously a director.

An hour later, Caroline, no longer Lady Belinda, was freed from her track by the cowboy, whom she was directed to kiss full on the lips. He had blushed furiously, and she had been intrigued to find how soft a young man's lips could be, not that she had had much experience with young men or, for that matter, old; she also noted that he smelled, powerfully, of sweating horse.

Caroline and her maid, Heloise, shared a tent close to the wooden house of the Hearsts atop Camp Hill. Since there were always a dozen houseguests as well as an army of servants, gardeners, ranch-hands, the hill was now a city of temporary tents, surrounding the elaborate wooden house, which was taken down in winter and put up in summer.

"And here, right here," said Hearst, "I'm going to build a castle, just like the one you and Blaise have at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc."

They were seated in the Chiefs princ.i.p.al sitting room, with its rough-hewn beams and unfinished pine walls on which were hung perhaps the largest collection of false old masters that any American millionaire had ever acc.u.mulated. But then it was always said of Hearst that after thirty years of the wholesale buying of art, he could always tell a good fake from a bad one; and of the world's forgeries, he chose, invariably, the ones with the most accurate brushwork. "He has," the art merchant Duveen was supposed to have said, "an excellent c.o.c.ked-eye."

While Caroline drank sherry, Hearst stood over a round table on which was placed what looked to be a wedding cake covered with velvet. Like a matador, he removed the covering to reveal the model of a castle with two towers, all meticulously detailed in plaster. "This is it," he said. "What I'm going to build up here."

"It is," Caroline was guarded, "like nothing else."

"Nothing else in California, anyway. Can't wait to get started." Hearst's major-domo of twenty years, George Thompson, was now as round as an owl and as rosy as a piglet; for more than twenty years he had appeared at the same hour with Coca-Cola in a silver-embossed mug for the Chief; and now sherry for Caroline. "Good evening, Mrs. Sanford." She smiled upon him. After all, it was George who encouraged the Chief to traffic with fas.h.i.+onables like herself in addition to the Chiefs own preference, politicians and theater folk, while the friendly Millicent tended to keep her distance from her husband's friends. She preferred New York to California; motherhood to glamour; respectability to Hearstian fame; and Roman Catholic strictness to Protestant easiness. She was said to be quite aware that she had been superseded in the Chiefs affections by a showgirl, who was either twenty years old or seventeen; if the latter, she was the same age that Millicent had been when she and her sister had danced their way off the stage of the Herald Square Theater, where they had been two of the many maidens in The Girl from Paris, and into Hearst's great heart. Now history was repeating itself with Miss Marion Davies, the daughter of a Brooklyn politician named Bernard Douras. Blaise had approved the Tribune story of the romance, which Caroline had read with delight and promptly spiked as a Matter of Taste, all important for the Tribune as the war-time President's favorite Was.h.i.+ngton newspaper now that Ned McLean's Post was known as "the court circular." Actually, the vaudeville-loving President would probably have enjoyed very much the highly suggestive but never absolutely libellous story of the young showgirl for whom the fifty-year-old Hearst had, if not forsaken his wife, abandoned her to the rigors of respectable domesticity while he squired, without cigarettes, alcohol or bad language, his chorus girl through the only slightly subdued night life of wartime New York. Miss Davies had left her convent-always a convent, Blaise had decreed-when a mere girl to join the chorus of Chu Chin Chow, Oh, Boy! and now her apotheosis in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917. There were whispers at San Simeon that when the Missis left, the Miss would arrive. But Hearst was silent on all personal matters; and Millicent seemed unperturbed.

"So George Creel wants you to organize the movie business." Hearst sat in a throne opposite Caroline while George lit the kerosene lamps. The electricity at San Simeon was home-made and unreliable. "Stories about Huns raping Belgian nuns?"

"Surely your papers have told us all that we want to hear on that subject." Caroline was smooth, relaxed by sherry. "I thought, perhaps, Huns raped by Belgian nuns, to encourage women to resist the beast."

"I always said," Hearst did not even smile, "that you were the newspaperman, not Blaise."

"Well, I did buy the Tribune, and I made it popular by copying faithfully your Journal."

"No. You've got a better paper. Better town, too. Particularly now. I'm thinking. ... You know, Creel worked for me on the Journal. Ambitious. Movies." Hearst stared at a Mantegna whose wooden frame sported wormholes only down one side; thanks to Hearst's usual haste, there had been no time for the forger to drill holes in the rest of the frame. "I think movies are the answer."

"To what?"

"The world." Hearst's glaring eagle eyes were fixed on Caroline and the hair that had been blond when they first met was now gray. "I always thought it was going to be the press. So simple to print. So simple to transmit with telegraph. But there's the language problem. By the time Jamie Bennett's stolen all our stories for his Paris Herald, the news is old hat. The beauty of the movies is they don't talk. Just a few cards in different languages to tell you what the plot is, what they're saying. Everyone in China watches my Perils of Pauline, but they can't read any of my papers there."

"You're going in?"

Hearst nodded. "I do this for fun, what we did today. Though if it looks okay, I'll distribute it. I've got my own company. You don't mind?"

"I'd be thrilled, of course." Of all professions that Caroline had ever daydreamed of for herself that of actress had not been one. As a girl, she had been taken by her father back-stage to see Sarah Bernhardt; and the sweat, the dirt, the terror had impressed itself upon her in a way that the splendor of what the public saw from the front of the stage had not. As for movie-acting, Millicent, an old showgirl, had grasped it all. Either the camera favored you or it did not. At forty, Caroline a.s.sumed that she would look just that; after all, there were, officially at least, no leading ladies of forty. She herself was interested only in the business end of the movies; she had also been commissioned to investigate the propaganda possibilities of this unexpected popular novelty. It had not been until such movie favorites as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks had taken to the marketplace and sold Liberty Bonds to millions of their fans that the government had realized how potent were the inventors of Hollywood; and Creel had agreed.

But Hearst, as usual, was idiosyncratic. "Distribution companies, theater chains, those are what matter. The rest is a bit like the theater, a gamble. Except you almost can't lose money on a film unless somebody like the director-what's his name-the two girls, the initials?"

"D. W. Griffith." Caroline knew all the names from her own paper.

"Decides he wants to make the biggest movie in the world by spending the most money, building things like all of Babylon. I hear he's broke. And Triangle wants to sell out. I've made a bid. But Zukor and Lasky have got more cash than I do-in hand, that is. This business is like a cornucopia, like Alaska in '49. A million dollars just for Mary Pickford. Incredible. Only danger is these Griffith types. Stage-door johnnies who start to think big once you give them a camera to play with. Though," the thin lips widened into a smile, "it is the best fun there is, making a movie. Sort of like a printer's block, the way you can keep rearranging all the pieces. But without a paper's deadline. You can keep at it until you get all the pieces in the right order. They call that part-just like we do-editing. Then it just doesn't lie there dead on the page, it moves."

"Let's sell our papers and go to Southern California." Caroline was always easily fired by Hearst.

"If I were younger I would. But," Hearst frowned, "there's New York."

"That's right. Didn't we endorse you for mayor, this fall?"

Hearst's face was blank. "The Tribune, on orders from Wilson I expect, has told me to tend to my papers, and support the inc.u.mbent, the hopeless John Purroy Mitchel."

Caroline was all mock wide-eyed innocence. "That must be our new editorial writer ..."

"That was my old friend Blaise. You must've missed the issue. Anyway, I've got Murphy. I've got Tammany. So if I win ..."

"You'll be the Democratic candidate for president in 1920."

"And the president in 1921, when I take the oath of office. It's about time, don't you think?"

Caroline had never understood Hearst's ambition other than to suspect that there was, simply, nothing more to it than sheer energy. "I have never known an election when there were so many candidates so early, and so-so unashamed."

"Nothing to be ashamed of." He rinsed his teeth noisily in Coca-Cola. 'The people don't like third terms. They also don't like Wilson. Roosevelt's a wreck and a spoiler and the people are tired of him. McAdoo ..." He paused.

"James Burden Day?" Loyally, Caroline said the name, which did not interest Hearst. "Champ Clark?" The Speaker of the House was the leading Bryanite; and already at work. "And those are just the Democrats."

"The Republicans will nominate Roosevelt, who's done for, or Leonard Wood, who I can do in any day of the week. He's a general," Hearst added with disdain.

"So is Pers.h.i.+ng, and when we win ..."

"There won't be a general on any ballot. Remember what I say. This war's too big. The ordinary man hates officers, West Pointers particularly. Every man who's gone through training will want to get back at the men who gave him such a hard time."

"Why wasn't this true in the other wars?"

"Well, it was true in my little war against Spain. I don't count Roosevelt, who was already a politician when he rode up that hill with my best reporters covering him. The true war candidate-back then-should've been Dewey. Dewey of Manila. Dewey the conquering hero. So what happened? Nothing."

"He was stupid."

"That's usually no drawback. Anyway, this time something called selective service is going to crowd the military out. These boys aren't volunteers for this war. They're being taken captive to go fight alongside people they hate, like the English, or against their own people."

"Your Irish and German supporters?"

"You bet. Or if they're just ordinary buckwheat Americans they won't know where they are once they're in Europe, or why they're supposed to be mad at something called the Kaiser. That means when they get back, if they get back, they're going to blame Wilson and their officers for the whole mess. You know, you ought to put some flags on your front page. There's this new color process. Good red. Pretty good blue. Looks nice and cheery. Patriotic. People like it."

Caroline had always regarded Hearst as a mindless genius; or an idiot savant; or something simply not calculable by the ordinary criteria of intelligence. Yet there was no getting round the preciseness and practicality of his instincts, including his occasional odd forays into socialism. Recently he had convinced Tammany Hall of the necessity of munic.i.p.al owners.h.i.+p of public utilities. If such a thing were to come to pa.s.s and if Hearst were to become president, the entire Senate, at his inauguration, would converge upon him and strike him down, like Caesar, in the name of those sacred trusts that had paid for their togas.

Twenty, sat down to dinner in a long timbered room hung with Aubusson tapestries. On the table huge crystal girandoles alternated with bottles of tomato ketchup and Worcesters.h.i.+re sauce. Caroline sat on the Chiefs right in deference to her high place as a fellow publisher. Seated on Caroline's right, at her request, was Timothy X. Farrell, the successful director of ten-or was it twenty-photo-plays in the last two years. Farrell had come to see Hearst on secret business, which Caroline had quickly discovered involved a screen career for Marion Davies and a new production company for Hearst, who had also just acquired, he told Caroline, casually, the Pathe Company from its war-beleaguered French owners.

Farrell was thin and dark and nearer thirty than forty; spoke with a Boston Irish brogue; had been to Holy Cross when he had got the call to make movies at Flus.h.i.+ng, New York. He had moved on to Santa Monica, California, where he had worked as a carpenter and general handyman for Thomas Ince. Now he was a successful director, noted for his use of light. Caroline was in a new world of jargon, not unlike-but then again not very like-journalism. Farrell was touchingly eager to make films celebrating the United States, freedom, democracy, while attacking, of course, the b.e.s.t.i.a.l Hun, monarchy and the latest horror, Bolshevism, now emerging from the ruins of czarist Russia and connected closely, Creel maintained, with various American labor unions, particularly those that sought to reduce the work day from twelve to eight hours.

"What we need is a story," said Farrell. "You can't just start shooting away, like the Chief. He's old-fas.h.i.+oned. He thinks Perils of Pauline is the latest in the movies. But it isn't. That serial's four years old. Four years is like a century in the movies. Everything's different now. The audience won't pay their dollars-or even nickels-to see just anything that moves on a sheet. But they'll pay as much as two dollars for a real story, and a real spectacle. Griffith changed everything."

"You, too," Caroline remembered to flatter. A film director was no different from a senator.

"Well, I got lucky last year. Missy Drugget had the biggest gross of any film for the year, in the States." Farrell frowned. "That's another problem with this war. Our overseas distributors-crooks all of them to begin with, but now there's a war they can really cheat us, and they do. Goldstein was going to do something about it. But now I guess he's going to jail."

"Who's Goldstein, and why jail?"

"Spirit of '76, Remember? About the American Revolution? Came out just before April, before we were in the war. Well, your friends in Was.h.i.+ngton thought," there seemed to be no sarcasm in Farrell's naturally urgent voice, "that any mention of our own revolution was an insult to our ally, England. You know it might confuse our simple folks to be told how we once had this war with England so that we could be a free country. Anyway, under one of the new laws, the government went and indicted Bob Goldstein, the producer, and they say he's going to get ten years in prison."

"Just for making a movie about how we became a free country?"

Farrell seemed without irony, but his voice was hard. "Free to put anyone-everyone-in jail. Yes."

"Why hasn't the press taken this up?"

"Ask Mr. Hearst. Ask yourself." The eyes were arctic blue with black lashes and brows.

"What is the exact charge against Goldstein?"

"I don't know. But it's all covered by the ... what's its name? Espionage Act, which didn't even exist when we made the picture."

"Your picture, too?"

Farrell flushed. "Yes. Me, too. I did the lighting and camera work as a favor. But they don't go after the small fry. Now, I'm working with Triangle. They're the group that Mr. Ince did Civilization with. He's a friend of Mr. Hearst, which is how I happen to be here, I guess."

"Will Mr. Ince be arrested, too?" Caroline remembered that Ince's Civilization had been a pacifist film. Since Hearst not only had been against the war but was considered pro-German, Caroline suspected a connection between the anti-war films of some of the best movie-makers and Hearst himself. In fact, Hearst had been so anti-Allies that the British and French governments had denied his newspapers the use of their international cables. In a fit of over-excitement, Canada had banned all of Hearst's newspapers and should a Canadian be caught reading so much as the Katzenjammer Kids comic pages, he could be imprisoned for five years.

"I doubt it. He has connections. He knows the President. But I'll bet he wishes he'd stuck to 'westerns.' "

After dinner, Hearst led them into a tent that served as a theater; and here he showed them a western of his own making, Romance of the Rancho. The hero was Hearst, looking rather bulkier than his giant horse; the heroine was Millicent, who sat next to Caroline during the performance, complaining bitterly about her appearance. "I look like a Pekingese. It's awful, seeing yourself like this."

"I wouldn't know," said Caroline, who was attracted to the idea of film not as an art or as light or as whatever one wanted to call so collective and vulgar a storytelling form but as a means of preserving time, netting the ephemeral and the fugitive-there it is! now, it's past, gone forever. Millicent, now, was seated beside her, face illuminated by the flickering light upon the screen while, on the screen, one saw Millicent then, weeks ago-whenever, unchanging and unchangeable forever.

As applause for Romance of the Rancho ended, Hearst stood up and gave a mock bow, and said, "I wrote the t.i.tle cards, too. Couldn't be easier. Just like picture captions." He looked at Caroline. "Now we'll see something that's still in the works. A super western epic." The lights went out. A beam of light from the projector was aimed at the screen, which suddenly filled with a picture of Hearst's train-of-all-work coming to a halt. Caroline recognized the sweaty cowboy with whom she had worked that day. Obviously he was much used in Hearst's home movies. She was struck at how startlingly handsome his somewhat-in life-square, crude face became on the screen. She noted, too, that his eyebrows grew together in a straight line, like those of an archaic Minoan athlete.

There was a murmur in the tent as a slender woman got off the train. She was received by the cowboy, hat in hand. A porter then gave him her suitcase. The camera was now very close on the woman's face: a widow's peak and a cleft chin emphasized the symmetry of her face; high cheekbones made flattering shadows below large eyes. Slowly, the woman smiled. There was a sigh from the audience.

"Jesus Christ," murmured Millicent, now all h.e.l.l's Kitchen Irish, "ain't you the looker!"

"I don't believe it." And Caroline did not. A t.i.tle card said, "Welcome to Dodge City, Lady Belinda."

Then the cowboy and Lady Belinda walked toward a waiting buggy; and Caroline stared at herself, mesmerized. But this was no longer herself. This was herself of two weeks ago; hence, two weeks younger than she now was. Yet here she was, aged forty, forever, and she scrutinized the screen for lines and found them only at the edge of the eyes-mascara could hide the worst, she thought automatically. Then as she smiled what she always took to be her most transparently insincere smile of greeting, usually produced in honor of a foreign dignitary or the president of the moment, she noted that Lady Belinda-she regarded the woman on the screen as an entirely third person-looked ravis.h.i.+ng and ravished, and the only lines discernible in the bright sunlight were two delicate brackets at the corners of her mouth. For twenty minutes the incomplete film ran.

When the lights came on, Caroline was given a standing ovation, led by Hearst. "We've got a brand-new star," he said, sounding exactly like a Hearst story from the entertainment page of the Journal, where a different chorus girl, at least a half-dozen times a year, went on stage in the place of a stricken star, and always triumphed and became the Toast of the Town.

Arthur Brisbane, Hearst's princ.i.p.al editor, shook Caroline's hand gravely. "Even without blue eyes, you hold the screen." Brisbane was notorious for his theory that all great men and presumably women, too, were blue-eyed.

"Perhaps my eyes will fade to blue in the sun." Caroline gave him her ravis.h.i.+ng smile; and felt like someone possessed. She was two people. One who existed up there on the screen, a figure from the past but now and forever immutable, while the other stood in the center of a stuffy tent, rapidly aging with each finite heartbeat, entirely in the present tense, as she accepted congratulations.

"It's a pity you aren't younger," said the merciless Millicent. "You could really do something in pictures."

"Lucky that I don't want to, and so I can enjoy my middle age."

The cameraman, Joe Hubbell, came up to her. "It was really my idea, sticking the film together like this. So you could see it."

Hearst nodded. "We've Joe to thank. I never look through the camera lens and I don't see rushes. So when Joe kept telling me that Mrs. Sanford is really something, I thought he was just being nice to the guests."

"He was," said Caroline. "He is." She was thoroughly bemused and alarmed, like one of those savages who believe that a photograph can steal away the soul.

After most of the guests had retired to their tents, Caroline and a chosen few went back to Hearst's wooden house, where George poured Coca-Cola, and Caroline talked to Farrell about the uses of film for propaganda purposes. "I don't think you-or Mr. Creel-will have to do much arm-twisting. Everybody in Hollywood does the same thing anyway, particularly now we're in the war, and you can go to jail if you criticize England or France or ..."

"Our government. In order to make the world safe for democracy," Caroline parodied herself as an editorial writer, "we must extinguish freedom at home."