The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  The downpour of daylight through the glass, coupled with side lighting, tended to flatten actors against the set and wash out their faces. So Claude and Hal devised a system of mounting bedsheets over wooden frames to soften the glare. They built boxes of white gravel and placed them in front of the actors, rounding out their features. Remembering his father’s oval-shaped daguerreotype frames, Hal told Claude to use coffee cans around the camera lens to shade the corners of the film. It made certain scenes appear hooded and nostalgic, as if they floated through the haze of memory.

  * * *

  Hal also streamlined the messy business of casting. He hired local Fort Lee residents as extras, and if he had to import actors from across the river, he dispensed roles only to performers with their own makeup and costumes, and with access to a telephone. The calls were made at five in the morning, to Manhattan rooming houses and hotel lobbies, and the actors had better be standing by. First call to the studio was at seven sharp. Actors trundled up the hill from the ferry terminal or took the trolley up the cobblestone road cut into the Palisades. They carried suitcases of costumes, props, wigs, little tubs of greasepaint.

  * * *

  Along the Palisades, Chip corralled horses and kept a small menagerie of exotic animals, including a wallaby, an Alaskan bear, and a Siberian tiger. All three had been retired from the Bronx Zoo. He knew nothing about wild animals outside the occasional brumby he’d broken at the childhood farm, so they hired an animal trainer from the nearby amusement park and soon they were renting out the animals to other shoots—trainer included—for fifty dollars a day. Chip also built a permanent stage along the edge of the Palisades, a mounted scaffold with mattresses that was perfect for filming cliffhangers.

  * * *

  Hal managed not only the studio’s budget and production schedule but the difficult personalities of his two principal moviemakers, Sabine and Claude. Although he was still single at twenty-eight, and didn’t have much experience in the realm of love, he instinctively understood Claude’s obsession with Sabine. Even into her early fifties, she was a shining enigma, a drop of quicksilver rolling across a tabletop.

  * * *

  One night at a party to celebrate the end of a shoot, Hal watched Claude study Sabine from across a crowded room. Claude leaned against a wall, blinking behind his eyeglasses, while she stood under a chandelier surrounded by a group of admirers. She wore a red silk dress threaded with glass beads and cabochons, her dark hair pulled up into a French twist, her neckline decidedly low and Parisian. Her girlish laughter broke through the wall of people, little guffaws of self-deprecation and delight. At one point, she touched a dashing young man’s tuxedo sleeve when he told the story of his grandmother walking her infirm spaniel down a busy Manhattan sidewalk, and Hal saw Claude wince and walk out into the night.

  * * *

  A week later, at a different gathering, Sabine appeared in the darkened corners of the same room, dressed in a man’s waistcoat and breeches, looking severe and brooding as she stood talking quietly with Pavel. She turned several admirers away, telling them that she had important business to discuss with her acting mentor. Hal stood nearby and watched as she beckoned Claude over from the sidelines. Claude arrived with a glass of wine in hand, flushed in the cheeks, the viewfinder around his neck. She asked him if her death scene that day had been convincing and Claude said he’d have to look at the negatives once they were developed. Hal looked over in time to see Sabine’s face harden.

  —Merde, you do not know what you saw with your own eyes? she asked.

  Then she turned her back to Claude and continued her conversation with Pavel. Hal heard her say that dying a thousand times onstage was a dress rehearsal for the real thing, that playing Phaedra had given her dreams of swimming in a pool of blue poison. Claude stood there blushing behind her back, one big hand in his pocket.

  * * *

  Loving a woman like that, Hal thought, was chasing smoke. He was sure that love could buoy a man, but it could also drag him down, and it was clear that Claude Ballard was sinking into the mires and backwaters of unrequited love. He wore his longing like a hangover—it left him tender and dazed and easily riled—and if he went under, the entire studio would suffer, since future productions hinged on harmony between Claude and Sabine, between the camera and its primary subject. So Hal perfected the role of confidant, peacemaker, and diplomat, consoling Sabine and Claude as the tiffs and slights became ever more explosive.

  * * *

  One source of disquiet was Lavinia Merryweather, a woman from Hoboken whom Claude had courted sporadically for years. Lavinia was a romantic contingency plan, an understudy to Sabine, and Claude freely admitted that she was his attempt to remedy his doomed infatuation with the actress. But they routinely broke things off and Claude liked to talk about their spats on location or sitting out on the patio at night with a bottle of burgundy. He had a Gallic talent for meditative suffering and epic sighs. Meanwhile, Sabine dispensed mean-spirited advice, told him to throw Lavinia from a bridge into the Hudson with house bricks in her coat pockets.

  * * *

  Claude would laugh, then fume. A drunken fight would break out, in English then French, two streams of invective and profanity that ran together and threatened Hal’s production schedule. Hal would give Chip Spalding a nod and Chip would take the sulking Frenchman out for a walk to cool off, as if he were bridling an unbroken horse. Eventually Chip would sober him up and deliver him to his own bed. Chip would report back to Hal, who would go smooth things over with Sabine. The next day they would all be back out filming, oblivious to the spat, Claude angling the camera to filch another strand of sunlight from Sabine’s hair or dress. During lunch in the canteen, Hal would sit between them, monitoring their beer or wine consumption, ready to broker a peace agreement if one of them spoke out of turn.

  8

  The Idea

  Loving Sabine Montrose was a migraine. Claude never knew when a bout of longing might seize him, leaving his eyeballs tender, his mouth dry, climbing for days through a mental fog. He might be watching the daily rushes and stop a frame of her face, or standing on set as she walked by in a vapor cloud of bergamot, or leafing through the pages of a screenplay, and then the big maw would open up and swallow him whole. For years, he’d tried to banish this ache in another hemisphere, had taken regular doses of Lavinia Merryweather as a tonic against this kind of debilitating want, but it was no use. He felt sickened in his heart and throat, weakened and appalled by his own need.

  * * *

  Constrained to the viewfinder, Sabine was all nuance and feeling, but she moved through the real world as an infuriating paradox. She was cruel and aloof, then loving and kind, all in the same hour. He was forever trying to recapture that spark of recognition in the hotel suite overcome by flowers and gifts, when the grinding of his sister’s death through the cinématographe pushed something to the surface between them. Sabine had dragged him ashore in that colossal bed with its lavendered sheets, directing his lovemaking so he could better himself in the coital arts.

  * * *

  When it was over she’d lit candles and brushed out her violet-dark hair at the edge of the bed while he curled behind her, kissing the milky flesh above her hipbones. They talked about their childhoods, and then she suddenly got sleepy and bored, turned her back to him while he lay awake for hours touching the tips of her hair. In the morning, as they negotiated the terms of the filming, it felt as if she’d folded up her affections like a breakfast newspaper. That was the exact moment, he thought, when this terrible plague began.

  * * *

  It continued throughout that day and every day after—a kind of platonic malaise. A cheek kiss here, a straightened collar there, but not the boundless thing itself. The unstinting, shining world had been splayed before him, its broadsheets laid flat, and now it lay quartered on the nightstand. For twelve years he’d been marooned within the fabric of that single night and he felt sure it had r
uined him for anything sedate or wholesome. When he made love to Lavinia there were no candles or wrists tied in silk; she came to bed in the dark, dressed in a petticoat, smelling of her supper.

  * * *

  For all these years he’d not only wanted to make love to Sabine again—to fall back into that trance—but to contain her in life the way he could in the viewfinder. On camera, she allowed herself to be pressed into the nitrate emulsion like an exotic, venomous spider in amber, but loving Sabine on a Tuesday afternoon in New Jersey was a vial of ether in your trouser pocket, an act of staring into vapors. She shifted, fidgeted, grew distracted, begrudged your affections, dissolved before your eyes. Claude imagined that he might cure this romantic disease if he killed Sabine off in a film with the morose precision of a Russian novel, with such veracity that his mind would finally be his own again. He pictured a frayed knot, finally untied, or an enormous boulder dropping into the river far below. His own great unburdening.

  * * *

  In Paris, Claude had sometimes attended the midnight plays at the Théâtre Chaptal, a run-down gothic chapel in Montmartre that had been taken over by a theater company. The director and playwright specialized in naturalistic displays of violence, in harrowing tales of cruelty and insanity, so that he found himself sitting in the dark of the converted sanctuary that now resembled an operating room or asylum. The theater was famous for its fake-blood recipe—a mixture of carmine and glycerin—and used it lavishly in every show: as the jilted husband performed brain surgery on his wife’s lover, as two hags plied an ice pick to blind a beautiful young inmate, as the barber opened out a customer’s throat with a straight razor. There were also, Claude remembered, subtler effects—Schubert playing from a gramophone in one corner, a white housecat that prowled among the audience’s legs, a grim-faced actor who sat among the ticketholders until he walked onstage to commit murder.

  * * *

  Claude didn’t want to make a film that was quite so gruesome, but he wondered if he might bring some of the Chaptal’s bewitched atmosphere to a dark melodrama. As an antidote to his longing, he daydreamed about all the ways Sabine’s character might die on-screen—chasing a hallucination down a staircase or being murdered in her sleep or burning up with tubercular fevers.

  * * *

  Then one night he was driving the studio’s Oldsmobile back from Manhattan after seeing a concert with Lavinia. He’d taken her to see a touring orchestra and she leaned back in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette, calling it a shabby little performance, and wasn’t the venerable old European maestro an absolute fraud, and Claude hummed to mask his annoyance. The performance had been rousing and majestic, a bursting, symphonic love poem. He decided to take a detour through some New Jersey backwoods while she talked—they’d been scouting for a stone quarry as a film location—and in a forgotten pocket of farmland he came upon a painted sign that made him slow and turn around: The Gladehill Hotel—Newly Electrified, Traveling Businessmen Welcome.

  * * *

  He drove partway down the long gravel driveway until a bluestone mansion came into view through the trees, every room lit up as if for surgery. There was a wide canvas awning overhanging a driving circle but not a single automobile in sight. Claude stared up at the blaze of lights, waited for a shadow or silhouette to appear behind a window, trying to imagine how traveling salesmen would ever find such a place. He got out of the Oldsmobile, took a few crunching steps along the gravel, when someone appeared behind a high window. It was a child’s silhouette, no more than a flicker, and then the light in that room was snuffed. Lavinia was suddenly behind him, blowing smoke into the night sky and saying No, sir, I am not staying here, not even for a single night. It’s the most desolate thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

  * * *

  On the drive back to the studio, Lavinia fell asleep and Claude began to devise film plots, the headlights picking through the trees and brush and his own imaginings. He thought about the house in D. W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa, about the way Billy Bitzer, the cameraman, had framed the view from below, so that you were staring up at the austere villa hunkered on the brow of the hill. As the attackers planned their assault—the camera like a fourth accomplice—the house sat as a sanctuary, like an ornate mahogany figurine poised to fall from a table. But what if the house or villa or hotel were the source of the menace itself?

  * * *

  When they climbed the stairs to Claude’s room in the main studio house, Lavinia took off her shoes and lay on the bed while Claude sat at the portable typewriter he kept by the window. He went through several sheets of paper, whittling and sharpening the idea until it had all the elements he wanted. Sometime in the small hours, he typed a synopsis onto a single index card:

  THE ELECTRIC HOTEL

  A hotelier dies suddenly, leaving his consumptive wife to run their country hotel and raise their two young children. Situated on a rambling estate, the gothic hotel falls into disrepair and the widow decides to modernize to attract paying customers. She electrifies the hotel and advertises, which draws a fresh wave of guests—mostly traveling businessmen and salesmen. Many of the guests are never seen again.

  Claude didn’t yet know exactly what the widow did to these men, but he was sure a writer could flesh that out. He switched off the lamp and got in bed beside a gently snoring Lavinia. While he waited for sleep, he lay there pondering all the horrifying cinematic deaths he might bestow on Sabine Montrose.

  * * *

  The next piece of the narrative puzzle fell into place on Halloween 1909. Hal Bender threw a party for his employees, the off-season crew from the amusement park, and any Fort Lee residents who wanted to make the wagon ride out to the studio acres. Especially for the occasion, Hal obtained a film from Fox Entertainments—William Selig’s sixteen-minute Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—which had come out the previous year and terrified audiences. Hal wanted to stay ahead of the competition, to branch out into thrillers and crime dramas, so he regularly obtained competitor films so he and Claude could study them. Claude had not yet told Hal about his feature film idea; he would pitch the idea once all the key details were in place and Sabine had agreed to do it. For the Halloween screening of Jekyll and Hyde, Hal asked Claude to come up with a frightening way to show Selig’s film.

  * * *

  But it was Chip who came up with the idea of the cliffside viewing. They would project the film above the river, on a framed screen that hung below a dirigible on loan from the amusement park. Chip had befriended the young aeronaut who flew the Strobel airship, a seventeen-year-old named Jimmy Thorpe. The Palisades Amusement Park billed him as the world’s youngest aeronaut and sent him on publicity flights across the river. During the summer, he circled Grant’s Tomb and floated above Broadway, delighting Midtown pedestrians, but tonight he would just sit in the sixty-foot airship while reels were projected on the screen below, the gondola tethered with steel cables to the cliff face. Chip, who loved a good prank, had instructed Jimmy on a harmless stunt to be performed at a climactic moment of the film.

  * * *

  Claude had invited Sabine to see the film and he arrived at her cottage in the guise of an escaped murderer—leg chains and a work gang uniform spattered with stage blood made from the Chaptal recipe. Claude couldn’t remember ever seeing Sabine frightened and hoped the sight of the blood and the filmstrip floating through the night would be enough to unsettle her. He remembered a carpenter severing his finger on set one day and her regarding it with cold scrutiny, asking the man whether he could still move it and touching the fingertip with a grease pencil. And in the audience of a movie house she never flinched, no matter what violence passed across the screen. A pugilist dabbing his facial wounds or a herd animal being brought down by a bounding predator—it was merely so much orchestrated motion and light.

  * * *

  Pavel answered the door in a tunic and moccasins, a treatise on homeopathy under one arm. He looked at the blood splattered across Claude’s work-gang unifo
rm and folded his arms.

  —You look festive.

  —Is this your Halloween costume? Claude asked.

  —Just my everyday. A suit contorts a man, constricts his thinking. I prefer to swim loose.

  * * *

  Claude stood in the doorway while Pavel went to fetch Sabine. He wondered, not for the first time, where Pavel slept when he stayed over at the studio. A dozen suitcases and trunks were lined up along the floor, some of them open and half-packed. Sabine, Pavel, and Helena were due to return to Paris for the winter recess in early December and would come back in the spring for a new filming season.

  * * *

  Sabine emerged from the back of the cottage as an oracle—a hunchbacked crone with a walking staff and nettles in her hair. She carried a silver goblet of mulled wine in one hand. Pavel walked her to the door and she stepped out onto the flagstone porch. When the door closed behind her, she took a sip of wine from her silver goblet and looked down toward the cliffs. The night smelled of damp leaves and wood smoke. The crew had built a big bonfire at the other end of the cliffs, far from the outdoor theater, and they could hear it faintly crackling in the cold air.