Jack and Susan in 1913

by Michael McDowell

  The motorcycle screeched to a circling halt at the other end of the blocked-off passage and then headed back for him.

  A truck and two automobiles passing on the open side of the boulevard slowed down to watch the progress of the filming. Jack pitched and weaved in the middle of the street. The curb and safety seemed far away.

  The motorcycle bore down behind him again, and Perks again wildly swung the club. Jack jumped to avoid it, but not far enough and he caught the end of the club in the middle of his back.

  It propelled him forward against the side of one of the passing automobiles. His foot hit the running board, and the waxen infant flew out of his arms into the lap of the lady passenger, who threw up her arms and screamed. The man behind the wheel, alarmed, dragged suddenly on the brakes.

  Jack was thrown off the car, back into the street.

  “Wonderful!” screamed Fane. “Keep going!”

  The driver then took off as quickly as his machine would let him, and the woman stared stuporously at the melting baby in her arms.

  Jack was sprawled in the dust as the motorcycle came at him again. He tried to get up and run, but the splint on his leg prevented his doing more than rolling out of the way. As he rolled in the direction of a second automobile, he lurched forward, grabbing hold of the bumper.

  He was pulled out of the way of Westermeade’s tires just in time. Perks, in trying to swipe at Jack once more with the stick, lost his balance and tumbled out of the sidecar headfirst on to the pavement. Westermeade, off balance with the sudden loss of weight, and looking behind him to see what happened, plunged into a knot of the supers, who scattered with screams that would never be heard in the completed print of the silent Plunder.

  Jack let go the bumper of the car when he was past the blockade a hundred feet or so farther down the street. Releasing his grip, he rolled out of the way, gasping for his breath, and thinking that he had just made up for any terrible thing he had ever done to Susan Bright.

  Junius Fane himself went over to help Jack up.

  “That was it,” said Fane. “That was it without a doubt. We’re not going to have to do it again.”

  “Good,” said Jack, looking down at his body. There was no blood that he could see, but his clothes were in tatters.

  “Take the rest of the day off,” said Fane. “And rest up. Tomorrow we’ll be driving out to Santa Monica beach. You’ll get knocked on the head and then tossed off the pier in the path of a speedboat. After that you’ll be tied up, thrown in a trunk, and buried in the sand at low tide. And Friday morning we’ll go out to the ostrich ranch. I know there’s been some trouble between you and Susan, but you’ll have to admit—that girl has one splendid imagination.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JACK NEARLY DROWNED in the water off the Santa Monica pier, while dozens of spectators from the adjacent roller-skating ballroom watched breathlessly for him to rise again after the speedboat flew over his head. He nearly suffocated in the trunk buried briefly in the sand a few hundred yards down the beach. Susan tried to show her indifference as to whether Jack lived or died by taking a few shots in a shooting gallery on the pier. The next day, he was nearly pecked to death by a flock of ostriches, while Susan and Ida nonchalantly shopped for plumes in the small shop attached to the ranch.

  When Plunder was finished on Saturday, Fane examined all the footage of the fledgling actor and pronounced it very fine. Susan and Jack watched the reels, too—from opposite sides of the room. Susan made more than one disparaging comment on Jack’s inability to register the proper range of emotions.

  “But it’s what I want,” Fane argued. “I want a man stalwart in the face of every danger. A man who quails before no difficulty, a man for whom mortal danger is as common and as little a thing as…as breakfast.”

  Jack gingerly prodded the bruises on his torso, his extremities, and the back of his head. “Miss Bright evidently believes that a man should be like a woman, and reveal everything in a gush of emotion,” said Jack in a bitter tone. “Miss Bright ought to learn that a man cannot always give himself away in that manner.”

  “Exactly,” said Fane. “Susan, didn’t you see how tender he was with Ida? How he kissed her at the wedding, and caressed her neck at the wedding dance? He registered his love for Ida in a perfectly manly way. Hosmer, thank you!”

  A few minutes later, giving an arm to each, Fane took Jack and Susan down the hall to Susan’s office. Tripod was standing on Susan’s desk, and as if he had only been waiting for the chance, he took a flying leap at Jack’s neck the minute the three of them stepped through the door. But dogs with three legs are not balanced, and Tripod’s aim was off. He flew into Junius Fane’s arms. “Write a part for a three-legged dog that leaps,” Fane commanded Susan. Then he went on, “Next week we’ll be shooting that Mixon farce you and he devised on the train out. It’s a little thin, so what I’d like you to do is write in a little romance—”

  “Mr. Beaumont and Ida?” Susan questioned. “Ida won’t work with Manfred. Says it’s beneath her dignity to appear in the same frame with a fat man.”

  “Not with Ida,” Fane said thoughtfully, “with Miss Songar. Miss Songar is very short, and Jack is very tall. Miss Songar is Manfred’s niece and heir to a fabulous fortune. She is very short and has a three-legged dog that leaps. This dog leaps upon command, does he not?”

  “He’ll leap at Mr. Beaumont with or without a command,” said Susan.

  “Good enough,” said Fane. Turning to Jack, he explained, “This will give you some range as an actor. We’ve tried you out in melodramatic danger, and now we’ll stick you into a comedy and see if you come up breathing.”

  “I have no doubt,” said Susan, “that Mr. Beaumont will prove himself to be as ridiculous as you may please.”

  “Yes,” returned Fane blandly, “I have every confidence in my new discovery. So, Susan, today is Saturday, and I’m going into Los Angeles for a couple of days—business,” he explained vaguely. “I’d like you to write the new scenes for the picture next week, and I’d like to see an outline for a three-reeler to be shot the following week.”

  “It’s been written, Mr. Fane, for Miss Songar and Mr. Perks. The Cameo.”

  “No,” said Fane, “I’m giving that to an assistant. I want you to write something for Jack and Ida. More thrills.” He thought for a moment. “Set it in a forest. We could go up into the mountains for a couple of days. Half the scenes interior—a prospector’s cabin, a general store, the timber baron’s palatial home, you know the sort of thing I mean—and the other half of the scenes exterior, mountain forests. Ida is the Timber Queen—not a bad title, either—who’s had all her land stolen from her by the evil Timber Baron. She’s only got five acres left, and they burn down. Write a forest fire, Miss Bright. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a forest fire in a moving picture. Jack here is a prospector, down on his luck, who discovers diamonds and gold on her five acres once the forest fire has cleared away the trees. They’re set upon by a bandit when they go into town to sell the diamonds and gold. They’re tied up and left to die. A group of wild Indians—there’re a band of Indians here in Hollywood who rent out for ten dollars a day, fifteen of ’em—come up and start using Jack and Ida for target practice. Jack gets loose, somehow or other, kills all the Indians, and unmasks the bandit—who turns out to be the Timber Baron, and he’s really Jack’s father. Or uncle. Or something. The title will be The Timber Queen. There, Susan, I’ve practically done your work for you, so you might as well have the thing on my desk Monday morning.”

  “Yes, Junius.”

  “And if I leave you two alone together now, you won’t claw one another, will you?”

  “I have Tripod to protect me,” said Susan, taking the dog from Fane.

  “If that dog works out next week, write him into The Timber Queen as well. I like animals in moving pictures.”

  That afternoon Jack and Susan returned to their neighboring bungalows by different routes, at different ti
mes. True to his word, Junius Fane drove off toward Los Angeles. A few minutes later, Jack, looking out of his window and hoping for a glimpse of Susan, saw Ida Conquest slip quietly out of the house, and tiptoe with ostentatious stealth across the yard and disappear around the corner.

  Jack had little doubt that Junius Fane’s snappy Speedking Sixty was waiting for her, out of sight of the Cosmic bungalows.

  A few moments later, there was a knock on the door of Jack’s room. “Jack?” Hosmer called, “are you in there?”

  Jack opened the door. There stood Hosmer, hat and satchel in hand. “I’ve got a cousin in Pasadena. Pretty thing. Thought I’d visit her. Be back tomorrow night. Can you get along?”

  “I think so,” Jack said with a grin.

  Jack listened for the front door to close. Then he went to the living room and peered out the window and watched until Hosmer was out of sight. Jack waited five minutes to make sure neither he nor Ida returned, then he crept out of the house, and whipped across the yard to Susan’s back door.

  Tripod’s infuriated barking announced Jack’s presence.

  Susan immediately opened the door and pulled him into the kitchen. She threw Tripod into the dining room and put a chair against the door. “Ida’s gone. Till tomorrow night,” she said.

  “So’s Hosmer. I think Ida went off with Fane.”

  “I’m sure she did,” said Susan. “And I think Hosmer probably went off to do something about the stolen patent.”

  “He said he was going to visit a cousin in Pasadena, but I’ll bet you’re right,” said Jack. “And in that case, I probably ought to follow him.”

  “Probably,” said Susan hesitantly.

  “On the other hand, he may really have a cousin in Pasadena.”

  “It’s probably too late to go after him anyway, now,” said Susan.

  “Yes,” Jack agreed readily, then added with a crimson blush, “I bought three sets of sheets this week.”

  “I don’t think we should risk Hosmer’s coming back unexpectedly,” said Susan.

  Jack’s face fell.

  “So let’s stay here,” said Susan. “Tripod!” she called through the closed doorway. “If you see Ida coming back, bark!”

  Jack and Susan did not stir from Susan’s bungalow the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday. Tripod’s growling grew hoarse at Susan’s bedroom door. Toward evening, Jack staggered home. Ida Conquest returned half an hour later, and Junius Fane drove up the street five minutes after that.

  Hosmer Collamore, it turned out, did not return on Sunday night at all. When Jack discovered this on Monday morning, he was annoyed on two counts. First, Susan might have spent the night with him without fear of discovery. Second, Jack and Susan’s suspicion that Hosmer’s absence had to do more with the stolen patent than with a pretty cousin in Pasadena was strengthened.

  When Hosmer didn’t show up for work at the studio, Fane ranted for a few minutes, fired Hosmer in absentia, and stuck Hosmer’s apprentice in his place.

  So, even without Hosmer, Manfred Mixon’s new farcical epic proceeded apace. Susan sat in her office in the morning and quickly typed out the new scenes for Jack, Miss Songar, and Tripod. Fane read them while eating his sandwich at lunch, approved them, sent them over to props for the procurement of the necessary furnishings for the three scenes that were to be filmed that afternoon.

  Manfred Mixon’s “front parlor” was actually three canvas walls, a threadbare rug, and three or four pieces of old-fashioned velvet-upholstered furniture, perched on a stage on a Hollywood hillside. Jack was very tall and moony, Miss Songar was very short and coy, and Tripod threw himself at Jack at every opportunity—tearing at his trouser cuffs, clamping his teeth down on his watch, and worrying his shoe as if it were a sewer rat.

  When his work was finished, Jack crept down the hill toward the back of the studio. Slipping into the thick shrubbery behind the old livery stable, he sidled along the wall until he came to the window of Susan’s office. He tapped at the glass.

  Susan got up from her desk, shut the door, and went over to the window.

  “How did you do?” she asked.

  “Well, Fane says that he’s going to ask you for a couple of scenes for me to play with Mixon, so I suppose I did well enough. So did Tripod. Every time Fane told him to attack, he attacked.”

  “I spoke to the men in the laboratory this afternoon. They said that Hosmer came here to the studio yesterday.”

  “Then he wasn’t in Pasadena.”

  “He stayed for about an hour, and then left. They don’t know what he was doing. Do you think we ought to warn Mr. Fane?”

  Jack shook his head. “Not yet. Maybe Hosmer was just clearing out. Despite what we think of him, he’s a good cameraman. Maybe he just got an offer somewhere. The studios out here make a practice of stealing from one another. I suppose they have to have a little excitement now that they’re so far away from the Patents Trust.”

  “Oh, no!” said Susan.

  “What?”

  “You don’t suppose that’s who Hosmer is working for, do you? And has been all along? And that your patent went to them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jack. “But if he was working for the Trust, then I don’t think we’ve heard the last of him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WHEN JACK GOT back to his bungalow that day, he found no sign of Hosmer himself. But there was evidence that he’d been there: He’d returned for his clothes—and for good measure he had taken a few of Jack’s personal items and all the food in the cupboards.

  Nothing more was heard of Hosmer that week. Plunder was edited and spliced together. Positives were made, and every title card added the Cosmic Film Studio’s new California address at the bottom. Publicity distributed with the prints extolled the lengths to which Cosmic had gone in order to establish a new plateau of moving-picture realism. The breathtaking holdup had been filmed on a genuine Kansas prairie, and the thrilling scene in which Jack Beaumont, the new Cosmic Hero, was dragged down Sunset Boulevard was true and real in every respect, and the couple in the car were genuine, unsuspecting citizens of Hollywood, California, the new home of the Cosmic Film Studio.

  A second page of publicity concerned the romance between Jack Beaumont and Ida Conquest, “The Lovers of the Decade.” Jack was touted as having been born to a patrician American family, having been educated at Yale, and having been a broker on Wall Street for some years before turning to moving-picture acting as his true profession. Ida Conquest had been born of parents well-known on the classical stages of London and Paris, had worked as a child with the immortal actors of the English stage, and had turned down offers of marriage from titled Europeans.

  Jack’s biography was gospel. Ida’s contained not one iota of truth.

  Photoplay magazine had recently begun running photographs of moving-picture stars and wanted a photograph of Jack Beaumont and Ida Conquest. It was thought wonderfully romantic by the editor that Jack and Ida lived in adjoining bungalows in Hollywood. The problem was that the barren yards were not particularly attractive as a backdrop. At Cosmic’s expense, therefore, Junius Fane hired a team of gardeners to landscape the two adjoining bungalows. One day when Jack and Susan returned from the studio, they found that they were now living in rose-bowered cottages. Grass had been planted in the front yard. Exotic evergreens shaded the windows. Climbing roses spilled over the doorways. Colorful flowers hedged the new stone walks to the street. A gleaming white picket fence had been erected on the property line between the two houses. (The surroundings of the other bungalows on the street, of course, remained nothing but dust.) Jack stood on his walk, and Susan and Tripod—on a short leash—stood on theirs, and looked at one another in astonishment.

  “Just like the illustrations in the weekly serials,” said Susan.

  “Marry me and we’ll live in a vine-covered cottage,” said Jack.

  Tripod howled in vigorous protest.

  “Shhh!” cried Susan, and she hurried inside.


  The next morning, Jack and Ida were photographed at the doorways of their respective bungalows, waving and smiling at each other. Then the two “Lovers of the Decade” met and modestly kissed across the gleaming picket fence chastely separating the houses.

  Plunder and The Timber Queen proved to be the greatest successes yet for the Cosmic Film Studio, and to Manfred Mixon’s indignation and fury, the Fabulous Fat Funny Fellow was eclipsed in box office earnings by the Lovers of the Decade. Jack’s salary was trebled, to $135 a week, and Junius Fane allowed Jack to keep the bungalow solely to himself. Susan’s salary, in recognition of her writing these masterpieces of the genre, was doubled to $110 a week, and Fane hired an assistant for her. (Her assistant was a cross-eyed fifteen-year-old girl with typing ability.) It was not known what recompense Ida Conquest received, but Susan soon noticed new diamond earrings and an entirely new wardrobe in the latest fashion.

  Nothing was heard from Hosmer Collamore. Susan telephoned every film company in the area, asking if the man were employed there, but she had no luck in finding what had become of him. Jack visited a lawyer who agreed to investigate whether the camera improvement had yet been patented, and if so, in whose name. But despite this uncertainty regarding the stolen invention, Jack and Susan could hardly help being happy. At night, after Ida had crept next door to Fane’s bungalow, Susan crept next door to Jack’s. Tripod was left alone in the house, wandering disconsolately all night long—pad pad pad tap—through the darkened bungalow.

  The nights in California were hot and windy in the last week in June. It might have been too hot for Jack and Susan to lie together in the same narrow bed, had Jack not bought a new electrical contraption—an oscillating fan—and set it on a chair next to them. Crickets had taken up residence in the climbing roses outside the windows, and when it was otherwise still, they could hear the rhythmic pumping of the oil wells nearby.

  “Are you jealous?” Jack asked.