California Gold

by John Jakes

  “But I’m living in Southern California. I have no plans to go back.”

  Stimson squared off in front of Mack like a debater. “Enrique Potter said I’d have a hard time selling you. But please consider carefully before you refuse. A decade ago, the citizens of California won significant victories over the SP—the Los Angeles harbor decision, the defeat of Huntington’s scheme to cancel the debt. But the Octopus is still huge—and powerful.”

  “Damned arrogant too,” Margolis said. “They slung most of the mud at the Good Government Group. Sneered and called us the Goo-Goos—”

  “It’s intolerable,” Stimson said. “And we won’t tolerate it. Not any longer.”

  “Mr. Stimson—gentlemen—I admire your zeal. And I don’t disagree. I believe every word. But you must also believe me. I’ve fought enough battles. I’m tired of fighting.”

  Dismayed, the three proper Republicans exchanged looks. Noone, the editor, said, “Your friend Rudolph Spreckels is one of us. Jim Phelan too.”

  “I admire them for it. It doesn’t change anything.”

  With sharply reduced enthusiasm, Stimson said, “Do I understand that you’re saying no?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Have a pleasant trip back to Los Angeles, gentlemen.”

  70

  MARGARET EMERSON ARRIVED ON the sleeper from San Francisco. Stepping down into sunshine and billowing steam, she was the very picture of Parisian style. Her travel suit was dark-brown wool, and a beige blouse with a jabot and a tight high collar enhanced the long graceful line of her neck. Brown gloves, brown silk parasol, brown straw hat with brown plumes—everything matched.

  She threw herself into Mack’s arms for a long hug. “It’s so wonderful to see you.”

  “I thought you’d never take me up on my invitation. I’m glad you did.”

  “How are you?”

  “About the same. This way.”

  They passed from under the eaves of the platform and she watched sunlight strike him. Physically he looked much improved, but those eyes were still dead. Margaret’s bubbling excitement turned to pain.

  He stowed her suitcases in the rear of his newest automobile, a four-wheeled yacht of a car, a Packard landau, brilliant yellow, with black fenders and trim and Packard’s stylish hex-shaped hubcaps. “I thought we’d spend the day sightseeing, then drive to Redondo Beach for the night. I reserved two suites,” he added in an offhand way. She got the point.

  Mack sped the open Packard away from the SP depot. Minutes later, he was weaving through downtown traffic. He shot around one of the big red cars of the Pacific Electric interurban system, and the motorman clanged his bell defensively. Margaret hung on to her hat and her seat cushion, gasping.

  “You’re a demon. What’s the speed limit?”

  “Six miles an hour downtown, thirty everywhere else. I can’t stand to go that slowly.”

  The Packard threaded through openings Margaret thought impossible. Mack was a fine driver, and never endangered pedestrians. Still, he hunched at the big wheel as if he had some unseen presence on his shoulder.

  “This is my first visit to Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s huge. I pictured adobes, and cows wandering the streets.”

  “I saw it that way in the eighties. There are three hundred and fifty thousand people, maybe more. We get a dozen or so off the trains every day.” He motored past the Times, now headquartered in a massive dark-red building crowned by brick turrets and battlements. “The unofficial capital of Otistown. The general’s commission in the Philippines went to his head. Notice the sentry box at the front door? He calls this place the Fortress. His home’s the Bivouac. Inside, they keep fifty or sixty high-power rifles.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “For the day the mad anarchist trade-union dogs rise up and attack,” Mack said with a wink.

  He drove through streets of small neat homes with derricks pumping noisily in backyards. He showed her the well he’d dug for Doheny, “one of the richest men in the state now.” Next he pointed out some of his own wells. In the late forenoon, he took her by Echo Park Lake. Sunshine painted rainbows on the heavy oil slick. “Someday all that seepage will catch fire.”

  He showed her Angel’s Flight, the cable railway that ascended Bunker Hill. When he offered to take her to the Alligator Farm on the east side, she declined.

  “All right, but you can’t experience Southern California fully unless you see something bizarre. Tell you what. Before you leave, we’ll go to Pasadena and I’ll show you the headquarters of a cult. I’ve told you about my old partner, haven’t I?”

  They ate pork loin, vegetables, potatoes, and gravy at Brown’s Union Square Cafeteria, a new kind of restaurant without table service. They pushed their trays along a shelf in front of neatly cased displays of food, selecting only what they wanted, and paid the cashier at the end of the line.

  “Another new California idea,” he said. It was hard to make himself heard. The Michigan Society was holding a meeting at several nearby tables. The Grand Wolverine, as his satin sash proclaimed him, extolled the state from which he and all his listeners had fled. At every mention of Michigan, the audience stamped, clapped, and clanged silverware against water glasses.

  “I guess they love snow now that they don’t have to shovel it,” Mack said.

  They drove out to Washington and Grand. “Biograph is filming there. They’ve sent a whole crew from New York for the winter, to take advantage of our sunshine. The picture they’re doing is called In Old California. They want to shoot at the San Gabriel mission, and on some property I own in the Hollywood hills.”

  Mack didn’t mention that most of Riverside considered him crazy for putting money in moving pictures, or having anything to do with them. “Still a novelty, and a trashy one,” Clive Henley said. “It’s a business run by a lot of ghetto Jews from New York. Glove merchants. Rag pickers. Dirty little sheenies, the lot of them.”

  “Your bigotry and snobbery are showing, Clive,” Mack said in reply. “Also the moss on your back.”

  Clive sniffed. “If you want to chum around with Jews and low-life actresses, don’t come to me complaining you’ve caught some disease.”

  Clive was trying to be humorous, but he came through as merely crude. Mack didn’t like him very much anymore. Nor did he like the constant attacks by the solid men of Riverside, the badgering he took because he held strong opinions and refused to run with the herd. He’d resigned from the polo club because of it.

  They found the Biograph Company working on a wooden-walled stage on a lot next to a lumberyard. There seemed to be a great deal of commotion. Actors and actresses rushed back and forth from four wooden huts to the stage, costumed as señoritas, friars, Spanish dons. Mack handed Margaret a business card.

  “That’s the man I have to see. Mike Sinnott.”

  “This says Mack Sennett.”

  “They all have professional names. Sinnott’s an assistant to the director. Also a bit player and scenario writer. So he said on the telephone, anyway.”

  They stepped onto the stage, suddenly immersed in the noise of many conversations and the rapping hammers of carpenters finishing a row of flats. The flats represented an hacienda interior. The roof of the stage was open to the sun, but hung with long linen battens to diffuse the light.

  “Sinnott?” Mack said to a girl rushing by with an armload of monk’s habits. She pointed to a burly bare-headed man with long, simian arms and rough features. He was talking to a little man with a cap and a tall, beak-nosed fellow of thirty-five or so. Striking rather than handsome, the tall man drew the eye because he wore a suit, cravat, and straw hat. Everyone else was in old clothes or costumed for the picture.

  The gent in the straw hat leaned an elbow on the great box of the camera, puffing a cigarette and gesturing like some languid dandy. Those around him hung on his words. “Must be the director,” Mack said.

  The conference ended and Sinnott broke away. Mack introduced himself and
pulled a document from his coat. “My lawyer, Mr. Potter, made one or two small changes in the location contract. I initialed them and signed it. I’ll expect the hundred-dollar fee by the end of the week.”

  “Right you are, Mr. Chance. Would you and the lady like to meet our principals?”

  He introduced them to a handsome young actor named Jack Pickford, and his sister Mary, an ingenue of striking beauty, who was perhaps fifteen or sixteen. Then he presented them to the little man in the cap, the cameraman, Bitzer, and the director, Mr. Griffith. “Welcome to the Biograph lot, Mr. Chance, Miss Emerson.” Mack heard the South in Griffith’s voice.

  “We’re all set with that fine location in Hollywood,” Sinnott advised his boss. “Mr. Chance and I struck a deal in ten minutes.”

  “Two Macks certainly ought to get along, don’t you think? Where are you from, sir?”

  “At the moment, Riverside. You?”

  “I was born on a plantation in Oldham County, Kentucky, about twenty miles from Louisville. I’m proud to say the blood of the old Confederacy flows in my veins. My father fought for the white race in the First Kentucky Cavalry. He rode for Bedford Forrest and Joe Wheeler. What about you, Miss Emerson?”

  “Northern California.”

  The director fondled Margaret’s chin in a familiar way. It annoyed Mack, and made Miss Pickford pout like a jealous lover. “What a smile you have,” Griffith said. “If you’d like to go waltzing some evening, leave a message at the Alexandria Hotel down on Spring Street.”

  It was lighthearted, superficially a joking invitation. But Griffith’s eye feasted on Margaret. Mary Pickford said sweetly, “Will Mrs. Griffith let you out, D.W.?”

  Griffith shot her a look. “I love you too, Mary,” he said, turning his back on the little girl with curls. Jack Pickford pulled at his sweaty monk’s habit and snickered.

  All charm again, Griffith shook Mack’s hand and smiled at Margaret. “Guard her, Mr. Chance. If you don’t, someone will steal her.”

  He kissed her hand, about-faced smartly, and clapped three times. “All right, ladies and gentlemen. Jack, Mary, Wally— rehearsal, please.”

  They watched for an hour. Margaret was fascinated by the actors, the orderly disorder, the hand-cranked camera, and Griffith’s absolute command of every detail. The director deliberated before each shot. He argued with Bitzer but seldom gave in. A general in charge of a raffish army, when he worked he was blunt, even biting if something went wrong, quite different from the courtly Southerner who’d tipped his hat and flattered Margaret.

  “What an attractive man,” she said as they left the stage.

  “I didn’t like his crack about defending the white race.”

  “No. But did you notice that lovely Pickford girl? She’s mad for him.”

  “She and three or four others I saw mooning over him. Marriage doesn’t seem to keep his eye from roving.”

  “You sound like a grumpy old prude. Marriage doesn’t interfere with my customers at the Maison either. They come in spite of it.”

  “Or because of it.”

  She laughed, but he didn’t.

  The January afternoon grew cool, the shadows long and sharp, the light a deepening gold, and melancholy. On the way out to the ocean, he pulled to the roadside near a large colorful billboard. While he raised the folding top and latched it to the wind screen, Margaret studied the board. Painted aircraft filled a painted sky—fanciful dirigibles, balloons with gondolas, monoplanes and biplanes with translucent ribbed wings.

  FIRST IN AMERICA!

  AVIATION MEET

  LOS ANGELES JANUARY 10-20

  “What’s an aviation meet?” she asked as they started up.

  “A big exhibition with races, demonstrations, time trials, that sort of thing. The Hearst paper in Los Angeles is sponsoring it. Glenn Curtiss is bringing a replica of the Golden Flyer, the plane he flew to win the Gordon Bennett Cup at Rheims. Louis Paulhan’s coming from France. It’s shaping up to be quite an event.”

  “I’ve read a lot about flying machines. I’d never want to ride in one but I’d love to see them. Could we go?”

  “I suppose. We might as well. I’ve no family to entertain you while you’re here. Nor any close friends, for that matter.”

  “Have you heard from H.B.?”

  “Not since he left.”

  Mack sped the Packard down the dirt highway. He caught up with a bicyclist and honked him out of the way. Margaret frowned and held on, and soon she was gasping again, clutching any available handhold while her cheeks paled and her heart raced. She exclaimed over the noise, “It’ll be a wonderful vacation if I live through it.”

  The clerk at the Redondo Lodge showed them to adjoining suites without comment. Mack immediately noticed a connecting door.

  They unpacked, changed from their dusty clothes, and walked down to the shore of Santa Monica Bay. An orange winter sky reflected in the silver water and high waves broke and roared toward the wet shingle. Two young men in tight striped bathing costumes balanced precariously on prow-shaped boards atop the rushing waves.

  “What on earth are they doing?”

  “It’s something called surf riding. Brand new. There’s always something new out here.”

  They watched the spray-soaked surf riders on the crests of their waves, tilting from side to side with arms out for balance, laughing in their strength and their youth. Margaret slipped her arm through Mack’s, and he could feel the roundness of her breast touching him. He didn’t pull away.

  They ate in the cozy wood-paneled dining room of the lodge. Mack was surprised to find Sonoma Creek cabernet listed among the offerings of the small cellar. They drank one bottle with their abalone steaks, and then a second, and both of them were weaving a little as they went up to bed. Margaret gave him a polite good-night kiss on the cheek and went to her door with her own key.

  He’d drunk too much. He fell asleep facedown on the bed, still in his clothes. Sometime later he heard tapping on the connecting door. Opening it, he saw Margaret with the small bedside candle in its brass holder; the lodge was not electrified. Her nightgown was white as a bride’s, her nipples dark and large as dollar pieces beneath.

  “Margaret—”

  She put her palm on his mouth.

  When she was sure she’d quieted him, she kissed him, and he could smell her hair and her skin. He flung off his clothes. She blew out the candle, and soon she was astride him.

  They slept a while. When they woke he held her in his arms.

  “Margaret.”

  “Yes?”

  “We mustn’t do that again. Ever.”

  “No. But I had to do it once.”

  She kissed him, her auburn hair tumbling down on his naked shoulders. “Thank you, my love.”

  She left the warm tangled bed, and a moment later the connecting door closed. In the morning she was refreshed, humming as they walked down to breakfast.

  “What a lovely dream I had, Mack. I dreamed you and I made love. We made a little bargain beforehand too. I’d sleep with you if you would take me to see the airplanes. Yesterday, you didn’t sound at all enthusiastic. I thought you loved new inventions.”

  “I do,” he said with surprising vigor. He’d shaved clean and close, put on fresh linen. Despite the wine he had no hangover. For the first time in months, he felt better.

  “Good, it’s settled.” To the Waiter she said, “A table in the sunshine, please.”

  71

  A THREE-CAR PACIFIC electric special arrived at Dominguez Junction every 120 seconds. From there it was a half-mile hike up a muddy road to the flat summit of Dominguez Hill. Promoters of the air meet had constructed a grandstand to hold twenty-six thousand, a three-mile wire fence to protect spectators from taxiing aircraft, and an area of large exhibition tents behind the stands. Special telephone lines linked the site to the city room of the Los Angeles Examiner. Concession booths lined both sides of the auto road leading to the hilltop. The promoters christened it Av
iation Park.

  From a modest twenty thousand or so on opening day, attendance jumped to forty thousand a day by the end of the first week. On Sunday, a boy and an older man squeezed in with many others aboard one of the P.E. specials from downtown. The boy’s left shoulder dipped noticeably each time he put his weight on his left foot. The man used a cane and moved stiffly because of arthritis. He was tall, and so was the eleven-year-old with the handsome face, blond hair, and dark-blue eyes. Both seemed to be crippled. People took them for relatives.

  The boy went by the name Jim David, the first name that had come into his head when the older man asked what to call him. The man was called Jocker Sprue, though that wasn’t his real first name. “I was named for various thimble-riggers, money-grubbers, and whited sepulchers among my ancestors in the tidewater of Virginia. My full name, I regret to say, is Arlington Arvide Murtha Sprue,” he said once, when Jim asked the question. “Is that a mother’s triple sin against her offspring, or isn’t it?”

  Jocker was the tall man who had created such an impression of terror in those vividly remembered moments just before the Valencia Street Hotel collapsed and a wall came down on them in the alley. Jocker had flung himself on top of Jim instinctively, and being more agile then, and powerfully strong from living a rough life in hobo jungles, he protected Jim in those moments when lath and plaster, siding and flooring and roofing and even a bed fell and buried them.

  Jim had been knocked out for a while, waking to darkness, choking dust, and the weight of Jocker and the rubble on top of him.

  “Shout, boy,” came Jocker’s hoarse voice in the dark. “Shout and pray to God somebody pays attention. It’s an earthquake, and a bad one.”

  They yelled, “Help, under here, somebody help,” for what seemed like hours, meantime listening to a growing cacophony of sounds: fires crackling, injured or dying hotel guests moaning and pleading, people running and yelling in fear. Finally Jim felt he could yell no more and, in a gasp, said so. The unseen man whose weight was grinding down on him managed to grasp his shoulder and squeeze it—an excruciating pain.