by Howard Blum
He cried, tears racing down his face:
“I know my life. I know what I have done. My life has not been perfect. It has been human, too human. I have felt the heartbeats of every man who lived. I have tried to be the friend of every man who lived. I have tried to help in the world. I have not had malice in my heart. I have had love for my fellow men. I have done the best I could.”
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As he finished, the jury wept unashamedly along with him.
At 9:20 the next morning, the judge offered a final word of advice to the jury. “May God give you the wisdom to see the right and the courage to do the right.” Then the twelve men went off to decide Darrow’s fate.
Forty minutes later the jury returned.
“What does it mean?” Ruby asked her husband.
“Maybe they want some instructions,” he said. The trial had lasted three months. There were five thousand pages of transcripts in eighty-nine volumes. It seemed impossible that a verdict could have been reached so quickly.
Judge Hutton addressed the jurors: “Your pleasure?”
“A verdict,” said Foreman Williams.
“You may read it.”
The foreman paused and then spoke in a loud, clear voice: “Not guilty!”
At lunchtime the celebration moved from the courtroom to the nearby Café Martan. A photograph was taken of the victory luncheon, and it remains a revealing memento. There is Ruby in a wide-brimmed dark hat, hair pulled up to reveal a long stately neck, and her face is radiant. With the verdict, her worries lifted. Next to her is Darrow. A lock of hair falls carelessly over his forehead as he bends to read the afternoon papers’ reporting on the verdict. He has been vindicated, but there is no look of triumph on his face. His pouchy face is set in stern resolve. He was judged not guilty, but he knew he was not innocent. It is the face of a man who understands how narrow was his escape and who realizes the responsibilities he must assume. With today’s verdict, the McNamara case was finally over. He must now find the spirit to move forward with the flow of history. And standing behind Darrow, her sharp eyes craning over his shoulder as she attempts to read the newspaper he’s holding, is Mary Field. Hers is a secret smile, for she also knows the truth. She, too, knows how close Darrow came to giving in. She knows he has been blessed. Mary and Darrow are no longer lovers. But some ties remain, and at this moment it’s as if she’s looking at him filled with a wondrous question: What will my Darrow do with this unexpected gift of the rest of his life?
FORTY-FIVE
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AMERICA BEGAN TO CHANGE. With the verdict and the end at last of the McNamara case, it was as if the national equilibrium had been restored. Politics became less rancorous. Terror no longer seemed a sustainable ideal. Strikes continued, but the class war had eased; a new civil war pitting labor against capital no longer seemed a possibility. Entrepreneurial opportunities took shape, and they spread through the nation’s cities and towns as a more hopeful alternative to the desperation of violence. Another harbinger: Just three months after the acquittal in Los Angeles, the progressive idealist Woodrow Wilson was elected president. The country was on its way to becoming a different place. And swept along by this transforming flow of modern American energy, Darrow became a movie star.
Frank Wolfe, the McNamara defense team’s publicist and Socialist city council candidate, had written and directed an epic. Released in 1913, From Dusk to Dawn was a five-reel extravaganza with a cast of more than ten thousand, a rambling story about love and politics. And it was a film, as Wolfe was the first to acknowledge proudly, that would not have been possible without the precedent of D.W.’s genius.
The Biograph movies had been Wolfe’s entire film education. He had sat in the dark and watched and learned. D.W. had taught him that moving pictures could tell a story, and that the story could have a moral and intellectual force. He had been seduced by D.W.’s new aesthetic. Close-ups, cross-cutting, realism, star performers—Wolfe had unashamedly purloined an innovative cinematic grammar from the Biograph one-reelers.
Wolfe was D.W.’s child, but—his own great intellectual gift—his political passions and experiences ran deeper than his teacher’s. And from this hard-won knowledge, he created a film that was a product of its unique moment in American history. It was a story fundamentally about justice. Its tacit message: After the years of terrorist bombings, twentieth-century America needed to find the moral wisdom to do things in a better, more equitable way.
Dusk told a wonderfully hopeful yarn. Iron molder Dan Grayson and laundress Carlena Wayne fall in love and battle for better wages and working conditions. Cavalier managers fire them both. A resolute Dan, however, fights backs—not with bricks or bombs but with nonviolence. He organizes the workers. Marching in orderly formations, hands firmly clasped and mouths shut in a defiant silence, the strikers refuse to be intimidated by management. And they triumph. The laundries and iron foundries become more reasonable places to work. In recognition of this accomplishment, Dan is persuaded to run for governor on the Socialist ticket. The workers flock to the polls, and Dan wins in a landslide. The movie ends with this vision of a peaceful, democratic solution to the inequities in American life; and Dan and Carlena, their hands entwined in a lovers’ secure grasp, vow to “become comrades for life.”
Visually, the film is a spectacle. Wolfe’s ambition was purposefully large. He staged rallies bursting with people, panning his camera over thousands of extras. He interspersed into the narrative actual footage of the masses marching in Labor Day parades, of line after line of stolid picketers staring down real-life management goons, of rows of dismal tenements. The total effect is visceral: The movie is as sprawling, tumultuous, and momentous as the first decade of the twentieth century.
And the film is filled with stars. Wolfe, though, cast from a different yet no less distinguished troupe than his mentor. In Dusk labor leaders and Socialist politicians play themselves. But it is Darrow, the instinctive actor, whom the camera adores. He steals the movie.
True, Darrow’s part is deliberately tailored to his strengths. But this accommodation makes his performance no less riveting. After Dan’s nomination for governor, his wary enemies frame him. He is put on trial for conspiracy charges, and the legendary Darrow arrives to handle the defense. Rumpled yet charged with a remarkable fervor, staring into the camera with a fierce light in his eyes, Darrow delivers a spellbinding speech to the jury. It is, word for passionate word, taken directly from the redeeming summation he made at his own trial. Of course, Dan is acquitted too.
Dusk was an unexpected commercial success. In New York it was booked into the entire Loews chain, and a half-million people saw it. In Chicago and nearby towns, it played in forty-five theaters in two weeks and set attendance records. From there it moved on to movie theaters around the country.
And so the ideas flowed, from politics to art and back to politics and on and on across the nation, in a recurring circuit of relevance and inspiration. D.W.’s prophecy that movies would become “a new force in the intellectual world as revolutionary as electricity” was more than a poetic simile. The current of energy now coursing through American life was inescapable and transforming.
And just as the student had learned from the master, D.W. learned from Wolfe, too. He now dreamed of creating a spectacle. He wanted to bring the scale and drama of the nation’s defining moments to the screen. But first he would have to break with Biograph.
When he returned from California, D.W. found the new studio in the Bronx a disappointment. The commercial success of his films had paid for the two huge indoor stages—one artificially lit, the other a daylight studio—as well as officelike dressing rooms and oversize prop and wardrobe rooms. But it gave him no pride. He found the structure numbing, as dreary as a factory. He was an artist, and when he walked into the new building, he felt his spirits sink.
The studio heads sensed this resentment; and cautious and ungrateful, they were quick to encourage it. D.W. w
as making them uncomfortable. The scale of his filmmaker’s vision had grown too large. It scared them. It was too ambitious and therefore too expensive.
Jeremiah Kennedy, Biograph’s chief money man, made the studio’s position clear. “The time has come for the production of big fifty-thousand-dollar pictures,” he told D.W. “You are the man to make them. But Biograph is not ready to go into that line of production. If you stay with Biograph it will be to make the same kind of short pictures that you have in the past. You will not do that. You’ve got the hundred-thousand-dollar idea in the back of your mind.”
Kennedy was right; and without bitterness D.W. left. He decided to align himself with Harry Aitken’s Mutual Films. “Mutual Movies Make Time Fly” was the independent studio’s slogan. But with ruthless determination D.W. was preparing to make a film that did much more than that.
Just days before his deal with Mutual was announced, a full-page ad appeared in the New York Dramatic Mirror. The ad was signed by Albert H.T. Banzhaf, who identified himself as “counselor at law and personal representative.” But D.W. was the advertisement’s guiding force.
The ad was a celebration of all D.W. had accomplished in the five years—an implausibly brief time—since he had so casually been given the opportunity to direct The Adventures of Dollie. It publicly identified D.W. as the “producer of all great Biograph successes,” the films “revolutionizing motion picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art.” It was D.W., the ad boldly insisted, who had invented the close-up, the long shot, crosscutting, and “restraint in expression.” And it listed, incredibly, 151 of the most famous Biograph films he had made.
What self-promotion! D.W. had proclaimed to the nation that he was a director, an artist, and the inventor of a new industry. He had declared himself the biggest star in the moving-picture business.
Yet, it was inspired. There was more than a megalomaniac ego pushing D.W. The director understood fame. The man who had created the Biograph girls, Pickford, and the Gishes grasped the country’s easy infatuation with celebrity. And he realized it would now be essential to establish his image, too, in people’s minds. For he was contemplating a creation on a scale unprecedented in the art of America. He was ready to throw himself into it without hesitation, but at the same time he shrewdly began working the levers of celebrity in the hope of commanding the audience’s support even as he took the first preliminary steps.
He had an idea for a new movie. “A big movie,” he told people. Frank Woods, who wrote scenarios, had suggested to the director that he take a look at Frank Dixon’s best-selling novel The Clansman. D.W. read the book—an odd, sour, and disturbingly racist reinterpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction—and it took an immediate hold over his filmmaker’s mind. Its fraudulent mythology of gallant white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan riders defending the downtrodden southern gentry from the nefarious clutches of libidinous former slaves reinforced the saga he had invented to explain his own Kentucky family’s sad decline. From the start D.W. saw the opportunity to create an American epic. Large, magnificent screen images started appearing to him as if summoned from a trance. “Now I could see a chance to do this ride-to-the-rescue on a grand scale,” he explained. “Instead of saving one poor little Nell of the Plains, this ride would be to save a nation.”
As D.W. worked the movie out in his mind—he never used a formal script—its message and visual power grew not just out of his southern childhood but also from his recent years in Los Angeles. He wanted to make a movie that was a “a true history” of the Civil War, but many of his ideas were inspired by the near second civil war he had lived through in that city, the raging battle between capital and labor that had culminated in the crime of the century.
D.W.’s ambition was to show audiences how the war had brought the South down low, leaving the white plantation gentry victimized and powerless against the carpetbaggers and unscrupulous former slaves. Crushed to near despair, its women threatened, the only hope for the southern white man was to fight back. And therefore, as D.W. creatively (and rather disingenuously) spun the tale, the Ku Klux Klan came into being. Galloping through the night, white sheets flying in the wind, the Klan were avengers. Men on a mission. Violence, D.W. believed, was the only possible response by proud men to their oppression.
It was a complexity—logic as paradox as well as moral justification—that had first taken shape in the director’s mind as he sorted through the uproar and trial surrounding the bombing of the Los Angeles Times. Labor, he had come to believe, had no choice but to fight back against the powerful forces grinding the workingman down. It was war, and dynamite was a cruel but necessary weapon. Like Steffens, D.W. had come to accept “justifiable dynamiting.” He, too, felt that a conspiracy of capital had left labor with no choice but to turn violent. And like Scripps, he mourned the twenty-one dead but nevertheless sympathized with the argument that those killed were “soldiers enlisted under a capitalist employer whose main purpose in life was warfare against the unions.”
D.W.’s South was only a distant childhood memory, but the events in Los Angeles were more recent, more affecting, and more involving. They held center stage in his thoughts. And as D.W.’s vision of the past took shape, as the movie he wanted to make began to play out in his mind, it was all filtered through his understanding of the McNamara case. A combative, retributive urgency, powered by the same exaggerations of sentiment and desperation that had led reasonable men to resort to terror or to bribe jurors, now fused through the director’s consciousness and energized his creator’s vision. And he saw a story of tremendous power, filled with magnificent images, a movie unlike any that had ever been made.
D.W. had Aitken acquire the rights to Dixon’s novel for the colossal price of $25,000. Then he returned to Los Angeles and threw himself into making The Birth of a Nation.
D.W.’s intent was to rewrite history. In the process the director, like Darrow, like Billy, would help America—its art, its ideals, its imagination—move into the modern world. It was a confident time. So much had been accomplished, yet there was the untamed promise of still grander gifts. D.W. felt certain that his great success, and the nation’s, was still to come.
EPILOGUE
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THE ALEX
EPILOGUE
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THE THREE MEN DID, in fact, meet. The detective, the lawyer, and the director found themselves at the same moment one spring evening in 1912 in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel.
It was just days after Billy and Rogers had come to blows in the courthouse corridor.
D.W. was sitting on a brown leather couch in the high-ceilinged lobby. It was his habit to smoke an after-dinner cigar before returning to the studio projection room to review the day’s rushes.
Darrow, as it happened, was making his slow, ponderous way to the bar. Steffens had returned to town to testify about his earlier role in the McNamara settlement negotiations; that the talks had been so far along that Darrow’s bribing a juror would have been unnecessary. The writer had checked into the Alex that afternoon and now was waiting in a booth in the bar.
And Billy was striding across a large reddish Oriental carpet on his way to the dining room. Since finishing up on the witness stand, he had stayed in Los Angeles to meet with Mayor Alexander and several of the M&M officers in the hope of persuading them to release the city’s share of the reward money. But the conversations had not been encouraging, and he had made plans to return to Chicago.
As Billy headed to the dining room at the rear of the lobby, D.W. noticed his old acquaintance. The director rose and took a couple of long, looping strides toward him. Billy saw the tall, thin man approaching and veered to greet him. And at the same moment his route intersected with Darrow’s.
All at once they were standing together: D.W., Billy, and Darrow.
The lawyer took one look at the man fate had put in his path, and for a moment he seemed too stunned to speak. “Mr. Bu
rns,” he managed at last, the words sounding flat and hollow. Then without another comment he continued across the long lobby on his way to meet Steffens in the bar.
D.W. asked Billy if that was who he thought it was.
Indeed it was, said the detective.
The director made a small, amused face. Then he focused all his attention on Billy. He had read about the fight with Rogers, D.W. began. And he had a question.
Billy frowned. He had grown weary of discussing the McNamara case and more recently the bribery trial. Everyone hoped to hear the inside story. There was even a New York theatrical manager who wanted to book a lecture tour. He had promised a thousand dollars a speech. Billy needed the money, but the prospect of night after night re-creating his manhunt, the arrests, and sharing stories about the many intrigues during each of the trials, left him low. He wanted to busy himself with new cases, new challenges. He did not want to live in the past. So it was with little interest and even a bit of impatience that Billy waited to hear the director’s question.
“What did you hit him with, Mr. Burns?” the director asked.
Billy laughed out loud. This was not the sort of question he had been expecting, he told D.W.
D.W. explained that on the set he often had to keep people in line with his fists. Extras were one problem, but the actors were another. One time Charlie Inslee refused to get into makeup and came at him with a beer bottle. D.W. had had no choice but to knock him out with a punch. Since then he made sure to get in some shadow-boxing each day even if he had to do it between takes. “A man must perspire once every day to keep in reasonably good health,” he was fond of saying. His curiosity, he went on, was strictly professional. He repeated the question: “What did you hit him with?”
