by Ace Atkins
He wondered where they’d all gone.
SAM FOUND His STATEROOM, steamer trunk arriving soon after, a negro porter unloading it from his back. Sam tipped the man and sat on the small bunk, wishing for a pint of Scotch but settling for a glass of water, watching the clock on the wall, knowing the ship would sail at midnight, hearing the lot of people coming and going, screaming and yelling, excited for the big send-off.
At seven, he called the porter and ordered a bottle.
He had three stiff drinks and found himself walking the deck, crowds gathering on the railing facing the dock, waving to their families. There was champagne being chilled by barmen, ready to uncork at sea, cigarettes being smoked by women in long dresses and men in tuxedos. Chinese women handed everyone stingers and confetti, gold dust to toss into the air at send-off.
Sam checked his watch. He watched a man light another man’s cigar with the crisp burning end of some currency. They laughed and blew smoke into the air.
The wind was brisk, deafening Sam’s ears as he stared in disbelief.
He returned down below for a drink.
He had three more.
He walked back to the deck and searched for Daisy, checking a half dozen times with members of the crew. He found a spot on the railing and smoked several cigarettes until the pack was empty. He noted the time again, watching the length of Pier 35 until it came upon half past eleven, the gangplanks gone empty, men in overalls ready by the taut lines stretching down to the dock.
Sam returned below, the ship’s horns blaring, porters roaming the halls calling for all those going ashore. He checked his timepiece, feeling a gentle hum vibrating the steel of the big ship. He drank down the last of the bottle, not even bothering with the glass.
Sam reached into the pocket of his tweeds, finding not a handkerchief but a rough card. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and stared down into his palm at the small, insignificant card with numbers hammered into the type and the ink prints of two small feet.
He staggered to his feet, searching for the hall, instead finding a dressing mirror. “Goddamn son of a bitch.”
When he opened the door, people were running crazy down the halls, throwing streamers and confetti, and champagne had already been uncorked while they were still moored. Sam staggered the hallways, using the walls for balance, getting lost, running into people, women kissing him full on the lips, until he finally found the porter and gave him a silver dollar and begged him to please unload his trunk before they sailed.
“Just set it on the pier,” Sam said. “I’ll find it. It’s been with me for some time.”
The man looked confused, black face wise and weathered, but pocketed the money. Sam wavered on his feet.
He followed the hall and then another and twisted down into the guts of the ship and down a staircase into the clanging engine room. Men in white coveralls shoveled coal into the red-hot furnace, stoking the fire, wiping their brows, getting the steamer prepped for the journey.
Sam could not breathe, the heat and grit of the place wrenching his lungs. Two crewmen passed, not giving him a second glance, and Sam rounded the short staircase up to the steel deck overlooking the workers. With his pocketknife, he again unscrewed the vent and pulled away the grille, reaching his arm far into the air duct, fingers fanning as far as they could for the hidden fire hose but only feeling the heat in the shaft and an endless void. He stretched in with all of his shoulder, finding the short curve where he pushed the nozzle, spreading out the length of his fingers, but he knew the gold was gone.
He pulled out his hand, wiping the coal dust on his pants, replaced the grille, and screwed the vent back in place.
Sam felt a hand on his shoulder.
He turned into the face of the first officer, the same man he’d met the first day on the ship. McManus. Sam gave him his best sober stare, his legs feeling unsteady.
“Already working?” the first officer asked.
“You?” Sam asked.
The first officer shook his head. “You’re the second person givin’ the engine room a good thorough look today.”
“And the other was a nice-looking gal with silver eyes.”
“How’d you know?”
Sam shrugged in the sloppy manner of a drunk.
“One last thing,” Sam asked. “Which way is up?”
FOR THE NEW YEAR’S PARTY, Hearst had a carousel delivered to the great dock at San Simeon. The guests had arrived by boat and stayed in tents all along the beach and were given rides up to the top of the hill where the castle was just beginning to take shape. Nearing midnight, Hearst finally gained his favorite carousel horse, a violent black mare with a fearsome carved face and golden saddle, and he delighted in his whirl around the sights, the dock, the tents, the vast hills. He laughed at it all, clowning for a little crowd waiting for their turn. Hearst made a big show of riding with no hands and, on another pass, sidesaddle, but what really got them was when he rode backward, waving to them all and laughing. Marion was alongside him and then behind him and then on the opposite side of the carousel, and after a few rotations, the night filled with the gay-piped calliope music, he walked in the opposite direction, the very axis tilting under him, until he made it nearly around and saw her sitting astride the giant white filly with the pink hair and the gay mouth, and she was laughing uproariously, holding a batch of cotton candy. And Hearst just stood there, seeing the enjoyment, taking pleasure in bringing it to her, very self-satisfied. He took another step forward with his giant black boots and removed his plantation hat, a stupid grin on his face, and then saw the Englishman there, holding the reigns of the false horse in his hands and performing dog tricks for his girl, pantomiming and laughing, jumping from one horse to the next.
The beach was dark, the loping hills nothing but rough-cut shadows, and the only warmth on the shore coming from the kaleidoscope of lights from the carousel and the little fires clicking along the beach where the Chinese would cook the fish and sweets in a giant party Hearst had organized to see 1922 meet its first dawn.
Hearst watched the Englishman, finding nothing attractive or charming or funny about him, wondering why the world would so adore a man like Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin held on to the golden rod of the horse, pumping up and down, Marion laughing, and made his way onto Marion’s great white horse, the one Hearst had picked out especially for her. He shrugged and smiled with so much vanity, tipping the end of a delicate champagne glass to her mouth, drinking it, spilling on the dress, a great, horrendous laugh to follow.
Hearst walked into the turn of the carousel, hands upon his back, to much laughter and praise and thanks from his guests. Men dressed as women and women as men. There were harlequins and harlots and tigers and knights. He smiled and pleasantly told them all they were welcome and returned to his great black horse, hugging its neck, the carousel pumping and twirling twice until it slowed, the calliope music gently stopping to a single note.
“You s-silly man,” Marion said.
Hearst looked up from the horse’s neck. She took off his hat and kissed him on the head. She cocked her hip in a sexy way and tipped a bottle of champagne by the neck into her mouth and throat. She kissed him again.
“H-how ’bout another turn, W.R.?”
“Whatever the lady wishes.”
“You silly man.”
He smiled at her, tasting the champagne on her lips and smelling another man’s cologne on the nape of her flowered dress.
She smiled back.
THE SECOND TRIAL was well under way in January when Sam shadowed Fred Fishback to a Chinatown opium den, Fishback having been called by McNab but not showing up to the Hall. The joint was a Hip Sing Tong place, the tongs finally settling their latest turf battle in the colony, and the owner of the place offered a little cup of ny ka pa before taking Sam into the back room, where whites and Chinese had settled themselves along bunks and relaxed against silk cushions. A little Chinese boy with a pigtail worked to attach
scrolls in the cracks of the hovel, a brisk January wind snaking through the cracks and dimming the candles in the room. The owner pointed to Fishback, who rested in a lower bunk with two women clutched to his chest, his own loose hand on his forehead, a great smile on his face when he saw Sam. One woman turned her head, awaking from her dream, and clawed her hand up at the wavering image of Sam.
It was Alice Blake, her face a mess of paint, a sloppy red smile on her lips.
The other woman, the girl from the Manchu, settled into Fishback’s chest.
“Boom, chisel, chisel,” Sam said. “Boom, chisel.”
The girl said, “Yes, of course.”
Fishback’s face looked as if it were made of parched paper, dark circles under his eyes, a lazy, go-to-hell look. He’d grown a clipped mustache, the rest of his face stubbled and unshaven.
On the top bunk, a Chinese man in traditional silk getup stroked a white cat as he sucked on a pipe.
“Have you ever danced on a table?” Fishback asked, disheveled but still handsome.
Sam didn’t say anything.
“We all danced,” Fishback said, as if the words called for great effort.
“For two days straight. With my beauties.” He kissed them and looked to Sam. “And now I’m no longer afraid of death. I’m so rude. Would you like a smoke?”
“I’ll stick to Scotch.”
“You show ’em.”
Fishback laughed and rocked back into the bed. The girls snuggled into him.
“I just finished a film,” Fishback said. “And I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted and my mind was still going. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
“I have something for you,” Sam said, pulling the subpoena from his coat.
“I like to do something I fear,” Fishback said. “I like to set up obstacles and defeat them. I like to be afraid of the project. I always am. When I get into something, really into something, I always believe I shouldn’t have the job. But you know what? I fooled them again. I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it. The anxiety works for me.”
“You’re wanted in court tomorrow.”
“You can’t save him.”
“Tomorrow,” Sam said, tossing the subpoena into his lap.
Alice Blake picked it from his chest and opened it with thick fingers. She squinted one eye at Sam and made a gun from a thumb and forefinger and just said, “Kennedy,” before leaning over and kissing the Oriental gal and resting her head on Fishback’s chest.
“Doesn’t he look like Wallace Reid?” Fishback asked.
Two days later, Fishback testified. McNab slung arrows. Fishback repeated the same tale from the first trial.
Five days later, a masseuse showed up at his hotel room. She found him naked, cold, and dead on the floor. His body was shipped back to Los Angeles on the same train that had brought Virginia and buried not ten paces from her.
34
Roscoe stood trial for killing Virginia Rappe three times. The third jury acquitted him after deliberating for five minutes, calling the case an insult to their intelligence and even posing for pictures with him after the whole thing wrapped. They wrote him a letter of apology that all the newspapers ran, except the Hearst papers, Roscoe noted, and by April the movie houses had dusted off their reels of Crazy to Marry and Gasoline Gus. He could now drive down to the airfields and picnic as the zeppelins would take off and land and was welcomed on picture sets with his old buddy Buster, who asked him if he’d like to direct a couple comedies he’d written during all this mess. Minta stayed on with him, Ma taking a room downstairs by the bowling alley, and all through those first days in April he’d join his ex-wife at the piano and they’d remember old songs from when they were teenagers performing at the Byde-A-While, and sometimes Roscoe would accompany her on kazoo, bringing Luke to his feet with a great howl.
It was two days after Easter, not even a week since returning home, that Al Zukor showed up at the West Adams house, refusing to hand over his coat to the butler, saying he didn’t want to interrupt, only to offer the congratulations of everyone at the picture company.
Roscoe offered him a tea, coffee, a cigar perhaps? But Zukor said he really must be going.
“I have some ideas,” Roscoe said. “Some of the pictures we had set, I think I like Thirty Days best. A rich playboy who can only escape his woman’s rival by ducking into prison. I make fun of the situation, that’s the only way.”
Zukor nodded.
“Would you like to hear a song?” Roscoe asked.
“I really must be going.”
“Dine with us, Musso and Frank’s. Like the old days.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Roscoe looked at him.
“The Hays Commission, Will Hays, has banned you.”
“Banned me?” Roscoe said, laughing. “From what?”
“Making pictures.”
“I was acquitted.”
“There was a deal,” Zukor said, his eyes finding the floor. “You are doing the industry a great service. Be patient, mein Kind. If it wasn’t for the commission, every goddamn picture would be sliced up by every two-bit censor and religious nut.”
“I’ve lost a chunk of change during this mess,” Roscoe said. “They say they could take my home.”
“You’ll be back,” Zukor said. “I just wanted you to hear from me and not those goddamn newspapermen. They should be knocking on your door anytime. I suggest you get out while you can. Ask for a private table. They’ll understand.”
Roscoe felt a palsy in his cheeks. Minta rose from the piano. Roscoe held the edge of the piano. Luke sniffed at Zukor’s leg and began a low growl.
“How can they do this?”
“We voted,” Zukor said. “All of us did. It was best with the trial and all, and a few other things. The average Joe thinks Hollywood is the devil’s garden. See? We have to show them different. Listen, I tried my best to stop Hays, but he was intent that you were taught a lesson.”
“I was acquitted.”
“He said it sends the wrong message, that we can’t be tough enough on our own people. We must show toughness now.” Zukor shrugged. “In a year? Maybe another story.”
Roscoe just stared at him, feeling his heart drop, wanting a drink very badly.
“Maybe we can get a deal for Luke,” Zukor said. “How’d you like that?” Luke continued to growl, Minta walking by Roscoe and grabbing the dog’s collar. Teeth now bared.
Zukor had a fine camel coat laid across his arm and a beaver hat in his fingers that he nearly dropped while trying to shake Roscoe’s hand again. Roscoe took his hand but didn’t hold it. Zukor patted his shoulder and called him his child again, and just walked away, up the little landing and across the great hallway of marble checkerboard.
Roscoe did not move.
“Why has God done this to me?”
Minta didn’t answer, only sat back at the piano and started to play a song that they sang together in all those saloons and mining towns, and he turned to her, resting his hand upon her shoulder, and joined in, taking the time for a solo on the old kazoo.
He sang louder and louder, the windows of the mansion shaking, one song breaking into the next, while the front door chimed and the telephone rang. Minta’s gentle voice warming his heart until tears ran down his face and hit the keys.
He would not star in another picture for a dozen years, the very same year he died.
IT WAS FALL OF 1924 and Hearst decided on a party, quickly settling on the theme, the birthday of his good friend Tom Ince. He cobbled together a group of thirteen, including Miss Davies, and they all sailed from Wilmington on his sturdy little Oneida. That first night there was a spectacular dinner party, lobster cocktails and roast turkey and the endless uncorking of champagne for his guests. At sunset, the crew strung red Japanese lanterns along the rigging and the whole yacht took on a mystical glow in the balmy night, the thirteen gathering on deck for song and dessert, coffee,
and more champagne. A giant birthday cake was brought out for Ince, baked in the shape of a horse since the man was famous for directing all those westerns—or what Hearst loved to call “horse operas.”
Ince blew out the candles and there was applause, and singing, and Marion announced after drinking more than she’d promised that everyone was to find a costume.
