“This ground.” He raised both hands and placed them on his breast.
I hardly paid attention to the rest of the speech. The single camera swung constantly from the crowd to the speaker. I was more interested in the agility with which Reiter, a heavy and muscular bull-necked man, ran constantly back and forth around the edges of the set as he shouted and barked at the actors, careful to stay out of the circle of light at the center which was sacrosanct to the camera. His eyeglasses, with lenses so thick that through them his eyes appeared like two milky underwater creatures, now and then caught a gleam of light from the reflector screens. With one hand he slapped the rattan riding crop against his leg, and with the other he scratched nervously at his throat through the neck of the open shirt.
“Lincoln!” he yelled.
The speaker was just concluding. He was making his most histrionic gesture of all, a broad spreading of the arms that seemed to encompass not only the listening crowd but all truth, wisdom, and idealism.
“… Shall. Not. Perish. From the earth,” he enunciated with emphasis on each of the phrases which he separated carefully one from the other.
“Crowd!”
On this signal the crowd raised their own arms and began waving them wildly.
“Hurrah.”
“Hurrah.”
“Hurrah.”
Reiter turned from them and sprang away to the other side of the set. “Lincoln!” he yelled.
The camera swung back to the speaker. But he was silent now, standing with hands clasped and head slightly lowered as though in meditation. He turned to one side. The man sitting in the chair stood up and they shook hands.
“Cut. Good. Print that,” yelled Reiter.
He took his hat off, produced a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his head with it. He was almost bald and his head was closely shaved. His skull, rather than round, was formed entirely of intersecting planes and seemed to be polished; it reflected light like the finest marble. He put his hat back on and then took off his eyeglasses and polished them too, but not with the same handkerchief; he had another one for this purpose.
“A two-reeler,” said Nesselrode. “Would you believe, only twenty minutes of picture and it takes a week to shoot.”
The bearded man mopped his brow. The makeup girl came up and repaired the damage to his cosmetics, filling in his wrinkles with a little brush. The grips began dragging everything—klieg lights, generators, reflector screens, and Reiter’s canvas chair in which he never sat—over to the next set. This consisted of two walls of some room or other in the White House. There were lace curtains on the windows of the flimsy walls, which were propped up on the outside with two-by-fours. For furniture there was a chair, an oaken table, and an American flag hanging on the wall. The bearded man, in the same costume except that he had taken off his hat, stood talking to a plump lady whose monobust filled the front of her ample linen blouse.
Reiter examined the shot through the viewfinder. Then he sprang down and began pacing around like a cat again. “Lights. Camera. Action,” he yelled.
The bearded man stood with his knuckles resting on the large round oaken table with its ball-and-claw legs. “Mary,” he said, “my mind is made up. I am going to Ford’s Theatre tonight whatever the danger. I must show myself to the people.”
“Cut!” yelled Reiter. The lights went out and the clucking of the camera stopped. “Morton, what is wrong with you? Is your face paralyzed by some disease or what? You say everything exactly the same. Make your face different each time you say something.”
“Different how?”
“Oh, my God.” Reiter slapped his breeches irritatedly with the crop. “Do I have to tell you every little thing? Mind is made up. Resolution. Whatever the danger. Contempt for danger. Show myself to the people. Courage.”
The bearded man adjusted his string necktie, took a breath, and rested his knuckles on the table again. The plump lady began wringing her hands in anxiety even before he began speaking.
“Lights. Camera. Action.”
The bearded man pressed his lips together, raised his head, and gazed resolutely at his wife.
“Mary, my mind is made up.”
He frowned darkly and clenched his fingers, both those of the hand resting on the table and the other that hung at his side.
“I am going to Ford’s Theatre tonight whatever the danger.”
He straightened his body to its full height, removed the frown from his face, and gazed into the distance with a stern and courageous look of determination.
“I must show myself to the people.”
“Cut. Good. Print that,” yelled Reiter.
“Reiter, a genius,” repeated Nesselrode.
The klieg lights went out. The grips began dragging everything over to yet another set. Reiter followed them, switching his crop, and Nesselrode and I came along after. This set had two parts to it. Below was a little corner of a theater stage, and above it and to one side was a balcony with a box at the rear. The extras, still in their Gettysburg Address costumes, took their places in the balcony. The camera ground away at several shots of these people staring at something in front of and below them, at the end of each shot clapping mechanically like dolls. Responding to Reiter’s shouts, the crowd smiled and then unsmiled at certain points. In the box, the bearded man and the lady with the monobosom gazed unsmilingly down at the stage, she anxious, he resolute and calm.
“Cut!” yelled Reiter.
He turned to me, seeming to notice me for the first time.
“A good-looking boy.”
“He’s the type to be in pictures,” said Nesselrode, staring at me with one of his sideways twitches. “Already I told him so.”
“Has he ever worked?”
“No, but a natural. A genius. He could go far.”
It struck me that Nesselrode used the word genius rather loosely. Still I couldn’t help feeling flattered.
Reiter no longer slapped his breeches with his crop. His manner became natural, almost amiable. He was a human being after all.
“Why don’t you try it?” he asked me in a friendly tone. “It’s easy. Just for a lark.”
“It’s like I told you,” said Nesselrode. “You don’t have to know something. Just do what the director says.”
The costume people appeared. I allowed them to clap a frock coat on me and fasten a bow tie with an elastic clip around my neck. The black trousers I had on would do, but they pushed me down into a chair and put riding boots on my feet. I stepped up onto the tiny fragment of stage and an old-fashioned horse pistol was thrust into my hand. I fired away at the bearded man on the balcony, who fell from his chair with both hands on his chest. “Sic semper tyrannis!” I cried spontaneously, catching my spur in the flag and breaking my leg.
They helped me up. “Not bad for a beginner,” said Reiter. The bearded man in the balcony got up and dusted off the seat of his breeches. The lady with the monobust had been waiting all through this scene to belch. She now did so politely, holding her hand before her mouth.
“You see, Morton,” Reiter told the bearded man, “this boy knows how to act. As he fired, he screwed his face up into a grimace of resolution.”
“It wasn’t that,” I said. “I was afraid of the noise of the gun going off.”
“It doesn’t make any noise,” said Reiter.
It was true; it didn’t make any noise. I hadn’t noticed.
5.
Everybody dispersed. The grips wandered off together to a low platform a short distance away, sat down on it, and lighted cigarettes. A gang of carpenters appeared and began prying apart the Ford’s Theatre set with crowbars and throwing the pieces onto a pile at one side. Everybody else had disappeared. There was no sign of Nesselrode and Reiter. I couldn’t imagine where everyone had gone off to so suddenly; it was as though they had evaporated by magic. The only one left was the script-girl, a crisp young woman with bobbed hair and a tailored suit. She was sitting in a canvas chair flipping t
he pages of the script and crossing things out.
“Excuse me. Where …”
Without looking up she pointed toward a door at the other side of the studio. She went back to crossing things out in her script.
I pushed open the door and went out into the blinding sunlight. Directly opposite, across a yard of dirt thinly sprinkled with gravel, was a long stucco building with a sign reading “Commissary” over the door. I went in, more to get out of the sunlight than anything else.
The large room inside seemed only half finished. There was no ceiling and the bare beams showed overhead. Along the middle were long wooden tables with benches, something like those at a summer camp for children. At one side was a bar where you could get coffee, doughnuts, and desiccated sandwiches made of white bread curled up at the corners. The place was filled with people and everyone was smoking and chattering.
I got a cup of coffee for myself and wandered around looking for a place to sit down. Every bench seemed occupied and a number of people were standing. Most of the people in the room were in costume; I caught sight of Lincoln in his stovepipe hat, Mary Todd Lincoln with her monobust, and a figure or two from the Lincoln picture extras. Others from other pictures were dressed as Austrian diplomats in white uniforms or Indian chiefs with feather headdresses.
After a while I began to notice that the people in the room were not distributed evenly. They seemed to cluster about certain foci of interest. As I studied this phenomenon I saw that they had gathered around stars or important directors, as though drawn by a kind of magnetism, or in the way bees are attracted to the scent of flowers. This was why so many people were standing; they had gathered behind other seated people in order to be as close as possible to some person of importance. Reiter was the center of one of these groups, and so was Charles Morton, the bearded man who had played Lincoln. Another group had gathered around a handsome young man with a clipped mustache, and I recognized him as Roland Lightfoot, whose photograph I had seen in the playbill at the Alhambra Theater.
I moved around through these groups trying to find an empty place at a table where I could sit down with my cup of coffee. Then I stopped: seated at a table nearby with a crowd of people around her was the most strikingly beautiful woman I had ever seen. She had a clear porcelain-pale complexion, with dark eyes and dark eyelashes. Her face was a perfect oval, the features delicate, the mouth small but mobile and expressive. Her dark hair, bobbed short in the fashionable boyish style, accentuated the almost shocking whiteness of her face, like the shadow of a blackbird on snow. Even more than all this it was something about her poise or her manner that caught my attention. She seemed conscious of the admiration she attracted and held her chin up in an imperious and theatrical, slightly affected way, and yet she had the air of being constantly amused by everything. As I stared at her she caught my eye and our glances were locked for a moment. She smiled briefly, then she looked away.
I made my way down the room through the crowd, the coffee still in my hand. By some incredible luck there was a place free on the bench across from her. I manipulated my legs over the bench with care not to spill the coffee. She watched me as I did this, still with her air as though she were amused at something, perhaps at me.
I saw now that she was sitting with another actor, a lean man somewhat smaller than ordinary size with the look of an acrobat about him. He was dressed like a vaudeville English lord, in a cutaway coat, striped trousers, and a collapsible silk hat. His face too was white, but in his ease it looked as though it had been painted with white paint. His smile was an acidic rictus that seemed permanently frozen on his face. The monocle in his eye was only an empty metal ring; there was no glass in it.
He went on examining me with his slightly insane smile, and I found this unsettling. I turned back to the girl with the dark eyes. At closer range I saw that she was perhaps not as young as she had seemed at first; her face was smooth and perfect but without gloss, like expensive bond paper. I didn’t know what to say. After a moment it was she who spoke, with a quick friendly lifting of the corners of her mouth.
“How did it go?”
“All right.”
I stared at her. Everything about her was fragile, symmetrical, and perfect. Her pale complexion seemed to radiate a faint coolness. Against this the darkness of the eyes and the lock of hair over the brow, the expressiveness of the small mouth, offered a mélange of artificial and yet disturbing beauty that struck with the kind of power one sometimes feels in the presence of a work of art, a perfect alabaster fragment perhaps from the antique world. For the first time I noticed what she was wearing: a simple white frock, almost childish, and a ribbon in her hair. Her glance was clear and candid; there was something childlike about it too, in spite of the nuance of irony that lingered always just below the surface of her expression. I took a sip of coffee and set it down. I tried to collect my wits to think of something to say.
“I don’t believe I know who you are.”
“Of course you do. I’m Moira Silver. And this is …”
She turned with a theatrical gesture of introduction to the man at her side. He was carrying an umbrella in his hands clasped behind his back, and without changing his expression he manipulated this so that the silk hat tipped up in the back and then came down again.
“Lord Muldoon, at your service.”
I ignored him and turned back to the girl. “Have you been in pictures long?” I managed to articulate.
“Oh, for a long time,” she said.
“They haven’t been making pictures for such a long time.”
“Yes, but you see, here everything happens so quickly that we have a different concept of time.” She smiled again, seemingly pleased that she was able to answer my question so adroitly. After a moment she said, “But you haven’t told us your name.”
“Alys.”
She and Lord Muldoon exchanged a look at this. They both remained perfectly grave, although the sardonic rictus remained fixed on his face. Perhaps it was only makeup, the painted smile of a clown.
I still felt cold and hot at the same time. I wondered if I was blushing. Since there were no mirrors, I raised my hand for some totally irrational reason and looked at it instead. It was as white as the other faces around me. She watched with calm curiosity as I did all this.
“Smoke?” inquired Lord Muldoon with his skull-like grin.
He drew two long thin cigars from the inner pocket of his coat and offered me one. The other he put in his mouth. I looked around but there were no matches on the table. Lord Muldoon was feeling around in his pockets, first the left and then the right. He came out with— nothing, just his hand. Holding it out in the air before him, he scratched his thumb against two fingers. Nothing happened. He looked at the hand with a frown. He made a slight adjustment to an imaginary screw of some kind, using the fingernail of the other hand as a screwdriver. This time, when he scratched the two fingers again, a pale steady flame leaped out and stood on the upright thumb. He offered this to light my cigar. I puffed until I got it going. He lit his own. Then, instead of blowing out the flame, he simply folded up the lighter—that is to say, he put his thumb back inside the two fingers and the flame disappeared.
Moira laughed, a little tinkle like a running brook. Then, after a pause, she looked at me again in her candid and friendly way, seeming to study me. The little smile was still there, but her manner was grave.
“Has anyone shown you around?”
“Shown me around?”
She came around the table and took my hand. I got up. “Ta ta,” said Lord Muldoon indifferently.
Moira led me out through another door at the side of the commissary, one I hadn’t noticed before.
We went down a path that led off toward some sets erected on the bare and dusty ground in the distance. From the rear you couldn’t tell what the sets were, but when we passed through a gap between two of the flimsy board-and-canvas structures we came out into a western cowboy town, complete with saloon,
boardinghouse, hitching posts, and a broad main street suitable for shoot outs. The set looked a little shabby and the torn canvas was hanging down on the front of the boardinghouse; it hadn’t been used for some time. The next set was more pleasant; Moira led me along a sidewalk through what appeared to be a modest suburban neighborhood with rose-covered bungalows, picket fences, and so on.
“A nice place to marry and settle down,” I suggested.
“Yes. And then, we could go on our honeymoon.”
We passed through another set of flats and came out into a little corner of Venice, with palazzi, a cupola or two of St. Mark’s basilica with the fake marble walls propped up with two-by-fours, and a pair of gondolas in a canal of greenish water about fifty feet long. A pleasant coolness came up from the stretch of water, even though it was stagnant. A few old telephone poles with decorative wooden tops were driven into the mud at odd angles. We skirted along the edge of the canal, passed through the ornate papier-maché portal of a palazzo, and found ourselves on a sylvan path leading through a grove of shady sycamores. There was a white fence along one side of the path. In the distance there were buildings, a shingled roof and a fragment of white clapboard wall with a window. I could hear the plash of running water.
Moira still held my hand, in a way that was friendly but utterly without intimate significance, as one child holds the hand of another. We came out through the trees into a grassy pasture. Beyond it was a small and neatly painted New England farmhouse, and a little farther along a mill over a brook, with the mill wheel slowly turning. There were buttercups here and there in the grass, and bees buzzed lazily. Over the tops of the trees I could catch a glimpse of the corrugated-iron studios in the distance.
Here someone had been shooting a picnic scene. In the meadow by the millrace there was a white cloth laid out with a wicker picnic basket on it. Some napkins, paper cups, a thermos bottle, and other flotsam from the lunch were scattered around, and there was a ukulele lying near them on the grass.
We sat down together on the grass, Moira smiling in her significant and slightly mysterious way.
Screenplay Page 6
