by Jack Finney
“And this . . .” Ted Bollinghurst was turning to move on, and now I saw that half the tables in the room weren’t tables but duplicate glass-topped display cases. We stopped at the next, lined with identical watered silk except that it was canary yellow, and bent over it. “Ramon Navarro’s whip. From Ben Hur.” And now Marion, nose almost touching the glass, was smiling: satisfied; pleased; impressed.
We walked slowly around a piano, and among the dozens of photographs on its closed top, all inscribed to Ted and often misspelling his name, I recognized Clive Brook, Leatrice Joy, Aileen Pringle, Larry Semon, Rod La Rocque, Clara Kimball Young. Marion and I looked up from them at the same time, our eyes meeting, and we smiled in recognition of what seemed like a mutual bond. It wasn’t, though; we’d each seen all these people in the same pictures, every last movement on the screen identical for each of us, but of course we’d each seen something different. For her they’d been young and beautiful people, still very much alive, the pictures new and with more to come. But for me they’d been resurrections, the miracle that movies finally made possible, of long-gone mythical people. But we smiled and nodded, each with his own pleasure, and walked on with Ted to another case like the others except that this was lined in pink.
All these watered-silk linings matched in weave and texture, differing only in color, and all were applied at the sides in tucks and flounces, but stretched tautly over smooth padding on the bottoms. On the softly lighted pink of this case lay—What was this? Hair: it was hair, jet-black, and I saw that although it lay crumpled, it retained a shape. If there’d been a way to apply it, this might have been a false beard; the Vandyke chin beard, sideburns, and joining mustache were clearly discernible. The printed card read RUDOLPH VALENTINO’S BEARD, SHAVED OFF IN THE SUMMER OF 1924 AT THE REQUEST OF THE NATIONAL BARBERS ASSOCIATION. Marion was nodding. “Yes, I remember: it was in all the papers.”
“Charley Morrison bought it. Right from the barber; it’s the real thing, all right. For only ten smackers, the lucky stiff. He’d never sell it to me, but when he died, in 1950, I bought it from his widow; made the deal at his funeral. Had to; I’d heard The Woman in Black was after it.”
On the pale apple-green lining of the next case lay a typed sheet much amended in the margins and between the lines in several handwritings. “A real prize,” Ted said. “This is the fourth and next-to-final draft of Shirley Temple’s annual letter to Santa Claus, published nation-wide every December. This was written when she was fourteen, one of the last; some of the marginal corrections are in L. B. Mayer’s own handwriting.” We stared in awe, bent over the delicate little cabinet, and I read the sheet down to “and plese, plese dear Sandy, don’t ferget all the poor childern . . .” Then I stopped.
We saw Lon Chaney’s hump from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a marvelous thing of plaster of Paris attached to a leather harness that I wouldn’t have minded owning myself and wearing around the house now and then.
We moved on to a blackened, shriveled something I thought was a meteorite lying on white silk, and I had to give Ted credit: he scrupulously explained that he wasn’t entirely certain of the authenticity of this. He thought, he had reason to believe, that this was probably the actual grapefruit half James Cagney had shoved into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy. He’d paid twenty dollars for it to a stagehand on the set who swore it was the real thing, but Ted wasn’t quite convinced that this particular rind hadn’t actually been one used only in rehearsal.
We saw, lying on silk the color of orange sherbet, three shattered ornaments shot off a Christmas tree with a popgun by William Powell in The Thin Man. And on deep-blue silk—this was authentic, because Ted had stolen it himself from Marlene Dietrich’s dressing room right after the last day’s shooting on Morocco—a bottle of leg depilatory.
On silver cloth: four crescent-shaped objects of gold. Bent over the case, I saw that their inner edges were sharp, worn to ragged paper thinness, and looking like miniature scimitars punctured with small holes. RUBY KEELER’S TAPS: WORN OUT ON THE SET OF “42ND STREET.”
“Gold?” I said to Ted.
“I had them plated.”
We saw the artificial butterfly Lew Ayres had been reaching for from his trench just as he was shot in the final scene of All Quiet on the Western Front; and a half dollar tossed by George Raft. And in one of the last cases, a small object about an inch and a half long, lying on scarlet silk. In shape it was a vague, elongated figure eight wrapped in cloudy cellophane, cinched at the middle by a paper band. There was no explanatory card, and Ted glanced uneasily at Marion, then leaned toward me. “From an Andy Hardy picture,” he whispered. “That’s the actual contraceptive Lewis Stone found in the watch pocket of Andy’s pants the morning after the junior prom. It didn’t actually show in the film, of course. Judge Hardy held it cupped in his hand when he showed it to Andy, and he didn’t say what it was; but you knew. The Judge handed me that himself.”
We’d reached the staircase landing and stopped for a moment; the wall beside it was bookshelves from floor to eye level, filled with leather-bound volumes stamped in gold on the spines. Each volume was a year’s copies of Photoplay, Silver Screen, or one of the other old movie mags, each bound in its own distinctive color. The entire lower shelf was packed with leather-bound scripts, beginning with The Great Train Robbery.
Looking at them, I was remembering an article I’d read by a psychiatrist who said it was probably lucky that not many obsessed people were rich. He gave an example of one who was: a man ridden by fear of germs. He’d begun like people we’ve all encountered, who open doors with their hand in a coat pocket to avoid germs on the knobs. But he was rich, and able to let his obsession grow unchecked. Presently he was living in a Paris hotel suite into which no one else but a single servant was ever admitted. Next he rented and kept vacant the rooms on each side, then the rooms above and below him. Isolated in space, finally, he still had to eat. And eventually reduced himself to subsisting only on overcooked meat; enormous roasts brought to the door by the hotel cook, left there for him to take in when the cook had gone. And then in the room, with his own knife, he would cut out a cube from deep in the very heart of the roast, a chunk of cooked meat that no other hand could possibly have touched before.
Ted Bollinghurst, too, was simply a man with a common obsession—a movie fan, an old-film buff, of which there are a lot of us—but with the money to take it just as far as he wanted to go. And I knew that here but for a few million dollars or so stood I. At the foot of Vilma Banky’s staircase, ready and anxious to see where they led.
I’d dreaded the question for fear of the answer, and when Marion asked it now, flicking a glance at me, I literally held my breath. “Ted, you used to collect prints of films you liked,” she began.
“Yes. Stole them, you mean.” He chuckled, and had to cough.
“Do you . . . still have them?” I wanted to put my hands to my ears, but stood openmouthed, straining for the answer.
“Well, of course. Would you like to see them?”
I exhaled so audibly that he glanced at me, and when Marion answered yes, all I could do was nod.
We turned to the stairs, and Ted led the way up them slowly but very steadily, right foot always advancing first, dry old hand sliding up the banister rail. He said, “D. W. Griffith climbed these stairs; we know that for sure. So did Mary Pickford, Dolores del Rio, Dustin Farnum, Milton Sills, Ernst Lubitsch, Alma Rubens, and many, many more. Several, in fact, have fallen down them. And I have nine authenticated instances of stars, of both sexes—several of whom would astound you—who were chased up them.”
We turned left at the top to walk along the railed balcony looking down into the immense room below us, its dainty display cases pastel ovals of color from here. On our right, closed doors each labeled with a small brass plate: TURKISH BATH . . . BILLIARD ROOM . . . RADIO LOUNGE . . . two doors side by side, one labeled SHEIKS, the other SHEBAS . . . and at the end, labeled SODA FOUNTAIN, a door that
Ted pushed open invitingly. The room was just that: there was a marble soda fountain with chromed spigots and a back mirror; round tables with chairs whose legs and back were made of heavy twisted wire. “Like a soda? It’s all equipped; a couple dozen flavors.” We said no thanks, and he nodded, letting the door swing shut, walking on. “Sometimes I go in there and fix one myself.”
We’d reached the end of the balcony, turning right to face a pair of leather-padded swinging doors, and I pushed through, holding one open for Marion and Ted. We were in a corridor, and as I turned and we began our slow walk along it, I had my first look at it.
It was very wide, surely a dozen feet or more. And so long you could actually see the diminishing perspective, the four lines of its floor and ceiling angles slanting in to the corners of the distant square that was the corridor’s far end—so distant I couldn’t make out what was down there; something, I couldn’t quite see what. The ceiling was high, and the floor white marble, white because the wall at our left was an outside wall into which four high, arch-topped windows of stained glass were set at long intervals, the first of them a dozen yards ahead. Natural light from outside these windows, augmented now by spotlights—it must have been dusk out—illuminated the corridor, patterning the white marble floor and the walls with colored light, a fine effect.
As we said so to Ted, who looked pleased, we were slowly approaching a door on the inside wall at our right. Fastened to the wall beside the door at eye level hung a shaped wooden plaque of what I took to be polished walnut. Carved into its surface, the letters picked out in gilt, was a listing of some kind. As we moved slowly nearer, I was able to read it: ALLA NAZIMOVA, ANTONIO MORENO, HOPE HAMPTON, EDMUND LOWE, DOLORES COSTELLO, RICHARD DIX, TOM MIX. “All of them stayed in that bedroom at one time or another,” Ted said. “Some at the same time.” I heard Marion inhale sharply and turned.
We were approaching the first of the great stained-glass windows, and I hurried several steps closer, then stopped to stare. So brilliantly illuminated that it seemed to hang in space, it was made of hundreds of pieces of glass, some as small as a thumbnail, some big as a man’s arm. Marvelously cut and leaded together, they formed a vertical scene of every conceivable color and shade, but predominately green in a dozen or more shades and gradations of shades, and each piece was afire with light.
It was a picture, made of glowing flat jewels of glass. From the crest of a tree-dotted hill rose a great gray battlement, the edge of a lush forest far in the background. Before it, a blue-filled moat and a raised drawbridge. And high on that battlement—in green tights, jerkin, and peaked hat; a quiver of arrows slung on his back; a fist on one hip, bow raised high in the other hand; feet arrogantly wide apart, and grinning so widely that the dazzle of his teeth made me blink—stood—Yes, of course, and I said it aloud, “Douglas Fairbanks.”
“In Robin Hood,” Marion breathed.
Ted nodded. “These are my additions. They took the artist four and a half years.” After a long minute or more, we walked on.
NITA NALDI headed the list on the next bedroom-door plaque: REGINALD DENNY, POLA NEGRI, HERMAN MANKIEWICZ, LEATRICE JOY, MARY MILES MINTER, CONRAD NAGEL . . . but I stopped reading: we’d reached the second great picture of shimmering glass.
Filling the entire lower left corner, behind the blur of its propeller, hung the engine and cockpit of an airplane headed straight at us. The plane was dramatically tilted, its double wings on one side slanting sharply toward the upper right corner. At lower right, far below the slanted wings, a shell-cratered battlefield. Above it, rising clear to the top of the window and a background for everything else, a cloud-dotted blue sky. And at upper center of the sky, a small and distant plane heading straight down and trailing black smoke, on each upper-wing tip a black Maltese cross. The pilot of the first plane, the big one filling the lower left corner of the huge window, was grinning, a hand lifted in the act of peeling off his leather helmet and goggles. I knew the grin, knew the face: Buddy Rogers, of course, in Wings, and I meant it when I told Ted Bollinghurst I thought this window was great.
On past the next bedroom door: CONSTANCE BINNEY, THOMAS MEIGHAN, MAE MURRAY, CLAIRE WINDSOR, RICHARD BARTHELMESS, NATACHA RAMBOVA . . . And on the window across the hall, a blue-coated, white-kepied soldier, wearing white-canvas puttees, and ankle deep in sand, looked back over his shoulder, face anguished, at the struggling column of men he was leading toward a distant fort, high in the upper left corner, the tricolor limp on its staff at the near corner of the battlements. “Beau Geste,” Marion said softly, “Ronald Colman. Oh, I love him!” and I nodded and said, “So do I.”
LILA LEE, BARBARA LA MARR, JACK HOLT, MABEL NORMAND, WALLACE REID, CONSTANCE COLLIER, BULL MONTANA . . .
The rose in her hand a spectacular glowing red, Renee Adoree ran through the village street that slanted across and up the last great window, trying vainly to catch the olive-drab army truck from which John Gilbert, behind the raised tailgate, yearned after her, rifle in one hand, the other arm straining for the rose, in The Big Parade.
EVELYN BRENT, SESSUE HAYAKAWA, OLGA BACLANOVA, BUCK JONES, BILLIE DOVE, GEORGE ARLISS, MADGE BELLAMY, LYA DE PUTTI . . . “Oh, my God,” I said, “if I could have been here! If only I could have been here then.” And Ted and Marion nodded.
Two carved wooden doors inlaid with gilt and flanked by gold pillars studded with lapis lazuli filled the end of the corridor just ahead; a shadowed projection jutted out over them into the hall. Ted flicked up a wall switch, and the filaments of dozens of half-size bulbs—of clear glass and with spiked ends—came to life, outlining the rectangular shape of a miniature marquee. Across its front tiny colored bulbs spelled VILMA’S VISTA. They were of every color, bright and gay, flashing on and off enticingly, welcoming us, offering the old magic of “going to the movies.” Ted pulled open a door, lights coming on inside, and Marion and I walked in, grinning with excitement. “Vilma’s projection room,” Ted said, letting the door swing silently closed behind us, “almost exactly as she had it.”
It was a marvel, a pure joy; my heart leaped in envy. We stood at the back of a miniature movie palace of the Twenties: painted and gilded pillars and plaster ornamentations; burnished mahogany side walls, an elaborate tiny Spanish balcony halfway up each of them; a vaulted ceiling inset with softly lighted giant jewels. Up front, a square screen, maybe half size. And lined up before it in three rows, not seats but low softly upholstered chesterfields and chairs, enough to seat maybe twenty people, aisles at the sides only.
We stood at the rear of this little beauty, the fronts of our thighs touching the back edge of a long worktable extending nearly all the way across the rear of the theater. Fastened to the table were film-viewing and editing equipment, including a pair of hand-cranked reel holders for rewinding film. Off to the left, directly beside that end of the worktable, stood the great black bulk of an old-style arc-light projector.
I turned to Ted to say, “I’d give my arm, I really would; the left one anyway.”
“It’s beautiful,” Marion breathed. “Oh, Ted, it is!”
“Yes.” He nodded, not smiling. “It’s like a chapel to me. I come in here often. Just to meditate. Then I run off an old favorite, accompanying it myself.” He pointed, ahead and to the left, and I saw something I’d missed. A shell-like alcove curved into the left wall, just off the aisle and halfway up it. In it stood a miniature gilt pipe organ. “I learned to play it. To accompany the older pictures. They should never be run in silence, of course.” He turned to finger the drapery that hung in loose folds across the entire back wall except for the doors, and extending up the side aisles a little. “But I had to install these for sound film,” he said apologetically. “There was an echo.”
We stood looking around. It was pleasantly cool, I could feel a steady flow of air rising up past us from the floor, and I turned and found the continuous vent across the back of the theater set into the wood walls just under the ceiling and above the tops of the draping. Directly b
ehind us, the doors we’d entered by bore a red exit sign, and I thought they were the only doors. But Ted had walked across the back of the theater behind the worktable, to the right. Now he parted the drapes on the mahogany side wall to reveal another door, and when I saw it I felt the excitement close my throat.
There’d been a question I hadn’t even wanted to admit existed: How could Ted Bollinghurst possibly have kept old nitrate film stock of the Twenties from disintegrating over the years? This was why so many old films had been lost; they’d slowly moldered away in the vaults of uncaring studios.
But the door Ted had exposed was white, enameled, and angled across its upper left corner a chromed script read WESTINGHOUSE. He was opening the door now; it had not a knob but a long chromed locking handle. Reaching inside, he flicked on the ceiling lights and we saw the overhead piping white with frost. It was a vast walk-in refrigerator, the kind built for meat wholesalers. “The only practical way I know of to preserve the old film,” Ted said, standing half turned toward us in the doorway. He smiled. “I used ice in the earliest days; kept my film in secondhand wooden iceboxes. I didn’t always eat lunch, but I always found money for ice. Later I used old Frigidaires, and now this. Every inch of film I have is in perfect condition. Every print flawless, diamond clear. Not a scratched frame in this entire vault.” Suddenly he grinned. “Come on in!”
My knees were trembling minutely as I walked, my breathing shallow, and passing through the vault door I bumped Marion’s shoulder. I’d forgotten she was there, forgotten everything but the lighted rectangle of that doorway, Ted standing just inside it beckoning.
It was cold, but I didn’t care. Both sides of the vault were lined with stainless-steel drawers. Each had a heavy vertical handle, and above each handle a metal frame held a card. When I saw what some of them said, I had to turn and stare down at the floor for a moment because I actually felt dizzy.
