by Jack Finney
Then I lifted my eyes again. I stood facing three drawers labeled WM. DE MILLE, and typed below this on each label a list of titles. I pulled a handle, the drawer rolled out on bearings, and I stared down at the double row of film cans, a dozen deep the length of the drawer. There they were. There they really were, films directed by William de Mille, with the small de, not brother Cecil, with the big De, most of whose films have unfortunately been saved. Here were the films of the brother who made the good ones, and I lifted out a film can, the metal chill on my palms and fingers, and read the label aloud: “World’s Applause.” I looked slowly up at Ted. “This must be the only print in the world.”
He bobbed his head eagerly, eyes bright. “I’m sure of it. Want to see it! I’ll run it off!”
“Wait.” I held up a hand and put the can back. I’d seen drawers labeled GARBO, and I rolled the de Mille drawer shut and began reading Garbo labels. It wasn’t on the first or second. Behind me Marion exclaimed, “I remember this: Shoulder Arms! I saw it when I was a girl during the war.” On the third label, I found it: The Divine Woman, with Garbo and, I remembered, Polly Moran, John Mack Brown . . . a lost Garbo. Was this the film I wanted Ted to run off? I began to feel a little frantic; we could hardly see more than one picture, yet—I stood looking around—the vault was filled with film I had to see!
I began reading labels, yanking open drawers, staring for a moment, rolling them shut, opening another. Here lay the films of Edward Sloman, maybe a greater director than Griffith himself, but . . . The National Film Archive has Sloman’s Ghost of Rosie Taylor, made in 1918; the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a few reels of Shattered Idols; but nearly all the rest of his work is gone. Possibly one of our finest directors, if we could only see his work, and here it was, certainly most of it. Did I want to see one of these? Or maybe a reel from each of several. Yes, yes, but . . .
“Mary Pickford,” Marion murmured, rolling open a bin.
Ted stood alternately lifting one foot, then the other, in a slow little dance of excitement. “Pick one out, Marion! I’ll show it! I’ve got Tess of the Storm Country!” That was another lost film, and I almost called yes, but Marion was pushing the drawer closed.
“I’ve seen it.”
I stepped over beside her to read the Pickford labels, and found it—Fanchon and the Cricket—near the top of the first list of titles, and was tempted. It was made in 1915, starring Mary Pickford, and featuring a very, very young Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele.
Then I saw them, two drawers there in the row just above the Pickford bins, and they were labeled GREED. I couldn’t talk, only point, but when Ted stepped closer to read the labels, I managed to say, “All? All forty-two reels?”
Eyes sparkling, he nodded. “All of them. A complete and absolutely perfect print made by their three best technicians working all night right up until dawn of the morning the studio had the negative destroyed.”
I just stood there: I didn’t know what to do. To see all forty-two reels of Greed would take ten hours. “That it?” Ted was demanding. “That what you want to see? All of it? Part of it? I’ll show anything you want!” He was beside himself.
I said, “Ted. One reel was tinted—”
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” He yanked open a bin, ran his eyes along the cans, then plucked one out. “This is it! Right at the beginning of the reel. Want to see it? I’ll thread it up!” He ducked out into the tiny theater, and, plumping the can onto the worktable, pulled off the lid.
I walked over and tapped his arm; I knew what I wanted now. “No need to run it off, Ted. Just let me hold it.”
He’d unreeled the couple yards or so of leader and a half a dozen feet of the start of the reel; now he turned to stare at me. Then he nodded slowly and smiled. “I understand; yes, I do.” Suddenly anxious, he said, “You know how to handle film?”
“Believe me, yes; by the edges only. I’ve never left a finger mark on a strip of film in my life.”
He handed me the leader, I raised it high, then took the first of the film between thumb and middle finger, its edges lightly pressing into them. “Thread it on the viewer, if you like,” Ted said, but I shook my head. I’d raised the film to the ceiling light, and that was enough: there was the famous scene, Zasu Pitts, but a very young and lovely Zasu Pitts, lying naked on a bed she’d scattered with gold coins. In the tiny progressions of each frame, I could see that she was literally rolling in gold, feeling the coins press into her body, the very epitome of greed. And this scene, this was the scene Von Stroheim had actually ordered to be tinted by hand: on the strip I held high to the light, every tiny coin had been tinted gold by the tip of a brush, and my hands shook at the thought of what I was holding.
I put it down finally and started to rewind it into the can, but Ted was jouncing with excitement. “I’ll do that! Leave it!” I don’t suppose he’d ever left film like that in his life before, but he was too excited to take time now. “Come in here; find whatever you want to see; find it!”
I couldn’t. And neither could Marion. “Lost films” meant nothing to her; she’d seen most of them when they were new. It was pictures she’d missed that she exclaimed over: a Charlie Chaplin, a Dolores Costello, some of which you can buy from Blackhawk. Once I heard her say to Ted, “Look; I saw this being filmed.”
I found The Patriot, a lost Ernst Lubitsch, and took it to the table to pull out just enough film to have the pleasure of reading the cast and credits. But this wasn’t the one, the one, and Ted almost literally dragged me back to the vault to find it.
I looked through the unbelievable collection of all D. W. Griffith’s features, trying to pick. I chose The Greatest Thing in Life, finally, because Lillian Gish always claimed it was the master’s greatest. “I think I’d like to see some of this,” I said, handing the first reel to Ted, and he nodded quickly, and we walked out to the worktable. But when he opened the can, I suddenly said, “No, wait! That’s not the best choice,” and almost ran back into the vault.
Put a hungry child in a candy store, tell him he can have whatever he wants but one choice only and nothing more . . . that was me. I could not make up my mind because, always, there might be something even better I hadn’t yet seen.
I found The Miracle Man, directed in 1919 by the mysterious George Loane Tucker, lost for decades. And Peg o’ My Heart, with Laurette Taylor. Films starring Marie Doro, Marguerite Clark, and Elsie Ferguson, all of whose films have been lost.
And then I found it. Walking past the second drawer labeled ERNST LUBITSCH, a corner of my eye caught a title on the label, and from that bin I brought out the picture I knew I had to see, the long-lost silent version of The Great Gatsby. At least I thought it must be, and I took the first reel out to the table to check the credits. The worktable was crowded with the film we’d opened, which bothered me; I’m sure it wasn’t customary with this collection. But although it looked helter-skelter, winding lengths of film curling out of the open cans, it wasn’t. No film tangled with any other; each can lay in a little space of its own. I had to make room for The Great Gatsby but I moved the other film carefully, clearing a little space for this. Then I uncoiled the leader from the outer edge of the big fat disk of wound film, found the cast listing, and held it to the light.
And there in tiny white letters on the black background of each of the frames stretched between my two hands was the incredible cast: Rudolph Valentino as Gatsby himself . . . Gloria Swanson as Daisy Buchanan . . . Greta Garbo as Jordan Baker . . . John Gilbert as Carraway . . . Mae West as Myrtle, her only silent role, I was almost sure . . . George O’Brien as Tom Buchanan . . . Harry Langdon, in his only serious role, that I did know, as Myrtle’s husband . . .
Ted was standing beside me peering up at my film, and I said, “Isn’t this the one with the party sequence at Gatsby’s estate?”
“Yes, with Gilda Gray, Chaplin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald himself as part of the crowd.”
I lowered the film and stood staring up a
t the empty screen for a moment. Not only had this incredible picture been lost for decades, it had never even been shown; suppressed by Gloria Swanson, supposedly, because Lubitsch had given too much footage to Garbo and West. I turned to Ted. “This is the one,” I said. “This is the one I want to see.” Then, from inside the vault, Marion gave a little scream.
She was standing at a closed bin, pointing at the label. As we stopped beside her she read it aloud: “Daughters of Jazz . . . Oh, damn it, Ted, why did you keep this! I want to see it, and I don’t want to look at it!” She turned to me. “That’s the one, Nickie. They replaced me with Crawford . . . I’d have been the discovery, not her, if only—” She shook her head. “No, goddamn it! I don’t want to see it!”
But Ted had opened the bin; only two film cans lay inside. “Marion . . . she’s not in this.”
“Yes, she—What do you mean?”
“I saved your outtakes.” His chin lifted suddenly, and he stared at her, his old eyes blinking in puzzlement. “We thought you’d been killed! Yes . . . we thought that. And I had prints made of your outtakes before they discarded the negatives. When the picture was finished, with Crawford in your part, I took her bits out of my print. And spliced in yours.”
He was standing at the open bin, hand still on the edge of the metal drawer. After a moment Marion reached out to put her hand on his. “Ted, why?”
He looked away. “You know why. Don’t you?”
“Yes . . . I think I do.”
“Because I loved you. I always did.”
Watching, listening, I finally knew, really knew, why the old, old movies had once been so incredibly popular. Why out of a population only half the size of ours, sixty million people went to the movies every week of the Twenties. We laugh at their pictures and the stories they took seriously. But they were in tune with their movies, and their movies with them; that’s the way people were, or at least how they thought they wanted to be. Now Ted and Marion acted as their movies had, and sounded like their subtitles. Ted slowly withdrew his hand from under Marion’s: if I’d been filming it, their hands would have filled a close-up. His big, veined, wrinkled hand patted hers gently. Then hers turned, the two palms clasped, and parted. “But I knew it wasn’t to be,” Ted said. “I was older. So much older.” He grinned. “And a funny-looking gink besides!”
“No, you weren’t.” She brought up a fist slowly and touched the side of his jaw in a pantomimed punch. “You big lug . . .”
“Come on!” Ted grabbed up the two film cans. “This is what we want to see! It’s the first third only, just your part of the picture. Your picture, Marion!” Fade-out.
It was what we wanted to see. Marion did, and out of everything in that astounding vault, so did I. The old man at work bringing the massive old projector to life, I flicked off the vault lights, and let Marion lead the way, down the side aisle to the front row, then across to a low upholstered settee for two.
There we sat, Marion staring up at the empty screen, waiting like a child. Half-turned in my seat, I watched Ted thread up. He worked surprisingly fast, winding the leader through its gate, onto the sprockets, fastening the end onto the big take-up reel. He slammed the little metal door shut on the film, opened another behind the projection mechanism, adjusted the carbons, slammed the door shut, struck the arc, and ran a few feet of leader, houselights still on. He yanked open a metal door, and peered in at the reeled film, started it again, slammed the door shut, flicked off the houselights, and actually ran across the back of the theater and down the side aisle.
I didn’t understand the hurry until up on the screen the last of the white leader flicked past and, superimposed on a line drawing of a saxophone, the title appeared: JESSE L. LASKY PRESENTS “DAUGHTERS OF JAZZ,” A HOWARD BERMAN PRODUCTION, FROM THE NOVEL BY WALTER BRADEN. And in just that moment the first chord of Ted’s accompaniment began; he’d reached the organ in time.
Rapidly, not nearly so many screen credits as now, the titles appeared, and then the cast, in white letters on black. But I never read it as I generally always do, and I don’t think Marion did. Because opposite the very last listing, ADELE, something else appeared instead of the JOAN CRAWFORD that should have been there. It was a badly flickering rectangle of white, and I knew what had happened. On every last frame of that listing, Ted had carefully scraped off a narrow rectangle of emulsion and Joan Crawford’s name along with it. In its place we now read—the letters jiggling and vibrating—the name he had inked in to replace it, MARION MARSH.
The picture started then, continued, and it was nothing; neither Ted nor anyone else would have preserved it for itself. I’d heard of it once, I recalled now; a film collector I’d met had seen it run off. He was a Crawford fan, collecting her pictures, and had seen this simply because it was her first, the only reason it had been preserved. She’d been good, he said. It was why she’d been noticed, how she’d got her start.
It was a comedy of sorts. The star was Alicia Conway, who’d made a few pictures in the Twenties. In this she was a show girl out to marry a millionaire. Instead she falls helplessly in love with his handsome young valet, and marries him for pure love. After a lot of nonsense, it turns out that he is the millionaire posing as his own valet because he’s tired of women chasing him for his money.
We watched for quite a while, the organ unobtrusive, its mood skillfully shifting with the action on the screen. Once I turned to watch him, and Ted sat swaying gently on the organ bench, fingers drifting over the keyboard; happy.
I felt a nudge and turned. On the screen, a swimming pool, rectangular, old-fashioned, the scene filmed outdoors in a little too much sun. And yes, there among a group standing beside the pool—the girls in dark, short-skirted, knit bathing suits, and rubber caps; the men in dark trunks and white tops—stood the girl I’d seen on my television screen and, that same night, in transparent but vivid and colorful reality. The screen was black-and-white but in the sunlight her blondness was plain, as one by one the girls—show girls at the millionaire’s pool—walked onto the diving board, posed at its end, glancing around at the spectators, then dived.
I couldn’t make out how it happened. The others were simply actresses miming the part, waggling their hips and shoulders as they walked out on the board, batting their eyes as they posed, diving in. But now again, and as always, Marion Marsh made you lean forward. She walked out onto the board, not waggling, very simply and directly, but I was aware of her figure, her body, her movements, and herself—the person. And, genuinely unconscious, I think, of a change in their actions, so were the men beside the pool. For each of the four girls who’d preceded Marion, they’d grinned, worked their eyebrows up and down, made side-of-mouth comments. But for Marion they just stood and watched, motionless, not remembering to talk, and it made her the only moving figure on the screen. When she stood on the end of the board, ankles together, looking around with the Marion Marsh arrogance I’d come to know, even the girls dog-paddling in the pool stared up at her. Abruptly she dived in, knifing into the water out of sight, the next girl wriggling toward the board, and the scene went lifeless again.
“What did you do?” I whispered. “What were you thinking; did you actually feel that part?”
“The part? Hell, no. All I was thinking was that I was damn well going to make them look at me. The camera was what I thought about.”
On the screen, a street scene, and beside an enormous interurban trolley car, I caught a glimpse of an ancient electric automobile, the tall old kind that ran on batteries and steered with a tiller bar.
A little later, a chase: a touring car racing along a narrow asphalt road beside a railroad track trying to catch a speeding train. On the observation platform, Alicia Conway, arm outstretched, waited for a man crouched on the car’s running board to get close enough to toss her a weighted envelope containing her marriage license, the car wavering from side to side of the road.
Cut to a front view facing the car. We see the driver and three or four peo
ple in both front and back seats, men and women. They’re excited, the driver hunched over his wheel, twisting it back and forth, eyes wide, demonstrating great speed. The girls shriek, grimace, sway from side to side, and it occurs to me that they don’t trust this medium to actually record on film and, months later, make an audience believe. Except Marion.
You didn’t even notice her at first. But after the first dozen seconds of that swaying, gesticulating chase, you spotted a girl in the back seat almost hidden by the others. You became aware of her, I realized, because she wasn’t doing anything. She just sat, chin lifted a little, eyes nearly closed, and faintly smiling—but you sensed the rush of air she must be feeling on her face, detected her quiet exhilaration. Just as the bit ended, your eyes on her, she suddenly flung both hands up and outward, half rising in her seat, and you saw the word she spoke as though you’d heard it: Faster . . .
The scene was hers, locked up and stolen from everyone else while they weren’t even noticing her, and when I turned to look at Marion in the darkness, she was grinning. Eyes still on the screen, she murmured, “That was my idea, the last bit. I didn’t say anything for fear they’d stop me; just did it. And I’ll bet Crawford stole it.”
The reel ended, and Ted hurried back, turned on the houselights, pulled the reel out, set it down, and fitted in the second. Again he threaded up fast, checked both reels, slammed the little metal door closed, started the projector, flipped off the houselights. As the leader flickered by, he was hurrying down the aisle, and once again the first soft organ chord and the first frame of the reel came into being together.
“My last scene,” Marion murmured. “I think it comes early.”
It did, within a minute or two. A beloved old man, producer of a Broadway musical, had just collapsed backstage. Now the chorus, a dozen girls, had to go on, smiling out at the audience, snapping their jazz-age fingers while inwardly their hearts were anguished.
