by Ed Kurtz
“Look, Parson,” he said in a condescending manner, “you got your nutty Kraut sets, didn’t you? The place looks like Picasso puked all over it. Have I cried about it? Didn’t I give the go-ahead to this nightmare here?”
He gestured broadly toward the sharply angled set jutting crazily in every direction before them. A set painter stood frozen in the middle of it, staring wide-eyed at the plan he held like it was the lost Mormon tablets.
At the far end of the studio, Grace Baronsky stood in her dressing robe worrying her earrings and taking in the set.
“It’s the sex, Saul. The devilishness of this whole thing. The denouement is…well, it’s ghastly.”
“You wanted to make a European picture. Here it is.”
“I’ll probably get arrested. Did you think of that? There are obscenity laws, you know.”
“There are hardly any laws when it comes to motion pictures. The legislature is thirty years behind the times, if not more.”
“There was that case in Ohio…”
“This ain’t Ohio. Christ, this is hardly even America. They’ll want to throw you in the pokey, sure, but they won’t have a leg to stand on. And think of it—this picture will be like nothing anybody’s ever seen before. It will be a sensation. You, Jack, will be a sensation.”
“I’ll be a goddamned pornographer is what I’ll be.”
Saul chuckled through a blue-gray cloud of smoke. He then raised his chin and looked across the open warehouse studio at his nervous star-to-be.
“Grace, darling,” he called to her. “Come on over here for a minute, will you?”
With a strained smile, she stepped lightly on her bare feet, bouncing almost rabbit-like. Jack avoided eye contact with her. He sucked a final drag from his cigarette and crushed the end on the floor beneath his heel.
“Grace, honey,” Saul wooed, “you’ve read the script, haven’t you?”
“I have,” she said. “Of course I have.”
“And what do you think of it? I mean your general impression.”
“I think it’s marvelous, Mr. Veritek.”
“Saul, honey. It’s always Saul.”
She laughed lightly. Jack shook his head, patting his vest pockets in search of another smoke.
“Saul,” Grace agreed. “It sure beats the Keystone Kops, doesn’t it? I mean, this isn’t just a gag, is it? This is—I don’t know—art.”
Stabbing the cigar between his teeth, Saul rocked back on his heels and presented both palms to the director.
“Do you see? Art, my boy. Let Warners bore them to death with whatever thing Barrymore’s doing this year. We’re going to give them art.”
“If by art you mean tits, ass, and fucking the devil, fine. We’ll all agree to call that art.”
“You’re being difficult, Jackie,” Saul complained.
“You had the script changed. I get difficult when I get the wool pulled over my eyes.”
“Only sheep got wool. You’re no sheep.”
“No, but you’re sure a wolf, Saul.”
It was an insult, but Saul smiled. Between the two of them, Grace fidgeted with the hem of the robe. Saul placed a gentle hand at her elbow and took the stogie from his mouth.
“Now Grace here, she gets it, don’t you, Grace? She knows a sensation when she sees one.”
“It’ll sure knock them over,” she agreed, hesitantly.
“Indeed it will,” he agreed. “What’s Paramount got? Aloma of the South Seas? Christ. Fox is doing another war melodrama. It’s a bum year for the picture business, Jack—but you’re gonna cinch it. And you know why?”
Jack just smoked and sweated. Saul sucked a deep breath into his lungs and pinched at the hem of Grace’s robe. “Do you mind, dearheart? It’s for art.”
He gave the fabric a tug for emphasis. Grace swallowed, turned her eyes to the director, but he wasn’t looking at anyone. For a moment she froze, an ice sculpture in flesh, but the unwavering gaze of the studio head made its point. With a crooked smile and a silent sigh, Grace opened her robe and let it fall to the dusty floor at her feet. Beneath it she wore nothing but a sapphire ring on her right hand.
The few crewmen loitering around the studio stopped what they were doing to stare, slack-jawed, at the nude woman in their midst. Grace heard a throaty chuckle and fought against the urge to snatch up her robe and run.
“Audrey Munson did it,” Saul said to Jack. “Annette Kellerman did it. It’s not unheard of, nude women on film. But this, Jack—this. And in the context of that script…Jack, you’re not looking.”
“For Christ’s sakes, Saul…”
“You’ll need your eyes to direct this picture so look at her, goddamnit.”
Jack muttered, “Damn you, Saul.”
Grace tried to force a laugh, but it came out more like a honk. She knelt down and hurriedly shrugged back into her robe. Saul ran a hand over his mostly bald pate and patted her on the behind with the other.
“There’s a good girl,” he said. “Now run along and get into costume. We’ve got a picture to make, haven’t we, Jackie?”
“Yeah,” he said in a half-whisper.
With that, Saul dropped what remained of his cigar to the floor and walked triumphantly out of the studio, head high. Jack and Grace exchanged a brief glance. She then turned and hurried back to wardrobe, clutching the robe tightly closed with both hands.
3
Boston/L.A., 2013
I got married at 23; Helen was only 19 then. It was a stupid move on both our parts and just about everybody told us so, but I didn’t listen. Twenty-three-year-olds don’t listen to much. At least I didn’t.
Eight years went by, most of them sullen and crabby, and then after a week of the old silent treatment, she brusquely informed me that we were done, she’d met someone else, and I was expected to move out by the end of the week. I did, and I hadn’t been in the same room with her since. No kids, no pets to squabble over. I signed a waiver agreeing to whatever she wanted in front of the judge so I wouldn’t have to appear in court. That was what they called an amicable divorce. I didn’t feel particularly amiable about any of it, but I was glad when it was over. I tried dating a little in the aftermath, but nothing stuck. A year later I landed the lab gig and decided to marry that, instead. I’d been holed up in front of my scanner pretty much ever since.
Except for when I wasn’t, and when I wasn’t, I was usually habituating the back end of Bukowski’s, a neighborhood pub in Back Bay, nursing something dark and working my way through a peanut butter burger. I thought they sounded downright blasphemous first time I saw it on the menu, but curiosity got the better of me and I’d been a believer from that moment on. That’s what I was doing within an hour of hanging up the phone at the lab, washing my heart-clogging repast down with a pint of the black stuff and wondering how the hell Helen managed to creep back into my life.
I hadn’t gotten quite that far into the conversation with Leslie Wheeler. Once I’d agreed to the job, she told me she’d get everything arranged and get back in touch. I didn’t really think Helen was so evil that she wouldn’t recommend my skills to somebody looking for what I do, but I still couldn’t get past the fact that there were experts better equipped than I who weren’t three thousand miles away. I appreciated the commission, but it just didn’t make a lot of sense.
I was halfway through swallowing the second-to-last bite when a shadow intercepted the setting sun glaring through the window. I glanced up as Jake Maitland sat down across from me.
“Guya, Gake,” I said with a maw full of peanut butter, white bread, and beef.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?”
I shrugged and swallowed the rest. Rinsed my gullet with the rest of my Guinness.
I said, “Why don’t you rustle me up another one?”
“One on you?” he asked.
I shrugged again. He traipsed off to the bar.
Jake Maitland was tall and rangy with a pitte
d face and short-cropped hair. Sort of an Ed Gein look-alike, almost. He was in the same class of failed screenwriter as I was; we’d both gone out to L.A. in the nineties to make good on the so-called indie boom and both came back to the East Coast inside two years with our tails between our legs. You could say one of my lousy scripts got produced, unlike old Jake, though by the time they were done with it none of my words were left intact. I got a “story by” credit and enough scratch to leave town with.
We hadn’t known each other out there, but I’d met him at some lame party around 2001 or 2002. An okay guy, talked too much. Still had visions of grandeur. I’d lost mine somewhere between Albuquerque and Little Rock on the drive back home.
When he came back, Jake set my pint in front of me and took a long draw from his own. It left an off-white mustache across his top lip.
“How’s the old movie business?” he asked.
“Picking up.”
“I couldn’t do it, man. Hell, I can hardly watch films anymore. I always think I could’ve done better.”
Like I said: visions of grandeur. I let it pass.
Jake sat down and said, “So what’s new?”
“Heading out to L.A., looks like.”
His eyes popped wide. “L.A.? What’s doing out there?”
“Nothing half as good as you’re thinking,” I said. “A restoration job, sort of.”
“What, they don’t got people for that on the left coast?”
“They got plenty. It’s kind of a weird deal.”
“Does it pay?”
“Sure, it pays.”
“Gift horse and all that, then,” Jake said.
“Sure,” I said. “And all that.”
We finished our pints, ordered another pair, and chatted aimlessly about everything from the resurgence of South Korean cinema to whether Ken Russell would ever be appreciated enough in the U.S. After I paid—for all of it—I made my excuses and started to leave. Jake grabbed my wrist as I started to walk by him, stopping me dead.
“This hasn’t got anything to do with Helen, does it?”
I groaned some, pulled my wrist free.
“Yeah,” I said. “A little.”
Jake screwed up his mouth and shook his head.
“Nothing half as bad as you’re thinking,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it is.” Truth was, I didn’t really know. Not yet, anyway.
“How you planning to get out there?”
I glanced at the time on my phone, making a bit of a show out of it.
“Flying, I guess. Folks I’m working for are covering everything.”
“Forget that,” Jake said, killing off his beer and standing up from his chair. “I’ll drive you. I miss the old town, it’s been years. And besides, we’ve never been there together, have we? Powers combined, right?”
I laughed awkwardly, avoided eye contact for a minute.
“Look, I’m not going out there to do anything but work on an old print,” I said. I didn’t know if Jake had ever heard of Angel of the Abyss, but I wasn’t going to press my luck. “I’ll be in the lab all day and sleeping all night. Besides, driving there would take half a week. They’ll want me there sooner than that. Sorry, buddy—can’t do it.”
I patted him on the shoulder and gave an apologetic smile. Jake smiled back, and as I finally got past him he said, “Okay…see you there, Graham.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said with a laugh on the way out. But I sort of knew he meant it.
* * *
While the lead attendant went over her safety speech in a droning, half-asleep voice, I leaned over the one book I brought for the trip: Lives of the Silent Film Stars. I was proud to possess an impressive library of texts on film history, criticism, and theory, though the volume in my lap wasn’t one I’d spent much time reading. It was structured more or less like Butler’s Lives of the Saints—I used to be Catholic, so I couldn’t help but make the comparison—but these were saints of the silver screen, almost all of them actually sinners. The one chapter dealing with Grace Baron dedicated only two paragraphs to the subject. I read them three times over before the plane started down the runway.
She was born Grace Baronsky in Boise, Idaho, in June of 1901 (exact date unknown), though some sources listed her year of birth as 1904. She moved to Hollywood with an aunt in 1922 and, upon being discovered by Monumental Pictures head Saul Veritek, began production on her only film, Angel of the Abyss, in 1926. She was either 22 or 25 at the time. Production lasted ten weeks, and the picture premiered at the Domino Theater in Hollywood on August 15. It was an instant sensation—of the bad kind. A pair of nude scenes scandalized a packed house of Hollywood elites, while the subject matter drove them from their seats. No script, footage, or stills were known to exist, but the first and last picture to star Grace Baron, as the studio rechristened her, reportedly dealt with such taboo topics as rape and a graphic occult ritual that depicted Baron’s character giving herself to an anthropomorphic goat.
Not long after, according to my reading, Monumental shuttered. Saul Veritek was ruined. The director, Jack Parson, skipped to Europe and ended up making expressionist pictures in the Weimar Republic until Hitler took over. After that, he went to England, then Canada, and eventually back to the States, where he fathered a future minor movie exec and melted into obscurity. And Grace Baronsky vanished from the face of the earth. Extensive searches were made for her in both California and Iowa for over a year, but in early 1927 she was officially declared dead by the City Coroner’s Office of Los Angeles. Rumors persisted to the present that she had gotten mixed up with some sort of underground Communist cabal that had something to do with her disappearance and, possibly, her death. But no one really knew.
The plane lifted off from Logan and I closed the book. I had six and a half hours to kill and I spent it nodding on and off, half-thinking and half-dreaming about a forgotten starlet who was notorious for one night before the worst kind of fame swallowed her whole.
* * *
I landed at LAX fifteen minutes early and spent another twenty waiting for my suitcase at the baggage claim. After that I traipsed over to where all the drivers stood around holding signs for specific pickups among which, according to Leslie Wheeler, I was supposed to be one. I glanced at each sign in succession from right to left, but none of them had my name on it. My next glance was through the glass doors leading to the sidewalk outside and the myriad of taxis and vans and limos crowded next to it. A couple of guys were out there smoking, so I rolled my suitcase out to them and asked to bum a smoke. The taller and wider of the two knocked a Camel out of his pack and lit it for me, and I stood there smoking with them until I was done. It tasted like heaven.
When I returned inside, the group of drivers had thinned some, but there still wasn’t one designated for me. I loitered another half hour, bought a coffee at a stand and wished there was someone else to bum a cigarette from, which there wasn’t. No soap. I grumbled and found a quiet corner to dig out my state-of-the-art-in-2002 mobile phone to call the number Leslie gave me. Straight to voice mail. Naturally.
Outside I hailed a taxi. The driver didn’t pop the trunk so I dragged my suitcase into the backseat with me. When he asked me where to, I told him the hotel Leslie set me up with, the Wilson Arms. It ended up being a forty-five-minute ride that made me as poorer in dollars as it had in minutes.
The hotel was right in the heart of old Hollywood, a once glamorous town gone to seed and now on its way back up thanks to regentrification. My old apartment building was only four blocks south, though I wasn’t feeling sentimental. I rolled my case into the narrow lobby, took in what looked like a recently refurbished atmosphere, and then told the clerk my name. He said my room was ready and paid for, and he handed me a key. Not a keycard, an actual key. Some old things still stuck around. I rode the elevator up to the third floor, found 325 around the first corner in the hallway, and went inside.
It was a smallish room, but big enough. A few framed glossies of dead mov
ie stars on the walls. Maybe they’d stayed here, and maybe even in this very room. Maybe the place was haunted. I sat down on the edge of the double bed and had a staring contest with David Niven. He won.
On the credenza there was a white envelope with my name on it. Gratified that at least something did for once, I picked it up and ripped it open. Inside was a check for two thousand dollars, signed by Leslie Wheeler. A sticky note on the back of the check read: For the third reel. More if we find them. Start tomorrow? LW.
I folded the check in half and slid it into my wallet. Then I opened the mini-fridge next to the credenza, found a $10 bottle of beer, and drank it. I wanted a cigarette and thought about roaming down to street level to find one or twenty, but instead I lay down on top of the comforter and dropped into a deep sleep, still in my clothes. When I woke up, the clock beside the bed told me it was three in the morning. I washed my face in the bathroom with cold water, dug my book out of my travel bag, and read the paragraphs on Grace Baron again. The hazy photo next to the text still failed to compete with the footage I’d seen from Angel of the Abyss. After I set the book down on the bed, I closed my eyes and replayed the reel in my head. Then I waited for dawn.
* * *
The unimaginatively named Silent Film Appreciation Society was housed in a narrow postwar building on a side street of Hollywood Boulevard, several blocks east of all the action. There wasn’t anything resembling a guide to the offices in the dusty entryway, so I wandered up the stairs and examined the doors on the second floor until I found what I was looking for. Masticating savagely on a flavorless piece of nicotine gum, I knocked on the door. When a few minutes crawled by and no one answered, I knocked again.
“Ms. Wheeler? It’s Graham Woodard.”
Still nothing. I tried the doorknob. Locked.
