Marion's Wall

by Jack Finney

  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 behind 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.

  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 f
ilms 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 at 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!”