by Howard Fast
‘What the hell has loyalty got to do with it? You’re a woman. I’m a man. And just don’t ever tell me what Max did for me.’ He stepped away from her now. ‘Think about it, Sally, just think about it.’ And then he turned and left the pantry.
What does one do? she wondered. Does one tell one’s husband? Does one pretend it never happened?
‘How did he save your life?’ she asked Max now.
‘He showed me how to steal bread without getting caught.’
‘Max, I’m serious.’
‘So am I.’
‘You don’t mean that about stealing bread?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you wouldn’t steal anything.’
‘What do you mean, I wouldn’t steal? I wouldn’t steal ten dollars or a hundred or a thousand. What good would that do me? I’d be stupid to steal. A man who steals is either stupid or desperate.’
‘But –’
‘I know. I said Bert showed me how to steal bread without being caught.’
‘You’re always teasing me and making me feel that I grew up in some insulated place, without knowing anything about the world.’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No! I taught school on Clinton Street. Clinton Street. If you know a worse place than Clinton Street, just name it for me!’
‘You’re really angry.’
‘I am!’ Sally snapped. ‘I’m very angry. I ask you a question about Bert and you answer as if I were an idiot.’
Max had never seen her this way before, her face white and tense, her lips quivering, her hands trembling. ‘I wasn’t teasing,’ he said. ‘I was just a kid and I had seven people to feed – seven – and when we had nothing else to eat, we ate bread. It kept us alive. In those days, the rich people lived uptown around Gramercy Park and Madison Square and Washington Square and Fifth Avenue below Twenty-third Street. Most of them had fresh bread delivered, between five and six in the morning. Bert showed me how to follow the bread wagons. When the bread man went into one of the mews or delivery yards, we’d take a loaf from the wagon. No more than one loaf from a wagon, and mostly they’d never notice it missing and not roust out the cops.’
‘You stole the bread, you actually stole the bread?’
‘Boss Tweed stole over two hundred million dollars from this city. William Henry Vanderbilt boasted that he was the richest man in the world. Murphy says he was too proud to steal anything under a million, but Jay Gould wasn’t proud, and he stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, and Jim Fisk stole it even if it was nailed down, and Fernando Wood –’
‘I know about Fernando Wood. I know about all the others you’re ready to name. Does that make stealing right?’
‘Goddamn it,’ Max said slowly, ‘when you steal to keep from dying of hunger, it’s right!’ He was angry now. Goddamn her, who the hell was she to lecture him and give herself airs? From the day they met, she had been lecturing him, parading her superior intelligence and manners. He stalked out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. Downstairs, he dropped into a chair in the living room and lit a cigar. The darkness suited his mood, but smoking in the darkness was uncomfortable, and he reached out and switched on a lamp. Easy, everything easy these days. No more stinking, sputtering kerosene lamps, no more smelly, dangerous gas jets. Reach out and turn an electric switch, and the light goes on. He was rich. He had only to point to something and it was his, except that now the whole thing had become a house of cards. All their smart talk after dinner didn’t add up to a single roll of film. It was so damned easy to talk about something that no one had ever done before, but when he put the reality in front of the fantasy, he saw nothing but disaster. In a week, unless he gave away half of his business, his theatres would be dark.
Sally came into the room and dropped into a chair facing him. ‘I didn’t mean to shout at you,’ she said.
‘That’s OK.’
‘I guess now you feel that everything we talked about tonight is water down the drain. There’s no way you can do it because nobody else did it.’
He was amazed at her perception. ‘Yeah, I guess that’s how I feel.’
‘Nobody else ever did the things Max Britsky did. Wasn’t it always that way?’
‘Trying to make me feel good?’ He grinned at her.
‘Why not?’
‘What’s to feel good about?’
‘Beating those bastards, Stanford and Calvin.’
‘I never heard you swear before.’
‘It’s about time,’ Sally said.
‘Yeah, I guess it is. What makes you think we can beat them?’
‘I know you, but they don’t know you. They’re crazy to put themselves up against Max Britsky. You’ll cut them into ribbons.’
‘You really think so.’
‘I do.’
‘Then tell me, where do I start with this moving picture idea of yours?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. There has to be a story – I mean, written out – so that whenever the cameraman photographs a scene, he will know exactly what it is and so will the actors. And then, I think, each dialogue card must be worked out in advance. I mean, even if they’re changed later, they should be ready, otherwise we’d only have confusion and nothing would make much sense.’
‘Yeah, sure. So where do we find all this? Who does it, if so far nobody ever did it?’
‘I’ll do it, if you want me to.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘I mean, I was thinking about somebody who writes these plays that are such hits, like Shaw or Ibsen or Wilde?’
‘Oscar Wilde is dead, so I don’t think he’d be interested.’
‘All right, so he’s dead,’ Max said petulantly.
‘Max, I only mean these men or someone like them might be interested, but they’d want a great deal of money and even with all their reputation, there’s no telling that they could do it any more than I could. At least nothing’s lost if I try.’
‘All right, you try, and I’ll do the rest some way.’
‘Put the cigar away and come to bed,’ Sally told him.
Boss Murphy listened glumly to Max’s account. ‘If they were in New York, Max, maybe I could hit them a bit. But National’s based in Philadelphia, and as far as Edison’s concerned, nobody’s got a shoe in with Edison. You really want to fight this?’
Max’s impression was that Murphy didn’t want to be bothered. If National took fifty percent, he’d still have his eleven percent or Stanford and Calvin wouldn’t operate in New York.
‘I’d burn every one of them theatres to the ground before I’d let those bastards have them.’
‘That’s pretty extreme, Max.’
‘Maybe you’re not for me,’ Max said, studying Murphy shrewdly. ‘I just don’t want you against me.’
‘What makes you think I’d be against you?’
‘You could see it losing eleven percent.’
‘You could lose eighty-nine percent.’
‘Oh, no,’ Max said. ‘I’m not going to lose.’
‘All right,’ Murphy said. ‘Count on that. I’m not against you. I don’t know what Calvin and Stanford got, but you got a barrel of piss and vinegar.’
That never occurred to Mr Alvin Berry, who was in charge of the loan department at the Chase Bank at 177 Broadway. He saw sitting facing him a sober young man in a blue serge suit. Berry kept his own scorecard on his petitioners, and one of his first notations depended on what they were wearing. If the petitioner wore blue serge, as did ninety percent of the stable citizens who earned their living south of Fulton Street, he was already high on the scorecard. A white shirt and a matching cloth collar added to acceptability; and not only was Max properly dressed, but his nails were clean and his hair cropped properly. When the appointment had been set up, Mr Berry had inquired into the background of Max Britsky, and now he observed with interest the young man who was New York’s newest overnight millionaire. Mr Berry was not surprised t
hat as a millionaire, Max needed cash desperately; he was rather more surprised that this Jew who had murky origins in the East Side ghetto should be well dressed and quite good-looking and well spoken, too. On the other hand, he did not know how tightly and desperately Max was controlling his speech and his grammar.
‘As far as collateral is concerned,’ Max had said, ‘we operate thirty-three houses. Of course, they’re not all theatres in the legitimate sense. Fourteen of them are storefront nickelodeons, and a number of others are converted lecture halls. I mentioned these simply to point out the extent of our operation. But we do have ten theatres, originally built for theatrical dramatic production. Four of them are mortgaged. Six are owned free and clear.’ He took out of a briefcase a folder that was stuffed with documents. ‘Here are all the facts and figures.’
Glancing through the folder, Berry asked, ‘How much are you looking for, Mr Britsky?’
‘I need half a million.’
‘Suppose you leave this material with me. We’ll let you know.’
Berry telephoned Max’s office two days later to inform him that the line of credit for five hundred thousand dollars was his. But that was only the beginning. Jake Stein worked out a projection of what it would cost to keep the theatres while they were dark. Stein was a lugubrious man. He regarded himself not simply as an accountant but as the keeper of the flame, a flame that no one else understood and which would be snuffed out if he so much as turned his back. ‘Max,’ he said, ‘it will take every dollar we got. If it wasn’t for the bank line, we’d be broke. We got to fire everybody.’
‘Don’t start firing so quick. First thing, I want you to dump the nickelodeons. Sell the chairs and the projectors if you can’t sell the leases. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. National won’t give us any film, but if we sell, they’ll do business with the buyers. The same thing with the lecture halls. We own three of them. Sell the property. With the rest, sell the leases. The chairs and the projectors go with the sale. We got to realise close to a million.’
‘Max, you’re crazy. You’re talking about twenty-three houses. We sell them and what have we got?’
‘We got the theatres. The day of the nickelodeon is over. Sure, I know they’re opening them all over the place, but it’s done. If we don’t pull this off, we’ll be broke and the hell with it. But if we do, that’s the end of the nickelodeon. Who’s going to go see a dog jump through a hoop when they can have theatrical entertainment?’
‘I still think you’re crazy. So we keep the theatres. What do we do, fire everyone? Lock them up?’
‘Jake, take it easy,’ Max said. ‘Don’t be so quick to fire anyone. Let’s see how the cash comes in from the nickelodeons. Then we’ll know who we got to fire, but maybe nobody. I got to find out how many we need to make a big moving picture, something I don’t know where to begin with.’
Fred Feldman took another tack. Coming out of hours spent in the law library of his former employer, he informed Max that they had an unshakable action against National Distributors. ‘Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, it’s absolutely clear. There are no loopholes, Max. We got them – in blatant restraint of trade. I think we should sue for ten million dollars.’
‘You know,’ Max said, ‘Sam Snyder can’t buy cameras.
The word’s out, and I think the telephone company’s in the deal too.’
‘Wow! You know what that gives us? That gives us maybe the biggest antitrust action of the year.’
‘Except that we ain’t taking it. Snyder sails for France tomorrow. He can buy all the cameras we need there, and they’re better than any cameras we can buy here. He’s also bringing twenty thousand feet of film stock back with him. We hired two guys away from Edison, where the pay is lousy, and we’ll set up our own laboratory.’
‘But Max, you got to bring an action against National. We can pin their ears back.’
‘Freddy,’ Max said, ‘what for?’
‘They tried to kill us. We return the favor.’
‘Maybe they done us a favor. I asked Murphy about suing them. He says to go up against people like National and the telephone company and Edison and them cookies up in Rochester, we got as much chance as a snowball in hell. Screw them, Freddy. I got more important things to do.’
Among the more important things were two tickets to J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton. It had opened in New York four years earlier, in 1902, to a very good run, and now it was being revived for a limited run of six weeks in the Clarion Theatre on Fourteenth Street. There were plans to tear down the Clarion and erect an apartment house on the site, but Max held an option to buy the old theatre. His option still held for another three months, and during that period the owners took in limited engagements. Crichton was played by Will Fredrickson, a very competent if not great English actor, and the play was directed by a newcomer to the theatre, Gerald Freedman by name. The function of a director in America was still quite recent. While many plays were done with no particular person in charge of the direction, except for the limited participation of the producer, Sally felt that something as untested and complicated as the motion picture they proposed to make required some sort of theatre person to oversee it. Gerald Freedman’s parents lived in Flatbush, and they were neighbors of Sally’s parents; when Sally’s mother heard that she was writing a moving picture, she suggested Freedman as someone who might be helpful. The fact that Freedman was working in a theatre where Max held an option was merely coincidental, but it did help to provide excellent seats.
Sally was uncertain as to what Max’s reaction to Barrie’s whimsy and satire would be. To her surprise, he loved the play, delighted with the concept of a butler superior to his master, and when they went backstage, he dropped his usual suspicious and cynical approach to shake hands enthusiastically with Gerald Freedman and to insist that he join them for a late supper at Rector’s.
Freedman was a year younger than Max, a couple of inches taller, and already balding. He had large, sad brown eyes behind heavy glasses, a long, narrow face, and a prominent nose – a kind of homeliness that was quite attractive and unusual. The revival of the Barrie play was his first important professional job; before it and since his graduation from City College, he had waited tables in the Palm Restaurant on Bleecker Street and had spent all of his spare hours in the theatre, first as a general gofer, then painting scenery, taking small parts when he could get them, and becoming involved in a number of amateur productions at Cooper Union and at the Henry Street Settlement. Thereby his life line had already crossed Max’s twice, once on Henry Street and again at the Clarion Theatre; as Max put it, ‘That’s got to mean something, Gerald – Gerry – you don’t mind I call you Gerry? You call me Max and Sally is Sally. We’re going to be working together a lot, so we won’t be formal.’
‘Of course,’ Freedman said, ‘I have to be honest. I’m very excited at the kind of opportunity you’re offering me, but I’ve never made a moving picture of the kind Mrs Britsky spoke about –’
‘Neither did anyone else.’
‘– or any kind of moving picture. I mean, I have to be truthful. I don’t know anything about moving pictures. I have only the vaguest notion of how they are made.’
‘You went to the nickelodeons?’ Max asked him.
‘A hundred times, sure.’
‘Did you see The Great Train Robbery?’ Sally asked him.
‘Oh, yes, yes. Twice.’
‘Well, if you think of The Great Train Robbery as being one incident in a long story that makes some sense, well, that’s what we hope to do.’
‘I still don’t see what my role would be.’
Max laughed and patted Freedman on the shoulder. Already, at only twenty-seven years, Max was assuming a manner both paternal and feudal. After all, here he was at Rector’s, high uptown at Forty-third Street, driven here with his guest in his own carriage, hosting a supper party in what to Max was a restaurant more important if less splendid than Delmonico’s. Max did not s
hare in the sense of doom that had overtaken his business associates. When Charley Rector paused at his table to say, ‘Good to see you, Mr Britsky, and Mrs Britsky, lovelier than ever,’ it was an accolade that he was already taking for granted. He might have had a few hours of doubt after his encounter with Stanford and Calvin, but it had dissipated, and now there were no questions about the ultimate success of their project. He had won this place, sitting here with his wife and young Freedman under the glittering crystal chandeliers, pouring champagne, eating eggs Benedict, taking just a few spoonfuls of the chocolate soufflé he had ordered for dessert, lighting a fine Havana cigar. Let the others have doubts. He knew he would make these moving pictures because he intended to do it, and what he intended, he did.
‘When the time comes, Gerry, I’ll tell you what your job is.’
Not that Max had more than the vaguest idea at that moment. But as he saw it, that was not the, important thing. The important thing was to move ahead, to do it.
The small, cramped, makeshift studio that Edison had built in New Jersey to make his ten-minute films made no sense to Max, but then, neither did he have any clear idea of what a proper moving picture studio should consist of. The Philadelphia operation was being conducted in an old barn, but to Max that was as limited and senseless as Edison’s studio. His own thinking was influenced by the legitimate theatres he had taken over and converted into moving picture houses. He admired the backstage height of these old theatres, the way scenery could be pulled up out of sight. He liked the thought of a camera shooting down from thirty or forty feet, although he had never seen such a thing. He was falling into the habit of seeing things with the eye of a camera, squaring off a piece of the reality around him and imagining it on a screen. His distaste for the short subjects shown in the Britsky theatres and nickelodeons had increased over the years, the stupidity and pointlessness becoming something he watched with either indifference or annoyance, and as he sought for a place to make his own films, his excitement at what he proposed to do increased. Day after day, he prowled the streets of Lower Manhattan, rejecting all the suggestions that he might find what he was looking for in New Jersey or in the Bronx. Downtown New York was his home base, his place of sustenance. He had to be there. And finally he found it.
