by Howard Fast
It was an old ice house on Eighteenth Street, between Ninth and Tenth avenues, a building forty feet wide, one hundred feet deep, with a ceiling sixty feet high. The ceiling was the roof of the building, and the inner space was clear except for stairs and landings climbing the rear wall. There was a dray loading platform off the back that opened onto Seventeenth Street. When used as an ice house, the ice would be stacked, the large blocks separated with sawdust, from floor to ceiling, and then sold off for shipping from the top down. Now the place was empty, except for piles of sawdust on the floor. The real estate agent who showed it to Max told him that it could be had for fifteen thousand dollars. The new ice houses had hydraulic elevators; this one was too small and narrow to make the installation worthwhile. ‘Which makes me wonder,’ the real estate man said, ‘what you intend to do with it.’
‘Make money,’ Max answered succinctly.
Feldman was dubious as he drew up the papers for the purchase of the ice house. ‘It’s a crazy building, Max. Suppose we have to sell it. Who’ll buy it?’
‘In five years, the lot it stands on will be worth twice what we paid for the building. Trouble is, Freddy, you worry about things.’
‘That’s what you pay me for.’
Sam Snyder, on the other hand, was delighted with the building. He returned from France a few days after the purchase was completed, bringing with him the cameras and the thousands of feet of film stock, filled with excitement and news: namely, that George Melies, the French filmmaker, was planning the same kind of dramatic film production Sally had suggested. Undoubtedly, it was in the air. ‘The thing is, Max,’ Sam said, ‘that that National crowd can’t keep our theatres dark. There’ll be moving pictures like ours in France and in England too.’
As for the ice house, Snyder pointed out that many things had to be done, electric power brought in for super-illumination, fans for ventilation, sets to be built once they knew what the story would be, electricians and carpenters to be hired. ‘It’s easy to talk about,’ he said to Max, ‘but when it comes down to doing it, it’s one big son of a bitch, and then if those talking cards of Sally’s don’t work, we can dump the whole thing.’
‘They’ll work,’ Max assured him.
Meanwhile, Gerry Freedman had become almost a daily visitor at the house on Sixty-sixth Street. Sally had never met anyone quite like him. To some extent, he shared Max’s trait of self-confidence, but he brought with it a sensitivity that Max had never exhibited. He seemed to anticipate Sally’s thoughts, to know what her response would be even before he made a suggestion. Without his help and encouragement, she certainly would have abandoned the project, dismissing what she had done as absurd and unworthy.
As far as Freedman was concerned, that first night at Rector’s found him completely entranced with Sally Britsky. Each to his own taste. Bert Bellamy described Sally as a frightened mouse. Others saw her as an attractive woman. Max accepted the compliments on the subject of Sally’s appearance as, in his words, ‘political horseshit,’ since most of it came from men connected in one way or another with Tammany. Once, when he used the expression to Murphy, Murphy said, ‘It has a nicer sound in Irish, my lad. Just blarney.’ Yet it never entered Max’s mind that Gerald Freedman or any other man could fall in love with Sally. Sally was his wife, the mother of his children, even though she had never been very much of a sexual object as far as Max was concerned, and once Richard and Marion had come into the world, Max and Sally’s sexual relationship practically ceased. It was two years since Marion Britsky had entered the realm of the living, but Sally still used the aftereffects of birth and nursing as an excuse to refrain from sex.
Max was entirely willing to go along with her, being comfortable in his relationship with Etta Goodman. His horror of venereal disease still persisted from his youth, but in his mind Etta was a nice, clean Jewish girl, and that she might remain that way, he said, ‘From here on in, you don’t look at another man. Understood?’
‘Sure, I understand. So why don’t you leave that skinny nothing and marry me?’
‘You know I don’t like that kind of talk.’
‘So let me tell you something, Mr Britsky. Don’t think I never looked in a mirror. I’m five times as beautiful as your schoolteacher, and maybe I ain’t a schoolteacher, but I’m as smart as she is, so don’t you tell me I can’t look at another man.’
The next time he saw Etta, he presented her with a two-hundred-dollar watch pin to wear on her shirtwaist. But, unmollified, Etta snorted, ‘She gets a mansion and a carriage. I get a watch pin.’
When Sally suggested that they might both be more comfortable in twin beds, Max made no protest, although his mother said in no uncertain terms, ‘It’s absolutely the most disgusting thing. It’s a shame to everyone’s eyes.’
‘Sally wants it that way.’
‘She wants the moon, so go give her the moon.’
‘She hasn’t been able to sleep so well since Marion’s birth.’
‘God forbid she should lose a night’s sleep. Your mother could go without sleep for a week, you don’t lift a finger. But Sally don’t sleep so good, so right away she needs a separate bed.’
Yet the last thing in the world Sally would have considered was an act of unfaithfulness, even as a mild flirtation. In her world, such things did not happen. Freedman was a friend, someone she could talk to. There was nothing wrong with having a friend. Max felt the same way. He was pleased that Freedman and Sally got along so well. He was aware that he needed talent like Gerald Freedman’s for this new venture he had embarked on. He was more than conscious of his own lack of education, and he did not deceive himself into believing that his glibness and his gift for dissembling substituted for knowledge. There was a whole world apart from himself, the world of theatre and books and art, and this world was shrouded in a kind of darkness that confused and troubled him. Freedman was an asset, just as Sally was an asset, and more to the point,’ Freedman was a man. Max could not cope with the notion that a woman could deal with complex creative problems, just as he could not even entertain the notion that Sally might be unfaithful to him. For all that he valued Freedman’s education and potential skill and taste, he could not imagine Freedman as competition for Sally’s affection. Freedman simply did not conform to any of Max’s definitions of attractive masculinity.
Freedman and Sally worked together for five weeks. The fact that they had no previous models to compare with and no tradition to guide them gave them a degree of freedom they would not have possessed were they doing a theatrical play, and the fact that neither of them possessed the skill or experience to create a traditional drama did not inhibit them. They were not in competition with Shaw or Ibsen; they were not in competition with anyone, not even with themselves, for they had no real critical faculties, and thus they worked on excitedly yet amiably to the final product.
In those five weeks, Max had accomplished a great deal. The leases on the nickelodeons and the equity in the converted lecture halls had been sold; the purchase of the ice house had gone through, and a crew of carpenters and electricians had been working there under Sam Snyder’s direction. The ten legitimate theatres had been closed down, and were being cleaned and refurbished. When they reopened, Max’s intention was to charge fifty cents in the orchestra and thirty cents in the balcony, which would result in a cash flow, according to his rough calculations, of at least double the amount the whole chain took in at the time of closing. He had been spending money with a kind of royal abandon, convinced that this throw of the dice must work. And at the end of the five weeks, they gathered at Max’s home to hear the results of the efforts of Sally and Gerald Freedman.
Sally slipped into the background. Somewhere, just below her threshold of conscious awareness, she understood that the projection of a woman as a major factor in their scheme might create opposition and resistance; when they were gathered in the living room, she explained that Freedman would outline the camera work, and at the appropriate moments, she w
ould hold up one or another of the stack of dialogue cards that rested in her lap. She had arranged it this way in spite of Freedman’s opposition and in spite of the fact that she had done most of the creative work.
‘You’re going to photograph those cards?’ Fred Feldman asked.
‘That’s our plan, yes.’ She turned to Snyder. ‘No problem about that, is there, Sam?’
‘None at all. But how long do you figure to hold on each card?’
Sally glanced at Freedman, who explained, ‘We try to limit a dialogue card to twelve words, except for prepositions and conjunctions and pronouns. Most are less than twelve words –’
Sally read the look on Max’s face and said quickly, ‘Words like “and,” “but,” “I,” “you,” “she,” “he” – we don’t count those because we feel they will respond to quick recognition. But even so, we tried to make the dialogue lines very short. It’s not always possible.”
‘I don’t know,’ Max said. ‘People don’t go around talking in two or three words.’
‘But this isn’t real,’ Freedman said. ‘I think it works. Now in answer to Sam’s question, we worked out the dialogue in two ways. First we would read a card the way you read a book, to yourself. We found we could read the twelve words comfortably in six seconds. Then we mouthed them, because that’s the way people read who have learned to read as adults – I mean people of limited education who still struggle with the language – and that takes twice as long, about twelve seconds.’
‘And I think,’ Sally added, ‘that many people will read aloud. I mean, if someone brings his mother or father and they’re immigrants and can’t read English, wouldn’t you think he’d read aloud?’
‘Hopefully in a whisper,’ Freedman said.
‘Of course, if we must have more than twelve words, we can increase the card time.’
‘We’ll worry about that later,’ Max said. ‘Let’s get going.’
‘Sure, here goes,’ Freedman agreed. ‘Our title first. We call this Jennifer, Child of the Street.’
‘Jennifer? What the hell kind of a name is Jennifer?’
‘Well, we shorten it. I mean, in the picture it’s Jenny.’
‘So why shouldn’t it be Jenny in the title?’
‘Come on, Max,’ Bert said. ‘Let him get on with it.’
‘No reason why it can’t be Jenny in the title,’ Freedman said. ‘We call her Jenny, in any case. She lives with her mother and father in a cold-water flat downtown. The father’s name is Joe Kent, and he’s a drunkard and a brute. Sometimes he works as a stevedore down on the docks, but mostly he doesn’t work, and the family ekes out its poor existence from the sewing the mother does and from the pencils Jenny sells on the street. The mother, whose name is Alice, is crippled. Of course, this is just background to the story itself –’
‘But if it’s background,’ Fred Feldman broke in, ‘how do you tell it? You don’t print it all out on cards, do you?’
‘Oh, no. No. We show it in the action. The action is more important than anything else. I’m simply placing Jenny.’
Sally held up the first card. ‘All his money spent on Booze, Joe Kent comes home.’
‘We’ve established the apartment at this point,’ Freedman said. ‘It’s our first set. Alice, the mother, sits at her sewing table. Then the card. You see, while most cards are dialogue, we must have a few that are simply exposition. Alice looks up with a smile at first. Then, seeing Joe reeling drunk, her smile fades. She spreads her arms to show hopeless disapproval. He waves an arm and curses her. Then Jenny runs into the room.’
Sally held up the second card: ‘Don’t say such things to Mother. You’re drunk.’
‘He turns on Jenny and strikes her. The mother rises with a superhuman effort, then falls to the floor. Jenny gets up from her knees and runs to her mother, then kneeling with her arms around her mother. She confronts her father as he approaches.’
Sally held up a card: ‘Don’t touch her.’
‘Would you know Jenny is speaking?’ Bert asked.
‘Oh, no doubt of that. We would put the camera directly on Jenny. She speaks the words, then the card. Then we go back to Joe Kent with the camera as he stalks around the room in his fury, knocking furniture around, turning back in anger on his wife and daughter. Then we put the camera on them to show their frightened, hopeless response. Then back on Joe Kent, who turns to them, curses them once more, goes to the cupboard, finds a bottle of hooch, and drains it. Then he flings the bottle against the wall, turns to curse his wife and daughter once again, and exits, slamming the door behind him. Now we move the camera around to another angle to include Alice and Jenny. Alice speaks to her.’
Sally held up a card: ‘He wasn’t always this way. He was kind before he became a drunkard.’
Freedman looked up from his manuscript. ‘I must say that once Sally and I got into this, we realised that we could do things we never thought about – I mean moving the camera from place to place. In the next scene, Jenny leaves her home to go to her work of selling pencils. This she must do so that her family may survive. I would like to show her going down the stairs in the cold-water tenement. Could we do that, Sam?’
‘I think we could work it out,’ Snyder said. ‘It’s just a question of getting enough light in the place.’
‘And follow her out into the street?’
‘Why not?’
He turned back to the manuscript. ‘I have a lot of details in here,’ Freedman said, ‘but the main thing is that this poor, sick child goes out on the street to sell her pencils –’
‘Child? What’s a child?’ Max demanded. ‘How old is she?’
‘Eighteen,’ Sally said.
‘What kind of sickness?’ Feldman wanted to know.
‘We don’t specify. It’s not necessary. It could be simple malnutrition, hunger, not enough to eat. Anyway, she’s out there on the street, pleading with people to buy her pencils, and they don’t. They pass her by, and then suddenly she collapses in a faint.’
‘You see,’ Sally put in, ‘it can be done. We’ve moved the story to this point with only three dialogue cards and one card of exposition. Dou you like it so far, Max?’
‘Yeah, I like it so far, but you got to know where it’s going. I get the picture all right – the drunken old bum and the mother and this poor kid – but I want to know where it’s going.’
Freedman nodded. ‘Yes, of course. We have the scene where she faints, and a crowd gathers. But you know the way a crowd is in New York. They look, but they don’t do anything. Now here,’ he said, tapping the manuscript, ‘we put in directions about how we think the cameras should be placed, and we keep doing that, but I don’t think you want all that because that way we can lose the story. Wouldn’t you agree with me, Sally?’
‘Absolutely. I think you should just tell the story, and then whenever the proper place comes, I’ll hold up the proper dialogue card.’
‘That makes sense,’ Max agreed. ‘I think we’re beginning to see how the dialogue cards work, so let’s have the story.’
‘Fine. Now at the same moment, more or less, that Jenny falls down in her faint, a chauffeur-driven limousine automobile comes along, one of those big new cars, and this one belongs to our leading man, whose name is Manfred Van Dyme. He is about twenty-six years old, and he’s the only son of a very rich old New York family that goes way back to the Dutch. He’s like one of those people Richard Harding Davis writes about, so rich that he doesn’t have to work for a living, but all the same a very decent person.’
‘Not if he’s anything like the bankers I deal with,’ Max said.
‘Well, no. He’s not in business. He’s a gentleman of leisure, and he drifts around in his automobile when he isn’t strolling on the avenue. The point is that his car reaches a point opposite Jenny just as she faints.’
Sally held up a card: ‘Pull over, Johnson.’
‘Johnson’s the chauffeur’s name. The car pulls over, and Manfred leaps out, pushes
through the crowd, and bends over Jenny.’
‘Why didn’t somebody call an ambulance?’ Jake Stein wanted to know.
‘Jake, it’s a story!’ Max snapped.
‘Well, Manfred sees this beautiful young woman lying there in a faint, and he’s touched. He’s deeply touched, and he also gazes with anger at those people standing around who haven’t enough compassion to do something to help this poor, beautiful young woman. So he picks her up in his arms and carries her to his car. Johnson holds the door open for him, and Manfred places her on a seat and climbs in. Now at this point, Sally and I felt that we could do something that appears to be practical but which we’ve never seen done. I guess Sam is the one to tell us whether it’s possible.’
‘Name it, Gerry. I’ll do my best.’
‘Well, it’s like this, Sam. He picks her up, say, on Fourteenth Street. Now we feel the Van Dyme mansion should be on Fifth Avenue, one of those graystone houses in the Fifties or in the Sixties. Now he’s going to drive her home with him –’
‘Home?’ Max demanded. ‘Wait a minute. Maybe I don’t know exactly how the classy uptown bluebloods live, but sure as hell there ain’t nobody going to pick up a broad on the street and take her home and present her to Mama and Papa. Not to the papas I’ve dealt with.’
‘No, Max,’ Sally said. ‘You’re getting ahead of us. Manfred’s mother and father are away touring Europe. It’s the thing with such people. I’m always reading how they’re touring the Continent. And you must understand that Manfred’s a most unusual man.’
‘OK, he’s got to be Santa Claus in plain clothes – but why not? I guess every poor kid dreams of something like that.’
‘Back to your question, Gerry,’ Snyder reminded him.
‘Yes. Well, what we were wondering is whether you could mount a camera on a dray, or on one of those automobile trucks, and then keep photographing Manfred’s car as he drives from Fourteenth Street to upper Fifth Avenue. We might need police cooperation, but Max tells me that’s no problem. Could we do it?’
