by Howard Fast
Freedman persuaded Eric Sims, who had designed the sets for Gounod’s Faust at the Metropolitan Opera House, to do the basic interiors for the movie, and while Max howled at his fee of three thousand dollars, he decided finally that the association of so exalted a name as Eric Sims with his project was worth the price. He was spending money now at a rate that numbed him, but like a child, he exulted at the action and confusion inside the old ice house – the carpenters building the sets, the electricians with their wires and cables, the painters and drapery people and carpet people and the procession of actors in and out for the casting. Nothing like this had ever happened to Max in the past. He had transformed storefronts into nickelodeons and lecture halls into moving picture houses, but this thing of making something out of nothing, of a creation out of the whole cloth – this was new and more exciting than anything else he had turned his hand to.
He was constantly frustrated by his lack of knowledge, his lack of judgment in creative matters, his general lack of education, his ignorance of the technology they were using, and to compensate, he bludgeoned those around him and played the boss more and more dictatorially. Yet Max, more than anyone else engaged in the project, had some sort of subconscious realisation that what they were doing would be a factor in changing the history of the human race. He could not have phrased it that way, but a sense of the power of those shadows reflected on the silver screen had pervaded his mind for years, had grown and become a part of his being.
But perhaps because he could make no philosophical approach to his life and career, he had no way to take the hardening edges of his personality in hand, to smooth them, and to allow his life to come into focus. So when Bert Bellamy said to him, ‘What in hell is happening to you, Max? You’re becoming a son of a bitch,’ Max replied, ‘Maybe it’s time.’
He had just blown up at Sam Snyder after some test shots showed that the lighting was inadequate. The film had developed dark and muddy, and it meant they would lose three days rewiring, aside from the additional cost. Snyder met the attack by staring at Max blankly and uncomprehendingly.
Sam Snyder was a plump, easygoing man, a family man devoted to his stout wife and his five children, content with his work and with the variety of excellent German dishes his wife produced – and, from the very beginning, the link between Thomas Edison as a source and the driving energy of Max Britsky. Since Max bought the ice house on Eighteenth Street, Snyder had seen his family hardly at all, first making the trip to Europe, then working twelve and fourteen hours a day turning the building into a studio. He was totally devoted to Max and crushed by Max’s anger. Bert was witness to the scene, and demanded of Max, ‘Why? Without Sam, we’d all be dead.’
Max went to Sam and apologised. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me,’ Max told him. ‘Jesus, Sam, you got to be the best friend I got in the world.’
‘I thought so.’
‘You don’t hold it against me? You know something, Sam, you could turn around and walk out on me, and all I’d do would be to blow my brains out.’
‘I wouldn’t walk out on you, Max. You know that.’
Max made amends with money. He always made amends with money. He raised Snyder’s salary to ten thousand a year, a princely sum for the time and enough to drive Jake Stein to tears. ‘Do you know what we’re spending each day?’ Stein demanded of Max. ‘It’s all outgoing, and not a dime coming in.’ Then Max bought an ermine coat for Sally – except that he had to buy two of them. If he bought an ermine coat for Sally and not for his mother, Sarah would give him no peace. Of course, when Sally discovered that he had purchased the same coat for his mother, she refused to wear hers. At the same time, Gerry Freedman was insisting that Sally be consulted on the casting. The battles over that went both ways.
‘I don’t want her here,’ Max said. ‘A wife’s a wife. She’s got everything in the world. She’s got two kids to take care of.’
Day by day, Freedman was beginning to realise the enormity of the project he had undertaken. ‘You don’t understand, Mr Britsky,’ he told Max. ‘Mrs Britsky is very modest, but this is her creation, her story. It’s true that I helped her, but she’s the one who conceived it, and she can be very helpful.’ He might have added that Eric Sims, a middle-aged homosexual, had made advances to Freedman which Freedman rejected somewhat, crudely, after which Sims would not talk to him. On the other hand, Sims was charmed with Sally.
But Sally was by no means charmed with Max’s request that she become a part of the company at the ice house. ‘With that little whore of yours lording it over things!’
‘Come on, come on, Sally. Etta Goodman is not a whore.’
‘Of course not. She’s the daughter of some fine gentleman to whom you have a great obligation. You are a prince, Max.’
‘Come on, Sally –’
‘I spoke to her father.’
Max was silent. Etta’s father had been dead these five years.
‘You know,’ Max said meekly, ‘this picture, it ain’t—’
‘Isn’t,’ Sally interrupted. ‘Oh, why do I bother?’
‘Because you like me, at least a little. It isn’t only for you and me. There are also the kids. I got ten theatres standing empty. If this don’t work, Sally, it’s all gone. Everything.’
‘I want you to tell that little bitch to keep out of my way.’
Not only was Sally different, but her language was different. In one short argument, she had used the words ‘whore’ and ‘bitch.’ It was incredible. But she was not the only one caught up in the process of change. Etta Goodman died a quick death; Feona Amour stepped into life full blown.
As Feona, Etta had begun the process of being a star, even though no such thing existed. It was not that she possessed any sort of prescience or had any inkling of herself as the founder of a dynasty; it was simply the emergence of her previously crushed spirit as the burgeoning of a monster. It began with the dressmaker who fitted her for costumes, continued with the hairdresser, and came to fruition in the process of casting. Freedman had a large cast to fill within a limited budget. He could make only a very rough estimate of how long it would take to film the story, and since the time was in doubt, he hesitated to try to engage important actors from New York’s legitimate theatre. Instead, he turned to the Yiddish Theatre, which was at the height of its glory and which had created on Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street a theatrical center that rivaled the uptown English-speaking theatre. Also, actors in the Yiddish Theatre came out of the Eastern European tradition; not only were they frequently brilliant as thespians, but their emotional level was much higher and their movements more explicit than those of the actors on the New York stage, who were deeply influenced by the British style. Yiddish actors moved their arms, clenched and unclenched their hands, turned their whole bodies into instruments of expression, and since none of the spoken words would be heard, Freedman felt that this specific quality would incur to his advantage. And since they would be silent, engaging in a sort of mime, the fact that they spoke English poorly and often with a heavy accent made no difference.
Feona objected. ‘They all sound like my grandfather. It’s ridiculous. And she’ – pointing to Julia Schwartz, who had played in Europe opposite Sarah Bernhardt and who even now, at fifty-five, was one of the great ladies of the Yiddish Theatre – ‘she is impossible.’
Thus a star is born. Freedman pleaded, suffered, connived, and somehow managed. For Sally, it was the breadth of life renewed. She realised that since she had given up teaching, her life had been squeezed into a hell of boredom. She was not a housekeeper; she could not exist in caring for two small children; and her increasing bitterness was largely the result of sheer frustration. Working with Freedman in a project that was both creative and fascinating, she found herself. But it was not until they actually began to play the scenes in front of the camera that Sally realised how novel and original their project was. Piece by piece, they worked it out, staring with wonder and excitement at each piece of fi
lm that came back from the laboratory. At times the scene was a total disaster, the focus clear in one part and blurred in another, and it would have to be redone. Again, a scene would lack a point of attention. Everyone threw ideas into the hopper, the actors included, and of course Max, whose eye was strangely vivid and clear in terms of what the camera could do. It was his notion to add a second and then a third camera. Sally insisted on a swiveled coupling. Fred Feldman, near-sighted, complained of being unable to make out faces. They tried a new kind of spotlighting, and then they tried moving the camera in on a specific person. Sam Snyder, working on focus, went to New Jersey and consulted with his old pals still working for Edison. They discovered that they needed new lenses, but there was no time to invent and make them. So they improvised.
There were days when the old ice house turned into a battleground, with the actors screaming at Max in Yiddish and Max shouting back in his own kitchen variety of the language, Freedman pleading for peace and Feona waving her arms regally, and Isadore Melchik, the famous Second Avenue tragedian who had been persuaded to play the role of Dr Anthony Leighton, whispering, ‘Meshuganas, madmen, I have been given into a den of madmen, with a witless dunce who calls herself Feona.’ Fortunately, Feona understood no Yiddish – fortunate in this instance, but very unfortunate at other times when the Yiddish Theatre members of the cast joined in opposition to Etta Goodman and Pasquel Massoni. Massoni, a tall, handsome, dark-eyed Italian, had been hired by Freedman to play the part of Manfred Van Dyme since no one in the Yiddish Theatre suited Sally’s concept and the few who did in the English-speaking theatre were otherwise engaged. Massoni claimed that he had been one of the leading men in the rather famous Vittorio Repertory Company of Milan, and when they toured the States in 1905, he parted company with them and decided to try his fortunes in the American theatre. Since his English was minimal and since he had survived as a waiter in Dino’s Spaghetti Hole on Mott Street, Freedman found his story dubious; but his appearance was so striking, his profile so excellent, his hair so wonderfully curled in black ringlets, that Freedman decided to take a chance. ‘After all,’ he said to Sally, ‘if I can teach Feona to be Jennifer, then I can teach Pasquel to be Manfred Van Dyme.’ Sally agreed with his choice, Pasquel Massoni being so pleasant to look upon that she was certain his lack of talent and English would be forgiven.
On the other hand, the Yiddish Theatre members of the cast promptly dubbed him the luksh, luksh being a shortened version of luckshon, which in Yiddish means noodle or spaghetti; after watching his first attempts at the role of Manfred, they changed it to the narisha luksh, which could be freely translated as noodlehead or fool. He and Feona joined forces as fellow outsiders, and Sally watched gleefully as Feona and Pasquel, whose name had now been changed for program purposes to Warren Heart, each found in the other an object of admiration and affection. They shared an ignorance of Yiddish, which language was used by most of the cast to hurl their imprecations at the leading man and the leading lady, said imprecations being for the most part unprintable. Manfred, who was once Pasquel and became Warren, was easygoing and sensitive; in fact, sensitive to a fault. Pushed too far, he was given to tears. Feona mothered him. Freedman said to Sally, ‘Does it appear to you as much as to me as a sort of lunatic asylum?’
Sally had just spent a half-hour attempting to teach Yussel Shimkowitz, who was playing the part of the Van Dyme chauffeur, to mouth the words: ‘Certainly, Mr Van Dyme. It will be a pleasure.’
‘What difference will it make,’ Shimkowitz argued, ‘if I say it in Yiddish? Who hears me? For eleven weeks I played Falstaff in Yiddish, and I stopped the house. Three times I stopped the house. If I can speak the words of Shakespeare in Yiddish, I can speak the idiot mouthings of an idiot chauffeur.’
Fortunately, Sally had less than a nodding acquaintance with the Yiddish language, but then, no one in the ice house understood Italian. ‘Very much so,’ she told Freedman. ‘But will it really make any difference, Gerry? I mean, how many lip readers will there be in the audience?’
Then the two of them went into a dressing room, closed the door, and while one spoke silently into the mirror, the other tried to read the words. A few minutes later they burst out laughing and fell into each other’s arms, still laughing and hugging each other. It was the first moment of abandon or of any kind of joy that Sally could recall experiencing since the day of her marriage. Then they realised what they were doing and drew back and away from each other.
‘I’m sorry,’ Freedman said.
‘For what? For laughing?’
‘For being in love with you, I guess.’
‘Is that a joke?’
‘Does it sound like one?’
For a long moment Sally stood and stared at him, then she turned and fled from the dressing room. Freedman followed her more slowly, and back on the set, said to her, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, Sally, and I don’t think it makes so much difference what they say – I mean, even if Manfred says it in Italian.’
‘What?’ Her thoughts were elsewhere. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean what we were talking about, the lip reading. Nobody reads lips. Anyway, tomorrow morning we’re photographing on Fifth Avenue and the side street. Max has fixed it with Boss Murphy, and they’re closing off the avenue and we’ll have fifty cops taking care of things. You have to hand it to Max. He does things right.’
‘Yes, he does,’ Sally said shortly.
Fred Feldman pressed Max for a meeting, and Max avoided him. Feldman and Jake Stein discussed the matter, and they went over the books together. Bert Bellamy, together with Ruby Britsky, had arranged the sale of the nine lecture halls that Max had converted into moving picture theatres. Five of the halls had been sold to the Jessup Nickelodeon Company, and there was the regular real estate deduction, with checks made out to Cynthia Collins, agent for the transaction, with an address on William Street. Miss Collins was an attractive woman of about forty or so, and drawing up the papers for the sale, Feldman had no suspicion that Miss Collins was anything other than she claimed to be. However, when he tried to find her a few weeks later to discuss a small change in the contracts, he discovered that she had never occupied the premises at William Street – or, indeed, any other premises that he could find. The commissions had amounted to almost five thousand dollars. Feldman discussed the matter with Jake Stein.
‘I know,’ Stein said.
‘What the devil do you mean, you know? What do you know?’
‘I spoke to Hymie Brockman. He’s in the business, and he knows every real estate broker south of Fourteenth Street. There ain’t no Cynthia Collins. There never was no Cynthia Collins.’
‘What!’
‘Just like I say.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Max?’
‘Look, Freddy, I love Max. Even when he’s a son of a bitch, which is fairly frequently, I am loving him. He’s good to me. My wife had to go up to Keppleman’s Mountain House in Sullivan County, and I needed five hundred bucks. Max didn’t hesitate. He gives it to me and he still don’t let me dock my pay. Ruby’s had his hand in the cashboxes for years. He makes a deal with the ticket sellers. They take out two dollars a night – a dollar to Ruby, a dollar to the ticket man. Not much, but it adds up. Then little brother Benny gets in on the graft, just a little bit, here and there. Max knows, but the couple of times I try to talk to him about it, he takes my head off. Now it’s possible that Bellamy’s in on it, and who’s Bert? Only Max’s best and oldest friend in the world, since they were kids together working at the penny arcade. So what do we do? We tell Max that his brother and his best friend are crooks?’
‘About Bert, we just don’t know. You say possibly – that’s not good enough. But if Max finds Out –’ Feldman shook his head.
‘How does he find out, Freddy? It’s a few thousand lousy dollars. Leave it alone. The way Max is moving these days, he’s spending twice that each day. That’s what you got to talk to him about. If we don�
�t finish this moving picture in another week, we can all go on vacation.’
But to sit down with Max for a meeting was not easy. Feldman and Stein might be worried about money, but Max had his huge toy, the ice house with its sets and lights and cameras and actors. He was happier than he had ever been before, probably happier than he would be again, and when at last Feldman cornered him in one of the dressing rooms, Max said, ‘Freddy, stop crying. Tomorrow we photograph the cards, and then we paste it all together, and then all we need is ten thousand dollars for the prints, fifty thousand for advertising and tumeling, and another five thousand to hire Rector’s for the opening night, and to throw the kind of a party this town won’t forget. So do we have a lousy sixty-five big ones still in the till, or do I have to go begging?’
‘We got about fifty-two thousand, and you don’t do the begging. I’ll do it, and I’ll get it from Chase, where you got your teeth into them already. I’ll squeeze another mortgage out of the theatres. But God Almighty, Max, suppose the whole thing fizzles?’
‘Then we’re all out on our asses, right?’
They spent the next week, as Max put it, pasting it all together. Sam Snyder, together with a young man named Martin Kellogg, whom he had hired away from Edison, devised a sort of enlarger that magnified the film and enabled them to roll it back and forth as they worked on it. No one in the group – not Sam Snyder or Sally or Freedman or Max – had anticipated the specific difficulties encountered putting the film together. The trained, practiced film editor was far in the future; then they had to invent, guess, and hope.
The consensus was that the entire motion picture should run for one hundred minutes, but they found themselves with one hundred and eighty-three minutes of film, not including the dialogue cards. What to leave in? What to take out? There was a scene of a small, dirty street child weeping. It had little to do with the story and had come about accidentally, and Sally loved it. She wept when it fell to the cutting room floor, the beginning of millions of feet of film, unused, unseen, that would accumulate through the years on the floors of a thousand cutting rooms. There were bitter arguments, screaming confrontations, pleading – as much emotion as had gone into the making of the film itself – but finally it was done, and there had come into existence a feature-length motion picture called The Waif, starring Feona Amour and Warren Heart. The supporting cast of Yiddish Theatre actors had also been transmuted into an Anglo-Saxon nomenclature, the list of actors including Thomas Morton, James Spalding, Oswald Smith, Joan Ashley, Alice Henderson, and so forth and so on. But Max bristled at the suggestion that his own name might be changed. ‘With actors, it is one thing. But Britsky remains Britsky. They don’t like it, they can shove it up their ass.’
