Max

by Howard Fast

  And while Miss Amour lacks the training and polish of a fine theatrical actress, she almost makes up for it with her ingenuousness. Both she and Warren Heart, her leading man, might be faulted for excessive gestures and posturing, but I am not at all certain that this type of silent drama does not call for such excesses. The other members of the cast were well suited to their supporting roles, particularly Thomas Morton and Joan Ashley.

  The other newspapers responded in kind. Indeed, the reception given The Waif was beyond anything Max had expected.

  [ S E V E N ]

  Max had asked Clifford Abel, the architect, to join him and Sam Snyder and Fred Feldman for lunch at the Café Coronet on Second Avenue. Clifford Abel, only thirty-seven years old, had already earned a national reputation as an innovator alongside such men as Stanford White and Frank Lloyd Wright, except that he eschewed somberness or granite dignity. As it was said, he built palaces, which was precisely the reason Max had come to him; yet while Abel’s experience was widespread, this was his first meal in a Jewish dairy restaurant.

  ‘So we’ll find no meat on the menu,’ Max explained. ‘You’ll try the fish, it’s excellent. And why no meat? It ain’t like Mr Upton Sinclair wants we should all be vegetarians. It’s a question of the Jewish dietary laws. Myself, I don’t pay attention to them, but Jewish restaurants don’t want to turn away the Orthodox Jews, who won’t eat anything where meat and milk products are mixed. So to sell meat and milk dishes, a restaurant would have to have two kitchens, two cooks, two sets of dishes, and also pots and silver. Much easier to be one or the other. In this case, the Café Coronet is a dairy restaurant.’

  Abel was not sure that he had followed Max’s train of thought, but he nodded agreeably and wondered about fish.

  ‘Not included,’ Max said.

  ‘You order for me,’ Abel said. ‘My tastes are catholic.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s only Jewish food,’ Max said. ‘I didn’t know you were Catholic.’

  ‘Only in taste.’ To Feldman’s relief, Abel turned the conversation to the matter at hand, confessing that he had never built a theatre. ‘It’s a very special art, you know. They say acoustics are a science, but I question that. I should think you would have engaged Bill Tuthill. His Carnegie Hall is a miracle of acoustics.’

  ‘Because I don’t want no Carnegie Hall, and I don’t want no Metropolitan Opera House, and I don’t want no theatre like fifty theatres we already got. Right now, Mr Abel, the Britsky chain consists of eighteen theatres here in New York City, eleven in Philadelphia, two in Albany, two in Pittsburgh, six in Boston, two in Atlanta, and seven in Chicago. Makes almost fifty. Most of them were legitimate houses, a few were concert auditoriums, a number of music halls, and a few we built ourselves. But as far as Tuthill is concerned, I don’t think he’d know what I’m talking about. It’s a question of the movies. Sure, acoustics are important, but that’s not my first concern. In fact, I have just about decided that the stage show, the vaudeville act, is a weak sister. It’s the old music hall trying to keep pace with progress. Until now, nobody had the guts to do away with vaudeville. Yeah, I know, in the nickelodeons there was no vaudeville, but the day of the nickelodeons is over and now every exhibitor feels that if he don’t have five vaudeville acts he can’t claim to run a first-class theatre. And why? Because he don’t understand the movies. Either he sees the movies as a way to make money – and believe me, it is a way to make money – or else he feels inferior about it. I don’t. To me, we’re just at the beginning of something that’s beyond anybody’s imagination, and that’s why I want to have this discussion with you. Suppose I order for you cold sweet and sour whitefish? It’s better than anything you’ll find at Delmonico’s or at Rector’s.’

  ‘It sounds fine,’ Abel agreed.

  Eli himself came over to take their order. Eli was the owner, but for certain old and important customers, only he took the orders. Now he told Max, ‘My son, Bernard – he’s the younger one – he says that in A Tale of Two Cities, you left out the most important part. He’s studying the book in high school.’

  ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ Max explained to Abel. He replied to Eli, ‘Tell him we’ll do a sequel. The French Revolution costs too much, believe me. That was top budget. The whitefish should be perfect.’

  ‘It’s always perfect.’

  ‘You see,’ Max explained to Abel, ‘it’s involvement. Millions of people who were never involved before. Mr Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World, just opened. You seen it?’

  Abel nodded. ‘A lovely work.’

  ‘My wife dragged me to see it. She thinks it can be a moving picture. I’m not crazy for it. But do you see Eli’s boy involved? He don’t know it exists. All right, you got to stop me because I can lecture about the movies all day. The main thing is for you to understand what I’m talking about when I say I want a palace. I want a theatre, but I want it to be something new. I think of it as a palace.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose there have been some pretty ornate theatres.’

  ‘Ornate is not enough. First place, I want it big, at least two thousand seats. Only one balcony, and pitched to the screen, not to the stage. Now Mr Snyder here, he’s our technical expert, and I want you to work with him to get the line of sight. Also, I want a pipe organ, a pipe organ big enough to blow the walls open once you hit it. Instead of a pianist, we’ll have an organist, and I hear with an organ you can even reproduce a battle scene if you have to.’ Turning to Snyder, ‘That’s what you’ve been telling me, Sam, right?’

  ‘Well, there might have to be some special attachments, but that’s the idea. Mr Abel. Until now, we’ve had only pianos, and occasionally in the larger theatres a trio, piano, violin, and a drum set. I’ve been investigating the pipe organ, and I think it can really improve what we’re trying to do. Did you see our moving picture The Stand at Concord Bridge?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t get to the movies as often as I should,’ Abel said apologetically.

  ‘We can run it for you. The point is, I have a friend who plays organ at St Catherine’s, and he was demonstrating some of the sounds he can make to suggest a battle. It was very remarkable.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure,’ Abel agreed. ‘I’ve heard some remarkable sounds out of pipe organs, and if I undertake this project for you, I’ll certainly have to work with one of the large organ companies – perhaps in Europe if we can’t do it here. However, I’m still not certain of your thoughts about a palace, Mr Britsky. It’s true that some of my buildings have been spoken of as palaces, but that’s merely a euphemism from those who feel that ornamentation is sinful.’

  ‘All right. This time we’ll let them call a palace a palace. I don’t feel that class is sinful. I don’t want this to look like some nice, quiet theatre. I want it to look like a moving picture palace.’

  ‘Well, for example, Mr Britsky?’

  ‘You seen pictures of the Taj Mahal?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.’

  ‘That’s the general idea. Not the towers, not exactly the same, but something a kid looks at, he says to his mama, that’s a beautiful palace. And when he goes into it, I want a lobby big enough to hold a thousand people, not the stinking, dark, crowded lobbies they have in the legitimate houses, and I want two huge staircases curving up on either side’ – he spread his arms and circled his hands to illustrate – ‘like this, you know what I mean?’ The whitefish arrived, and Max said, ‘Go ahead eat. You can starve just sitting there and listening to me. And I’ll tell you something else. Inside, when the audience looks up and around them, they should see the points – what do you call them, like towers?’

  ‘Pinnacles.’

  ‘Exactly, palace walls and pinnacles, like they’re inside the palace looking out, and over the walls, I want them to see the sky, not the real sky, but like on a set, so when the lights go out, the sky is dark with points of light like the stars.’

  Abel had lost interest in his whitefish. He was staring at Max inte
ntly, his gray eyes half closed, and half to himself, he whispered, ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree: where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round –’

  He caught himself and stopped, and Max grinned and said, ‘I like that. I certainly like that. You and me, Mr Abel, I think we think the same way. You want the job?’

  ‘We haven’t even discussed cost.’

  ‘To hell with the cost. If this works out, I build one of these palaces in every big city in America, and each one different. How do you like that?’

  ‘It’s a dream come true. Where will you put this one, the first?’

  ‘I got a lot on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-second Street. It’s uptown, but that’s where the action’s going to be, uptown. So what do you say, Mr Abel. Do we shake hands?’

  ‘I think we do,’ Abel said.

  Three floors of the Hobart Building were now given over to Britsky Productions. A year before, the building had gone up for sale, and Max bought it. Yet he hadn’t changed his original office. To build a palace for people who desired to spend a few hours watching a moving picture was one thing, but to provide a room like a palace interior for his day-to-day work was another thing entirely. Della O’Donnell, who had come to work for Max eight years ago, and who was some sort of distant relative of Charlie Murphy, boss of Tammany Hall, had been advanced from receptionist to the position of Max’s personal secretary. She was the same warm, bosomy, red-headed, overweight, motherly woman about whom Max had his marital fantasies, who had come to adore Max, who had been deserted by an alcoholic husband, and who, being a year older than Max, treated him like her favorite child.

  For years Max made no pass at her, treating her with exemplary propriety, firm in his conviction that he would not become involved at the same time with two women who worked for Britsky Productions; this behavior upon Max’s part went against everything Della had ever heard about Max Britsky. At the same time, it was combined with a tenderness on Max’s part that quite overwhelmed her. For the first time in his life, Max was actually, tenderly, romantically in love. His youthful compulsion toward Sally had been something else, a desperate quest for qualities missing in himself, but never the combination of tenderness and passion he felt toward Della; yet years went by during which time he saw Della daily yet made no movement as a man toward a woman he cares for.

  Instead, he approached the matter in another way entirely. Every few months, he raised Della’s salary five dollars, an action that drove Jake Stein crazy since he, like others in the office, knew that absolutely nothing serious was happening between Della and Max. On Christmas, Max would send Della a huge basket of delicacies, sensing that anything more personal than food would be odd and inexplicable; finally he learned her birth date and sent her two dozen long-stemmed roses. The day after receiving the roses, Della said to him, very formally, ‘Could I speak to you alone in your office, Mr Britsky?’

  In Max’s office, Della said to him, her voice quavering a bit, ‘Why are you being so kind to me, Mr Britsky?’

  Max stared at her and tried to think of an appropriate answer.

  ‘I must know,’ she said, her large blue eyes beginning to mist with tears. ‘I simply must know, because no one has ever been so kind to me before, and I don’t know why, I really don’t know why.’

  Max shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to say, Della. I like you. I guess I love you.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Max mumbled with a diffidence he had never exhibited before. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Britsky,’ Della said, ‘don’t you know how I feel about you?’

  ‘No. How?’

  ‘I think you’re wonderful. I think you’re the best man I ever met.’

  ‘You can’t be that crazy,’ Max said, grinning with pleasure.

  ‘I just didn’t dare hope that you’d ever feel that way about me.’

  ‘Even when you knew what was going on between me and Etta?’

  ‘I understand that. My goodness, I know how your wife treats you. Sometimes I’d like to shake her, the way she treats you.’

  ‘Only it’s over,’ Max said emphatically. ‘Since Etta became Feona, it has been over, absolutely over. Furthermore, you and me, we’ll have dinner tonight, because that’s something I been thinking about for years and I’m not waiting any longer.’

  That way it began. There was no question of seducing Della. She and Max came together without any question or hesitation. She kept on working because, as she explained to Max, she would go out of her mind if she had to sit all day alone, and Max was delighted with a situation where this wonderful, pink-cheeked, red-headed woman could be around him all day; and now, today, Della rose as Max came into his office and whispered, ‘She’s in there.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ruby’s wife. I didn’t want to let her in, but you know how she is.’

  ‘I know. What else?’

  ‘A new set of drawings from Mr Abel. They’re on your desk.’

  ‘Did you look at them?’

  ‘I just peeked. They’re beautiful.’

  ‘Not too fancy?’

  ‘I like things fancy. And your wife called. Tonight, she said, you’re having dinner with the mayor. You shouldn’t forget. Is he nice?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The mayor. Mr Gaynor.’

  ‘Jay Gaynor’s business is being nice. Mine ain’t. Why did you let her in?’

  ‘She’s Mr Ruby’s wife. I just don’t know how to treat her.’

  ‘Treat her like a tramp and you can’t go wrong.’ Then Max went into his office. Kathy was sitting in his desk chair, her back to him and hidden by the high back of the swivel chair.

  ‘Close the door, Max,’ she said.

  ‘It’s closed,’ Max said tiredly. ‘What have you got in mind?’ Then he noticed her clothes piled neatly on his desk and sighed. ‘Oh, Jesus, no.’

  She swiveled the chair, got up, and came around the desk to face him. She was stark naked. She was no longer the beautiful young creature Ruby had married twelve years before, but her figure was still good, her well-shaped breasts high and firm, her hips not too wide.

  ‘What in hell are you up to?’ Max demanded angrily.

  ‘What are you up to, brother-in-law? You been eating me with your goddamn eyes for ten years now, and for ten years I been begging you to put me in your pictures. Time’s passing too quick. I decided to trade.’

  ‘Put on your clothes!’ Max snapped.

  ‘Why? You don’t want me? I ain’t got the goods Etta Goodman had or that tramp O’Donnell out front?’

  ‘Goddamn it, you’re my brother’s wife!’

  ‘So what? You don’t know your brother Ruby? When it comes to offstage fucking, he’s got ten to one on me, so don’t shed no tears for him.’ She walked toward Max. He backed away.

  ‘You want to be in one of my movies, is that it?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask. Come on, Max, I’m as good as anything you ever laid eyes on.’

  ‘All right, all right. You talk Ruby into it, and you’re in a picture. That’s my word. Just put on your clothes.’

  ‘You mean that, Max?’

  ‘I swear, absolutely.’

  She ran to him, flung her arms around him, and kissed him.

  ‘Will you put on your goddamn clothes!’

  She clung to him. ‘You horny little bastard. You got an erection as big as a house.’

  He pulled loose. ‘Either get dressed or the deal’s off. Now!’

  She sighed, shrugged, went to the desk, and began to dress herself. ‘Here, help me,’ she said to Max. ‘Here in back.’

  Biting his lips, he fastened her stays. ‘How are the kids?’ he managed to say.

  ‘Great. Just great. What kind of a picture, Max?’

  ‘The right kind. Get dressed and get out.’

/>   ‘OK, but don’t screw me, Max. Not that way. I can be a bitch if I have to.’

  ‘I bet you can.’

  When she had left, he said to Della, ‘You ever let her in here again, ever, I’ll –’ Words failed him.

  ‘She’s Mr Britsky’s wife,’ Della reminded him.

  It would be difficult to find two men more apparently different than Max Britsky and Sam Snyder. Snyder’s parents were immigrants from Thuringia in East Germany, and Snyder himself was a devout Lutheran and an utterly faithful husband whose only vices were cigars and beer. He was slow-spoken, round-faced and had over the years an ample belly that he filled with heavy German food. His sandy hair and childlike blue eyes could give an impression of somewhat stupid innocence, an impression far from the reality; the reality was a mind and outlook unlike Max’s, but nevertheless innovative and at times brilliant. It was Sam Snyder who had set up the projection booths, who designed the angles of projection in the theatres, who had devised new and different projectors when National Distributors got an injunction against those already in use in Max’s houses, and who had designed and organised the first studio. It was Sam Snyder who went to France and sat down with Auguste Lumière, and over three bottles of wine and an enormous roast goose, made the deal that gave Max a steady flow of French film stock at the time Eastman Kodak had cut off his supply in collusion with the distribution trust. At the same time, working together with Lumière, Snyder made certain that Lumiè’re camera was outside of Edison’s patents and would not involve Max in a lawsuit – after which he gave Lumière an order for fourteen cameras.

  Yet the differences that separated Max and Sam Snyder apparently served as glue to bind them together. Snyder worshipped Max and firmly believed him capable of achieving anything he set out to do; and by 1912, Max’s thirty-third year, Snyder was earning four hundred dollars a week, a truly princely sum for a production manager. Max had reached a point where he made no decisions regarding the production of films without first consulting Snyder. When he faced the necessity of producing six feature films a month, it was Snyder who convinced him that it could be done, whereupon they purchased a square block of rotting barns and stables in East Harlem, tore them down, and built on One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street the first motion picture studio constructed as such. It was also through Snyder’s relationship with the Lumières that Max began to buy films from Europe, making the deal just a month before this for the feature The Queen, starring the great Sarah Bernhardt. At that point, Max had almost a corner on the better foreign films, and had brought to America over the past few months Quo Vadis from Italy and War and Peace from Russia.