by Howard Fast
But it was the casting of Sarah Bernhardt in The Queen that set Max and those around him to thinking of what would eventually become the star system, and it was Sam Snyder who pinned it down. With four other film producers. Max had started, three years before, an exchange which allowed each producer to play the films of the others; until National Distributors stepped into the arrangement and let the other exhibitors know that if they dealt with Britsky, they would be cut out of National’s product as well as the use of National’s projectors, since National had a monopoly on patented projectors, again through arrangements and collusion. When Max ran the Bernhardt film, the other exhibitors made overtures, but only overtures. They lacked the courage to follow through. But independent theatres, still linked to Max, bought the film and showed it to tremendous crowds.
‘That’s what we need,’ Max said to Freedman. ‘We need Bernhardt. With her, we can sell anything.’
‘Max, we can’t have her, and the truth is that the picture’s lousy. We make better pictures. I tried using stage stars. It doesn’t work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they don’t know how. They’re too low key. As crazy as it sounds, Etta Goodman does it right. She doesn’t act, but as Feona, with all her gestures and poses, she gives us what we need.’
The night following this exchange with Freedman, Max had dinner at Sam Snyder’s house on Thirty-seventh Street, between First and Second avenues. It was an old pre-Civil War red brick house with a wide twenty-four-foot frontage, only three stories high, but with four bedrooms on both the second and third floors, a convenience for a man who had five children. Max felt comfortable in Snyder’s house – indeed, more comfortable than in the spotless neatness of his own home. The Snyder house was never neat and never spotless, but it was comfortable, and if Alice Snyder was not the world’s best housekeeper, she was a marvelous cook, an art she never left to their single servant. She produced rich German food, kugels and dumplings and six different kinds of sausage and sauerbraten, food that Max loved, and since he never gained weight, food he could eat to the point of satiation.
Sally, who never berated Max for spending an evening away from home, actually appeared to welcome evenings apart from him, especially since so many of her evenings were spent working with Freedman on the endless flow of scenarios. She had little in common with Alice Snyder, a goodhearted buxom country girl out of a Pennsylvania Dutch background who had less than a primary school education and no interest apart from her family, and she was relieved not to have to join Max in his social relationship with Sam Snyder. Max, on the other hand, experienced at Snyder’s home a sense of easy comfort and relaxation that he had never known before, not in the flat on Henry Street and not in the elegant brown-stone on Sixty-sixth Street. The comfort was increased when one night Snyder invited him to join the family for dinner and Max had to refuse.
‘Why not?’ Snyder asked. ‘Is Sally expecting you?’
‘As a matter of fact, she ain’t. She and Freedman are meeting with two new writers they want to hire, at Rector’s. One is a novelist, so they want to impress him. Only –’ He stared at Snyder uncertainly. ‘Well, the truth is, I asked Della to have dinner with me.’
‘Della O’Donnell?’
‘Yeah,’ Max said truculently.
‘Then bring her along. I like Della, and Alice will be crazy about her.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know. Trust me.’
Snyder was right. Alice and Della were very much alike, both of them balancing small learning with large wisdom, both of them plump just short of stoutness at a time when no premium was placed on a woman’s slenderness, both of them soft-spoken, gentle, never challenging the superiority of the male, both of them handsome women. Nor was Della bothered by disorder or by kids. The dinner was a great success. Alice’s roasted duck in raisin sauce magnificent, the spring beer dark and heavy, and Max more relaxed and content than Della had ever seen him before. He and Snyder lit long, thick, twenty-five-cent Cuban cigars and filled the dining room with clouds of smoke that neither woman objected to, and Max said dreamily, ‘If I had five Sarah Bernhardts on my payroll, I’d say vus felt mere.’
‘Which means?’ Della asked.
‘Which means I got absolutely nothing to worry about except those bas – excuse me, except Mr Frank Stanford who runs National, and who’s coming to see me next week, I should just live that long.’
‘What does he want this time?’ Snyder asked.
‘A pound of flesh, only with all the blood the system holds. You see, Alice,’ he said to Mrs Snyder, ‘this outfit, National Distributors, can’t bear that we’re alive. First, ten, twelve years ago, they were only a distributing outfit for garbage – you should excuse me, for the eight-hundred-foot films they made which they called moving pictures. At that time they wanted our theatres, and when I told them to go suck an egg, they cut off our product. No more National films for the nickelodeons. Well, you remember, we junked the nickelodeons and made The Waif, and I think maybe The Waif was the end of the nickelodeons, although not just at once. So once we showed how it could be done, other producers started doing the same thing, and we exchange films because nobody can make enough films to have a new film every week of the year.’
Max paused to light his cigar, and Snyder said, ‘Except maybe we got to.’
‘Maybe. Who knows. Anyway, like I said, other companies began making films, and each one set up an exchange. Only not National. Those goddamn – you should excuse me, I can’t clean up my language and talk about National at the same time.’
‘The children are asleep,’ Alice said calmly, ‘so you just say what you have to, Max, and I am sure that both Della and I will survive it.’
‘The thing is,’ Max went on, ‘that National couldn’t make a decent moving picture. With all their money and power and the telephone company behind them and Morgan and the crowd up in Rochester and Edison going along with them – with all that they don’t have the brains to make a decent moving picture. So they began buying up the exchanges.’
‘Except us,’ Snyder said.
‘Except us. That’s right, and that’s what Stanford and the trust want so hard he can’t sleep at night, and next week he comes sucking around for it. He’s seen the numbers on the Bernhardt film. Now if I had ten like her –’
‘Make them,’ Sam Snyder said suddenly. ‘You take a girl like Etta – Etta Goodman,’ he explained to his wife, ‘she’s now Feona Amour. Well, you take her and spend enough advertising her and put her picture up on the billboards and on the beer coasters in every saloon, and you got something as big as Bernhardt.’
‘Maybe,’ Max agreed.
‘Max, you got the Welonsky kid, that little Polish girl Gerry named Renee Favour –’ Della caught the excitement. ‘You could do it with her and with Mary Malone.’
‘It takes time, time.’ Max shook his head unhappily. ‘The question is, what do they throw at us this time? This miserable crumb, Stanford,’ he explained to Alice, ‘always has a gun in his pocket. Not a real gun, but something to hit us with. He’ll come with an injunction claiming that our projectors violate his patents. He’s done that twice. Each time, Sam here, God bless him, he’s got to alter the projector to get around the injunction. Same with your cameras. Freddy Feldman could make his bed in the courts, and I hate to tell you what it costs.’
‘Talking about Feldman,’ Snyder said, ‘he’s got a cousin Barney, works for the Tribune. He did the story about Etta and Pasquel, you remember, Feona loves Warren, or does she? The kid’s crazy about movies. You could hire him away and put it in his lap – how to turn them all into Sarah Bernhardts.’
‘Without learning to act,’ Della couldn’t help saying. ‘That is something.’
‘Acting!’ Max snorted. ‘Who needs acting? It’s a good idea, Sam. I’ll give it a shot.’
‘I got to plead with you to come to see me,’ Max’s mother said to him. ‘You’re a millionaire. After all, wh
at kind of use has a millionaire got for an old Jewish lady?’
‘Mama, I haven’t been avoiding you. I am up to my ears in problems.’
‘And you live next door. And even now, I wouldn’t see you except I got to go and plead with your stuck-up, fancy wife. Please, you should tell Max his mother wants to speak to him. Not anybody. Not somebody dragged in from the street, but his own mother who slaved her heart out for him.’
‘Mama, Sally’s not stuck up. She even said I’m neglecting you.’
‘Ah-hah, so when she says it it’s right, and you come running. Otherwise, I could drop dead. Eat something. I stayed up to the middle of the night baking.’ She pointed to a dish of cake and cookies resting on a table with a teapot and cups and saucers, the table set in the parlor and covered with a lace cloth. It was a small, round table that stood in front of an enormous velvet-covered sofa. Though his taste was limited, Max recoiled in despair every time he walked into his mother’s house. The living room was filled with large, ungainly pieces of furniture set on a garish Persian rug. On marble pedestals there stood a stuffed owl, a stuffed squirrel, and a bronze casting of a young woman in flowing robes. On another table was displayed a collection of sea shells, and on the walls, hanging almost as high as the twelve-foot ceiling, a series of oil paintings that Freida had discovered in the various auction houses she visited.
Max bit into a cookie and praised it, and Sarah said, ‘See, I would have time to bake if my children were happy.’
‘So now what, Mama?’
‘Your sister Esther, my beautiful Esther with the red hair, she’s got two babies, they should starve? That’s what you want?’
‘What do you mean, that’s what I want?’
‘With Manny not working, what else?’
‘You mean that bum she married has been fired again? I talk Plotkin into giving him the best kind of a selling job a man can have, and he’s fired again?’
‘What kind of a life does she have with him traveling all the time?’
‘At least he’s out of the way.’
‘Manny’s a sweet man.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I can see the meanness in you. You’ll let them starve.’
‘Mama, I won’t let them starve. Only he’s such a damn schmuck.’
‘That’s language to use in front of me!’
‘I’m sorry, Mama. All right, I’ll find something.’ He got up, ready to leave.
‘You’ll wait a minute? I got something to say about next door.’
‘What do you mean, next door?’ Max was on his feet. He started to leave, and each step was like pulling a foot out of hot tar.
‘Next door is where you live. You got a minute more for your mother?’
‘All right.’
‘So sit down.’
‘I’ll stand. What about where I live?’
‘You I don’t see going in, but Freedman’s in and out of there all the time, except when she ain’t there. Instead of raising her children, she’s running around.’
‘She’s not running around. She’s working.’
‘She shouldn’t be working. She’s a lady. Her husband ain’t got enough money, she got to be working?’
He left there, his fists clenched so tightly his nails bit into his skin. The following day, at his office, he called Della O’Donnell in and asked her to sit down. ‘Tell me about your mother, Della,’ he said to her. ‘You never said a word about your mother or your father.’
‘All of a sudden, Max? Just like that? You call me into your office and tell me to tell you about my mother?’
‘I got reasons.’
‘All right. My father was a drunken bum and he used to beat the hell out of my mother. She drank. If she didn’t drink, how could she stand it? I was the only kid. I didn’t like my father and I don’t like to talk about it. I didn’t like my mother but I felt sorry for her. My father was a teamster, and one day his horses went crazy and he was dragged to death. I was eleven. A year later, Mama died, and the Murphys sent me off to board at school, at the Good Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Period. You have my life story, Max.’
‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
He looked so crestfallen that Della went around his desk and kissed him. ‘I usually don’t do it during business hours.’
‘Why didn’t I find you when I was a kid?’
‘Maybe you were never a kid, Max.’
‘Maybe not. Now, darling Della, get out of here and let me think, because in a half-hour I got to talk to that son of a bitch Stanford. Also, send in Freddy and Sam. I need support.’
‘I think,’ Feldman said, sitting in Max’s office with Snyder and Max, waiting for Stanford to appear, ‘I think we have to fight him this time – I mean, we have to take him to court under the Sherman Antitrust Act, which National has violated a hundred times. This trust is no different than all the other trusts, and they just march along, figuring that the world is theirs until someone stops them. We have to stop them.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Max said. ‘I don’t like the courts and I don’t trust the courts. National, the telephone company, the Rochester people, Edison – every part of that lousy trust is burning up because a handful of Jews without a dime of capital have put something together that they never even dreamed of. We made this. We created the moving picture, and now that it’s here, they tell us to drop dead. Well, screw them!’
‘All right. Screw them. But do it my way.’
‘Hold on, hold on,’ Snyder said gently, ‘Max, you remember when we made The Waif? You gambled with everything. You sold the nickelodeons and the halls and put every dime we had into that picture – and it worked. Sure they hate the Jews, but those bastards hate everyone else – the Irish, the Germans, the Polacks, the Italians – the hell with that. We got to stop them, Max. We can’t live with it anymore. I can’t invent a new projector every time they slap an injunction on us.’
‘Do you know what it has to cost? Tell him, Freddy.’
‘It could be half a million before we’re through.’
‘And right now,’ Max said, ‘we’re shooting four features, two up in Harlem and two in the ice house. Where does the money come from? Suppose it runs to a million, two million?’
‘And suppose they slap an injunction on our cameras while we got four pictures going?’
‘All right, let’s think about it,’ Feldman said. ‘Meanwhile, buzz Della in here.’
‘What for?’
‘You’ll see. Trust me.’
Max pressed the buzzer on his desk and Della came into the room. ‘Is he here yet?’ Max asked.
‘Sitting outside and as annoyed as a wet hen. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’
‘Let him stew. Now what, Freddy?’
Feldman pointed to the door that led to his office. ‘I’m going to leave the door open a crack, Della, and I’ll put a chair right next to it in my office. After Stanford comes in here, take your pad and go around to my office and sit just outside that door and try to take down every word that’s said in here.’
Della shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Mr Feldman. I just don’t know if I’m that quick.’
‘Give it a try. What’s important is to get what Stanford says. You can fudge what we say, but get him.’
‘I’ll try.’
Frank Stanford, tall, elegant, amiable, gave no sign of the irritation Della had observed. He shook hands with Snyder and Feldman. Max, protected by his desk, did not offer his hand and Stanford did not ask for it. He observed that Max was looking well.
‘I got a clear conscience,’ Max said coldly.
‘Hell, Max,’ Stanford said, ‘I can’t see why you got a chip on your shoulder. You beat the tar out of us on that Queen film. We broke our backs to get it, but you got some kind of love affair going with the French.’
‘No love affair,’ Feldman said, trying to ease the tension. ‘We sell them good films. They sell us their best.’
‘Just like that?’
>
‘More or less.’
‘We offered them double what you did.’
‘Maybe they don’t like your ass,’ Max said. ‘You’re a bunch of tight-ass bastards. Maybe the French don’t appreciate that.’
Feldman looked at Max pleadingly, and Stanford said, ‘That was uncalled for.’
Max shrugged, ‘Sure. Trouble is, Stanford, that every time you come around, you bring an ax with you.’
‘I bring offers. That’s the way business works. We would have liked to have The Queen. But we can understand how you Jews stick together. We don’t hold that against you.’
‘What in hell does that mean, the way we stick together?’
‘Well, it’s no secret Sarah Bernhardt’s a Jew lady –’
‘And you think that’s how we got the picture?’ Max said icily.
‘Now, hold on,’ Stanford said, spreading his arms. ‘Let’s not have unpleasantness. I came here to make you an offer. We want your moving pictures. We’ll buy them or rent them, whatever you wish, and we’ll open our stock to you. But we want the European films and we want the European market. You bow out of that, and we’ll open our doors to you.’
Max burst out laughing.
‘I don’t find it amusing.’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Max said.’
‘I expected that. You never got your face out of the gutter, did you, Britsky? All right, we have put up with you – now you’re finished. We are going to wipe you out. We’ll smother you with injunctions. We’ll make it impossible for you to buy film stock if we have to buy half of France, and we’ll lock every film you try to import into Customs. And we can do it. We have the money and the connections, and if you think you can buck a trust the size of ours, you’re out of your mind. We got the telephone company behind us, and we got the whole Rochester crowd locked into this. We’ll tie up every camera you got in your studios. You’re a two-bit little East Side Jew, Britsky, and too big for your boots. If you think that you alone, out of every producer in America, can buck the trust, you are crazy. You’re finished!’ With that, he turned on his heel and strode to the door, flung it open, and then slammed it behind him.
