by Howard Fast
‘Whose cousin?’
‘Max Britsky’s. All right, I’m a buyer for Altman’s in New York. My name is Frances Button, and I buy shoes. So you see some things are predestined.’
‘Max Britsky.’
‘I thought so. Shoes and purses. I do a lot of traveling in New England and west to Chicago, and I fill most of the lonely hours with the movies. I am a confirmed fan and addict, and I’ve come to look for Max Britsky Productions. This is you?’
‘That’s right. Britsky in person. Can I buy you a drink?’
‘I’ll have a sherry, yes, if you don’t mind.’
Max motioned for the porter and gave him the order. ‘What did you mean by predestined?’ he asked, turning to the lady beside him.
‘Not you and me, Mr Britsky.’ She burst out laughing. ‘Oh, no. My name. Frances Button, buyer in shoes. Button – shoes. My maiden name was Smith, but of all people, I had to go and marry Oscar Button. Fortunately, that ended some years ago, amicably and without issue, mostly because I didn’t ask for alimony, which I didn’t because the bum couldn’t have paid any. And what do I need him for? I make a good living – for a woman, a damn good living.’
The porter set down her glass of sherry and Max paid him.
‘Are you traveling with your wife, Mr Britsky?’
‘No. With two associates.’
‘Gentlemen, of course.’
‘Possibly.’
‘Possibly? Oh, you do have a sense of humor. You know, I love trains. Some of the most interesting people I ever met I meet on trains. Of course, I never met an important moving picture producer before, but you know, all sorts of interesting people. I’m sure you have arrangements for dinner with your friends, but after dinner –’
‘What happens after dinner?’
‘The car behind the diner. Room D.’
‘Why?’ Max wondered.
‘Why not? A few laughs, a few drinks. What else is there, Mr Britsky?’
‘I don’t know, just like I don’t know you. You don’t want to go to bed with me, Mrs Button. I might just have a social disease.’
‘There’s no need to be nasty.’
‘No, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
‘No,’ she whispered, ‘you’re not sorry at all. You’re a disgusting, nasty, little Jew.’ With that, she rose and left the car. Max relit his cigar, which had gone out.
The three men were in the double bedroom, relaxed in their shirt-sleeves and suspenders, their shoes off, their feet stretched out, drinking beer and smoking cigars and staring through the window at the Arizona arroyos and canyons that crisscrossed under the Santa Fe tracks. The wonderful, jagged formations of red and black and yellow stone, the deep, terrifying cuts in the earth, and the growths of cactus and mesquite were like nothing any of them had seen before. Neither Snyder nor Feldman had ever been west of Chicago. As for Max, he had once done a two-day stint in Denver with Bert Bellamy, but his memories were of a dreary and uninspiring town that sat on a large and uninspiring prairie. None of it was like this. This changed his mood, elevated and excited him, and drove away the depression that had gripped him since leaving New York. It was a landscape he had never dreamed of, for him a wonderland, a dreamland, and above all a moving picture land; and as he stared at the landscape through the window, he experienced a marvelous sense of completeness, an emptiness that was almost exalting and unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He wanted nothing. Here he was, in the small cubicle of the railroad suite, with good beer and a good cigar and with two old friends closer to him than anyone else in the world, and there was absolutely nothing in the world that frustrated him or pricked at his desire.
‘When I was a kid,’ Sam Snyder remembered, ‘Pop took me to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It was just about the greatest day of my life. I shook hands with him. Can you believe that? I actually shook hands with Buffalo Bill Cody, himself, in the flesh. I’ll never forget that. He was dressed in buckskin, white-fringed buckskin, absolutely beautiful. And he wore two pearl-handled six-guns.’
‘From what I hear,’ Max said, ‘those guns were loaded with buckshot, which is how he managed to never miss.’
‘I hate to believe that.’
‘Closest I ever got to one of those fellers,’ Feldman said, ‘was when I was reading law in old Meyer Sonberg’s office. A guy walks in and becomes our client by the name of Bat Masterson. Heard of him?’
‘Who hasn’t?’ Snyder said.
‘He was one of them western hoodlums, like Billy the Kid,’ Max said.
‘Oh, no. No, sir. Billy the Kid was a hoodlum. Bat Masterson was a sheriff or something in one of them little towns we passed yesterday, I think it was Dodge City. Well, he became a newspaper writer in some western city – maybe Chicago, I don’t exactly remember – and someone made a deal to tell his story in a book and then cheated him on the deal. I don’t remember the details, but he needed a New York lawyer and someone sent him to Sonberg, and Sonberg called me in and said to me, “Freddy, I want you to meet one of the great ones.” And then we shook hands. Nice feller.’
There was a long moment of silence while Max puffed on his cigar and stared at the rose and pink and purple landscape, and then Snyder said, ‘Shook hands with Sitting Bull. He was part of that same show. I got his picture on a postcard with his signature. I keep meaning to frame it for the kids, and I keep forgetting.’
‘How come he could write?’
‘I think just his signature. They showed him how to do that. You know, I heard that when Buffalo Bill made the deal with him to join the Wild West Show with some of his braves, Sitting Bull said that instead of payment in money, he’d settle for the concession on postcards of himself. He sold them for twenty-five cents each.’
‘That’s a good head for business,’ Max agreed, ‘but I’m not sure I want that in the scenario.’
‘What scenario?’
‘I been dreaming it while you two are talking. The Adventures of Buffalo Bill – the first really great moving picture about the West. But great, not like the schlock Lunberg makes with his Mexican cowboys. Real cowboys, hundreds of them. Whole tribes of Indians.’
‘I don’t know if there are any whole tribes of Indians left, Max.’ Feldman said.
‘We’ll find them.’
‘Buffaloes,’ Snyder said. ‘Where do we find buffaloes?’
‘We’ll find them. And if we can’t find them, we’ll use cows and dress them up. Who knows the difference between a cow and a buffalo?’
‘A lot of people, I’m afraid,’ Feldman said gently.
‘All right, so we’ll find real ones. And someone to play Buffalo Bill. Hey, is he still alive?’
‘Come on,’ Snyder said.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Feldman told them. ‘Come to think of it, he is. I read a piece in the Tribune about him just last week. I think something about him putting together a new show.’
‘I’ll be damned.’
‘Max,’ Snyder said, ‘maybe Fred can work out some kind of agreement. I’ll bet he’d be excited. Maybe we could work him into it.’
‘Anyway, Custer’s dead,’ Max said. ‘I been thinking about Custer’s last stand. You know, with something like that, you could just about do away with the dialogue cards – just let people watch it as it happens.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Snyder agreed. ‘I know what you mean.’
It was a strange and somewhat wonderful few days in Max’s life, and though he was to take that train ride across the continent again and again in the years to come, it never had the same quality or worked the same magic as the first time. That evening, when Snyder and Feldman decided that their bedtime had come, Max left them and went into the club car. The thought of sleep was impossible; he was totally alive. It was as if he had been born adult the day before, and he grudged the surrender of a moment of the feeling. It was almost midnight, and Max was alone. Before they closed the bar, the porter had mixed him a tall rye whiskey and wat
er, and Max lit a cigar to taste with it. The cold, sweet taste of the diluted whiskey joined with the cigar smoke to add to his feeling of loose, unharassed contentment. He felt young and strong and part of some natural flux of existence – feelings he could neither articulate nor hope to communicate. The thought occurred to him that Sally, the old Sally, the Sally he once knew so long ago, might understand how he felt; but that Sally was gone.
He had been sitting in the club car for about a half-hour or so when the train ground to a stop, and the club car porter came in to ask him whether he would like a breath of fresh air since the train would be there for twenty minutes.
‘Where are we?’
‘In the Mojave Desert, Mr Britsky. We change engines and take on water here.’
‘Desert, really? Yes, sure, I’d like that.’
‘Then you better get your hat and coat, Mr Britsky. It’s cold out there.’
Max found his coat and got off the train. The air was icy cold, so cold that he thrust his hands into his pockets, but clean and sweet with a strange scent that he had never experienced before. When he looked up at the sky, he again experienced something new and improbable, a sky that fairly blazed with starlight. He was relieved that he had left his cigar in the ashtray in the smoking car. There was a purity here that amazed and frightened him; you didn’t smoke cigars, you didn’t speak, and you even moved carefully, as if any untoward movement or sound would shatter what was here. He walked slowly down the long line of dark and silent cars to where the great locomotive discharged its pent-up pressure in clouds of steam. A trainman, walking by with an oil can, nodded at him. The silence had been broken, and in the distance a train whistle shrieked its warning. Max stood between the tracks as an eastbound freight, taking advantage of the passenger train’s dalliance on a siding, thundered by, car after car, without end and seemingly forever.
Later, back in the club car, lighting his cigar once again, he felt a warm sense of security, and a little later, he went to his room, crawled into the berth, and fell asleep almost instantly, rocked by the clanging, bouncing motion of the train.
Fred Feldman had a relative by the name of Stanley Meyer, a first cousin once or twice removed – Feldman was not precisely certain of the nature of the relationship – who had moved to Los Angeles some years before. The move had been occasioned by his wife’s health, and once there, Stanley Meyer had gone into the real estate business, which, as he had written to Feldman, ‘happens to be a business in which even a moron cannot escape success.’ Feldman explained to Max that Meyer was hardly a moron, but a very shrewd operator who knew the Los Angeles area very well indeed. Meyer was waiting for them when the train pulled into the Santa Fe depot, a tall, thin, solemn-faced man who bore not even a vague resemblance to his eastern cousin.
After they were introduced and their luggage collected, and after Meyer had begged them not to judge Los Angeles by the tacky train depot, he told them that he had made reservations for the party at the Alexandria Hotel, at Fifth and Spring streets. ‘It’s an excellent hotel,’ he told them, ‘and it’s centrally located. I managed to snare their only three-bedroom suite, so you’ll be comfortable. I’ve set aside the whole week to work with you, but if we don’t find something this week, I’ll cancel everything for next week as well. We want you out here in Los Angeles, Mr Britsky. Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company is already out here, and both Biograph and Mr Lasky are very seriously considering moving their entire enterprises out. As yet it’s only a small thing, but I have a notion that we may well outpace New York in time – that is, a moving picture center.’
‘We’ll see,’ Max said. ‘If I got nothing else, I got an open mind, and believe me, I’m not complaining about the sunshine and the warm weather.’
Meyer’s car, parked outside the station, was a hundred-horsepower Pierce Arrow 66, a large, powerful open-top touring car with, as Meyer informed them, an 825-cubic-inch engine. ‘It’s a damn monster, but you need it out here. Some places there are roads that are called roads and other places there are cart tracks called roads. And you want a car that stands high, because when it rains out here, it rains like hell. You notice I carry four spare tires.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Max said. ‘Do they sell them out here?’
‘They certainly do.’
‘Order one for me,’ Max said.
Meyer nodded with new respect.
Riding from the Santa Fe station to the hotel, Max was open-mouthed with delight. The shabby jerry-built houses, most of them not much better than shacks, the abandoned oil derricks standing everywhere, the unpaved streets, the huge, clanging, interurban cars grinding by on the railroad tracks that divided the roads – all these bothered him not at all. He was enchanted with the hills all about them, with the lush semitropical vegetation, with the profusion of roses climbing over old fences, with the blue sky and the sweet smell of the air.
‘Just yesterday,’ Meyer explained, ‘we were an oil field, maybe the richest in America. Then, as we used to say, you couldn’t see your nose for the derricks. But now the oil is running out, and maybe be can replace it with a city. Not everywhere, but in some places you can still count ten derricks for every city block.’
That afternoon, after the three travelers had bathed and put away an excellent lunch in the Alexandria’s grandiose dining room beneath an amazing display of stained-glass windows, they gathered around a table in their suite. Meyer spread out a large map of Los Angeles County.
‘I brought this big map of the county,’ he told them, ‘because you can get awful damn confused without it. This is a hell of a big place, and I think someone once said that the county is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Maybe so. Anyway, Freddy here wrote to me asking about Lunberg’s operation. He has an old barn out in a suburb called Hollywood. It’s a sleepy little town with not much of anything to recommend it.’
‘Isn’t Lasky out there?’ Max asked.
‘Right. Like Lunberg, he rented himself a barn on Vine Street, which is one of the dirt roads that come down out of the Hollywood Hills. But Lasky’s thing is tentative. I understand he rented space to shoot a few pictures, but he keeps his operation in the East. Freddy doesn’t think that’s what you had in mind, Mr Britsky, is it?’
‘No,’ Max said decisively. ‘Absolutely not. I like to keep my operation in one place. Already, it’s too spread out. We got our corporate headquarters in the Hobart Building on Fourteenth Street, which I own. Not Fourteenth Street, I should live so long, but the building. Also, we got studios on Eighteenth Street, up in Harlem, and over in Jersey. If I make another studio here in California, I’ll go crazy. So if you sell me on this, Stanley, I’ll move the whole kit and kaboodle out here. That’s the way I operate. I don’t do things maybe I do them, I do them.’
‘Good. I’m glad to be clear on that, because it will save us lots of time. I told you before that Lasky and Biograph were considering a move out here, but for the time being, they rent whatever shack or barn they can put their equipment in. You don’t want that kind of thing?’
‘No way, Stanley. Sam Snyder here heads up our technical operation. Sam, tell him how we function.’
‘You see,’ Snyder said, ‘we’re a little different from the others. We got our seven hundred theatres around the country, and we got to feed them constantly. We run a film exchange, in which we exchange our films with other companies, but Max wouldn’t sleep if he was at the mercy of other picture makers. So we got to manufacture our basic product. Which means that we got to keep a minimum of six companies going all the time. That’s a minimum. More often, we can have as many as twenty companies working –’
‘And at the rate we open theatres, that ain’t enough,’ Max put in.
‘Right. So what do we need if we come out here? All the way out here on the train, Mr Britsky and I and Mr Feldman here have been discussing the cowboy and Indian pictures that Mr Britsky feels are going to be the biggest thing in the business. So we got to have space. I suggested to
Mr Britsky that we build a western town, like some of those we seen from the train, and he agrees. We feel that we need a basic plant of at least a hundred acres. We have to put up stages, dressing rooms, offices, shops for our carpenters and our plasterers and costumers, and we need some kind of warehouse arrangement to store sets in. We need other things, like for example generators for our lighting and a good water supply. How cold does it get out here?’
‘Well, never very cold. Most days in the winter months, December, January, February, and March, range between seventy and ninety degrees. Nighttime, it can go down to forty, but that’s unusual. Mostly, winter nights are forty-five to sixty degrees. Summer – which means April to November – is a few degrees warmer, day and night. Even during the rainy season, you get mostly some sunshine each day and sometimes weeks of sun between the rains. In May and June, you get some foggy mornings, but it almost always clears by noon.’
‘And you think you can find us what we need?’ Max wanted to know.
‘Oh, no question. Not in Hollywood. Hollywood has too many streets and houses. They’ve been nasty as hell with your friend Lunberg. Did you know that no bank in Hollywood would do business with him – or with Lasky, either. Not because their credit isn’t good, but because they don’t like New York Jews. Would you believe it? The banks wouldn’t take their money. Anyway it’s a lousy little nothing of a small town, and I don’t think it’s right for what you want, Mr Britsky.
‘Now there’s a feller name of Harry Culver, and he has an enormous piece of property that he’s trying to sell off and subdivide. He calls the property Culver City, and if you look at the map, it’s right here, just north of El Segundo and Inglewood. He was in to see me yesterday, because Lunberg told him you’d be coming out here. Now the trouble with Harry Culver is that he wants to hang on to the mineral rights; he thinks there’s some enormous pool of oil somewhere under his property. He doesn’t know where, and I don’t think that after investing all the money you’re talking about, you’d want them putting up derricks and drilling on your property. Anyway, he wants more than I think the land is worth, almost a thousand dollars an acre, and while we could knock down that price, I just don’t think it’s the right place.’
