The Englishman’s Boy

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Two could play this kind of game. It produced a different kind of stillness. He tapped the hand with the barrel and stuck up three fingers. “Three,” he said.

  She was quiet as a prayer. All but for Ed Grace ramping at the fort for him to come along now. Did he hear? But the Englishman’s boy had a piece of business to finish first. He was going to see that smart half-breed scamp chew feathers. The kid’s eyes were melting on him; they were going to puddle soon.

  “Open,” he said. He opened and closed his own hand to show what he meant.

  The half-breed shook his head like he had a bee in the ear. The rest of the brats were huddling back.

  “Open.”

  No sharp tooth showing now, was there? He weren’t no fool. They’d learn it now, by glory. Learn it if he’d have to break that young one’s fingers open.

  “Open your goddamn hand!” He saw his own hand when he shouted, the cords on the back of it standing up rigid like bones in a hen’s foot, the thumb hooked white on the hammer of the Colt. He caught the boy’s wrist, wrenched it viciously. The face twisted, he saw the broken tooth gleam from under a curling lip. Reluctantly, the hand fell open.

  It was empty.

  When the Englishman’s boy let go the wrist and quickly straightened up, he went light-headed. Showed up for a fool.

  They read his face, white, seething, violent as a blizzard.

  His head swivelled like a turtle’s in its shell, a painful, awkward seeking. Where was the voice? The horizon swam, the post buildings wobbled, the blood surging in his head submerged the voice in foam like a boulder in a rushing river. Then he located the source, Ed Grace, calling, beckoning him up by the fort.

  His thumb pressed down hard; the hammer locked and all the heads around the blanket jerked and then locked too, bug-eyed, open-mouthed.

  The Colt slowly drifted up as if it were rising on its own, then locked steady too. Everything seemed to freeze, even the buzzing of the flies. He jerked the trigger. The baby started on her sister’s lap, wailed.

  Ed Grace waved back. All right, he understood. He’d been heard.

  The Englishman’s boy lowered the Colt which had put a bullet in the belly of the sky, fishing in his pocket as he addressed the bone-boy’s face, tilted at him like a plate on a plate rack. Eating crow wasn’t his dish, never had been. “You beat me cold – twice,” he said. “I don’t know how you done it, but you done it.” He’d found what he was searching for, one of the Englishman’s precious silver dollars. He held it up. “Loser pays. Right?”

  The bone-boy lifted his wrist and pressed it to the side of his face.

  “You catch my drift?” asked the Englishman’s boy.

  The bone-boy gave no sign he did. The Englishman’s boy hesitated, dropped the coin on the striped blanket, strode off purposefully.

  The bone-boy didn’t move. The other children pushed their heads in to admire the silver dollar like moths closing on lamplight.

  22

  We begin to thrash out our picture in meetings at Chance’s place in the hills. These meetings have a bad-tempered, testy air because James Cruze’s Western, The Covered Wagon, has recently been released and everyone is hailing it as a masterpiece, speaking of it in the awed tones previously reserved for The Birth of a Nation. Its success is eating away at Chance, maybe because the triumph is so unexpected, the picture always having been under a cloud. Only a short time ago, rumours abounded that Mary Miles Minter had turned it down flat and Hollywood insiders were of the opinion its stars, J. Warren Kerrigan and Lois Wilson, didn’t have the box-office appeal to carry the film. There were budget overruns and enormous difficulties on location – heavy snow, dust storms, breakdowns of equipment, trouble supplying cast and hundreds of extras with food in the wilds – disasters which came near to duplicating the trials and hardships of the original pioneers themselves. Besides, it was the received wisdom that the public’s love affair with the Western was over, movie audiences were growing more sophisticated, demanding classier entertainment than horse operas; even the great William S. Hart’s pictures were flagging at the box office. And yet, despite frequent setbacks, Jesse Lasky stood by The Covered Wagon, ploughing more than eight hundred thousand dollars into a picture everybody was certain was doomed.

  Hollywood loves disaster. Hollywood loves success. But it loves disaster more. Everybody was anticipating a catastrophe on the scale of Mayer’s and Thalberg’s Ben-Hur, a production running up an unprecedented string of disasters in Italy. During the filming of a spectacular naval battle two men had been killed; then an entire fleet of Roman galleys resting at anchor had sunk overnight. Production had been disrupted by disturbances linked to Benito Mussolini’s new Fascist government and now the whole production crew was packing up to be shipped back to Hollywood to reshoot the picture.

  Everybody had been sure a similar fate was staring The Covered Wagon in the face. They were wrong. The dodo bird flew. It flew beautifully, and on its back Lasky and Paramount were soaring too.

  The Covered Wagon gnaws at Chance. When it crops up in his conversation it is always with the implication he has been cheated, robbed, swindled of what was his alone, the right to make the first Western epic. Fitz tries to coax and jolly him out of brooding, arguing the success of The Covered Wagon will play neatly into our hands, prove good for business by stoking public interest in the Western, but Chance isn’t mollified. It isn’t profit he is interested in, it is glory, and he resents having it snatched from under his nose. The Covered Wagon has raised the stakes in the glory race, and Chance is determined not to be beaten on territory he considers his own. A good deal of the praise lavished on Cruze’s picture has been for its documentary qualities – the endless wagon train crawling across the plains, the thrilling fording of the River Platte, the use of locations along the original wagon route.

  All this stokes Chance’s mania for authenticity; like his idol, Griffith, he demands historical accuracy in every detail. It is a consuming passion that isn’t satisfied cheaply.

  “We need Indians, Fitz. Three hundred. Maybe four. Make it four. And real Indians. No Mexicans in wigs on this picture.”

  “Where the hell am I going to get real Indians?” grumbles Fitz.

  “Lasky got real Indians, that’s all anybody’s talking about. Where the hell did he find them?”

  “Colonel McCoy got them for him. Two trainloads. But McCoy has connections with the Board of Indian Commissioners. He’s got pull.”

  “Then hire Colonel McCoy.”

  “Paramount has him sewed up. He’s running that Indian song-and-dance number at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater and once that’s done he’s taking a boatload of them to Europe to promote the picture there. The Colonel ain’t available.”

  “Then find us an equivalent. Call McDavitt in Washington and have him get in touch with somebody at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I didn’t put money into President Harding’s campaign for the good of my health. Pull some strings. Somebody owes me a couple of hundred Indians.”

  “Indians are more goddamn trouble than they’re worth. You don’t want nothing to do with them bastards. It’s easier to herd cats than Indians. Most don’t talk no English; they show up for work with dogs, squaws, papooses. Before you know it the bastards are into the firewater and stealing props. You got to negotiate a separate deal with each of them. One wants a cowboy hat for services rendered, the next one wants five dollars. Then they get jealous about what the next chief got and the dickering starts all over again. Cruze had to hustle up an army uniform for one of his bucks or he threatened not to do the big scene. You want a dogfight each and every day of the week, hire Indians.”

  Chance isn’t listening. “And another thing,” he says. “Hire me an Indian woman who can act. None of this ‘how’ stuff either. And make sure she’s good-looking.”

  “You ain’t asking for much,” says Fitz. “I ain’t never seen a good-looking Indian.”

  “And we’ll need another Indian who can act to play th
e chief.”

  “Christ, what’s the matter with Wallace Beery? I seen him in The Last of the Mohicans. He fooled me.”

  “I don’t want any iodine-stained Wallace Beery. What’s the name of the Indian in Griffith’s Mended Lute? Young something or other. Young Deer? Try and get hold of him. Give him a screen test.”

  But Young Deer is not to be found; reports have it he is in France directing pictures for Pathé. Indian actresses don’t come a dime a dozen either. Mona Darkfeather, a Seminole who worked for the Bison Company in the early days, is too old for the part, as is the other well-known Indian actress, Dove Eye Dark Cloud.

  Chance is like a man who claims to want to build a cathedral but spends all his time on the gargoyles. We have no director or scenario yet and here he is worrying about casting. When I suggest my time might be better spent writing a script, he dismisses the idea. “The scenario will be written in due course. But first, the essential elements must be put in place.”

  What are these essential elements? Indian artifacts for one. He wants all the Indian artifacts Best Chance can lay hands on. Buyers fan out across the country, chequebooks in hand, to dun private collectors, to seduce destitute reservation Indians who might be persuaded to part with Grandpa’s medicine bundle, coup stick, or eagle war bonnet for a pittance. Three artists are sent to Washington to sketch Plains Indian costumes in the collection of the Smithsonian. A Chicago stock-buyer is commissioned to purchase Mr. Chance his own herd of buffalo.

  Every day he thinks of something new; pelts will be required, lots of them, and somebody must be immediately sent to fur auctions in Canada. Location scouts accompanied by still- and motion-picture cameramen are sent north to survey prospective sites and report back on possibilities. Even before locations are settled on, he insists Fitz hire Mexican workmen to build an authentic adobe fort. He also reminds Fitzsimmons if clay isn’t available on site it will have to be shipped in by train, by the boxcar-load. A working riverboat, a stern-wheeler is needed. And don’t forget to clear landing strips at each location so he can fly in on a regular basis to supervise production.

  Fitz comes and goes, relaying orders and seeing the work gets done, while I keep Chance company beside the pool, or in the study, or eat lunch with him in the long dining room hung with Flemish tapestries, a convenient ear into which he can pour his thoughts about the picture.

  Soon wooden crates begin to arrive packed with wampum belts, beaded rifle-scabbards, leggings, scalp shirts, buffalo-bull-hide shields. Delivery is not to the studio wardrobe department but directly to Chance’s house, where I crowbar off the lids and he fingers the booty, nods bemused, then leaves the room, never to give them another glance.

  Has Fitz heard from Washington about getting Indians from the Bureau? Call again and keep calling until there is an answer. The right answer. Any likely candidates to play the girl? Why not? The chief? Why not? As soon as they arrive bring me the drawings from the Smithsonian. I’ll choose the ones I want and then you put the order in to wardrobe to run up costumes. Immediately. Even if it means putting production of another picture on hold. I want to see costumes here, in the house, on models, not mannequins. I want to be satisfied as to how they hang, how they move on a body.

  It is four weeks before he even raises the obvious question of who will play Shorty McAdoo. Fitz, predictably, lists the names of the most popular cowboy stars.

  “No,” says Chance, indignantly shaking his head. “To the public Tom Mix will always be Tom Mix and nobody else. Just as Hoot Gibson is Hoot Gibson and William S. Hart, William S. Hart. These gentlemen are personalities, not actors. The personality of a Tom Mix is like a force of nature, it simply is. When the movie-goer looks up at the screen and sees Tom Mix he cannot also believe he is seeing somebody called Shorty McAdoo. An elementary law of physics states that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. This is a psychological truth also.”

  “You don’t want personality,” says Fitz, “how about Richard Barthelmess? I didn’t recognize him when he played the Chink in Broken Blossoms.”

  “Not right. Dickie is too effeminate.”

  “Okay, you want to put a big set of balls on McAdoo – Donald Crisp.”

  “Too old.”

  “Richard Dix?”

  Chance hesitates before making a note. “How many movies has he made?”

  “Three, four.”

  “Perhaps DeMille hasn’t done him irreparable damage yet. Cecil has such a pronounced taste for ham. Get Dix in for a test.”

  “Monte Blue.”

  “No. He can’t act.”

  “You want acting, what about that guy you went so nuts about when we were in New York, the one in Hamlet - John Barrymore. He’s a new face. Break him into pictures in a big way. All he’s done so far is that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

  “You must have lost your mind, Fitz. Apollo in chaps? The famous Barrymore profile against the background of an elegant drawing room may resemble a chiselled cameo, but on film, in a Western, it would caricature the scenery – hoodoos, mesas, chimney rocks. No, not John Barrymore.”

  “Raoul Walsh then.”

  “I thought he was directing now.”

  “For the right kind of money he could learn to be an actor again.”

  And so the names roll by, Roy D’Arcy, Jack Holt, Bull Montana, Henry B. Walthall, Rockcliffe Fellowes, Neil Hamilton, Arthur Dewey, none of them satisfactory.

  Then I say, “Noah Beery.” It is the first time I have dared to speak. Both of them look up at me.

  “Fuck, he must be forty. I thought McAdoo’s supposed to be a kid,” says Fitz.

  “You’re right. Bad idea.” I shrug. “But Noah Beery feels right. He reminds me of McAdoo, that’s all. A fighting cock.”

  Chance leans back in his deck chair under the umbrella and sips his tomato juice. “Let me think about it,” he says. “After all, art is elastic not rigid. The spirit of Shorty McAdoo is what we must capture. If Harry says Beery, then perhaps Beery it must be.” He toasts me with his tomato juice. “Intuition, Harry. I’m inclined to trust it. For the moment,” he qualifies.

  Chance requests I accompany him to a showing of The Covered Wagon at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater. It surprises me he hasn’t seen the movie yet. Is he afraid it is as good as everybody says it is?

  We take a cab, not the Hispano-Suiza. He doesn’t want to be recognized. He orders the hack to stop a few blocks from the theatre and we walk the rest of the way. Chance is in disguise, muffled up in a dark overcoat with a flat cap balanced on his head like a stove lid, the spitting image of a hardware-store owner out for an evening of wholesome fun.

  Grauman’s Egyptian Theater was the precursor of the more famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater, where stars have been plunking down their hands in wet cement for the past thirty years. But the Egyptian came first, influenced by the craze for things Egyptian set off by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Grauman certainly pulled out all stops building a sideshow. Before the entrance there is a spacious forecourt, lined on the right with massive columns supporting a tile roof. The doors to the cinema are modelled on the massive gates of a city of antiquity, flanked by gigantic plinths crowned with the busts of pharaohs. To the left of the entrance an impressive stairway rises to the roof where potted palms stand in relief against the evening sky. The front of the building is covered with green, red, blue, rust, and purple hieroglyphics, golden scarabs, paintings of hawk- and jackal-headed Egyptian divinities. Over the entrance, stylized wings of green and red and blue bear a yellow-horned scarlet moon with vipers curled like apostrophes on either side of it. The lobby of the theatre is more of the same, more painted pillars, more hieroglyphics, more Isis, Osiris, Anubis, and Ra, more decorative hyperbole.

  The program is well advanced when our usher directs us to our seats. The twenty-piece orchestra has played the overture, selections from Faust; “News of the Week” and a short Chaplin comedy have been shown; Colonel Tim McCoy has put his live Arapahos through
a war dance on stage as a warm-up to the main event. Now the feature presentation is ready to begin and twenty-five hundred men, women, and children sit, a respectfully quiet congregation.

  Thirty years later it is difficult to remember how pictures used to speak to us then, in a more primitive, uncomplicated language of image and music. But I recall the opening of The Covered Wagon like it was yesterday, the close-up shot of a young boy picking the strings of a banjo, and from the orchestra pit the ghostly twang of that simple instrument, sounding lonely and tentative in the vastness of the auditorium, sounding as it might have in the emptiness of the echoing wilderness. Then, on the boy’s face, a shot of sheet music is slowly superimposed and, as the notes and words to “Oh, Susannah” become clear, on cue the whole orchestra springs into action, twenty instruments like a burst of hope in the heart, and beneath the surge of music an insect hum is heard, the audience murmuring the familiar song. Next, a shot of Lois Wilson framed by the canopy of a wagon, a portrait of American womanhood, sweet, chaste, shyly smiling to you and you alone as “Oh, Susannah!” dies to a faint whisper, a sad, tender signature tune for the girl lovely under the arch of canvas.

  The Covered Wagon has something. Hundreds of prairie schooners creeping across a limitless expanse of earth under an infinite sky make the gigantism of Grauman’s theatre seem shabby and hollow. The scenery has a reality, a conviction, that Ra and the pharaohs – long-dead god and long-dead men – can’t compete with. It’s true J. Warren Kerrigan with make-up crinkled in his crows’-feet and his face as white as a geisha girl’s is every bit as dead as a California Tutankhamen, but the leathery faces of the extras aren’t; men and women like them are living in plain wooden bungalows all over L.A., you see them every day of your life. More important, you can believe they did ford the River Platte, did lay the bullwhip to the oxen, did tramp mile after mile in billowing clouds of dust. The honesty of certain faces, the honesty of the land itself.