Hollywood (24 page)

Currently, the world’s greatest photo-play star was under contract to Famous Players. At twenty-five, Mary Pickford was still playing pubescent long-haired girls, for which she had been given a million dollars for two years of her time by the Messrs. Zukor and Lasky. She had already made
The Little American
, to the delight of George Creel, and now she was in something called
M’liss
. Patriotism was abroad in the land, and Caroline was now doing more than her part in a seven-reel photo-play that would, Mr. Ince assured her, “make a fortune. I know. I can tell. But don’t ask me how.”

Beneath an umbrella, Ince and Caroline were served tea, while the six-man orchestra, which was used on the set to inspire the actors, now played light dance music. In the first of Caroline’s many weeping scenes, she had discovered, as so many amateurs do, that it is difficult to weep on cue. Tim had
suggested that she think of someone close to her dead. She thought of her daughter, Emma; not a tear came. She thought of Plon, who was dead; and scowled, with anger, that she should have lost him in so stupid a war. The orchestra was asked to help inspire tears. The conductor, a violinist, said, “I have just the thing. Mary and Doug and Mr. Chaplin all cry like babies when I play.…” With that, the orchestra, standing in a hospital set where the wounded and the dying were being ministered to by Caroline, played “Danny Boy,” and Caroline laughed. Finally, a stick of camphor was given to Héloise, who held it close to Caroline’s face, so that the pungent fumes would make tears while the orchestra softly played “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” The result had been deeply satisfying for Caroline; and authentic, too, according to the delighted Tim.

“The question is …” But Caroline was then obliged to shut her mouth as the make-up man repainted her face, starting with the lips. Caroline no longer looked at herself in mirrors. If she wanted to see herself she could watch the rushes. But after staring at herself on the screen for half an hour on the first day, she had had enough. She allowed herself to be painted by others; moved here and there at Tim’s orders; and dressed as the wardrobe mistress decreed. Luxuriously, she had given herself up. Let them invent her.

“The question is, how long can we keep you a secret? But then, you tell me. You’re a publisher, Mrs. Sanford. You know more about that than we do.”

“Not really.” The mouth had been finished; now the lines about her eyes were being painted over. “It’s bound to come out, and I don’t mind at all if … well, if I’m not too shameful.”

Ince stared at her appreciatively, as if she were a work of art that he had got on loan from a museum. Caroline had seen the same look many times on Hearst’s face. “No chance of that. And believe me I’d tell you if there was any danger for you, because it’s all on my head, too. No, you’re a novelty, and that always works. We’ve got a raft of Russian royalty out here, all trying to get work with us. Even the socialites are showing interest. Just had a message from Mrs. Lydig Hoyt that she might do a photo-play or two, as war-work.”

“Your cup,” said Caroline, who knew the New York lady, “runneth over.”

“But where she’s just a society name, good for some ballyhooly in the press, you have this face.” He looked suddenly sad. “Wasted, if you’ll forgive me, all these years when we could have used you. Oh, how we could have used you! Like Marguerite Clark …”

“Not Mary Pickford?” Now that Caroline had entered a world of perfect fantasy, she was subject to all sorts of irrational likes and dislikes that she would never have entertained in the real world. Mary Pickford, almost young enough to be her daughter, was the chief rival to be overthrown, while the Gish sisters’ wistful charm enraged her.

“Not Mary. There’s only one of her, and considering what she costs, there may not even be one of
her
much longer. No. You’re something that really hasn’t happened before—a woman of forty who looks younger, of course—”

“Who looks her age.”

“Whatever. But looks extraordinarily beautiful on screen. We’ve had a lot of famous actresses who were around the bend, like they say, starting with Bernhardt. But you’re not an actress. You’re unknown—to the public, anyway—and you’re playing your age …”

“And here is my son.”

A tall dark man of thirty with a small nose and round blue eyes, suitable for shutting in death scenes, saluted them. He wore a torn French uniform. The plot: An American, he had enlisted in the French army. Lost in action at Belleau Wood, his mother, a society butterfly, became an heroic nurse, a second Florence Nightingale; and her search through the battlefields for her lost son was like the stations of the cross, Tim maintained, or Dante’s descent into hell. Caroline grew nobler and nobler as the death and destruction all about her grew worse and worse. Caroline was also working herself into an hallucinatory mood: she really was home in France, searching for Plon. From that point of view, the transference of actual self to fictional character was working perfectly, and Tim was awed by the ease with which she became, as they called it, the character.

“Hi, Emma. Mr. Ince. You keeping track of how much film we’re using up today?”

“No, I’m just a tourist!”

“Well, don’t forget that western you told me about. Did you know,” he turned to Caroline, eyes even rounder than usual, “Mr. Ince discovered William S. Hart?” Then Tim pulled Caroline’s “son” onto the set and covered him with mud.

“I must’ve made a hundred westerns,” said Ince. “They’re fun. Always the same plot. No problems.”

“Unlike
Civilization?
” One of the reasons that Caroline was acting as vicereine for Creel in Hollywood was to make sure that nothing like
Civilization
was ever made again. Although it was regarded as Ince’s two-and-a-half-hour
masterpiece, the pacifist theme popular in 1916 was now, in 1918, treasonable—even blasphemous, as the subtitle indicated,
He Who Returned
. The plot concerned the return of Christ as a German submarine engineer, who preaches peace with the usual result. But Ince had cleverly covered himself. Since Wilson was then running for president as the peace candidate, Ince added an epilogue to the film, showing Wilson himself thanking Ince for having made so powerful a contribution to peace and, as it turned out, his own re-election. A man of no particular beliefs, political or otherwise, Ince was now concentrating on films like Caroline’s
Huns from Hell
. Meanwhile, his partner, D. W. Griffith, had gone to London to make pro-Allies films; and it was rumored that once the war was over he would make his future photo-plays in the East. The failure of Griffith’s expensively ambitious
Intolerance
had so wrecked Triangle that Famous Players had then bought two sides of the Triangle, Ince and Sennett, as well as the debonair screen-lover Douglas Fairbanks and the bucolic William S. Hart.

“This is the last Triangle film. So we want to go all out. Open at the Strand in New York. Charge a dollar-fifty a ticket.”

As he talked, Caroline thought not of movies but of France. She had made no effort to go back even though there were so many things that she could be doing there, if somewhat less heroic than what she was now playing. Mrs. Wharton—the ancient friend of Henry James—had organized the seamstresses of Paris, and was making clothes for the troops. Saint-Cloud-le-Duc had been taken over by the French government as a hospital, to Blaise’s alarm but her secret delight. She could see herself, gently smiling, moving from bed to bed amongst the familiar
boisserie
while …

Caroline stopped the image in her mind. She was beginning to think like a movie, always a bad sign. But then she had been thinking for years like a newspaper—in headlines, sub-heads, bold roman, italics and, of course, pictures artfully arranged upon the page, bigger and bigger pictures as reproductions luckily improved at the same rate that people were able to read less and less text. Once a year the book critic of the
Tribune
would write a despairing piece on literature’s approaching end while the drama critic would deplore the effect on the theater of the public’s passion for movie-going. As yet, there was no critic for the moving pictures. But that would come, Caroline decided, as she bade Mr. Ince farewell. They would meet again that evening, socially. There was a Mrs. Ince and children. There was an elaborate social life already established in what was known as the “movie colony,” set down like a pillar of fire in the midst of bewildered Iowans.

Tim led her onto the set of a ruined church. There was a section of nave, containing the high altar on which a crucified Christ loomed, amidst the wreckage. Behind the altar a round window contained a few fragments of stained glass. Above the roofless set was the same gray gauze that had filtered the light of Belleau Wood.

“Most authentic,” Caroline commended the art director, a newly arrived Russian who spoke no English but, somehow, between bits of French and sign language was able to create anything that Tim required. The make-up man kept fiddling with Caroline’s face like a painter with an unfinished canvas. He added white greasepaint to the white layer already in place. We look like dead people, she thought. Yet, on the screen, a transformation took place: the ghoulish white faces in life came alive, while the imagination of the audiences made lips red, cheeks rosy. But not the young old, she thought, grimly, trusting to Tim’s instinct that a middle-aged woman could be “ravishing” on screen.

Tim and the cameraman whispered to one another. Two technicians presided over a pair of blazing klieg lights that made the crucifix glow eerily in the dimness. A third light was in place to illuminate Caroline’s face. She noted, professionally, that the light was sufficiently high on its arc to erase her lines. Daylight was the worst for an aging woman. Only when the sun was low—rising or setting—could one look at all like oneself and not haggard. Because of the cruelty of natural light, the original film stars had been extremely young, like Pickford and the Gish sisters. But now, thanks to new cameras and controlled lighting, all this was changing; but then everything kept changing in the movie business, unlike life.

Caroline began the task of convincing herself that she would look absolutely “ravishing” in front of the altar, with the highest arc light full in her face. As always, even the thought of light, and her eyes began reflexively to tear. She suffered from “klieg eyes”: somehow, dust or light rays caused an inflammation of the eyes that could lead to temporary blindness. The make-up man, quick to see the tears, mopped them up. Should her eyes get worse, ice would be applied to tortured lids.

Tim and Pierre, a French actor who was playing a German officer mutely in broken English, joined Caroline at the altar. As befitted a professional movie actor, Pierre was small, with the obligatory large head, which had been so shaved that the painted white scalp looked like an enamelled Mont Blanc. He wore a monocle.

“Now,” said Tim, “this is where you find out that your son has been taken
prisoner. Pierre, you are pleased with the situation. You sit, there—at your table below the altar. You’re writing dispatches. While she is pleading with you, you keep on reading and writing. Don’t look up. Then when she begs you to tell her what prison he’s in—we’ll follow the script. By the way, do you both know it?” Both claimed knowledge of the script. Caroline always learned her part while driving in to the studio. There had been a time when actors simply made up their lines as they went along, telling one another jokes or dirty stories that had nothing to do with the scene. But they had not counted on the ingenuity of the first audience that had been brought up on movies: many had become skilled lip-readers, who appreciated every nuance of the acting and were horrified whenever an actor betrayed them with nonsense or, worse, obscenity.

“Then you look up, Pierre. You see she’s beautiful. You stand up. You come round the table. To your right. You try to take her. She resists. You chase her to the altar. She seizes the crucifix—don’t worry, it’s very light wood—and she clubs you with it. You fall backwards. We end with a close shot of it, of Nurse Madeleine, holding the crucifix. Horrified …”

“Transfixed.” Caroline delighted in this sort of thing.

“Anything you can think of. Okay. Go to it.”

They took their places. At first the camera would be on Pierre. Then Caroline would move so that she was at the center of the picture and at the very edge of the traditional nine-foot distance between the acting space and the camera. In the original photo-plays, the camera did not move. But now cameras could be put on automobiles or trolleys and the actors were less constrained.

“Okay!” Tim’s voice was authoritative.

“Quiet on the set!” said the assistant. The six-man orchestra was in place back of the camera. The conductor said, “What will it be, Miss Traxler?”

“
Die Meistersinger.
” Caroline had already worked out the sort of music she would need to inspire her to heroism.

“German,” an unidentified voice sounded.

“Shut up,” said Tim. Then the command that started filming, “Interlock.”

“My son … they say you would know. Where, Colonel von Hartmann,
where
is he? Now.”

“Name?”

They went through the standing-sitting part of the scene. Then Caroline made her move into the bright discomfort of the klieg light that conferred, along with burning eyes, glory. Fortunately, glory was not mixed this time
with unscripted tears. She delighted in the power of the great light, even as it began to melt the white greasepaint on her face, even as Wagner began to melt her brain.

“You Americans will never learn to fight. Never. Germany will triumph over your mongrel race.” Caroline wanted to smile—the French-accented English was ludicrous coming from what looked to be a Hun straight from hell.

“We will—all of us—do our duty, as my son did his,” Caroline declaimed into the camera.

“Go on,” said Tim.

“I don’t have any more words.”

“Make them up. Both of you, after he gets up from the desk.”

“Henry Adams,” Caroline began in her best society-hostess voice, “felt that you Germans were essentially heathen, and your wars are always against Christianity.”