‘Yore a jammy littel bugger.’ she said affectionately. She was trying on various accessories before the wall-length mirror. ‘I reckon we’re birds of a fewer, you an’ me, Ive. Thass why it’d orlways be a mistake ter you-know-what.’ I smiled at this, not completely in agreement. ‘We wouldn’t be ‘ere nar,’ she pointed out, ‘if we’d’ve bin up ter a bit o’ the how’s-yer-fahver.’ She put down the long scarf she had been winding round her cami-knickered waist. The scarf was scarlet, her underwear pale green satin. ‘So thass why yore orl antsy t’day.’ She kissed me on the forehead as she reached behind me for a headdress of bright blue ostrich feathers. ‘Ah, well. Somebody’s gotta ‘elp yer spend it, eh?’ In the course of her love affair with Hever she had grown, as people will, more tolerant of what she still called my infatuation.
It was true I was trembling with excitement. By the end of the following month I should be reunited, after all those painful years, with my darling Esmé. My entire body had quickened and come to life in anticipation of our meeting. This ecstasy transcended fleshly sensation. I experienced it so forcefully, I think, because I was at once confident, relaxed and unthreatened. Wann sehe ich Sie wider? Ich habe lange geschlafen. Die Zeit vergeht. Sie hat ihr Tat selbst zu verantworten. It had been three years. Seit 1921. Wo sind wir? Drei jahre! Ich habe geschlafen. Der Traum is eybik. Der Traum wird morgen nicht kommen. Hat sie mein Trait m missdeutet? Mit Esmé Ich. . .
Every day I visited my new domain, my little factory. At Hever’s suggestion we had taken over the workshops of a bankrupt firm (it had hoped to build a funicular railway system between the various ranges of Los Angeles hills). In the unremarkable area of the Long Beach docks several small engineering firms had their headquarters. During the day the local air was a hullabaloo of saws and rivet guns, gouting furnaces and pounding hammers, like some gnomish nether region. It looked out directly over the harbour. Grey warships would stand there for weeks, apparently deserted by all save a handful of men, then suddenly weigh anchor and be gone. I watched seaplanes coming and going. Some of the early Curtiss prototypes were taking shape. As I got to know him, I would offer advice to Curtiss and his people. It was astonishing how many of my suggestions they accepted, how many became standard procedural and production features. Naturally, I never received payment or acknowledgement. I did not worry about such things. I merely delighted in the thump of floats striking water, the shrill early notes of an approaching machine, the wheeling and climbing of the beautiful little craft.
I had only so much to do to our own adapted Buick tourer. Chiefly my duties consisted of overseeing the mechanics. There were three of them, all excellent, and an apprentice. Having exchanged petroleum tanks for compressed-gas cylinders we were experimenting with means of feeding the gas to the engine. I studied several types of steam car, including the excellent Stanley, which had ceased production in 1920. What we learned from these, we attempted to apply to our own prototype. I was lucky in my team of enthusiastic young men; my band of brothers, sworn to secrecy. Sometimes, when a particularly difficult problem arose, we would all work through the night. Again I had that life-giving powder to thank for her benevolent help. With such wages, I could afford it. Es ken nisht shatn. Thus the gas car gradually took shape. I continued to experience that thrill of anticipation, for the day when Esmé would place her dainty feet upon the soil of America.
With no photographs of my little girl, I had to make do with many of Lillian (and sometimes Dorothy) Gish. How much more wholesome they were than the likes of Clara Bow or Gloria Swanson. Somewhere in those few years we lost ‘the Nation’s Sweetheart’ and were given instead ‘the Hottest Jazz-Baby in Town’. I prayed my little shvester, mayn meydl, mavn metsie, would not have been coarsened or otherwise changed by her hardships. Her letters suggested she was the same delightful Mädchen of my dreams, my incorruptible daughter; sweet mistress of my mazl. Yet she had lived for long in the Vatican’s shade. I knew the Jesuit tricks. They would introduce sin into Eden if H. G. Wells would tell them how to build his zeygermashin. God help us if they become engineers. Then we shall see also their zindmashin! Maybe she was cynical. Who would not be after saving so long only to have the money snatched away at the very moment it is needed? I know some of these feelings. Yet I had fought cynicism, maintained my idealism against all odds. I was sure my sister, so much my alter ego, had protected her innocence equally well. Soon, together, we should be able to embark again upon that zukhn, that holy quest for the purity we had known in Kiev, for the tranquillity that once filled our hearts, for the zilber of clear thought. Iber morgn du vest kumen. I was confident, but I was not wholly confident, as they say. That is, I yearned for confirmation. Here were the sunshine years of my life, in California. I, who had always loved silver, learned the value of gold. There is a clarity in sunlight I never understood until Los Angeles. Though I know Carthage, terrified of silver, lurks in gold, I refuse to condemn the metal itself. I lusted for our union: my purity of intellect, her purity of flesh. The days began to manifest themselves as well-defined units.
When happy I always work best. What little pressure I had exerted on Mucker Hever was completely justified. We had an excellent design. The engine began to prove well. It would greatly increase Hever’s already monstrous fortune and by this means he would find his judgment confirmed. He and Mrs Cornelius occasionally visited the workshop, but were so involved with one another my descriptions were meaningless to them. This did not distress me. I prefer to work without supervision. Mrs Cornelius would never know I helped tip the balance in her favour, founding her assurances from Hever in something much more solid than momentary infatuation; she was to embark on her movie career very soon. I blamed myself for nothing. Wer hat gewennen? Das Spiel war unent schieden. Nobody was unhappy.
Und nun ist der Traum Wirklichkeit. Es ist höcliste Zeit, dass ich auf main Schiff zurükhehre. Karthago wird von einem glühenden Hass auf die Weissen verzehrt, die er als Wurzel alien Übels in der Welt betrachtet - obwohl ich andereseits wieder gehört habe, dass sinige weisse Wissenschaftler in seinen Diensten stehen. Seine Mittel wachsen folglich ständig. Gelt. . . Golden cupolas rising in Atlanta, in Odessa, and in Sparta. These domes rise in Jackson and Jubilee; copper and pewter, as any in Kiev, they rise in St Petersburg Fla and Alabama’s redbrick metropoli; no longer the domes of Christ Arisen, these are the domes of Civil dignity and Law, just democracy. A clock chimes where the sun’s orb blazed; red, white and blue flapping on a polished staff where for my sense of congruity should be a Russian crucifix. And these sappherine skies, are they never silver? In Arcadia alligators crusted with antiquity wallow in metal tanks. Their heavy jaws clack shut on asymmetrical teeth; they haul themselves over each others’ backs, refusing even the notion of death, they have existed so long. Small cousins to the mile-deep Atlantic monsters, blind representatives of a Carthaginian future, they are now bred by men to make handbags for Beverly Hills housewives, boots for singing cowboys and belts to decorate the trousers of millionaire dentists. The Jew showed me kindness in Arcadia. Wir steigen unter leichtem Schaukeln vom Bodenauf, wobei der Motor sin kaum varnehmbares Schnurren von sich gab. In Arcadia I came unsuspectingly upon those old reptiles. They could not know they were bred for profit. The Jew gave me warmth and his food. With his hands he fed me; with his dry sardonic lips he offered realistic prophecy. Maybe I was wrong to trust him. Der blut, der toyt, der kamf, der blitz, der synemmen, der oyfgeheybung!
Der oyfegebrakhtkayt! Ich haben das Opferbereit, meine Glaube, meine Schöpferdrang, meine Arbeit, mein Genie, meine Jugden, mein Kamerad, mein Kampf, meine Mission, mein Engel, mein Schicksal. I am strong in this. Karthago nicht viel von der Art der Leute wusste. Das Geheimnis seiner Kraft? Der shtof! When they took that from me, I was for a while weaker. But there is such a thing as resurrection. It is what they refuse to understand. The Jew looked at me with kindness, offering security. In this other Arcadia I hear sluggish liquid churn; claws rattle on steel floors. Those alligators smell of old Carthage’s endur
ing evil. I look over the fence and they are grinning back, their snouts dilating. He was gentle. The better kind of Jew. Der shtof was never der Mayster. Ikh bin abn meditsin-mayster. He said he was going to find a job on a newspaper in Odessa. He was prepared to accommodate the Bolsheviks when they arrived. Maybe he was already one of them. I took the tram along the shore. I never saw him again.
Der Engelsfestung eybik iz. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Vos iz dos? La Cité de. . . The City of the Angels is eternal and must become the New Byzantium. Carthage she absorbs, utilises, rejects what she does not want. The holy wood is where Parsifal discovered the Grail. Here all shall find salvation, on the final coast. We have travelled so long. Carthage cannot conquer here, though she will always threaten. So, at least, I am inclined to believe. It could be I grew euphoric and lazy under the benevolent Southern Californian sun; they say that happens to many. It could be I was seduced by her luxury, her golden charm, her aristocracy. Yet the attraction, I would swear, was positive.
So swiftly did my car assume reality I had soon some leisure time and this frequently was spent with friends, visiting the homes of their peers. For the most part these N’divim, these modern princes, possessed a grace and wit usually lacking in their European counterparts. Their world was vital and constantly expanding, through art, industry and intellect. They had every reason to carry themselves with dignity, to build their palaces amongst the wooded hills and feel superior. They had no use for the petty moralities with which a bourgeois rationalises his shortcomings. Yet they never denied or derided their European heritage; indeed, they imported it in such quantities it sometimes seemed there could be nothing left of the Old World; it had been entirely reassembled in the New. Renaissance tapestries, Jacobean tables and Louis Quinze chandeliers, all of them genuine, were common to the homes I visited. Yet in almost every great mansion one found acknowledgement of native America.
When, in the middle of July, 1924, I called on Mr and Mrs Tom Mix, their French furniture and suits of medieval armour, their Scottish shields and claymores shared the same rooms as Indian headdresses, his collection of silver-studded saddles and other elaborate mementoes of the West. They were a gracious, modest couple. Mrs Mix took to me with great warmth. She said I was ‘the image of Valentino’. It was true that I somewhat resembled the star, having similar eyes and colouring, but I was anxious to point out that I did not possess a single drop of Italian blood.
John Hever preferred the company of movie people (I believe he never got over his worship of the screen) and would frequently ask me to go somewhere for dinner or for a weekend. I think he had mixed motives, for he was anxious to prove even to this easy-going world that his relations with Mrs Cornelius were perfectly respectable. I was a kind of chaperone (though, naturally, I found myself prey to the usual disgusting gossip). Thus I at last entered the portals of Pickfair. That unpretentious tribute to good taste, influenced chiefly by a ‘mock Tudor’ style popular in England, never proclaimed itself a palace, nor advertised its wealth. There were touches of the Swiss chalet, tributes here and there to the Spanish adobe dwelling settlers, but in the main Pickfair, in its fifteen acres of landscaped grounds, resembled everything an English country estate should be; even its huge swimming-pool did not seem grandiose. At dinner I got into conversation with the charming athlete, who did not recall our earlier meeting. ‘Dougy’ was a perfect host. Learning of my relish for oceanliners he produced the family photograph album. His favourite trip, he said, ‘because it was our honeymoon’, was on the S.S. Lapland with Mary. He was at that time completing The Thief of Baghdad, perhaps his most exotic film. The house was piled with drawings. Minarets, domes and crenellated walls reminded me of Constantinople. Here was Asia as it should have been. Fairbanks never spared expense on his sets. He made full-sized cities and towns, castles and mountains. This is what convinced the moviegoer of the reality of the stories. Mary Pickford was at that time turning her back on childhood and attempting a more fashionable ‘jazz-baby’ part with Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. I had seen her Rosita and been deeply disappointed. On behalf of all her fans I begged her to return to her more innocent roles. She responded sweetly and began to explain what she was attempting to do when her husband interrupted us with a display of obvious jealousy which silenced, for a moment, the whole party. There had been no question of my ‘making a pass’ at his wife; even had there been I saw no call for the stage-whisper, nor the reference to ‘some yiddisher lounge-lizard’, particularly since almost half our company were of the Jewish persuasion.
This fact had originally startled me. The Jews who settled in the hills around Hollywood were not at all what I recognised from Ukraine. Samuel Goldfish, for instance, was a man of exceptional elegance and education. He told me in confidence how much he admired Shakespeare when he was a boy. His only real ambition was to translate those great plays for the silent drama. ‘They are stories,’ he told me soberly. ‘And stories are stories, no matter how you look at it.’ He and Mucker Hever had already been co-producers of two successful films, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Tower of Lies. Mucker Hever had told him I was the author of a successful piece, which had been touring to packed houses for over a year. When I described the plot he nodded approvingly. He had a soft spot, he said, for the subject and with the right leading actors it could work very well. He suggested I have the synopsis typed and sent to him. ‘Though if Mucker’s already happy, then I guess I’m happy.’ Then, to break the slight chill which had descended, Mary Pickford clapped her hands and suggested we all file in to another room ‘to watch a flicker’. We saw Merton of the Movies with Glenn Hunter and Viola Dana, both of whom were with us in the audience! It was an amusing comedy, what today would be called a ‘satire’, about the industry itself. Some of its references were obscure, but the movie people found the scenes which baffled me the funniest of all. Though I was to become much more familiar with Hollywood’s aristocracy, I look back on those first few weeks of heady glamour as amongst the most wonderful of my life. I will never recapture the surprise at meeting Theda Bara and finding her a sweet, well-mannered lady whose home had a comfortable, almost old-maidish atmosphere, save for one room decorated with memento mori, Oriental tapestries, tiger skins and mummy cases. This, she explained modestly, was where she was photographed. She had wanted to play Gish or Pickford parts, but the public insisted she remain always a vamp. I understand these pressures. We are all, to some degree, caricatures of what society demands of us.
One of the few Hollywood Yehudi I found vulgar was, in fact, from Kiev. I recognised this type instantly. We knew the likes of Selsnik in Podol, swaggering in loud suits, displaying rings and gold watch chains, smoking the largest cigars they could find, parading their wealth with appalling braggadocio. It was no wonder that occasionally the ordinary people of the city would round on them. Selsnik boasted to me he had sent the Tsar a telegram in 1917. He was full of his own atrocious joke, sprawling in the powerfully scented velvets and satins of Clara Bow’s living-room where Mrs Cornelius and I (without Hever for a change) had been invited for tea. Miss Bow herself was a lively, solicitous hostess. ‘I heard, see, the Tsar is abdicated. So I think to myself, what the hell? I’ll send him a telegram. Know what I said? You and your police weren’t kind to me when I was a boy in Kiev, I said, so me and my people come America. Here we did very well. Now they tell me you’re out of a job. No hard feelings about your cossacks. I’m willing to offer you a position acting in pictures. Name your own salary. Reply at my expense. Regards to the family.’
The others found it funny. I did not. I made an excuse and left.
The Cornelius boy is always asking me about the Hearst place. It was not finished in 1924 and very few people saw it going up. Hearst kept changing the size of the pool, adding new wings before the first ones were completed. Later I was invited to his ‘Enchanted Castle’, with a lot of dull industrialists, engineers and newspaper editors. Marion Davies was charming. Hearst was a Zeppelin, with a wren’
s peeping little voice, largely oblivious to the world around him, even the one he had built. At Hearst’s you were never allowed to drink alcohol, but a good many of the movie people used cocaine in secret. By that time I had my own excellent suppliers, of course. In certain circles you were judged by the quality of your ‘stuff very much as a French nobleman would be judged by the quality of his cellar. Mir ist warm. Vifl iz der zeyger? Far more exciting to me was my meeting with the reserved old Southern gentleman, that world-genius, resembling a soldier rather than a showman, the soft-spoken First Lord of Tinsel Town, David W. Griffith. He happened to be at the Lasky studio when Hever and I accompanied Mrs Cornelius there to make her screen test.
I could hardly speak. I was in the presence of the greatest cultural figure of the twentieth century, the only one who genuinely deserved the title Kinomeyster. I mumbled like a peasant drawn from the fields to greet some mighty landsman. He was kind and courteous, cupping his ear to catch what I said. Mrs Cornelius saved the day. ’‘E finks yore ther cat’s whiskers,’ she told my hero. ‘Ter ‘ear ‘im goin’ on, y’d fink the sun shone arta yore -’
In horror I was able to bellow a complete word: ‘Trousers!’
And that was all I ever said to the one human being on Earth whose work truly influenced the course of my life. I believe he was at Lasky’s looking for a job. You would never have guessed from his bearing and stylish tailoring he was down on his luck. A natural prince, whose grasp of human nature was as profound as his political insights, now cap in hand to the immigrants he himself had helped establish in this idyllic World of Dreams. I should not have been so foolish. I blame myself. Mrs Cornelius was very popular with the movie people. They saw her as an eccentric English aristocrat. And everyone knew true English aristocrats could seem like paskudnick, they had such foul mouths. So ‘trousers’ it was for Birth of a Nation. In spite of Mrs Cornelius’s shining in her test, of watching her later in huge black and white close-up, I was not easily able to escape my depression. I constantly went over the meeting in my mind, rescripting it so that I impressed Griffith enough to bring, for a second, a look of startled emotion to his eyes as he realised here was someone who understood completely everything he had meant.