He and Babe rehearse. This he has learned from vaudeville: perfection lies in repetition. Babe is sometimes a reluctant participant. Babe will practice a golf swing until Babe can no longer lift his arms, yet Babe quickly grows weary of reprising a scene. But Babe’s instincts are perfect, and Babe can improvise. When the time comes to shoot, Babe is never less than prepared.
There is no genius. There is only the work.
There is no art. There is only the craft.
This is what Hal Roach’s money buys.
75
They fall by the wayside, these others. The advent of talking pictures silences them.
In the years that follow, the ignorant will claim that careers were lost because of voices, because the images on the screen were incompatible with the sounds that emerged from their mouths.
And the ignorant, as always, will be wrong.
Mary Pickford, no longer able to play the neophyte, accepts her Oscar and retires to become an alcoholic and a recluse, communicating with the world only by telephone.
Clara Bow’s nerves are shot, and the rumor spreads that she has venereal disease.
Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings return to Europe.
Pola Negri and Mae Murray make bad marriages.
William Haines, a fairy, refuses to make any marriage at all.
Karl Dane is dropped by MGM and ends up selling hot dogs outside the studio, then kills himself.
Colleen Moore’s career dies with the flappers.
John Gilbert’s dies with the melodrama.
Lon Chaney just dies.
Douglas Fairbanks just dies.
Renée Adorée just dies.
So their voices, he knows, have nothing to do with their failure to make it in talking pictures. Except for Raymond Griffith, the Silk Hat Comedian, who, at his best, is as good as Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd.
But not Chaplin.
Raymond Griffith can’t get a job in talking pictures because Raymond Griffith has no voice. Raymond Griffith is incapable of speaking above a whisper, and is therefore the perfect silent comedian. Eventually, Raymond Griffith chokes to death over dinner at the Masquers Club because he fails to chew his food properly.
But these ones do not concern him, or not as much as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
Not as much as Chaplin.
Buster Keaton signs to MGM and regrets it. Buster Keaton drinks so much that Buster Keaton marries a woman who doesn’t even remember his name.
Harold Lloyd gets old, and loses the hunger to create. Harold Lloyd will live off his investments and go on to take thousands of nudie photographs of women known and unknown.
Chaplin tries to ignore sound, and makes City Lights. It is a brilliant mistake. But Chaplin is Chaplin, and the same rules do not apply.
And he and Babe watch Hal Roach chew an entire hive of wasps as the studio invests in new sound equipment, and when Hal Roach is ready to record their voices, he and Babe will speak, and movement will be matched to dialogue, and dialogue will be matched to voices, and voices will be matched to faces, and the characters will not change because the characters cannot change, because they are fixed, and have always been fixed, and will always be fixed.
This he understands. This is the pact he has made.
76
At the Oceana Apartments, he writes gags that will never be performed because Babe is gone. But with each gag that he writes he hears Babe’s voice, and smells Babe’s cologne, and watches Babe’s movements. In the silence of his living room, he stands before the window, practicing the steps, blocking the scenes, testing the lines.
And Babe is his echo.
He has stopped smoking. For decades he chain-smokes three packs a day, mostly Chesterfields, sometimes Pall Malls, until his fingers turn ochre. One day he wakes up and can smoke no longer, does not even feel the urge. He cannot comprehend it. His only concern is that he has long associated the act of writing with holding a cigarette in his hand. He worries that the compulsion to smoke may be linked to the compulsion to write, and without one the other may cease.
But he continues writing.
Get the door, Babe’s voice says.
He leaves the room, and returns carrying a door.
Babe’s shadow ripples its approval.
Yes, says Babe’s voice.
Yes.
77
By 1929, the old vaudeville theaters are being transformed into picture houses. Some of the owners hold out, but they are doomed; and some try to serve two gods, but they, too, are doomed.
Alexander Pantages, King Greek himself, is charged with raping Eunice Pringle in the broom closet of one of his theaters. Eunice Pringle is seventeen years old and wishes to be a dancer. Alexander Pantages, who has never learned to read or write but is now worth $30 million, is sixty-two years old and wishes to retain control of his theater empire in the face of pressure to sell from Joseph Kennedy and RKO.
Alexander Pantages is sentenced to fifty years in prison for the rape of Eunice Pringle. Alexander Pantages is acquitted on appeal, but Alexander Pantages is ruined.
Joseph Kennedy and RKO get their theaters.
He likes Alexander Pantages, who gave Mae and him a berth on his circuit, and would regale him with tales of fucking Klondike Kate Rockwell during the Yukon Gold Rush, when Alexander Pantages was a younger, more agile man. He finds it difficult to picture the aging Alexander Pantages raping Eunice Pringle in a broom closet.
Perhaps, it is suggested, Joseph Kennedy and RKO wanted those theaters very badly indeed.
By 1929 he is a father, and a star. He has a beautiful wife. He has a St. Bernard dog named Lady. He has a big house on North Bedford Drive.
And he is fucking Alyce Ardell.
78
Alyce Ardell—or Marie Alice Pradel as was, another name sloughed in a town strewn with the discarded skins of former identities—is a French actress. He and Alyce Ardell have a shared history with Joe Rock. Perhaps Joe Rock was also fucking Alyce Ardell back then; he cannot be sure. He thinks Joe Rock was in love with Alyce Ardell at the very least, and who could blame him? Alyce Ardell is beautiful, and her accent makes men weep, but she is not much of an actress, and never was, so if Joe Rock was putting her in pictures, it wasn’t because of her talent.
Marcel Perez directed Alyce Ardell in the Joe Rock pictures. Babe knows Marcel Perez from the Bungles comedies they made together for Louis Burstein, when Marcel Perez had two legs. Now Marcel Perez has only one leg. Marcel Perez loses the other leg to cancer.
These are the kind of people who end up working for Joe Rock on Poverty Row.
Marcel Perez tells Babe that Alyce Ardell is a fine actress, as long as she does not move. Babe jokes about this on the Hal Roach lot until Babe realizes that he is fucking Alyce Ardell, at which point Babe stops joking. But Alyce Ardell is very good in bed, and she seems to care for him. If Alyce Ardell is acting the role of his lover, she is a better actress than Marcel Perez gives her credit for.
He and Babe are co-conspirators. They know each other’s secrets, and keep them. So he will fuck Alyce Ardell, and Babe will remain silent, just as Babe will later fuck a divorcée named Viola Morse, and he will remain silent in turn.
And why is he fucking Alyce Ardell when he is a father, and a star, and the husband to a beautiful wife, and the owner of a St. Bernard dog named Lady?
This he cannot say.
By 1929, Babe is trapped in a nightmare. Myrtle is an alcoholic, and clever with it, although only when it comes to her addiction. Babe is convinced that every hour of every day could be spent scouring their home for bottles of liquor, and still Myrtle would devise a way to conceal one more.
Sometimes, Babe tells him, I think she hides them inside her. I’d have to call a gynecologist to find them.
Babe is frightened of Myrtle because her rages are boundless, but Babe is also strangely protective of her. As Myrtle spirals down, they become less like husband and wife and more like father and daughter. When they make l
ove—when Myrtle is sober enough, although she is never sober—Babe sometimes feels guilty of an act of violation, and yet Babe cannot leave Myrtle because Babe loves her, and she needs him; and the worse she grows, the greater that need, and thus the greater the love. So Babe finds comfort in distance and gambling (there is not a casino doorman in Agua Caliente who does not greet Babe by name); in golf and in football; in hunting and in work.
But Myrtle is devouring Babe.
Babe’s bouts of melancholy grow deeper, and his outbursts of choler more frequent. Babe breaks the arm of the actor Tyler Brooke with a pool cue—or so Tyler Brooke claims—because Tyler Brooke calls Babe a son of a bitch. Money is paid to make Tyler Brooke go away, and as a result Hal Roach cuts Tyler Brooke adrift. And then, because fate likes a joke, Tyler Brooke marries a woman named Myrtle, and Tyler Brooke is still married to her when Tyler Brooke kills himself by ingesting carbon monoxide.
Myrtle—Babe’s Myrtle—sues for divorce. She and Babe reconcile.
Myrtle is committed to a sanitarium. Myrtle escapes.
On and on, over and over.
Babe is trying to save one marriage while his partner is sabotaging another.
And the Audience laughs and laughs.
79
At the Oceana Apartments, he reads the newspaper and drinks his tea. Even after all these years in the United States, he retains a fondness for British habits and British food: tea, treacle pudding, Brussels sprouts, liver with bacon and onions, ginger beer, Black & White whisky.
He is still A.J.’s son.
He is killing time. His mail for today has been answered. The television people have scheduled one of his pictures for later in the afternoon. There is no logic or order to the transmissions. Old follows older, silent follows sound. Sometimes it seems that his past has been cut into pieces and tossed in the air, let the fragments fall where they may.
In the quiet of his apartment, he hums an old music hall tune.
My old man said “Foller the van,
And don’t dilly dally on the way . . .”
Lois, his daughter, liked hearing him sing that song, although he was never a great singer. Babe was different. Babe would sing to pass the time on set. Babe would sing for the joy of singing. Babe would sing “Shine On, Harvest Moon” with Lois on his knee, over and over, and never tire of it, and never tire of her.
He thinks it is a shame that Babe did not have children of his own.
Another lyric intrudes, distracting him, but he cannot place it, not at first.
I love you so
I love you so
Oh I love my darling Daddy.
He tries to put a melody to this, but he cannot. It must be another music hall song. The lyrics have a certain rhythm, although he could be erring by forcing them into an inapposite form, but they also boast that sickly taint of sentimentality familiar to him from a hundred dusty stages, the singers working to lift the final line to the gods, straining against the molasses glut of mawkishness that threatens, in the hands of the wrong performer, to reduce it to the stuff of mockery.
I love you so
I love you so
Oh I love my darling Daddy.
He sets aside the newspaper, snagged on a spicule of memory.
A card left in Babe’s dressing room. Babe is using the card as a bookmark, the book lying face down, its boards reflected in the mirror. It might have been a study of politics, but he cannot be sure.
When was it: 1928, 1929? He cannot be sure of this either.
But he remembers that the card is handwritten, and the script Myrtle’s. He does not intend to read (he wants to believe), merely glance, but this glance takes in everything before he can look away.
Even now, at the Oceana Apartments, he is ashamed of his actions.
He tells himself that his curiosity is born out of concern for Babe, but if it is, then this concern is tainted by prurience. Despite what Babe has shared with him of his life with Myrtle, and what he has learned from others of Babe’s troubles, he is privy to very little that goes on behind the walls of Babe’s home. He and Babe rarely socialize together outside working hours. They do their socializing on set. They speak regularly on the telephone, but their conversations mostly revolve around scripts and gags.
Perhaps, though, they do not have to speak. Perhaps it is enough to be in each other’s company.
He knows this to be true, because he was there at the end for Babe’s slow dying.
He touches the card with his fingers, turning it to the light, just as, at the Oceana Apartments, he reaches out a hand as though to stop the ghost of himself from intruding on another man’s life, even one bound so intimately to his own. He can visualize the card before him. Why should this moment have lodged when so many others have drifted away?
I am so thankful I have had you all these years may God be good enough to let us go through life together. I love you so, Oh I love my darling Daddy.
Your own honey girl,
On our seventh anniversary, may there be seventy more. And lots of little Hardys to carry it on . . .
Just one “I love you so.” He had it wrong, but not so very wrong.
This is Myrtle, Myrtle the drunk. He wonders how many shots Myrtle had consumed when she wrote this anniversary card to Babe. Just enough, probably: another hour or two and Myrtle would have been writing Babe a very different note, if she could write at all.
There would be no little Hardys. Babe must have known, even then. Babe and Myrtle might have discussed the possibility of children when Myrtle was temporarily sober following one of her periods in the sanitarium, or when she was telling Babe how sorry she was after she relapsed, and Babe would have lied and told his Sweetest Little Baby that, yes, they would try, and, yes, she would be a wonderful mother, and yes, yes, yes, but Babe knew. There would be no children, not with this woman, and none at all if Babe remained with her.
Yet Babe could not abandon Myrtle.
So Babe would go to work, and sing “Shine On, Harvest Moon” to the children of other men.
80
Hal Roach watches the first of the Victor sound trucks arrive at his studio.
Hal Roach examines the microphones, and the soundproofing on the stages to block out the noise of the trains passing on the tracks behind the lot. Hal Roach oversees the installation of the power grids for the recording equipment, and the new projectors equipped for sound playback.
Hal Roach has spent a fortune converting his studio to sound. So, too, has Mack Sennett, who beats Hal Roach to the punch by getting the first talkie short into theaters in 1928, but Hal Roach believes that sound will ultimately be the death of Mack Sennett because Mack Sennett’s brand of slapstick will not survive the advent of talking pictures. Speech requires dialogue, and dialogue requires a subject. Storyline is all. A string of sight gags will no longer suffice.
Hal Roach hires Elmer Raguse to supervise the sound recording at the studio. Elmer Raguse is a diabetic and a perfectionist. Elmer Raguse may also be a genius, but nobody stays around Elmer Raguse long enough to tell for sure because Elmer Raguse isn’t a sociable man, not at first meeting, not even at later meeting, and certainly not with actors who forget where the microphone is, and effects men who set off explosions too close to his recording equipment, thereby blowing the delicate valves. But Hal Roach doesn’t care if Elmer Raguse never again speaks to another person as long as the Audience can hear what the actors are saying.
It doesn’t take much time before Hal Roach begins to regret the invention of speech—speech of any kind, never mind recorded speech. The illumination is wrong because the recording cameras are so big that the lights can’t be brought close enough to make the actors resemble human beings. It takes a team of men to shift a single camera while shooting; otherwise, the microphone picks up the sound of the motor. Hal Roach makes three pictures before someone realizes that the microphone itself can actually be moved. Until then, the actors are forced to loiter in its general vicinity like commut
ers waiting for a bus, or as though each of them has one foot nailed to the floor. Hal Roach also suspects that the actors may be frightened of changing position and accidentally breaking a piece of Elmer Raguse’s equipment, in which case Elmer Raguse will shout at them, and actors are delicate creatures that don’t care to be shouted at. Hal Roach considers having a word with Elmer Raguse about this until Hal Roach remembers just how much the equipment has cost him, at which point Hal Roach decides that the more frightened everyone is of Elmer Raguse, the better.
He is not enamored of his first experience of talking pictures. Despite all the preparation, all their honing of the script, he is still thrown when he steps on the soundstage to begin filming Their Last Word, the working title for what will become Unaccustomed As We Are, because nobody likes Their Last Word as a title, and it makes no sense to call a comedy in which they speak their first words Their Last Word. Even Leo McCarey admits this.
It is the stillness that makes filming difficult, the smothering of sound at the call for quiet on the set. Filming a silent picture is like filming life: there is noise in the background and noise in the foreground. Conversations continue regardless of the actors’ presence. Nails are hammered, boards are laid. Trains whistle, dogs bark.
But a sound picture must be filmed in quiescence, and for the first time in years he is uncomfortably aware of the proximity of the lens, the faces of the crew, the claustrophobia of his environs. A new tension has infected the set, and the actors are its first victims. The director will no longer be able to shout guidance or tweak gags while the camera is running. The crew will not be permitted to laugh, and if the crew cannot laugh, then how may he know that what he is doing is funny? The problem will be compounded once they commence making pictures on location: the crew will be aware of the necessity of silence because paychecks depend upon it, but a crowd lured by the sight of a camera will not be subdued so easily.