Only when she had disappeared did it come to me that her uniformed driver was also familiar. It had been none other than Jacob Mix himself. Perhaps I had him to thank for Esmé’s change of mood?
Me duele. Tengo hambre. Me duele. Me duele.
* * * *
FIVE
I AM NOT ESPECIALLY PROUD of the ways in which I earned my living in 1925. There was little honour in it. Yet I do not think I knew a time since my childhood when I felt more light-hearted or thoroughly fulfilled. Spending so much of the year in a state of near-perfect euphoria, I almost forgot I was born to suffer for science and humanity, destined to build my great flying cities, not create the baroque palaces and Gothick villages, mediaeval castles and Futurist ballrooms that Fantasy demanded. Yet, during that year in Hollywood it seemed possible to realise every single dream I had ever entertained and to do so easily. I could have been happy there and lived out my life there, with Esmé, my wife, my children; an honoured illusionist as famous as Walt Disney or von Stroheim and probably richer. With his wealth ‘Uncle Dizzy’ created a Land populated by his petit-bourgeois dreams of a prosaic future. I should have built Pyatnitskiland! Each part of my world would have demonstrated an invention of my own - the solid-hulled, turbo-powered aerial cruiser, the Atlantic aeroplane refuelling platforms, the radio oven, the space-rocket, the radio satellite relay, the desert liner, the television, the dynamite engine and the super-rapid ocean-clipper - and would have realised my greatest vision. Uncle Dizzy and Uncle Joe had that dream in common: they longed for a world populated entirely by programmable robots. Ultimate predictability as a guard against death. However, I dreamed of ultimate freedom. My great cities of the skies would at last release humanity forever from its chains, from the sucking hampering mud of its origins. Almost single-handedly I could have built a glorious future, transforming the planet in a thousand ways, harnessing all the bountiful resources of the American continent. There would have been no Second World War, no triumph of Bolshevism. Indeed, Bolshevism would have crumbled under the weight of its own delusions. Russia and America would have formed a noble alliance, a united Christian nation. I should have been content to have been recognised merely as the architect of all this. I have never desired political power, certainly not for its own sake. But circumstances would alter my life radically. Another future would be built: its proudest achievements a man-sized, incoherent duck and a monstrous mechanical ape.
This god is Set, who is also Sekhet, the goddess. Sekhet is called ‘the Eye of Ra’ and is the instrument of mankind’s destruction.
Sometimes I go to the Polish Club in Exhibition Road, just up from the Science Museum. It is still possible to get a good, cheap meal there and meet a few like-minded souls. They know I am not really Polish, but are prepared to turn a blind eye. They recognise suffering. All Slavs are welcome. The rooms of the club are tall and cool, even in summer, and there is a garden. I once took Mrs Cornelius with me as my guest. Nobody was rude to her. That cannot be said for everywhere one goes in London today. She found the atmosphere a little depressing, I think.
She still lives for the present. Though she is proud of her past and enjoys her memories she does not dwell on them. I became too morbid at the club, she said. I explained the difference between the spiritual contemplation of history and mere self-pity but she did not really listen. She, too, has had excessive pain in her life. Perhaps she, like me, cannot afford to dwell overmuch on certain aspects of the past. But she enjoys our reminiscences. Sometimes we sit together in her flat in Colville Terrace and talk. If the sound of the steel bands rehearsing and the prostitutes quarrelling with their pimps is not too loud we often continue well into the night. Mrs Cornelius recalls her successes, the times when she was a great star of the stage as well as the screen, but she has kept relatively little personal memorabilia. She reminds me of my own fame. Indeed, I have more recorded about her in my scrapbooks than I have of myself. She enjoys leafing through these glue-crusted heavy pages, screaming with laughter at her make-up, her dresses, her more outrageous stage-names. I suppose it is healthy, this response, but I find it a little disconcerting. My friend puts too little value on her talents. Always, she has done this. That is why I want to tell the world what she was. My own future was stolen from me but she, careless goddess that she was, threw hers away as casually as she tossed a cigarette over a ship’s rail. Yet she has never said she regretted it. Her regrets are of a different order, usually concerning some gentleman she failed to attract for a night’s passing pleasure. She has been loved by some of the greatest men in modern history, been the mistress of the most influential financiers and politicians, and if she were not discreet, she could fill the tabloids daily with her memories. Yet she seems to have little respect or nostalgia for them. ‘Blokes’re fer yer ‘olidays, like icecream and drinkin’ yerself silly. Too much of ‘em and it makes yer sick.’ She has as much and as little to say about the Persian playboy who first took her out of Whitechapel and abandoned her in Odessa as she does about Trotsky, whose paramour she became. ‘They corl it I-ran now, an’ well named it is, too. ‘Oo fuckin’ wouldn’t run if they ‘ad the chance? But ‘e ‘ad some fuckin’ gelt, the bastard. An’ ‘e never whinged on like Leo, ‘oo couldn’t bloody stop. Especially after ‘e got ter France. Remember Cassis, Ivan?’
E partito il treno? C’é tempo per scendere? Attraversiamo la frontiera? She was no yachna. And I live because of her. She is, I say, the actual keeper of my life. She laughs when I try to explain. She slaps my shoulder and calls me her sentimental little Russki. She has always been my friend.
We travelled towards Fastov through avenues of lime trees with a red flag flying from the mast of our Mercedes. She smelled of summer, of the roses, though she was wrapped in the finest fur. Later, you could inhale the bloody stink of dead horses piled into ditches by the side of the road and sometimes there were festering human corpses among them, those poor ignorant followers of Petlyura. He said he would give them land, but he was a friend of the rich. He gave them snow. His promises were insubstantial and melted away with the spring sunshine. If he had listened, if he had genuinely loved our Ukraine, as I loved her, I would have saved him so easily! He abandoned my Violet Ray. They were all greedy for our wheat and steel, those Moscow Jews. They are greedy still. But she says I am morbid and lets me talk only of the good times, the best of which were in Hollywood when I became a prince, a star, a man of substance and influence to rival all the other great aristocrats of Hollywood whom I admired, especially Griffith. Once I was his peer I invited the great director to my home, but even then he had become reclusive and suspicious. I should have taken a lesson from him. You are a king in Hollywood only while your work is popular, while you obey the studio’s power. Take some action in the name of art, idealism or even social conscience and make money and you are still celebrated for your virtues. But follow your conscience and fail to make money and you are destroyed overnight. You become a villain. This was the bitter truth Griffith had learned. But I was happy, perhaps because the future faded and the past became less painful, no more than a record of my triumphs. I learned from the great myth-makers of Hollywood how to present my curriculum vitae in the best and most dramatic light. Tom Mix was from Peoria and Greta Garbo from Detroit, but the world was told otherwise, not because they were liars but because they knew this was the only means by which they could maintain their authority with the public and, ultimately, the studio. But the studio, of course, could create other, less beneficial myths if it felt so disposed, so one always had to be a myth or two ahead of them. I had accounts in stores. I had my car. I had my little house in Venice. I had admirers. My social standing rose so high that I was sought after at dinner-parties. Frequently I attended these with Mrs Cornelius, also a star, and occasionally I saw my Esmé!
My success had come about largely through good fortune, through my natural gregariousness and through a certain talent for acting, part of which had been developed during my periods of hardship and
captivity and which was, since one was so frequently in the power of those who did not speak your language, highly dependent on mime. By early 1925, while on the set assisting Poldark, I had been ‘roped in’ for Ben Hur both as a galley slave and as a Christian. This led to me serving for a while as a stand-in. There are parts of The Dark Angel, Beau Geste, The Master Singer and Tricks which owe their special vibrancy to the fact that my back and half-face were used in place of a star too drunk, drugged or hung-over to perform as his public expected. I was already appearing in small parts by April 1925 when Goldfish had returned and commissioned a draft script of White King, Red Queen with a view to putting me on the strength. I visited him at the new offices which he shared with Cecil B. De Mille - a great white marble ‘colonial’ mansion which stood on Washington Boulevard not far from MGM and was, by coincidence, the old Thomas Ince Studio, sold to settle the dead director’s debts. He was in a fatherly mood. ‘Pleasure is pleasure and business is business.’ He spoke the idiomatic Yiddish of the Warsaw gutter. ‘You’ve got to divide up professional and amateur. I used to be taught the rule - the amateur you screw, the professional you hire. Me, I preferred to screw the professionals and let the others waste their time with amateurs. Two birds in one bath. You are not, I believe, whatever else, an amateur, Max, I hope.’
I assured him I was a pro’s pro of the old school.
‘Anyway I thought that was a better use of the time and time was money. Now, I’ve learned moderation. I married an amateur and now I don’t have to screw the professionals!’
I found Goldfish’s confidences both baffling and irresistible.
‘As a man of the world, Max, you know what I mean?’
I assured him I understood him most profoundly. His sentiments, I said, were an exact version, almost word for word, of my own. Only he had phrased it better. I congratulated him on his extraordinary literary turn of phrase. He said in all modesty that he was, by and large, a self-made man. ‘Reading is the answer. Travel, like I did, in gloves, and you get to reading a lot. And seeing movies, of course. Bit by bit you understand how ignorant you are. Bit by bit you start to remedy it. That’s me now, Max - remedied. Though they stole every idea, every property, every star and every hour of every hard-working day I put in for them - Art for Art’s sake remedied me. Quality, now, is what we do here. Small but prodigious, like in gloves. That way you make more profit for less work, believe me.’
I not only believed him, I said, I applauded him. We parted very cordially.
Mrs C. was Gloria Cornish now, of course, and in some ways the instrument of my success (or diversion, if you like). While Goldfish had been impressed by my writing and had commissioned a draft script with a view to ‘putting me on the strength’, it was Lon Chaney, the great character actor, who saw my drawings one evening and suggested immediately that I should be designing whole storyboards. I had until then been working as a part-time apprentice to Poldark. Chaney introduced me to a pleasant Scot called Menzies, a student of the great Grot, who was primarily known for his delicate children’s illustrations. Menzies was at that time trying to work with Valentino’s wife, who claimed to be some sort of Russian aristocrat, a painter, stage-decorator and haute couturière whose ideas were so extravagant that even when the sets were built they could hardly be filmed. The colour of the sets was important, since they tended to show up in certain pronounced ways. In her designs for Monsieur Beaucaire she had ignored all considerations of cost or technical capability and produced Valentino’s first failure. The sophisticated comedy was scarcely appropriate material for that elevated lounge-lizard, who looked exactly like the Italian gigolo he had been in real life and whose taste and manners continued to reflect his origins. Later Bob Hope far eclipsed him in the role. Some of us Hollywooders were able to rise above our humble beginnings. Valentino sank beneath the weight of his own unfounded self-esteem. Mayn schvitz der spic gonif trenken!
My natural skill as a draughtsman, the basics of which I had come by, of course, at the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, impressed Menzies. He said I had the kind of imagination that was best suited for movie work. I thought big, he said, but more importantly I produced designs which could be built and used. He was a great believer in the fluid camera and while he admired his master, Grot, he felt that Grot’s particular talent produced a beautifully static set. It was from Menzies that I learned most about designing for the films.
When I heard he was out at Korda’s studios during the War I tried to contact him. He was not very far from where I was living in Hammersmith at the time but even though I explained I was calling from a pay box at enormous cost I could not get anyone to bring him to the telephone. He was a fellow spirit. In the late thirties he would be the guiding hand behind a picture that came closer to the spirit of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation than anything I have ever seen.
The title was not to my taste and the thing was spoiled a little by the inclusion of that insipid halbjuden ‘Howard’ with his dyed blond hair, but Gone With the Wind was a wonder to me when I saw it at the Kilburn State soon after arriving in England in 1940. In its silent predecessor Gloria Cornish played the part of Nellie and now another Englishwoman, Vivien Leigh, reminded me so much of my Esmé, and yet she also had the determination of Mrs Cornelius. Of course, Clark Gable was magnificent. A flyer, in real life, like myself. With Fairbanks (and myself) he represented the American virtues of manly courage and rugged good-humoured honesty. Now save for John Wayne such virtues have all but disappeared from the screen. I remember Goering, also a flying man, in that jocular but at the same time deeply serious way of his, saying, ‘What are we going to do about America?’ This, I need hardly say, was at a time when Hitler had not been goaded into war by those interests most resistant to his ideals. Wohin gehen wir jetzt? I could have told him then.
At first Menzies gave me a few individual scenes to develop for Schenk’s comedy Her Sister From Paris with Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman. This did not require any great imaginative efforts, especially for the scenes Menzies entrusted to me, but it got me work on The Eagle, Valentino’s next film, in which we could indulge our lavish fantasies. We designed and built some of the screen’s most gorgeous sets.
They were romantic, extravagant (though not especially costly) and were the very spirit of everything I had ever demanded from the moving picture play. Unfortunately, although our designs were made and used, the script was lightweight and the film was not a particular success. I can, incidentally, be identified in several scenes as Valentino’s stand-in. Valentino chose to blame me for his failure, since the studio had refused to let his ludicrous spouse work on another picture. Not wishing to make an overt enemy of the more powerful Menzies, she took against me. Menzies however proved a good friend and by then every studio in Hollywood knew what Valentino and the pseudo-aristocrat were like. I did not, in the end, work with Menzies on the remaining Valentino picture, but he did give me scenes for Graustark and What Price Beauty? in which Mrs Cornelius had an important role but in which my only featured scene was cut. Gradually I grew to love my new medium. I became familiar with every creative and practical function. I built palaces, monuments, whole cities, I even populated them - sometimes as hero, sometimes as villain - and, for a while at least, my genius was satisfied. Lon Chaney became my patron - possibly because I did not condescend to him as some of the parvenu starlings did. He had been a professional most of his life, which had not been an easy one, and like me had begun his career as a travelling player. Perhaps he recognised in me some version of his younger self. Whatever it was, he took me in hand and for a while was my guiding light through the hazardous maze of Hollywood. Though he himself nursed an abiding love for a legless married woman and was frequently in despair, he yet found time to advise me on matters of etiquette, on brothels and their inmates, on drinks and their various properties. While he did not introduce me to the pleasures of opium and hashish, then undergoing a small vogue with the fad for things Oriental freshly stimulated b
y the discovery of the treasures of Tutenkhamun, he had excellent advice about the properties of the drugs and the character of those who dealt in them. Together we toured Chinatown. Menzies enjoyed such drugs. With their help he created two of the most memorable Arabian Nights fantasies ever seen by an awed public. One was for Fairbanks, the other for Korda. Both were called The Thief of Baghdad. (The nickname was enjoyed by Samuel Goldfish for a while, though he was not of Mesopotamian Jewish origin. Neither Goldwyn nor Goldfish is an Iraqi name!) Though Chaney advised me to stay away from such people, to sign a contract with one of the smaller studios and got me a screen-test with DeLuxe, there was hardly time to think. I was being given design and acting jobs as fast as I could say ‘yes’. It would have been foolish to say ‘no’ since there was no telling when it might not suddenly end. As a freelance I was frequently paid in cash. But a studio contract, as an actor and director, would bring me all kinds of security and that was, after all, what Esmé so keenly desired. It offered decent security and steady weekly money. I would accept it. Meanwhile I was saving my dollars. I had them in the Bank of Southern California earning 11 per cent interest. I was becoming for the first time in my life a citizen of material substance and responsibility. Increasingly I had the company of Esmé whenever she could get away from G. W. Meulemkaumpf, who had become her official sponsor in the US, and could withdraw his patronage if he discovered she was already engaged. While I understood the difficulties of her position the situation remained painful, even with the resourceful Jacob Mix as a reliable intermediary. In my worst moments I remembered that she was after all virtually my own creation. Had she not been Esmé Loukianoff’s half-sister, she would still be in Galata contracting diseases and earning pennies from a hundred nations’ sailors.