The Boy Who Granted Dreams

  “Is you havin’ one o’ your brilliant ideas?” Cyril sounded skeptical. “Twenty seconds.”

  “WNYC wants to pick us up,” said Karl, an enigmatic smile on his lips.

  Christmas and Cyril stared at him.

  “They’ll let us transmit over our own frequency; they’ll let us use all their equipment, including the studios. We decide all the programming, with no interference,” Karl went on, pulling some papers out of his jacket. “Here’s the contract. We’ll remain majority shareholders. Fifty-one percent for us.”

  “What advantage does we get?” asked Cyril suspiciously. “Ten seconds …”

  “We become a legal station. We’ll be able to advertise, have income …” said Karl.

  “They gettin' the mos’ popular program in New York, and’ all we gets is a studio?” Cyril interrupted. “That’s it?” He shook his head. “Five seconds.”

  Karl shook his head. “Actually they did make us an offer for the other forty-nine percent.”

  “… four …”

  Karl spread out the contract next to the rudimentary CKC equipment and jabbed a finger at some numbers.

  “three … two …”

  “A hundred and fifty thousand dollars to sign with them. Do you think that’s enough, partners?” crowed Karl.

  Cyril’s mouth and eyes flew wide open and his face turned pale. He pressed the transmission switch on mechanically, like an automaton. “We is on the air. Holy shit,” he said faintly.

  Christmas laughed, and his laughter reverberated through all the radios of the city. “Hello, New York. Can you hear me in the dark?” he said, and then he laughed again.

  Now the listeners could hear two other voices laughing along with Christmas.

  57

  Los Angeles, 1928

  “What did you do to Barrymore?” Mr. Bailey chuckled, coming into Ruth’s room. “He’s going around telling everybody you’re the best photographer he knows.” He fanned the photos in his hand. “And if I have to be honest with you, this isn’t even your best work. I’d even say there’s something cold about it.”

  Ruth gave a fleeting ambiguous smile.

  Mr. Bailey’s merry face darkened and his eyes looked at her worriedly.

  Ruth laughed. “Don’t think anything bad, Clarence,” she said. “Maybe the Indians are right when they believe that photos steal away their souls. But I gave his back to him.”

  “Well, dear, I haven’t understood a thing,” said Clarence, making a face. “All I know is that everyone in Hollywood wants you. Your appointment book is full.”

  In the next two weeks, Ruth photographed John Gilbert, William Boyd, Elinor Fair, Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Dorothy Cumming, James Murray, Mary Astor, Johnny Mac Brown, William Haines, Lillian Gish … Actors as well as producers were enthusiastic about Ruth’s photos, so enigmatic, intense, dark, dramatic. And when he saw her photos of his colleagues, Douglas Fairbanks — who had smiled exaggeratedly during the sitting — insisted on another session and promised Ruth he would follow her instructions to the letter just so he could have shots like the others, rich with a density that the subjects might not possess in life. Paramount, Fox, and MGM all put pressure on Clarence Bailey to let them have her services exclusively. The result was that Ruth’s paycheck grew.

  One Saturday morning Ruth had an appointment with Jeanne Eagels at Paramount. The year before, the actress had made a film for MGM, but now it seemed that Paramount was betting on her being a big star. For the following year they had scheduled two films with her in the lead.

  Ruth found her sitting in a corner of the big stage. The whole hangar was in shadow. Only an area for makeup and costume was lighted. Jeanne Eagels was sitting in a chair while a hairdresser combed out her blond hair. As she came nearer, Ruth could see the actress’ face more clearly. Platinum hair, pale skin. Her legs were crossed, and Ruth noticed her slim ankles. Her wrists were thin too. They looked fragile as crystal. The actress was twisting her hands, frowning slightly. When Ruth came close to her she noticed, too, that Jeanne Eagels was terribly thin, with a beauty that was both innocent and troubling; and she was trying to conceal her short gasps for breath. She was soberly dressed, with a knee-length gray skirt, black shoes, flesh-colored stockings, a white blouse, and a pearl necklace.

  “I’m not ready,” she said crossly, seeing Ruth. Then in a second her expression changed, there was a lost look in her eyes. She bit her lower lip and then smiled at Ruth. “Just kidding,” she said. “They had me come in especially for these photos.”

  “You must be tired,” said Ruth.

  Jeanne Eagels didn’t answer. Again her expression changed, as if she were overcome by a sudden anguish. She shook off the hairdresser’s hand and turned towards the shadows beyond the set, peering out anxiously. Then she pressed a hand to her breast, as if trying to control her ragged breathing. She looked at Ruth and laughed, softly, joylessly. But with an unexpected sweetness.

  She had just turned thirty, but she looked ten years younger. A girl of twenty with a woman’s gaze. These were going to be interesting photos, Ruth thought.

  Suddenly Jeanne Eagels jumped up, rummaged in her purse, and took out a cigarette. She turned it in her fingers without lighting it, continually turning to look at the entrance to the shooting stage. When she heard footsteps in the shadows, she stretched out her slender neck and almost stopped breathing. The look on her face was eager and intense.

  Ruth pointed the camera and shot.

  “No!” Jeanne Eagels cried at once. Again she turned towards the approaching footsteps. “Is that you, Ronald?” she said, her voice strained.

  “Yeah,” came a hoarse voice.

  Jeanne Eagels’ face lit up in a smile. But there wasn’t any light behind it, Ruth noticed. The actress walked away and hurried up the stairs that led to the dressing rooms, reserved for the principal players. She clung to the handrail. At the top of the stairs she looked back down. A small thin man with a straw hat tilted over his eyes followed her. Unlike Jeanne, the man walked with a measured tread, lazily. He had a doctor’s leather bag in his hand. The two of them disappeared into a dressing room.

  Ruth looked at the hairdresser, who slipped away, embarrassed.

  A few minutes later Jeanne Eagels reappeared in the dressing-room door. She came down the stairs with a calm light step, only faintly hesitant. As if she was floating. She sat down again, in front of the mirror, and finished arranging her hair. Now she turned to Ruth. “Shall we begin?” she asked her, with an angelic distant smile.

  “Can we shoot here?” Ruth asked. “I’d like to use the mirrors.”

  Jeanne Eagels half-closed her eyes, without answering, and tilted back her head in a careless and sensual pose. Ruth shot. The actress opened her eyes and looked at her reflection in the mirror, with a disarming smile. Ruth shot. Jeanne Eagels rested her head on the makeup table. The platinum hair spilled across the wooden surface, illuminated by the light bulbs around the mirror. Ruth shot. The actress closed her eyes, placed one hand on her shoulder. Now her hands moved gently, as if under water, without the nervousness they’d revealed a little while earlier. Ruth shot. The actress laughed, barely opening her lips. Ruth shot. The hand moved up from her shoulder to her neck, like a caress. Ruth shot. And then Jeanne turned, sitting up straight in the chair, her arms loosely in her lap and her head slightly tilted to the side.

  Ruth aimed the camera. These were going to be wonderful pictures, she thought. And yet this thought, instead of making her pleased, made her feel uncomfortable.

  “There’s a spot on your blouse,” Ruth said, lowering the camera and pointing to the actress’ right sleeve, at elbow level.

  Jeanne Eagels was slow to react. First she gave Ruth a distant smile, and then she looked down at the little red stain spreading on the white fabric. She covered it with her hand. “Lipstick,” she said.

  But Ruth knew it was blood. Blood that was coming out of a tiny wound in the vein of her arm. And now, as the footsteps o
f the man with the medical bag echoed down the stairs, Ruth understood what it was that caused the transformation of Jeanne Eagels. She understood why she had felt no pleasure in thinking how good the photos were going to be. And she knew where the familiar feeling of discomfort she felt at every shot had come from. Now Ruth knew what she was photographing. Hadn’t her very first photos been of women with that same absent look? Lost. She had photographed that look at the Newhall Spirit Resort for Women. In the clinic where she’d been incarcerated. And she knew what lay behind those pupils, tiny as the head of a pin: Desperation. Defeat. Death. Ruth had been photographing death.

  “We’re finished,” she said hastily.

  “Are we?” said Jeanne Eagels, far away and indifferent.

  Ruth stuffed the camera into her bag and hurried away from the studio. Only when she was out in the dazzling California sunlight, far from Hollywood, did she stop. She looked around. She didn’t know where she was. Maybe she was downtown. Maybe she wasn’t far from the ocean. She didn’t know where she was but it didn’t matter. This was the real world. The world she had been fleeing for too long. Ever since she had left New York for California. Ever since she had lost Christmas. Ever since she had lost herself.

  Ever since you started pretending that you’d found yourself again, she thought.

  She had shut her eyes again, telling herself that they were wide open behind her Leica’s viewfinder. She had barricaded herself in a room at a photo agency; she had let a protective old gentleman act as a membrane between herself and reality. She had deluded herself into believing that making photos of movie stars was like being alive. Those same stars she had seen as locusts the night she’d tried to commit suicide. Those same stars that fluttered their wings wildly because they knew they weren’t going to last, because theirs was not life, but a brief dream. Or a nightmare, as it was for Jeanne Eagels, Or John Barrymore. Or herself.

  Ruth sat down on some steps in front of a tall closed door. Around her she could hear people’s voices, the cry of seagulls, music coming out of a window, and above her the dense rumbling of automobiles. She had blocked her ears, she realized. She hadn’t looked, hadn’t listened. She hadn’t heard. She had only been pretending to look and listen and hear. But nothing had changed. She had hidden behind a daguerreotype of Grandpa Saul, making him live again in the kind eyes of Clarence Bailey. She had sealed Christmas inside a horrid red lacquer heart, the only thing that kept her company at night. An inanimate object.

  ”You’re alone,” she told herself, listening to the people all around her running, walking, calling to one another, laughing, exchanging insults. Communicating.

  She’d been living on ghosts. Her grandfather’s ghost. The ghost of Christmas. One of them was dead. And it was as if the other were dead too, because she didn’t have the courage to find him, to go and find out if he was still alive. Alive for her.

  “You’re alone,” she repeated. And she felt a great sadness.

  Then she got up and took the Leica out of her bag. She began to walk unhurriedly through those unknown streets, with no destination in mind. With no desire except to emerge from her own prison. That prison whose bars, walls, and locks she herself had constructed. That prison whose keys she had mislaid. She walked on; looking around as she never had done before. Or not for a very long time. She was looking and trying to see. She was listening and trying to hear.

  In a filthy alleyway she saw a bum lying on the ground, asleep. She took his picture. Then another. Finally she lowered the camera and looked at him. With her eyes. She breathed in the unpleasant odor emanating from him.

  Then she started walking again, going down streets in this city she still didn’t know, as if she were entering a mysterious jungle.

  Inside a shop, she saw a fat matron trying on a flowered dress. The salesgirl was trying desperately to button it. The fat woman looked mortified. Ruth raised the Leica and shot through the window. The women inside saw her and turned to look at her, amazed. Ruth shot again. Between the two women, blurred, in the foreground, in gilded letters edged with a black line, the word “Modes.”

  Ruth kept on walking. Everything seemed different to her now. As if she once more belonged in that world. The ordinary world. The real world. As if she had learned to breathe again. Like when she had undone the gauze strips that bound her breasts, that squeezed her lungs. As if she could never again escape from that moment.

  She got back to the studio very late that evening, and stayed up all night developing the photos she’d made. A man in a restaurant with his mouth improbably full of food, and the look of disappointment on his wife’s face. A uniformed waitress at the rear of the restaurant, massaging her foot, cigarette in mouth. A long row of used cars, with prices painted on their windshields, and behind them a salesman, tiny, alone, with no clients. A man and a woman kissing while their little child tugged at his mother’s skirt, weeping, unhappy at this love that didn’t include him. A freight train and an old tramp who couldn’t quite manage to climb onto the moving cars. Dozens of identical houses, all with their windows shut, as if no one lived there. A woman with a black eye, hanging out laundry. An old man in a rocking chair on a crumbling porch. A child dumping garbage.

  The next morning she gave all the pictures to Mr. Bailey — the few shots of Jeanne Eagels and the photos of Los Angeles.

  “Have you decided to go in a new direction?” Clarence asked her.

  “I don’t know,” said Ruth.

  Mr. Bailey put the Jeanne Eagels photos in an envelope for Paramount, distractedly. Then he took up the ones Ruth had made downtown and looked at them again. Slowly, attentively. “They’re very moving,” he said.

  Ruth got into the habit of walking all over Los Angeles with her camera. Systematically. Every day. To steal images that could move someone, she told herself. But without her even noticing, day after day, image after image, what she was doing was accustoming herself to life. As if she was learning it for the first time. As if that aimless wandering was a kind of school.

  Within two weeks she noticed that her photos now, sometimes, included people who were laughing. No one would call these pictures happy. They still bore the dark intensity of all her work, but perhaps they were softening. Or perhaps her field was expanding to let the lens capture life in all its complexity. With light and shadow.

  But still, at night, when she’d closed the door of her own room, she told herself, “You’re alone.”

  One Sunday, coming back from their weekly visit to Mrs. Bailey in Newhall, Ruth saw a park full of children. She asked Clarence to let her out of the car. As he drove away, she walked towards the park. She could hear the children’s excited cries more clearly. After the tense catatonic silence of the psychiatric clinic, their voices made her smile. She sat down on a bench and watched the children playing. Ordinary children. Like the rich kids she’d been supposed to photograph, happy and smiling, for her very first job. And she remembered the effort she’d made to exclude smiles and play from her shots. So, as if to give back the joy she’d denied those first child subjects, she raised her camera and captured it here instead.

  In the viewfinder, she saw the droll face of a five-year-old boy. He was watching her. He laughed, showing off for her, taking funny poses. His ears stuck out and his hair was cut very short. Long skinny legs with bony knees. Now he was striking a boxer’s pose, fists up. Ruth shot. Next he was a cowboy, with an imaginary six-gun in each hand. Ruth shot. The little boy laughed, delighted at this unexpected attention. He did an Indian war dance. Ruth shot.

  “Lookit me! I’m gonna be Tarzan!” he shrieked, climbing up a small tree and trying to dangle from a vine. But he lost his grip and fell awkwardly to the ground, skinning his knee. A pained lost look came over his funny face. He looked around and started to cry.

  Ruth left the bench and ran to the child. She bent down to pick him up, but two strong brown hands took hold of the boy.

  “You’re fine, Ronnie,” said the young man who had lifted th
e boy.

  Ruth looked at him. He was tall, with broad shoulders and rumpled blond hair. He was very tanned, with bright blue eyes in a nice face. Ruth thought he was only a few years older than she was. He might be twenty-two.

  “It was my fault,” said Ruth, looking down at her Leica. “I was taking some pictures and …”

  “And Ronnie couldn’t pass up a chance to climb a forbidden tree, right?” the young man said, in a tone of affectionate reproof.

  The little boy stopped crying. “I wanted to be Tarzan, king of the apes,” he whined, his face streaked with tears.

  “But instead, you made a crater in the park with your bottom,” said the young man, pointing to an imaginary hollow in the ground. “Just look what you did. If the cops find us they’ll arrest us and fry us in the electric chair.”

  The child laughed. “They won’t either!”

  “Just ask the young lady,” the young man looked at Ruth. “Go ahead, you tell him.”

  Ruth smiled. “Well, I’ve got some friends on the police force, maybe we can get off with a life sentence.”

  The young man laughed.

  “My knee hurts!” cried the little boy.

  The older boy looked at the knee. Then he shook his head sadly. “Oh my. We’re going to have to amputate.”

  “No!”

  “It’s a bad wound, Ronnie. There’s no other way.” He looked at Ruth. “You’re a nurse, right?”

  Ruth gaped at him. “Me …?”

  “You have to help him. It’s a terrible operation, really painful.”

  “All right,” said Ruth.

  “Follow me to the operating room,” said the young man, striding over to a drinking fountain.

  Ruth snapped their photo, and then joined them at the drinking fountain. The young man lay Ronnie on the grass and picked up a small stick. Pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and another one from Ronnie’s.

  “Okay, podner, th’ time has come fer yew t’ be mighty brave,” he said, affecting a cowboy twang. “We don’t have no painkiller, so jist bite down hard on this here stick. Yew, nurse, stop the bleedin’ when I start cuttin’,” he told Ruth, passing her one of the handkerchiefs. He soaked the other one in cool water.