Over the centuries Nabokov ranges, like an elegant but greedy unicorn, until the history of the Nabokovs becomes the history of Mother Russia herself, complete with loyal Ministers of State who are intimates of the Czar and rebellious Decembrists on their way to the scaffold. What a proliferation of Nabokovs, all the way back—Nabokov points out modestly—to a Russianized Tatar Prince Nabok Murza, in 1380. Six hundred years of Nabokovism! I want to cry out, “Vladimir, we came from your country, too, but while you were living on great estates and making history, we were huddled in our little synagogues, and in our village huts, hiding from history. Even the serfs looked down on us. We held no titles, never raced in luxurious sleighs through the forests of our dachas, we had no French, English, and German tutors, our ancestors did not distinguish themselves in celebrated duels and affairs of state. We were just poor Russian or Latvian Jews who lived out our unrecorded existences.”
Oh, but wait, we did have one claim to fame. My mother never tired of boasting about him when we were young: Pinsker, her mother’s brother, our “diamond-cutter to the Czar,” who had special permission to live—beyond the Pale—in that vast expanse of European Russia forbidden to ordinary Jews. I had visions of this legendary ancestor in his fur-lined jacket and handsome fur cap, enshrined in his diamond-cutting workshop in a corner of the Winter Palace, cutting exquisite, gleaming spheres for the pleasure of the Czarina. The Pinskers carried this high calling to the New World. While the Jaffes were sweltering in cramped railroad flats on the Lower East Side, the Pinskers were operating jewelry shops in Middletown, Connecticut, where their sons attended Wesleyan University, and where Adeline would be invited to escape the heat, the noise, and the smell of the ghetto summers. Middletown opened a window to what life could be like in America.
2
IF WE HAD NO family tree, yet ours was another kind of family, stretching horizontally, composed of motion-picture pioneers with whom my father the writer soon found himself involved. Before he was twenty, he had gone to work for the now-forgotten pioneer, Edwin S. Porter, truly the father of the American motion picture. It has become the convention to accord that role to D. W. Griffith, and to think of Griffith, DeMille, and Chaplin, along with the novice entrepreneurs Zukor, Lasky, Laemmle, and Goldwyn, as the creators of the first American films. But way back in 1903, years before these other pioneers had shot or presented their first reel, Porter had made the seminal narrative film, The Life of an American Fireman. This jumpy eight-minute flick, primitive and childish as it may look today, was a first step in the long march of the American film. In the period into which I was born, B.P. was working with Porter, fascinated with his technical inventions and his creative discoveries. Having heard these stories of Porter’s achievements firsthand, I accept them as part of my birthright. He is my Grand Duke.
In the days of Thomas Edison’s domination of the infant film industry at the turn of the century, Edwin S. Porter served as one of his mechanics and cameramen. An irony of Edison’s life is that, though he is credited with inventing the motion picture, his true love was the phonograph. He was interested in the coordination of sound and picture, but his young English assistant and co-inventor, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, was far more enthusiastic than Edison about the possibility of projecting motion pictures on a large screen. Edison favored the peep-box in the penny arcade, and even after the motion-picture screen emerged from its historic but unprepossessing Room Five in East Orange, New Jersey, he had no faith in the commercial future of the movies. Still, the nickelodeons were catching on, and so Edison reluctantly gave the audience what it seemed to want, twenty or thirty feet of moving pictures depicting New York in a Blizzard, or scenes of our sailors landing in Cuba, grandiosely titled Our Flag Is Here to Stay. Or, for the wicked, some enticing flashes of Fatima’s Coochee-Coochee Dance.
Basically a mechanic-inventor rather than an artist-director, Ed Porter happened to see one of the supernatural films that the French magician Georges Méliès had made in Paris. These Méliès films were the very first not to rely on actual photographed events but on staged theatrical scenes that told a story. With his mechanical mind—so my father would tell me when I was young—Porter examined these innovative movies frame by frame. Méliès was able to transfer his sleight of hand to the screen, able to change a pumpkin into a royal coach. He anticipated Walt Disney by 35 years, and his A Trip to the Moon, caricaturing the scientific daydreams of the 1900s, foreshadowed the optic miracles that the motion-picture camera was about to achieve. Méliès’ movies, Porter told my father, were “the fastest moving pictures” he had ever seen. After a few tentative imitations of Méliès’ magic films, he was ready to make his landmark “story picture.” The pragmatic tinkerer would choose a subject eminently down to earth: a fire. A mother and child trapped in a flaming house. Horse-drawn fire engines racing to the rescue. Precious lives saved in the nick of time!
Because Porter knew that Edison’s mind was closed to the artistic possibilities of his mechanical invention, he conspired to shoot his innovative story-film in secret. Without Edison’s knowledge (according to my father), Porter worked out his pioneer scenario. First, a shot of the house catching fire. Then a historic close shot (antedating Griffith’s more sophisticated use of this device) of the frantic mother gesticulating at the window. Cut back to the firehouse. The mustachioed firemen are lounging around until galvanized into action by the sound of the alarm. Then came the first American use of intercutting, the technique that was to become the spine of cinematic storytelling. Back again to the fire, the flames licking higher. Then cut to the fire wagon, drawn by powerful horses galloping down the street. Finally, a breathtaking climax, the last-minute rescue of the mother and child, with the house collapsing in flames behind them as they are carried to safety.
There it was, an American first, a creation that was to have as great an impact on the country as the invention of the telephone, the telegraph, and the electric light. The theater, the opera, the dance, and the concert had been the luxuries of the wealthy and the middle class. Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman opened the door to the art form of the poor, the art form soon to be enjoyed by millions of people all over the world.
But that door was not opened without a struggle from The Wizard, as Edison was known for his inventions of the incandescent light and the phonograph. A full generation before the advent of sound, he had worked to synchronize dialogue and music with moving pictures. But Porter knew the old man’s mentality, and he was in a cold sweat when he ushered Edison into the small projection room at the New Jersey laboratory. If you brought a mechanical development to Edison he would always take time to examine it. But he seemed strangely impatient with this latest brainchild. Edison fidgeted through the first four or five minutes of this historic film and then turned on his employee: “Porter, you must be crazy. I keep telling you people will never sit still for a whole reel. Eight minutes on a single story! It won’t sell. People want variety. At least four or five subjects on every reel.”
“But Mr. Edison, if they read dime novels, why can’t they follow a single story on the screen?” So Porter described the classic confrontation to my father. “Once we show them they can see a story, as well as read it, they’ll never go back to ‘The Destruction of the Standard Oil Plant at Bayonne,’ or the vaudeville juggling acts we’ve been giving them.” When Edison refused to believe it, Porter boldly offered to pay for the negative himself if Fireman proved to be a failure.
“Porter, all this celluloid must be going to your brain,” Edison argued. “I understand this picture cost eight hundred dollars. If I take you up on your offer you’ll be dead broke.”
Porter stuck to his guns. Or his fire hoses. The picture went out to the nickelodeons and the little storefront theaters that were beginning to pop up around the country, and the effect was electric: what Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation would be to the next decade, and Gone With the Wind to the 1940s.
With this success behind him, Por
ter was permitted to make an even more ambitious picture, what my father called “the Man o’War of American movies” because it sired an endless list of winning offspring all the way down to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There had been those who thought that The Life of an American Fireman was a fluke, its success based on its novelty. But The Great Train Robbery proved that the American story film was here to stay. Again, it was full of innovations that have been attributed to Porter’s successor, D. W. Griffith: the close-up, the dissolve, direct cuts from scene to scene without even a dissolve or a subtitle to clue the audience, letting the forward thrust of the story carry the viewers with it. Two lines of simultaneous action were juxtaposed, the train robbers escaping while the telegraph operator, bound and gagged, was discovered by his daughter in the station office. The action intercut between the posse formed to apprehend the robbers and the robbers themselves riding across western country to make their escape. At times Porter’s camera panned with his pursuing horsemen. At times he tilted his camera downward to follow the robbers scrambling down a wooded hillside. For the first time in history, the camera was moving with its subjects. Finally there was a sensational trick ending, a close-up of the face and hand of a besieged bandit firing his gun directly at the audience. The Edison handbill informed exhibitors that they had the choice of using this spectacular close-up either at the beginning of the picture as a “teaser,” or at the climax. When the shot was fired at the audience the effect was so startling that people actually jumped up from their seats and ran out of the theaters. So most of the pioneer showmen chose to use it at the end. The financial success of The Great Train Robbery finally convinced even the doubting Thomas Edison that the one-reel story film was a popular art form. The work of Edwin S. Porter was now studied—in New York and Chicago, in London, Paris, and Rome—his imitators taking their cameras out of doors, releasing them from their fixed positions, and making “chase” movies that were soon rivaling the originator’s.
When Porter left Edison in 1912 to form his own firm, Defender Films, my father approached the famous director on the set of his primitive studio in The Bronx and asked him to take out an ad in Film Reports. He would, he told my father, if the young man could write one that pleased him.
My father hurried back to his small office on Broadway to grapple with the problem. At the end of the day he was back on Porter’s set with his brainstorm: “Defend Your House [i.e., the movie theater] With Defender Films.” Porter not only bought the ad, he felt he had stumbled upon a fresh writing talent that he could put to use in his studio. When he invited B.P. to write a scenario, Father admitted that although he was associate editor of Film Reports at that time, he had never actually seen a photoplay. Porter promptly handed him the scenario of a current production, The School Marm’s Ride for Life.
“That script was exactly a page and a half long,” Father told me, “with a couple of crude sentences describing each of the eighteen scenes. ‘This is a scenario?’ I asked Mr. Porter. The great director, who had just introduced D. W. Griffith to motion pictures as an actor in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, assured me that this was a shooting script. ‘Well, if this is a scenario, then I am a scenario writer,’ I told him.” That same day, during his lunch hour, B.P. dashed off his first scenario. Porter was so pleased with it that he appointed him his regular scenario writer.
“It was great fun, really easy and exciting,” B.P. liked to reminisce. “I’d think up a plot and write it on Monday. Porter would cast it, paint his sets, and pick out locations on Tuesday. He would shoot the picture on Wednesday, by which time I’d be ready with the next one, which he’d cast, plan, and shoot by Friday. On Saturday our two one-reelers were shipped off to the distributors. That was our routine, week in and week out, over the two years before you were born.
“Actually I had started out with hopes of becoming a short-story writer, maybe even a novelist. And when F.P.A. accepted a few of my contributions for his ‘Conning Tower’ I had dreams of becoming another Jack London. But when I got married and your mother became pregnant with almost indecent haste, I knew that the life of a freelance writer would put us back in the ghetto. So I welcomed a chance to write those scenarios, even though I had no illusions that they were anything but dime novels flashed on a screen. By the time I met Porter, though he was the preeminent man in his field, he had really gone as far as he could go as a filmmaker. He had tried a few flights of imagination, inspired by Méliès, like The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, and he had also tried his hand at social consciousness with a film called The Kleptomaniac about a wealthy lady who gets slapped on the wrist for shoplifting, while a poor mother goes to jail for stealing a loaf of bread for her hungry children. But mostly his preference was for the sentimental and melodramatic, and in those early years, happy to get my thirty dollars a week for the two scenarios plus bonuses for the extra work I did, I ground out a mess of footage. But the moving-picture show was still such a novelty that audiences all over the country flocked to see our insipid offerings. You had to be really stupid and totally incompetent not to make money.”
My father remembered his very first scenario. With an eye to the approaching holiday season, he opened it with a kind-hearted cop who finds a lost child on Christmas Eve and takes her home to his wife and his own two children. The child explains, in a subtitle written by B.P., that she has run away from home because her mother has remarried and her stepfather is cruel to her. The big twist in the story was the wife’s discovery that the little girl is her own sister’s child! The cop and his wife decide to adopt the little girl, and since they don’t know her name they call her their Christmas Carol. The picture fades out on the cop’s equally kindhearted children sharing their Christmas presents with their new “sister.”
“We can laugh at it now,” B. P. told me, “but A Cop’s Christmas Carol cleaned up. There were actually lines at the little glass box offices. And all the ladies were sniffling into their handkerchiefs. Mr. Porter not only gave me an extra bonus that Christmas, he promoted me to Scenario Editor!”
While I was still in the fetal stage, the scenarios that my father was coping with were in a similar phase of primal development. At first they were jotted down on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes by the producers themselves, and by their directors, the actors, bookkeepers—even the elevator men in those drafty lofts that passed for studios. But the hunger for the new entertainment was so insatiable that soon the producers—or manufacturers, as they were first called—actually began advertising for movie stories. “Earn one hundred dollars a month by writing photoplays!” was the siren song in popular magazines. The headline was a teaser, for the smaller print explained that the price for each accepted photoplay would be ten dollars. So all you had to do to earn your C-note was to write ten acceptable photoplays a month.
“They came pouring in, mostly in illegible scrawls,” B.P. would tell me, “written on everything from postcards to butcher paper. Everybody who paid his nickel to see one of our shows thought it was easy money to dash off a movie. Most of them were illiterate. Nearly all of them were godawful. I sat there with the lofty title of Scenario Editor for Rex Films (the successor to Defender), reading literally thousands of pages of handwritten drivel, with titles like ‘A Counterfeiter’s Regret,’ or ‘Never Darken My Door Again,’ in which the entire plot was told in the title. One in five hundred was acceptable. I told Mr. Porter that my job was cruel and unusual punishment. I would rather write all the scripts myself than plow through moronic mush like ‘A Widow’s Revenge’ and ‘The Black Sheep Reforms.’”
But Porter was not only making his own films now, he was training new directors to work under him. The motion-picture audience and my mother’s middle were growing proportionately. My infancy, the infancy of Edison’s Kinetoscope, and Porter’s callow moving-picture shows are intertwined.
Self-proclaimed experts and “scenario schools” offered courses in photoplay writing for fees ranging from one dollar to twenty-five. The fak
ers who had dealt in patent medicines simply moved on to the new opportunity. They would offer to read, criticize, and correct scenarios for fees as low as fifty cents to a dollar. “Those fourflushers who had never been inside a film studio—such as they were—or had never seen a scenario were posing as old masters and pocketing fifty or sixty dollars a week, real money in those days,” my father told me. “I would have to read these ‘corrected’ scenarios and often they were worse than the originals.”
At the ripe old age of twenty, B. P. felt qualified to write that preface to How to Write a Photoplay. Giving up on the illiterate amateurs whose scenarios overflowed his desk, he suggested to Porter that they buy from or build up a staff of professional writers. Among these pioneer screenwriters was Frances Marion, who started at fifteen dollars for one scenario or twenty-five for two, and who worked her salary up over the next twenty years to two thousand dollars a week, with screen credit on such MGM powerhouses as Stella Dallas, Anna Christie, The Champ, and Dinner at Eight. Anita Loos sold her first scenario for fifteen dollars to D. W. Griffith when she was fifteen, launching the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on her marathon filmwriting career. Women’s Lib has no cause for complaint on the subject of pioneer screenwriters. For there was also Jeanie MacPherson, the silent actress later identified with nearly all the Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars; Clara Beranger, who married Cecil’s brother, William DeMille; and Ouida Bergere, who married Basil Rathbone and graduated from scripting silents to staging Hollywood’s most stylish parties. And there was also Louella O. Parsons, who later ruled over Hollywood as the gossip columnist of the Hearst Syndicate.