If Aliza wants to write about a place with a fascinating history, she should do a story about this theater. Everyone from W. C. Fields and Sophie Tucker to Itzhak Perlman and the Plasmatics have appeared on that stage up there. I was at the latter show, watching punk princess Wendy O. Williams break every taboo she could think of, including flashing the audience and taking a chainsaw to the bass player’s guitar. Over the years, moviegoers have watched flicks from Busby Berkeley to Boyhood and Birdman on that big screen. My parents used to take Simone, Frances, and me here when we were kids. We could walk to the movie theater in Three Rivers where we lived, but if it was a special-occasion film—say, The Shaggy Dog (with our cousin Annette!) or King of Kings (with Jesus!)—we saw it at the Garde. . . . The day I got my driver’s license, I took my high school girlfriend here and we necked up in the balcony instead of watching that boring big-budget mess Airport. . . . And one summer during the seventies, when I was home from college and my buddy Lonny was on leave from Fort Dix, we saw a porn film here, Carmen Baby, in which the title character did her infamous “bottle dance,” courtesy of a long-necked jug of wine and, I would guess, a fair number of those Kegel exercises women do. The place was in pitiful shape by then: ripped seats with the stuffing coming out, water stains creeping down the walls. Not long after that, when the Garde had reached its nadir, they showed a snuff film here. I passed on that one, but I think it was called Faces of Death. Something like that. There was a big brouhaha, I remember, and the cops shut it down after the first night. The theater closed for several years after that inglorious episode. Became a downtown eyesore and a target for vandals. There was talk of demolishing the place, but then a committee of locals and summer people with political pull got that whopper of a grant from some historic preservation foundation and they were able to renovate it back to its former glory. Well, I’d better get up to the projection room. Set things up for the movie club.
I love the way these old lobby cards accompany you on your way up the grand staircase. They got some of them on eBay, but they also found a stash of them stored in the cellar when they were doing the renovation. Miraculously, the cards were still in pristine condition. Look at these babies. Gloria Castillo and Edd “Kookie” Byrnes in Reform School Girl . . . The Singing Nun starring Debbie Reynolds . . . Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride . . . Mamie Van Doren in Born Reckless. I can all but hear Kat indicting Hollywood for only offering women two role models: virgins or whores. And, of course, that would be my fault.
This one at the top of the stairs is my favorite. It’s the film they screened at the Garde’s grand opening: The Marriage Clause, a Lois Weber film starring Billie Dove and Francis X. Bushman. It was 1926, so Bushman must have filmed it straight from his role as Messala, the villainous chariot driver in Ben-Hur. I’ll have to point out this poster to my group on Monday. Maybe I could do a little retrospective on Bushman’s and Dove’s careers. And Lois Weber’s career as a director, too. Now there’s a woman who never got her due. She was a trailblazer—a female film director in an industry dominated by domineering men. She made more than a hundred movies—shorts, mostly, with social justice themes: wage inequality, capital punishment, birth control, racial prejudice. Made the censors apoplectic from time to time, too, I’ve read, even before the Hays Commission lowered the boom. I forget the name of it, but one of her films was the first to show full-frontal female nudity. I’d take her on as a subject for a biography if I thought I could interest a publisher, but it would be a tough sell. Maybe some university press. Speer Morgan runs essays about film history in The Missouri Review. I could start there. Query him to see if he’d have any interest in an article on Weber and, if he did, maybe use it as a springboard to a full-blown book.
Well, back to business. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Reel number one. Let me just . . . let . . . me . . . just . . .
What the . . .
Holy Mother of God.
TWO
There are two of them. Two translucent females, vividly detailed but as insubstantial as cigarette smoke. “Greetings, Mr. Funicello.”
“Are you . . . Is this a dream?”
“No, Felix,” the talking one says. “May I call you that? I see no reason why we should stand on formality. In fact, I suspect we may become fast friends.”
“But what . . . ? Did I die? Is that it?”
“No, no. I doubt you’ll be joining our ranks for some time yet. You’ve conjured us from the shadow world via your cogitations about us. Had you had such thoughts elsewhere—in the grocery market, for instance, or at the college where you teach—we would not have appeared. But the Garde is so lovely and welcoming to its guests, living or shaded. I’ve heard the manager acknowledge that even when a show has empty seats, the theater is filled to capacity because those from our ranks are in attendance alongside you livings. And the staff never forgets to turn on the ghost light before they lock up for the night. We so appreciate such courtesies.”
I stare at them, dumbfounded. The talker is dressed in a cloche hat and one of those drop-waist dresses from the twenties. Looks to be in her early forties maybe? The younger one wears a glittery evening gown and long white gloves. With her painted-on eyebrows, bow lips, and spit-curl bangs, she looks camera-ready for a close-up. Maybe I’m dead despite what she said. Ghosts are known to be tricksters, aren’t they? But if I died, when did it happen? And how? And why is it I can feel my heart jackhammering in my chest? Do hearts still beat in the Great Beyond? Do the dead still get sweaty palms when they’re scared?
“Oh goodness, poor boy, you’re trembling,” the talker says. The glamorous one pouts sympathetically. “Well, I suppose moving pictures are to blame for that. We members of the shaded world have been depicted rather malevolently in the movies: Nosferatu, The Haunting, The Amityville Horror. Gothic nonsense! There’s no reason to be afraid, I assure you. We come in peace, dear Felix. Delighted to make your acquaintance.”
How does it—she?—know my name? “Excuse me, but who are . . . ?”
“Oh, forgive my manners. In the living world, I was Lois Weber. And this was my star, ‘the American Beauty’ herself, Miss Billie Dove.”
I point stupidly to the lobby card for The Marriage Clause.
“Yes, that was one of ours. It was the only time I directed Mr. Bushman, but Billie and I made several pictures together. We trusted each other’s work implicitly, which is so important when one of you is in front of the camera and the other is behind it.” “The American Beauty” nods in silent agreement.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize . . .”
“That’s understandable, regrettably. My contemporaries, Davy Griffith and Cecil B., are lionized. And when you livings talk about the early film actresses, the names Mary Pickford and Clara Bow are still bandied about. Unfortunately, posterity has been far less kind to poor Billie and me.”
The glamorous ghost pokes out her bottom lip and stamps her high-heeled slipper. Why doesn’t she say anything? Maybe it’s because, in costume, she’s more of a confection than a real woman—or maybe she just can’t get a word in edgewise. Anyway, despite my confusion about whatever’s going on, the film scholar in me can’t help seizing the moment. “So you knew DeMille and Griffith?”
“Oh yes. Knew them, know them still.”
“Wha . . . what were they like?”
She and her star exchange a look I can’t quite read. “Well, Felix, let’s just say that both men were talented moviemakers who assumed that moviemaking was a talent that only men could master. But that’s the underlying assumption in Hollywood to this day as well. Is it not?”
“Well, Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for directing The Hurt Locker.”
“So if one were keeping score, that would make nearly eight dozen male directors and one female. I believe that proves my point, does it not?”
“What about Pickford then? She was a producer as well as a star.” This is beyond weird. I’m playing devil’s advocate with a freakin
g ghost.
“So she was,” ghost-Lois says. “Little Gladys Smith from the wilds of Canada became an actress and an executive. She was a big chunk of cheese in the industry by all accounts, especially her own. But alas, Miss Pickford was all washed up once the talkies came along. And she was a tippler, too—the poor dear had more than a passing fondness for giggle water.”
Billie’s ghost tips an imaginary flask to her lips and smirks. Apparently, the dead can be as catty as the living.
“Not to toot my own horn, Felix, but my achievements far exceeded Miss Pickford’s,” ghost-Lois says. “At one time I was the highest-paid director and screenwriter of Hollywood picture-plays, male or female.”
Am I being Punk’d? Is Allen Funt’s ghost going to pop out and say “Smile! You’re on Paranormal Candid Camera!”
“I also established my own production company, pioneered the early talkies with sound-on-cylinder films, and originated the split-screen technique.” “The American Beauty” whispers something into her director’s ear. “Oh yes. I forgot to mention that, Billie,” Lois says. She informs me that she also served as the first mayor of Universal City, campaigning on a platform that advocated “cleanliness in municipal rule and cleanliness in picture making, by which I meant that filmmakers should take up the cause of making the middle class more compassionate toward society’s downtrodden.”
Impressive? Hell yes, but it’s not like I’ve requested her résumé. She’s a ghost, for Christ’s sake. Or a figment of my . . . Am I cracking up? Having some kind of psychotic episode?
“Yet Motion Picture World and Variety created the myth that my chief contribution to the industry was my ‘female intuition.’ I was touted as a kind of clairvoyant fairy godmother who could pluck pretty ingénues from obscurity, tap them with my magic wand, and turn them into cinematic Cinderellas.”
“I think I’ve read that about you. It wasn’t true?”
“Complete and utter applesauce!”
“Excuse me?”
“Applesauce. Publicists’ poppycock.”
“In other words, bullshit.”
“There’s no need for vulgarity, dear boy, but yes. That’s precisely what I mean. I was a hardworking professional, as were the actresses who starred in my films. To claim otherwise was condescending to me and to the ambitious players of Billie’s caliber who had honed their craft on the New York stage. But Hollywood was happy to reinforce the public’s cherished myths about the genders. I was the mother hen with witchlike powers and Griffith and DeMille were the geniuses.”
If I closed my eyes, I might think this was my ex-wife talking. Different era, same tone.
“With the exception of myself and my stable of scribes, the screenwriters of the silents served up characters who were clichés. There were the Sheiks and the Shebas, of course, and the comedians and comediennes—Chaplin and Keaton, Marie Dressler and ZaSu Pitts. Beyond that, male characters were stalwart heroes, cads, or Caspar Milquetoasts. The females had to be Pollyanna types, as played by the likes of Miss Pickford and Miss Gish, or Dumb Doras, or conniving femmes fatales. Those latter roles went to actresses like Pola Negri, Dolores del Rio, and Joan Crawford. Of course in La Crawford’s case, it wasn’t much of a stretch. She was happy to recline on the casting couch in exchange for plum roles and worldly gain. How else to explain the fact that her career straddled the silent era and the talkies?”
“Well, I hate to say so, but those stereotypes are alive and well in today’s films, too,” I tell her.
“Oh, yes. We keep abreast of the current fare, drifting undetected in and out of your cookie-cutter Cineplexes and the few movie palaces that still exist. When Roger Ebert crossed over not so long ago, he did so with his Netflix account intact, so we have access to contemporary films in that way, too. Ida Lupino and I watched a few episodes of your Orange Is the New Black recently and shared a chuckle. Among you livings, it’s touted as ‘groundbreaking,’ but in truth, dear boy, it travels the same terrain as women’s prison films from the forties and fifties and features the same hackneyed characters as audiences saw Ida, Jan Sterling, and Barbara Nichols play in House of Women, Blonde Bait, and all the others: the naïf who’s been cast into an all-female hell, the motherly jailhouse protector, the tough-as-nails bully. Of course, there are many more Negresses and Spanish girls in this version, and the lesbianism is explicit rather than implied, yours being such an indecorous age.”
Indecorous, eh? Well, she’s got me there. A few weeks ago on Madison Avenue, I was walking behind a young guy whose T-shirt read, I’ve got a PhD (Pretty Huge Dick).
“You know, Felix, I challenged stereotypes such as these in my 1915 film, Hypocrites. That was the picture whose name you could not recall before when you were conjuring Billie and me. It featured a nude female character whom I dubbed ‘The Naked Truth.’ State censorship boards banned the film for showing a woman in her natural state. As if museums the world over weren’t filled with the works of painters who had been free to do so since the earliest days of canvas and pigment.”
“Sheesh,” I say. “Ridiculous.”
“Hypocrites indeed! My film eventually came under scrutiny before the Supreme Court, where those pompous old men ruled that picture-plays were not protected by the First Amendment. And how about this for hypocrisy? The mayor of Boston, a known frequenter of Bay State houses of prostitution, was so offended by my film that he ordered clothing to be painted onto The Naked Truth, frame by frame, or else it was not fit to be shown to Bostonians!”
I smile. Commend her for being progressive.
“Indeed I was, kind sir. But alas, it’s always the prigs who prevail, is it not? The studio bosses saw to it that uplifting pictures like mine, which argued for the betterment of women, or an end to bigotry, or fairer treatment for the downtrodden, were replaced by simplistic stories that dared not upset the apple cart. They assumed audiences wanted to laugh or weep without having to think—wanted merely to cheer for the hero, boo the villain, have romantic love reaffirmed, and dismiss the picture as soon as the credits rolled.”
I nod, thinking about the modern box office champs: the Batman franchises and Twilight saga. The far superior indies that make a splash at Sundance or Toronto usually fade away after a few weeks in limited release.
“I try not to be bitter, Felix, but once stereotypes and softer plotlines won the war, the industry no longer sought my services as a directress. And so, I became the silenced woman of silent films. I was so impoverished by the time I passed on that my funeral services had to be covered by my onetime protégée Frances Marion, whom I had hired as a screenwriter decades earlier.”
“How old were you when you died?” Now there’s a question I’ve never asked anyone before.
“I was sixty. Succumbed to a bleeding ulcer in 1939.” She turns toward her ghostly companion. “Dear Billie here lived to the ripe old age of ninety-four.” Billie’s ghost shrugs and giggles in silence. “She crossed over in 1997, the year that that dreadful monstrosity Titanic was breaking all the records at the box office.”
I remind her that ’39 was a banner year in Hollywood.
“Yes indeed. Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Olivier in Wuthering Heights, Garbo in Ninotchka.” She releases a deep sigh. “Amidst all of that fanfare, my obituary in Variety merited nary a mention; I had become an afterthought in a business with a notoriously short-term memory. Alas, in today’s world, my entire oeuvre has fallen into the black hole of oblivion. I’m barely a footnote, and who reads them? That’s why I think it would be a marvelous idea if you were to write a book about me which, at long last, might set the record straight. This would be an authorized biography, of course. I should be happy to cooperate in any way.”
I tell her I’ll consider it. Then it hits me: I’ve just promised a freakin’ phantom that we might collaborate on her biography. Oh man, if these two wraiths aren’t real, then I’m in serious need of a psych eval and some heavy-duty meds. Maybe I should call 911. But what would I tell
them? That I’ve been chatting with a couple of ghosts? That I take a size large in straitjackets?
“And goodness knows, Felix, if you wanted to travel the low road after our project is finished—pen one of those lucrative tell-alls—I certainly could provide you with some scurrilous stories about the industry. Spill some juicy secrets, if you will. Tell some tales out of school, as we used to say. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal, for instance. There’s more to that one than the public ever got wind of. And I was at the studio when Coco Chanel and Gloria Swanson exchanged fisticuffs over a wardrobe issue. Joseph Kennedy, the future president’s father, was the one who broke it up. He and Gloria were ‘special friends,’ you know. They had a grand old time out on the West Coast while Joe’s wife, Rose, looked after the children and said her rosaries up there on Cape Cod. Oh, those randy Kennedy boys! They loved their Hollywood conquests. Poor Marilyn gave us quite an earful when she crossed over after her ‘probable suicide.’”
Hey, wait a minute. I bought a drive-thru coffee on the way down here. “One cream, no sugar,” I’d said, but it tasted sweet. And because I’d already gotten back on the road, I drank it anyway. Wasn’t “sugar cube” a nickname for LSD back in the day? The guy at the window who handed it to me looked a little sketchy.
“So many stars, Felix, so many transgressions. Crawford’s start in stag films, Clark Gable’s hushed-up hit-and-run, Judy Garland’s abortion of Tyrone Power’s love child. And then there was Ty’s affair with Cesar Romero, who, in turn, was doing the cha-cha with his fellow Cuban, a certain married executive at Desilu whose libido didn’t discriminate. You could fill an entire book with the sham dates and ‘lavender marriages’ the studio arranged for their homosexual and bisexual male stars with starlets and studio secretaries. Oh, the list goes on and on: Errol Flynn, Monty Clift, Randy Scott and Cary Grant sharing a ‘bachelor pad,’ young Mr. Dean before he had that dreadful automobile accident with Mr. Turnupseed. And among Hollywood’s female stars, there were part-time and full-time members of the ‘sewing circle.’”