Bannerman's Law

JOHN R.

MAXIM

BANNERMAN’S LAW

₁

0n a cool and perfect California morning, on the last day
of her short life, Lisa Benedict parked her Fiero in a quiet
residential area several streets away from the gate house
of Sur La Mer.

She had come by a different route this time, using only
back roads and residential streets. She avoided Tower
Road, which ringed the grounds on all but the ocean side.
It had been tempting to make a quick pass of it, to see
that all was quiet, but that would have meant driving past
the surveillance cameras. Better, she decided, not to let
them see her car again. The car was white, with a USC
Trojans deca
l
across the rear window, a student parking
sticker on the windshield, and a crumpled left front fender.
They were likely to remember it from the previous Sun
day. But without the car, she felt sure, they would not
recognize her at all.

On that first Sunday she had worn a skirt and blue
blazer, and a pair of heels, which she'd ended
,
up ruining.
This time she was better equipped. She wore a borrowed r
unning suit
,
dark green and hoode
d—t
o hide the shine of
her auburn hai
r—a
nd she had muted her new white Ree
boks with a bottle of Kitchen Bouquet which, she hoped,
would wash out. The suit was three sizes too large and shapeless, all the better for camouflage. She would blend nicely into the thick forest of sugar pines that ringed the
asylum.

She locked the car, then strapped a bulky tote around
her waist, adjusting it so that her Nikon and recorder
would not chafe her spine. She began jogging. Upon reach
ing Tower Road, where it bordered Su
r
La Me
r
to th
e
south, she turned right
,
away from the gates, and paced
herself with another runner some fifty yards ahead of her.
That's good,
she thought.
Not being the only one out here.
The other jogger, a man, faded red sweatshirt and shorts,
vi
sored tennis hat, glanced back over his shoulder but
kept on.

He'd seen her. It meant she would have to keep this
up for a while. She couldn't very well have him look back
again and see that she'd vanished. But no
w
he was turning,
reversing his direction, heading back toward her. As he
drew near, he nodded. A brief, polite smile, a flicker of
eye contact. He was a man in his forties, well tanned but
fleshy, not very fit.

That face. Did it seem familiar? No. Just a face. Don't
get paranoid. She bobbed her head in response, then con
tinued on, keeping the Sur La Mer estate to her left. She
counted off two hundred paces and the
n
pretended to trip
as if over a shoelace. She stopped, pretending to tie it.
Glancing the way she'd come, she sa
w
the other jogger
was gone.

Rats, she thought. She'd prefer to hav
e
seen him peel
off toward his home. Or at least to be sure that he wasn't
from Sur La Mer. Not that it should matter necessarily.
She wondered what her sister would do in this situation.
Better to make sure, she decided. She turned i
n
the direc
tion he had taken.

Keeping a steady pace, she approached the main gate,
the only gate, and its video camera. The camera's stare r
emained fixed, not tilting or turning as she went by.
Morning dew still covered the driveway. It showed one
set of tire tracks but no footprints. Satisfied, she slowed to a walk
,
then reversed her field once more.

All was quiet now. No people in sight. She heard no
sound but the distant yap of a small dog.

She reached the place where, seven days earlier, in
heels, she had struggled over the low fence and scurried
for the cover of the trees that formed a living moat around
Sur La Mer. She did it again, this time smoothly vaulting
the fence and promptly blending, green against green, into
the forest. Just inside the tree line, she lowered herself
into a squat so that it would seem, if anyone came, that she
had paused to relieve herself. She waited for five minutes,
listening, then she checked her watch. The climb to the
main grounds, she estimated, would take twenty minutes. Last Sunday it had taken nearly an hour. But this time she
was dressed for it. And she had a map. She knew where the trip wires were. She would not have t
o
feel her way.

Not bad, she told herself, for someone who'd never
done anything like this before. Her sister, Ca
rl
a, would be
proud o
f
her. Well
.
.
.
maybe, after bawling he
r
out first.
Lisa had asked herself, all that week, how Carla would
have gone about it. Careful preparation, came the answer.
Slow and easy. Except Carla, being Carla, would probably have brought a weapon of some kind. And her heart would
not be pounding this hard.

“
Who am I kidding
?”
she muttered aloud.

Carla wouldn't have done this at all. She would have
thought the whole thing was dumb. Seen too many movies.

On the other hand, Carla never cared much about her
grades. She had never even finished college, let alone
earned a masters at the toughest film school in the country.
Let alone graduating third in her class, if she could lock in an A for
Mecklenberg's
course.

And if Nellie Da
m
eon, up there, isn't worth an A
...
heck, an A
plus
once Mecklenberg learns that she, Lisa
Benedict, actuall
y
got her voic
e
on tape, then nothing is.

Lisa took a breath and began her climb.

₂

She had gone to Sur La Mer, on that other Sunday, with
no thought of trespassing. Her intention was merely to
photograph the main gate and, if she could, to sweet-talk
the gatekeeper into letting her walk up the entrance road
for a shot of Sur La

Mer itself.

Not that doing so seemed terribly important at the time.
There were plenty of file photographs of the main house and gardens. But most were fifty or sixty years old. The
only recent ones, and the only color shots, were all taken from the air. And not that her thesis would suffer for want
of a current shot at ground level. Nor, for that matter,
were photographs even required of her assignment. But
they were a nice touch. And she'd be glad to have them
if she ever wanted to try selling the finished product to a
magazine. Maybe, someday, even expanding it into a
book. Or a documentary.

More immediately, the name of the game was
impres
s
the professor. He'd told her that permission to visit was almost never granted. Not to the press, not to film histori
a
n
s, and certainly not to graduate students. She would
dearly love to show him that she'd actually talked her way
onto the grounds.

But there was no gatekeeper on whom to bestow her most melting sweet-young-thing smile. Only the camera
and a tinny male voice from a box. She tried nonetheless.
She promised the voic
e
that she would not bother the
patients. She would not talk to them or photograph them.
The voice was friendly enough, in a lecherous sort of wa
y—s
he could tell that its owner enjoyed looking at
he
r—b
ut, in the end, it was firm. The rules were strict.
No photographs, no admittance, no exceptions, sorry. The
voice clicked off. The camera stared. She stared back. She
tried looking sad. She even tried looking sexy, rubbing a
hand over her breasts, head back, lips parted, her tongue
running over them.

Nothing. No response.

This annoyed her. She tried to imagine that the man
behind that camera was up there drooling over his monitor
but she knew, more likely, that he was probably laughing and calling the other guards to come look. Lisa flushed.
Glaring at the silent lens, she raised her Nikon to her eye
and pressed the shutter, three times, out of spite.

This small act of defiance, while satisfying, was point
less. Lisa realized that. The inmates at Sur La Mer, the
very existence of the place, were only the smallest part of
her project, which dealt with the transitional period be
tween the Hollywood silent film era and the sound era.
Professor Mecklenberg called it a classic case study of corporate resilience in response to a revolution in technology.
“
Imagine the gasoline engine becoming obsolete
practically overnight. It was almost on that scale
,”
he
had said.

Lisa was doubtful at first. But Mecklenberg had lent
her a few books on the subject and the more she read, the
more fascinated she became. Back in 1927 many studio
executives had dismissed
'
‘
talkies
''
as a fad or, at most,
a development that would be no more than an occasional
novelty for years to come. As myopic as that thinking
seemed in retrospect, the reasoning behind it was solid. To begin with, the prospective cost of converting thousands of
theaters to sound was staggering. The amount would ex
ceed the industry's entire incom
e—n
ot profit,
incom
e
—f
or
the whole preceding year.

Further, all earnings from European distribution would
be lost; silent films were international, but Hollywood
movies would now have to be recorded strictly in English.
Dubbing was unknown. Even worse, the talkies would be
of dreadful quality because of the limitations of the sound-
stage. They would be little more than set piece stage plays
on film and the actors would be allowed almost no free
dom of movement. The camera, enclosed in a soundproof
box, would have to be stationary. The vacuum tube micro
phones of the day, sensitive in only one direction, would have to be concealed in lamps and in floral arrangements
and actors would have to speak directly into them without
moving their heads. Location films, outdoor adventures, battle scenes and chariot races, all that contributed to the sweep and grandeur of the silver screen, were now impos
sible.
“
Why the hell
,”
asked one studio head, reasonably,
“
would the public give all that up just to hear an actor talk to a potted plant
?”

What struck Lisa the most, in doing her research, was
the human cost of the transition. Careers of long standing were shattered overnight. Actors and actresses who were
household names in 1927 could find no work at all in
1928. Some failed because their voices were totally un-
suited to their screen images. Virile leading men had high-
pitched voices or pronounced lisps. Clara Bow had a
Bronx honk and the Talmadge sisters spoke Brooklynese. Others could talk perfectly well but not in English. One western hero, a former Texas Ranger according to studio
publicists, was actually from Sweden and could barely
order from an America
n
menu. Most actors, the studios realized to their horror, had virtually no concept of good
diction. Almost all, except those few with stage training, would need voice testing and diction coaches. Elocution
experts, many with invented credentials, flocked to Holly
wood where they were promptly enriched by frightened, desperate actors.

The studio heads, meanwhile, began importing stage
actors in great numbers. In effect, this left them with a
double payroll because many film actors with unproven
voices still had expensive contracts. More than a few stu
dio executives conspired to break those contracts through
intimidation, blackmail, invoking morals clauses, and even
deliberately sabotaging the sound tracks of these actors'
first talkies.

Gods and goddesses one day, unemployable the next.
Many had come from nothing; some were little more than
hoboes, lured to the film colony by the promise of work
as extras. Others had been ranch hands or cowboys, runaways or prostitutes. A few found success, money, and
adulation beyond their wildest dreams. Then, in a twin
kling, they were nothing again. They lost their homes,
their cars, and, quickest of all, their friends. Some became
suicides. Some died of broken hearts. A few retreated
into madness.

Clara Bow was one example. Nellie Da
m
eon was an
other. Nellie, it was said, had been so traumatized by the
sniggers that greeted her two attempts at talkies that she
never spoke again. She became a recluse, entombing her
self in her Benedict Canyon home until, abandoned by her one remaining servant when there was nothing left to steal,
the Motion Picture Association quietly arranged for her
care at a private asylum known as Sur La Mer. More than
sixty years later, Lisa Benedict was astonished to learn,
Nellie Dameon was still there. And there were others. No
one seemed to know how many.

Sur La Mer, according to one of
Mecklenberg's
books, was located on the crest of a wooded hill high above the Santa Barbara shoreline. She was well into her thesis, in which this place appeared as no more than a single foot
note, and had no real need, and certainly not the time, to
attempt a visit. But she found herself haunted by visions
of a frail old woman, silent, eyes glazed and distant, still
clinging to those brief champagne years before her mind and
heart were broken. And so, on a Sunday morning,
dressed nicely as if for church, Lisa drove north to Santa Barbara. She wanted to see the place. Feel it. Perhaps have
a photograph or two to show for the trip.

A shot of the entrance, thanks to the voice from the
gate house box, was all she was going to get. At least it was something. And it was rather a good one. There was
a heavy mist that morning. The road, beyond the gate,
faded into it. A nice touch. Eerie.

But she was no less annoyed. A place such as Sur La
Mer, she felt, surely had nothing to hide. Why, then, deny
her a shot of the main house? And she was also tempted.
What, she wondered, was the worst that could happen if
she were caught climbing up through the trees? How much
of a fine could there be for trespassing? It was done all
t
h
e time by the paparazzi, even by legitimate journalists.
More likely, the most it would cost her would be a dry
cleaning bill for her skirt and the scarring of a pair of
shoes that hurt her feet anyway. It seemed worth it. She
decided to try.

Lisa climbed back into her Fiero, fastened her seat belt,
and, after consulting a road map for the benefit of the surveillance camera, drove away, looking for a street on
which to conceal her car. That done, she returned on foot
to Tower Road. At one point, well up from the main gate,
she caught a glint of metal in a tree that extended over
the sidewalk. She moved closer, looking up. She saw two
more cameras there. They were fastened in fixed positions,
unable to scan, and they pointed in opposite directions.
She was, she realized, in a blind spot that extended for
perhaps twenty yards. She had approached them nearly at right angles. She would not have been seen. Convinced of
that, grateful for her luck, she climbed the four-foot fence
that ringed the property.

The fence, she soon learned, was the least of the obsta
cles preventing easy access to Sur La Mer. First there were
the pines themselves, thickly planted and rising like steps. In places, the climb was nearly vertical. Trees that might
have helped her seemed to have been deliberately cut
away. Rock faces had been greased, then covered with
peat moss so that any touch would leave evidence of an
intruder. Peat moss, she was fairly sure, did not belong in a pine forest. Someone had definitely put it there. She
paused, wondering whether this was such a good idea. As
she rested, and as the rising sun began filtering through
the
pines, her
eye caught another reflection off metal, this
time on the forest floor. Carefully, she moved toward its
source. She knelt.

It was a trip wire. Mostly hidden by moss. A two-foot
section of it had been exposed, probably by rain, and now
glistened with dew. What was this, she wondered? Why
trip wires? She thought again about retreating. But now
she was more than curious. Why, she asked, should a place
like Sur La Mer need such a security system? Who was
up there? Just a few old actors and actresses. Who would
want to harm them?

She
climbed, all
the more slowly, gently probing the
sphagnum with her fingertips. A few yards further on, she
found a second wire. She would have missed the third, or she might have touched it, had not a sharp spit of flame
erupted inches from her face. She blinked, waiting for the
afterimage to fade and for her heart to be still. Now she
saw it. The limp remains of a field mouse, eyes wide, face
scorched. This wire, if not the others as well, was electri
fied. Composing herself, she pressed on. Just above,
through the trees, she could see what seemed to be a
clearing. She raised her head. Now she could see the out
line of a roof. Another twenty yards.

And another twenty minutes to cover them. She moved,
one step at a time, looking for more cameras, more wires,
more dead animals. She found none. The climb, which might have taken ten minutes with the right shoes and
without the obstacle course, had taken more than fifty. But now she knew the way. Going down would be easier. And
she was there, inside, looking at a manor house so vast that it seemed to fill half the sky.