California Gold (90 page)

“I’m glad I told you. Let it hurt, you cruel shit. I hope it hurts till the day you die.”

She left, spraying diamond points of light on the walls, the ceiling, comets and stars flying in some great stellar cataclysm. The street door slammed and the crazed heavens became a plastered ceiling again.

The young Lutheran pastor was red-faced in the November cold. He nevertheless prayed with passion.

“Lord God, we now commend Thy servant Otto Adolphus Hellman to Thy eternal care.”

Gray mist from the ocean blew across Redeemer Cemetery and wet the gravestones and the brown grass.

“Thou shalt in time redeem all of mankind soul by soul, as Thou hast redeemed him.”

Mack stood at the foot of the open grave, his sad gaze on the bronzed metal casket. Yesterday the monument company had raised the obelisk, a tall shaft of pink marble surmounted by a Prussian eagle, with
HELLMAN
in relief on the base, ten inches high. Hellman’s dates were a quarter of the size.

“Thou hast cleansed him till he is innocent as a child, his soul bright and pure as dawn, his heart prepared, ready for Thy everlasting care.”

Fourteen mourners ringed the grave. All but Mack were connected with Hellman’s various real estate enterprises, managers, foremen, bankers, insurance brokers. All men; neither Carla nor her husband was present. They were represented instead by a five-foot floral tribute already wilting and browning.

“Receive him now, Almighty Father, now and forever—amen and amen.”

After an appropriate silence, the pastor’s glance signaled that the service was over, and the mourners dispersed quietly. Mack put on his derby, shook the pastor’s hand, and gave him an envelope containing his fee. Two bored cemetery workers turned cranks to lower the casket on straps.

The mist was turning to rain. Mack walked quickly up the slope, speaking to no one. At the summit, several black automobiles waited in a line. He was startled when a woman in a black wool coat and large black hat stepped from behind a stone angel.

“I thought you might need company afterward,” Margaret said, taking his arm. “You’ve been so grim since he died—it must have hit you terribly hard.”

Mack said nothing. His expression never changed. She thought he’d reached bottom when his son disappeared but it was worse now. Mack’s skin was yellowing, and huge dark rings showed under his eyes. James Macklin Chance, age forty, looked like an invalid.

Near the parked autos, a man in a cloth cap adjusted a box camera on a tripod. He uncapped the lens and raised his holder of flash powder. “Mr. Chance? This way, if you don’t mind.”

Mack ran at him, kicked his tripod, and rubbed dirt on the lens. He and Margaret sped off in the black Olds.

“A
BRAHAM RUEF, YOU HAVE
heard the verdict of the jury in this case. You are hereby sentenced to confinement in the state prison at San Quentin for the maximum term specified for the crime of bribery, fourteen years.”

Judge Lawlor rapped the gavel once.

The Boss grabbed the arm of Henry Ach, his defense attorney. The trial had ended two weeks ago. Gallagher’s testimony had established Ruef’s guilt beyond question.

“It’s an outrage—we’ll appeal,” Ach shouted. Reporters broke for the rear of the courtroom like track sprinters, several jostling Mack as he left his aisle seat. An exuberant Fremont Older pummeled his shoulder. “Got him, by God. Told you we would.”

Hiram Johnson, the stout and florid Sacramento lawyer who’d taken over for Heney, began to gather and stack his various notes and depositions with neat, crisp motions. People pumped his hand. Three men in blue surrounded Boss Ruef and swept him toward a side door. Ruef traveled to and from jail under heavy police guard.

Mack put on his derby. The Boss spied him and stopped. One of the policemen ordered him on. Ruef ignored him, quickly walking over to lean across an empty press table. His eyes were moist and shiny. “Well, are we quits?”

“I’d give you a hundred years if it were up to me.”

Ruef looked affronted. Then the police dragged him away.

Mack walked down the stairs at Greenwich Street. He’d packed one old leather valise. Señora Olivar stood just inside the parlor, tensely twisting and squeezing her apron. She watched Mack’s face, hunting for some sign of a reprieve.

Instead, he pressed an envelope into her hand. “That’s for Christmas. Alex will send your wages every week, as usual.” Alex and his wife had left for Riverside three days before.

“When will you be back, Señor?”

“I don’t know. I’m sick of this town.”

Under a winter half-moon, Mack drove through me outskirts of San Jose. A couple of revelers lurching from a roadside tavern waved and shouted, “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,” but Mack didn’t return the greeting. He drove on past the little island of red and green lights. Christmas night was nothing special. Just a night to put more miles behind his car. A night to drive the bumpy roads as long as he could before pulling over to sleep with his hand on the Shopkeeper’s Colt in his overcoat pocket.

On New Year’s Day, after two road breakdowns, Mack’s mud-spattered Oldsmobile coughed and strained up the last few hundred yards of winding road to Villa Mediterranean.

The servants tried to greet him cheerily, but the unspoken reaction was shock and dismay; their employer was haggard and sallow.

Mack handed over his valise and opened the office. Alex had been in, obviously. Papers and files were stacked and marked with notes written in his small, precise hand, indicating the priority of each batch.

He unlatched shutters. Shafts of winter light touched the desk, and
The Emigrant’s Guide to California & Its Gold Fields.
Mack picked it up and blew on the cover. A little puff of dust arose. Suddenly he hurled it against the wall.

He dragged a chair to the window and sat in the sunshine, staring out. Staring inward, at his confrontation with Carla.

The scene played and then repeated, like a film loop on a nickelodeon screen inside his head. Sometimes he stopped the image, froze it, to better examine Carla’s face at the moment she told him. He wanted to discover little signs of deception, falsehood. But he’d lived with her; he could tell—there were no such signs. He saw instead hysteria, and raw spite. She wasn’t lying about Jim. She’d picked her longest, sharpest knife and put it in his vitals to the hilt. He could feel it there. He’d never get it out.

The movies fled west. They fled from the wilds of New Jersey, and grubby studios like Biograph’s in a converted piano showroom on Fourteenth Street, New York. They fled the confinement of winter weather, endless days and weeks without sunshine, and they fled with even greater alacrity from the wrath of Thomas Edison, his writs, and his lawyers.

Edison had little to do with the invention of motion-picture cameras and projectors, generally scorning them as trivialities. But he was a canny businessman, always willing to lend his name to inventions that might make money, and when producers of silent movies began copying the design of Edison equipment and constructing duplicates, even selling the clones as their own, the inventor went into a frenzy. He claimed his motor design and the film-loop design were stolen. He couldn’t claim the film—that was made by Eastman—but he insisted the sprocket
holes
were patented.

In 1907, a federal court in Chicago held that independent producer William Selig had violated Edison camera patents. Like many of the early producers, “Colonel” Selig was a brawler, not inclined to shrug and accept defeat. He organized a production unit and sent it where he thought no Edison lawyers would pursue: over the Rockies to California.

Other independents read the lesson of the Selig case. If they bucked Edison, they foresaw endless harassment—endless interference with production and profits. Led by the powerful Biograph, seven of them amalgamated to make peace with the famous inventor. They would pay him royalties and, in return, would be the exclusive licensees of his equipment. Producers who weren’t members of their little club were forbidden to use the equipment under any circumstances.

Thus was born the Motion Picture Patents Company, a monopoly, soon to be nicknamed “the Patents Trust.” Its appearance in 1908 sent a horde of independents westward, where Selig had gone. But Patents Company goons scouted out their secret locations in California and the Southwest and interfered with production; they liked to pump bullets into the camera, just to make sure the picture was never finished.

Eventually, the Patents Company perished, trust-busting under the Sherman Act hammering some of the nails into its coffin. But in its day, the Patents Company drove many a moviemaker to California, while others such as Biograph and Essanay, Vitagraph and Kalem, comfortably established as members of the trust, went west for the greater productivity afforded by good weather year-round. The various producing companies were so delighted with results that wintering in California became an annual rite.

By the 1920s, Southern California had become the industry’s permanent home. The movies, too, had struck a vein of California gold.

O
N A BRIGHT, BRISK
morning in November 1909, Mack and Alex Muller cantered down the foothill drive on saddle horses.

Mack wore jeans and a faded denim shirt, red neckerchief, and leather vest. The months in Southern California had restored his color. He enjoyed these morning meetings on horseback. Alex didn’t; as usual, he looked fretful on his piebald. He also looked peculiar, sitting in his saddle in suit, waistcoat, and cravat.

Behind them, Villa Mediterranean presented a changed appearance. Ironworkers had torn out the
JMC
cartouche in the gate and filled the gap, and masons had chiseled the cartouches from the house, then repaired and painted the stucco.

Ahead, the luminous light of early morning lay on the orange groves, pencil lines of smoke showing just above the treetops; the previous night, when an early frost threatened, the burners had been set out. Now Mack’s white and Mexican laborers were sleepily piling the burners back into wagons.

“What’s first?”

Alex pulled out his neatly written agenda for the horseback meeting. These days he lived in a cottage at the foot of Mount Rubidoux, the proud if somewhat exhausted father of twin boys.

“We had a letter from Mr. Flintman, the bookkeeper at the tabernacle. He questioned the sum on our last oil royalty. I went over the statements. He was simply misreading one figure, so I telephoned and corrected him. He was extremely agitated over the mistake. To me he sounded like a man who suffers if he misplaces three pennies.”

Mack laughed. “How are the sun worshipers doing? I don’t keep track.”

“The tabernacle is the largest nondenominational church in all of Southern California, I understand.”

“Don’t call it a church. It’s a cult, a damned fraud. Someday they’ll catch up to Wyatt.”

“Meantime, it’s said that he lives like a rajah.’”

“He would. What’s next?”

They walked their mounts into a lane between the trees. The manager, Billy Biggerstaff, and two Mexicans called to them and waved. Mack returned the greeting while Alex bent over his paper, which kept him from hitting his head on a branch six inches above. He never saw it.

“Captain Norheim requests severance if you have no plans to take the yacht out of dry dock.”

“I don’t. Let him go. Pay him generously.”

“Very good, I’ll take care of it. Mr. Anderson writes, asking that you visit the new studio at your early convenience.”

Mack had put $50,000 into the Essanay studio in the East Bay. He’d also shared the opportunity with Giannini at the Bank of Italy. The shrewd little banker had interviewed Anderson, then put in $15,000. Giannini’s enthusiasm for movies matched Mack’s.

“I’ll see it when I go north again. Or
if
.”

“You are a major stockholder, sir. Shouldn’t you inspect your property?”

“I trust Anderson. I liked the scenario for the one-reeler that he sent last week. He’s calling his Western character Broncho Billy.”

Alex missed that. He was preoccupied, not to say bug-eyed behind his pince-nez. A green snake was wriggling along between the horses. Alex loved California, but he preferred to enjoy its natural aspects indoors, with his eyes jammed to a stereopticon.

Again he consulted the paper. “Wardlow Brothers. On Monday they will have final schematics and cost estimates for the new irrigation system at Fresno.”

Mack pondered. “I suppose I’ll go ahead. It’s a big outlay, though. New reservoirs and canals and dikes and spillways—”

“But the system will make the ranch a showplace for the Valley.”

Mack’s voice hardened. “Who am I going to show it to?”

Chastised, Alex lowered his head over the paper. “Selwyn Flyshack’s assistant telephoned from the Pinkerton office in Los Angeles.”

“And?”

“Nothing to report. It was just the required weekly call.”

Mack no longer took the calls himself. In August, Flyshack had delegated them to an underling. The Pinkertons had almost relegated the case to inactive status. Who could blame them? No one liked failure.

“One bit of good news,” Alex said in a hopeful way. “Miss Emerson telegraphed last night. She will arrive on vacation shortly after the first of the year.”

That seemed to restore Mack’s spirits somewhat. “I’ve been inviting her all year. I’ll be glad to see her. Are we finished?”

“Yes, sir. Except for a reminder of your appointment at two this afternoon. The gentlemen from the Lincoln-Roosevelt league.”

“Hell. I forgot. I don’t want to see them. I only let them come for the sake of politeness.”

The three visitors were white, Republican, and prosperously dressed. Their spats, cravats, and buttoned waistcoats didn’t fit the Italian-Spanish atmosphere of the living room, and clashed strongly with the attire of their host, who looked like a seedy cowhand.

Dorian Stimson, young and earnest, was a Harvard-educated lawyer Mack knew slightly through Enrique Potter. They’d talked at some length when Mack was a guest and Stimson the speaker at a meeting of the Christian Socialist Economic League, the Los Angeles organization of Dr. John Randolph Haynes. Haynes was a remarkable, complex man Mack admired because he somehow balanced passionate Fabian socialism with a lucrative surgical practice and great success as a real estate speculator.