Max (35 page)

‘I just peeked. They're beautiful.'

‘Not too fancy?'

‘I like things fancy. And your wife called. Tonight, she said, you're having dinner with the mayor. You shouldn't forget. Is he nice?'

‘Who?'

‘The mayor. Mr Gaynor.'

‘Jay Gaynor's business is being nice. Mine ain't. Why did you let her in?'

‘She's Mr Ruby's wife. I just don't know how to treat her.'

‘Treat her like a tramp and you can't go wrong.' Then Max went into his office. Kathy was sitting in his desk chair, her back to him and hidden by the high back of the swivel chair.

‘Close the door, Max,' she said.

‘It's closed,' Max said tiredly. ‘What have you got in mind?' Then he noticed her clothes piled neatly on his desk and sighed. ‘Oh, Jesus, no.'

She swiveled the chair, got up, and came around the desk to face him. She was stark naked. She was no longer the beautiful young creature Ruby had married twelve years before, but her figure was still good, her well-shaped breasts high and firm, her hips not too wide.

‘What in hell are you up to?' Max demanded angrily.

‘What are you up to, brother-in-law? You been eating me with your goddamn eyes for ten years now, and for ten years I been begging you to put me in your pictures. Time's passing too quick. I decided to trade.'

‘Put on your clothes!' Max snapped.

‘Why? You don't want me? I ain't got the goods Etta Goodman had or that tramp O'Donnell out front?'

‘Goddamn it, you're my brother's wife!'

‘So what? You don't know your brother Ruby? When it comes to offstage fucking, he's got ten to one on me, so don't shed no tears for him.' She walked toward Max. He backed away.

‘You want to be in one of my movies, is that it?'

‘I thought you'd never ask. Come on, Max, I'm as good as anything you ever laid eyes on.'

‘All right, all right. You talk Ruby into it, and you're in a picture. That's my word. Just put on your clothes.'

‘You mean that, Max?'

‘I swear, absolutely.'

She ran to him, flung her arms around him, and kissed him.

‘Will you put on your goddamn clothes!'

She clung to him. ‘You horny little bastard. You got an erection as big as a house.'

He pulled loose. ‘Either get dressed or the deal's off. Now!'

She sighed, shrugged, went to the desk, and began to dress herself. ‘Here, help me,' she said to Max. ‘Here in back.'

Biting his lips, he fastened her stays. ‘How are the kids?' he managed to say.

‘Great. Just great. What kind of a picture, Max?'

‘The right kind. Get dressed and get out.'

‘OK, but don't screw me, Max. Not that way. I can be a bitch if I have to.'

‘I bet you can.'

When she had left, he said to Della, ‘You ever let her in here again, ever, I'll –' Words failed him.

‘She's Mr Britsky's wife,' Della reminded him.

It would be difficult to find two men more apparently different than Max Britsky and Sam Snyder. Snyder's parents were immigrants from Thuringia in East Germany, and Snyder himself was a devout Lutheran and an utterly faithful husband whose only vices were cigars and beer. He was slow-spoken, round-faced and had over the years an ample belly that he filled with heavy German food. His sandy hair and childlike blue eyes could give an impression of somewhat stupid innocence, an impression far from the reality; the reality was a mind and outlook unlike Max's, but nevertheless innovative and at times brilliant. It was Sam Snyder who had set up the projection booths, who designed the angles of projection in the theatres, who had devised new and different projectors when National Distributors got an injunction against those already in use in Max's houses, and who had designed and organised the first studio. It was Sam Snyder who went to France and sat down with Auguste Lumière, and over three bottles of wine and an enormous roast goose, made the deal that gave Max a steady flow of French film stock at the time Eastman Kodak had cut off his supply in collusion with the distribution trust. At the same time, working together with Lumière, Snyder made certain that Lumiè're camera was outside of Edison's patents and would not involve Max in a lawsuit – after which he gave Lumière an order for fourteen cameras.

Yet the differences that separated Max and Sam Snyder apparently served as glue to bind them together. Snyder worshipped Max and firmly believed him capable of achieving anything he set out to do; and by 1912, Max's thirty-third year, Snyder was earning four hundred dollars a week, a truly princely sum for a production manager. Max had reached a point where he made no decisions regarding the production of films without first consulting Snyder. When he faced the necessity of producing six feature films a month, it was Snyder who convinced him that it could be done, whereupon they purchased a square block of rotting barns and stables in East Harlem, tore them down, and built on One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street the first motion picture studio constructed as such. It was also through Snyder's relationship with the Lumières that Max began to buy films from Europe, making the deal just a month before this for the feature
The Queen
, starring the great Sarah Bernhardt. At that point, Max had almost a corner on the better foreign films, and had brought to America over the past few months
Quo Vadis
from Italy and
War and Peace
from Russia.

But it was the casting of Sarah Bernhardt in
The Queen
that set Max and those around him to thinking of what would eventually become the star system, and it was Sam Snyder who pinned it down. With four other film producers. Max had started, three years before, an exchange which allowed each producer to play the films of the others; until National Distributors stepped into the arrangement and let the other exhibitors know that if they dealt with Britsky, they would be cut out of National's product as well as the use of National's projectors, since National had a monopoly on patented projectors, again through arrangements and collusion. When Max ran the Bernhardt film, the other exhibitors made overtures, but only overtures. They lacked the courage to follow through. But independent theatres, still linked to Max, bought the film and showed it to tremendous crowds.

‘That's what we need,' Max said to Freedman. ‘We need Bernhardt. With her, we can sell anything.'

‘Max, we can't have her, and the truth is that the picture's lousy. We make better pictures. I tried using stage stars. It doesn't work.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because they don't know how. They're too low key. As crazy as it sounds, Etta Goodman does it right. She doesn't act, but as Feona, with all her gestures and poses, she gives us what we need.'

The night following this exchange with Freedman, Max had dinner at Sam Snyder's house on Thirty-seventh Street, between First and Second avenues. It was an old pre-Civil War red brick house with a wide twenty-four-foot frontage, only three stories high, but with four bedrooms on both the second and third floors, a convenience for a man who had five children. Max felt comfortable in Snyder's house – indeed, more comfortable than in the spotless neatness of his own home. The Snyder house was never neat and never spotless, but it was comfortable, and if Alice Snyder was not the world's best housekeeper, she was a marvelous cook, an art she never left to their single servant. She produced rich German food, kugels and dumplings and six different kinds of sausage and sauerbraten, food that Max loved, and since he never gained weight, food he could eat to the point of satiation.

Sally, who never berated Max for spending an evening away from home, actually appeared to welcome evenings apart from him, especially since so many of her evenings were spent working with Freedman on the endless flow of scenarios. She had little in common with Alice Snyder, a goodhearted buxom country girl out of a Pennsylvania Dutch background who had less than a primary school education and no interest apart from her family, and she was relieved not to have to join Max in his social relationship with Sam Snyder. Max, on the other hand, experienced at Snyder's home a sense of easy comfort and relaxation that he had never known before, not in the flat on Henry Street and not in the elegant brown-stone on Sixty-sixth Street. The comfort was increased when one night Snyder invited him to join the family for dinner and Max had to refuse.

‘Why not?' Snyder asked. ‘Is Sally expecting you?'

‘As a matter of fact, she ain't. She and Freedman are meeting with two new writers they want to hire, at Rector's. One is a novelist, so they want to impress him. Only –' He stared at Snyder uncertainly. ‘Well, the truth is, I asked Della to have dinner with me.'

‘Della O'Donnell?'

‘Yeah,' Max said truculently.

‘Then bring her along. I like Della, and Alice will be crazy about her.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘I know. Trust me.'

Snyder was right. Alice and Della were very much alike, both of them balancing small learning with large wisdom, both of them plump just short of stoutness at a time when no premium was placed on a woman's slenderness, both of them soft-spoken, gentle, never challenging the superiority of the male, both of them handsome women. Nor was Della bothered by disorder or by kids. The dinner was a great success. Alice's roasted duck in raisin sauce magnificent, the spring beer dark and heavy, and Max more relaxed and content than Della had ever seen him before. He and Snyder lit long, thick, twenty-five-cent Cuban cigars and filled the dining room with clouds of smoke that neither woman objected to, and Max said dreamily, ‘If I had five Sarah Bernhardts on my payroll, I'd say
vus felt mere
.'

‘Which means?' Della asked.

‘Which means I got absolutely nothing to worry about except those bas – excuse me, except Mr Frank Stanford who runs National, and who's coming to see me next week, I should just live that long.'

‘What does he want this time?' Snyder asked.

‘A pound of flesh, only with all the blood the system holds. You see, Alice,' he said to Mrs Snyder, ‘this outfit, National Distributors, can't bear that we're alive. First, ten, twelve years ago, they were only a distributing outfit for garbage – you should excuse me, for the eight-hundred-foot films they made which they called moving pictures. At that time they wanted our theatres, and when I told them to go suck an egg, they cut off our product. No more National films for the nickelodeons. Well, you remember, we junked the nickelodeons and made
The Waif
, and I think maybe
The Waif
was the end of the nickelodeons, although not just at once. So once we showed how it could be done, other producers started doing the same thing, and we exchange films because nobody can make enough films to have a new film every week of the year.'

Max paused to light his cigar, and Snyder said, ‘Except maybe we got to.'

‘Maybe. Who knows. Anyway, like I said, other companies began making films, and each one set up an exchange. Only not National. Those goddamn – you should excuse me, I can't clean up my language and talk about National at the same time.'

‘The children are asleep,' Alice said calmly, ‘so you just say what you have to, Max, and I am sure that both Della and I will survive it.'

‘The thing is,' Max went on, ‘that National couldn't make a decent moving picture. With all their money and power and the telephone company behind them and Morgan and the crowd up in Rochester and Edison going along with them – with all that they don't have the brains to make a decent moving picture. So they began buying up the exchanges.'

‘Except us,' Snyder said.

‘Except us. That's right, and that's what Stanford and the trust want so hard he can't sleep at night, and next week he comes sucking around for it. He's seen the numbers on the Bernhardt film. Now if I had ten like her –'

‘Make them,' Sam Snyder said suddenly. ‘You take a girl like Etta – Etta Goodman,' he explained to his wife, ‘she's now Feona Amour. Well, you take her and spend enough advertising her and put her picture up on the billboards and on the beer coasters in every saloon, and you got something as big as Bernhardt.'

‘Maybe,' Max agreed.

‘Max, you got the Welonsky kid, that little Polish girl Gerry named Renee Favour –' Della caught the excitement. ‘You could do it with her and with Mary Malone.'

‘It takes time, time.' Max shook his head unhappily. ‘The question is, what do they throw at us this time? This miserable crumb, Stanford,' he explained to Alice, ‘always has a gun in his pocket. Not a real gun, but something to hit us with. He'll come with an injunction claiming that our projectors violate his patents. He's done that twice. Each time, Sam here, God bless him, he's got to alter the projector to get around the injunction. Same with your cameras. Freddy Feldman could make his bed in the courts, and I hate to tell you what it costs.'

‘Talking about Feldman,' Snyder said, ‘he's got a cousin Barney, works for the
Tribune
. He did the story about Etta and Pasquel, you remember, Feona loves Warren, or does she? The kid's crazy about movies. You could hire him away and put it in his lap – how to turn them all into Sarah Bernhardts.'

‘Without learning to act,' Della couldn't help saying. ‘That is something.'

‘Acting!' Max snorted. ‘Who needs acting? It's a good idea, Sam. I'll give it a shot.'

‘I got to plead with you to come to see me,' Max's mother said to him. ‘You're a millionaire. After all, what kind of use has a millionaire got for an old Jewish lady?'

‘Mama, I haven't been avoiding you. I am up to my ears in problems.'

‘And you live next door. And even now, I wouldn't see you except I got to go and plead with your stuck-up, fancy wife. Please, you should tell Max his mother wants to speak to him. Not anybody. Not somebody dragged in from the street, but his own mother who slaved her heart out for him.'