Max (40 page)

‘Lawyers, that's what you said. You think I'd walk out on you, so you throw lawyers right in my face.'

‘Honey, honey, I look at things the way they are. That's the name of Max Britsky. People go around saying Max Britsky's a son of a bitch. Maybe yes, maybe no. I got to look after Max Britsky because nobody else is going to. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Let me explain. For years, Vitagraph and Biograph kept the names of their actors secret so the actors shouldn't have no handle on them to push up their pay. Mary Pickford had to squeeze blood to break through that. I never did that. I made my actors famous because the more famous they got, the more people packed into my houses to look at them. I got nine Clifford Abel theatres around this country and every one's a palace like no king ever had a chance to live in, and I'm packing them in. All right, you're telling me Mary Pickford makes eight hundred a week. You know I do business with the Chase Bank down at One Seventy-seven Broadway. Berry down there manages the bank, and they pay him forty a week less than I pay you. But I'll tell you something else. Mary Pickford makes eight hundred – you got eight hundred and fifty, starts next week.'

‘Max –'

‘Think about it.'

‘Max, you don't mean that. You're kidding me, aren't you?'

‘Nope. I'm not kidding you. I go back to the office now and I talk to Jake Stein, my comptroller. He says to me, Max, you're crazy. I say to him. Yeah, crazy like a fox. Then I call in Barney Enfield, and I tell Barney, We got the highest paid movie star in the United States of America No, in the world, because the French pay peanuts, and now with this schmuck war starting in Europe, even peanuts they won't pay. So Britsky Productions has Natalie Love, who's not only more beautiful than Pickford or Gish, and more talented and sexy, but paid more. That's the whole
emmes
with Americans – more pay and you got to be better. With that kind of thing, Barney begins feeding stories to the newspapers and the magazines, and we get maybe fifty new photographs of you, and I sign Oscar Bitterman, who just has a new hit play opening on Forty-second Street, to write a scenario so that Barney can tell them that the most expensive star in America stars in the most expensive picture. So I got a couple of million dollars of publicity and maybe fifty million dollars of new business, and all it cost me is five hundred and fifty dollars a week to a young lady, and I couldn't think of a better place to put it –'

Alexa leaped out of bed, flung her arms around Max, and covered his face with kisses. ‘Oh, Maxie, I love you, I love you, I love you.'

He disentangled himself and agreed. ‘For that price, why not?'

‘Tomorrow, Max?'

‘Tomorrow, honey, I'll be sitting in a double bedroom suite, on my way to Chicago and from there to Los Angeles, and there maybe making the biggest decision of my life. Who knows?'

He had thought about it on and off, but it only began to take shape as a real possibility when he had lunch with Irving Lunberg in Café Coronet two weeks before. Lunberg was a small producer, a man who made half a dozen moving pictures a year and who depended entirely upon Max for his distribution. He made his pictures in a place called Hollywood, a district in Los Angeles County, where he had set up a studio in an old barn on a road called Gower Street. Lunberg had been pushing during the past twelve months for Max to buy him out, a move which Max resisted. Lunberg, to Max's way of thinking, made third-rate films, and since the man came with the company, Max had no desire to own either. On the other hand, he liked Lunberg and took him to lunch whenever he was in New York.

On this day, it was pouring, the third day of uninhibited rainfall, and when Max mentioned that a crew working on an outdoor film had been sitting on its hands for three days, Lunberg observed that it couldn't happen in Hollywood.

‘Why, it don't rain there?'

Lunberg was a fat, bald little man with fluttering eyelids that gave him an appearance of constant excitement. His hands shook, which added to the impression; and evidently Jewish food had not yet made its appearance in Hollywood, for he ordered a bewildering assortment of blintzes, sour cream, potato pancakes, and a pasta-buckwheat concoction known as
kasha-varanashkas
. On the side, he ordered bagels and cream cheese. ‘An empty stomach makes me nervous,' he explained to Max.

‘I can see that. About the rain?'

‘Sure, it rains. It has to rain, but it rains intelligently, so you can put together a schedule of shooting that won't drive you into the poorhouse, like this,' he said, pointing outside.

‘Tell me how it does that.'

‘All right. From April until November, you can be
pretty
sure it won't rain and it won't cloud up. From May until October, you can be
absolutely
sure it won't rain. You got sunshine like you never seen – clear, pure, beautiful light. Max, have some,' pushing the platter of potato pancakes toward Max.

‘I'm not hungry. Tell me more.'

‘They're not like my mama used to make.'

‘What?'

‘The potato
latkes
.'

‘You were talking about Hollywood.'

‘Like I said, sweet air, clean, none of the soot, like you have here, hills covered with cactus and that kind of stuff, plenty of room. It's like nobody ever been there except the oil companies, and already they found some oil in my back yard, would you believe it, right there on Gower Street. You ever read books by Zane Grey?'

‘I don't read much. I know the name. My wife was talking about him.'

‘Oh? Yeah, sure. How is Sally?'

‘I guess she's fine. We're getting divorced, Irving.'

‘No. Gee, I'm sorry to hear that.'

‘Let's get back to Hollywood and this Zane Grey writer.'

‘Yeah. Sure. Well, I read a couple of his books – he writes books about the West, with lots of cowboys and gunmen, you know, the Buffalo Bill kind of stuff – and I put together a scenario. I wouldn't say I stole it from Mr Grey, because if he sees it he'll never recognise that it had anything to do with his book. There's this Mexican ranch down in the southern part of Los Angeles County, and we took the cameras down there with our cowboy actor, who ain't really a cowboy but comes from Pittsburgh, a Hunky named Frank Lutzman, except that we call him Don Durango. We shot a pretty good picture, Max, and I think you'll like it. But also, I think there's going to be a real craze for these cowboy pictures.'

‘Why?'

‘Because everyone's looking for cowboy stars.'

‘They didn't have to go to Hollywood to make
The Great Train Robbery.
'

‘Max, this is different,' Lunberg said. ‘You got space and hills and scenery like you never dreamed.'

‘When can we see it?' Max asked him.

‘This afternoon. I got it with me at the hotel.'

The Western film that Lunberg had made and which was not exactly a steal from Zane Grey was the final argument that convinced Max that Los Angeles had to be seen and seriously considered as a place to make moving pictures. The Lunberg film was not very good, but it was the first thing of its kind that Max had ever seen, the first Western film shot, not on Long Island or in the piny wastes of South Jersey, but actually in the West. The splendid, chaparral-covered mountains, the expanse of land and sky, the marvelously skilled Mexican
vaqueros
– all of this combined to fill Max with a strange, romantic longing as well as a sense of what good pictures made in this background could mean at the box office. As he said to Alexa, he might well be facing the most important decision of his life.

That morning, he went from her apartment to his office in the Hobart Building, where Fred Feldman awaited him. Feldman said, ‘I got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?'

‘We'll take the good news.'

‘Is Sam in the building?'

‘Could be.'

‘Then call him in and Bert Bellamy as well. I want to make it in the form of an announcement. Take out the bottle of schnapps you keep in your desk. Max, and line up four glasses.'

Max smiled as he listened to Feldman. The lawyer was even smaller than Max, which made it even easier for Max to like him. He was short and prematurely bald and fat, and he got stouter each year, and right now he was so excited that he had to restrain himself to keep from hopping and dancing. Max buzzed his secretary – a new girl, Josie Levy, in her middle twenties and needle-nosed and efficient – and asked her to find Snyder and Bellamy. When they entered Max's office, he had finished filling four shot glasses with Golden Wedding Rye Whiskey.

‘Drink up,' he said.

‘What are we drinking to?'

‘Felix Chapman.'

‘And who the hell is Felix Chapman?'

‘Nobody except a federal judge,' Feldman said smugly. ‘Just a little old judge in the Federal District Court, Southern District of New York, who decided a case. And you know what he decided?'

Feldman gulped down his glassful, choked, swallowed, took a deep breath, and managed to say, ‘Come on now, drink up!'

‘All right, to his honor,' Max said.

‘And since you don't know what his honor decided, let me tell you. First of all, he decided that National is in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Act, and one or two other laws, not to mention conspiracy to fix prices, conspiracy in restraint of trade, and conspiracy to eliminate competition, and if that ain't a bundle, what is? My friends, the trust is finished, done, castrated. And who did it? Nobody but Max Britsky Productions.'

They all clapped hands while Max stood up and took a bow. ‘I almost feel sorry for the poor bastards,' Max said, ‘but what the hell! They never made a good picture, and for schmucks, they had a nice long run for their money. As soon as this gets out, every little cockroach who stayed under their thumb will be asking to be let into our film exchange.'

‘And we'll let them in,' Bert agreed, grinning. ‘Oh, maybe we'll make them kiss ass a little, but we shall take them in. Freddy, pour. And this time, I make the toast. Max and me, we go back a long, long way – a long, long way to a place called Rowdy Smith's penny arcade. Right, Max?'

‘Absolutely. Poor old bastard, I suppose he's been dead these many years.'

‘And that is where it all began,' Bert said, ‘turning the handles on the kinetoscopes, so my toast is to old Rowdy Smith, bless his Irish heart.'

‘I drink to that,' Max said.

‘But with all this,' Snyder wondered, ‘do we still go to California? A few days from now, we'll have more business than we know what to do with.'

‘All the more reason to go – except that you got to hang in here, Bert. The distribution is your baby, and you got to sit on it. If we settle on something out there in the West, you'll have plenty of sunshine in the years to come. Mean-, while, someone has to deal with those poor, liberated producers.'

Feldman remained in Max's office after the other two had left, and he said to Max somewhat tentatively, ‘How about it, Max? Do you realise what you're putting in Bert's hands?'

‘Will you once and for all get off that! What the hell gives with you and Bert? Bert is like a brother – yeah, a damn sight more than those two worthless crumbs I call my brothers.'

‘All right, all right,' Feldman said quickly. ‘Don't bite my nose off. I only asked a question.'

‘Then stop asking that question. Now, before you said we have good news and bad news. Suppose we get to the bad news.'

‘Sally.'

‘I thought so. Tell me what she wants.'

‘A million dollars.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘I wish I were kidding, Max, but I'm not. She wants a million dollars, and she wants the house on Sixty-sixth Street.'

‘I figured on that. She can have it.'

‘She knows we're off to the Coast, and she knows that if you go, your mother will go, and she wants the right to buy your mother's house for five thousand dollars.'

‘It's worth four times that, but she can have it. The million I don't understand. She wasn't like that. She was never that crazy for money.'

‘She is now. And she wants custody of the kids and she wants alimony of twenty thousand a year.'

‘On top of the million dollars?'

‘That's right, Max.'

‘That's crazy. I don't have a million dollars. You know that, Freddy. I don't have a damn thing. Jake Stein pays my bills, and each month he gives me the cash left over from my pay, you know, seven or eight hundred bucks. I don't even have a bank account.'

‘Max!'

‘What's the matter? You think I'm conning you. You're my lawyer.'

‘Max, who owns Britsky Productions?'

‘Me. Who else?'

‘Exactly. And Max Britsky Productions is the biggest theatre owner and the biggest moving picture production company not only in America but in the whole world right at this minute – that's right, bigger than Biograph or any of the others – and do you know how many millions of dollars that adds up to?'

‘So what? Do I sell my company?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Then you're out of your fucken mind!' Max exploded.

‘Will you listen?'

‘If you got something to say, I'll listen. But don't tell me maybe I'll sell this company, because if that's the way you're thinking, you can get to hell out of here.'

‘Will you calm down and listen to me? I been working for you twelve years and I haven't sold you out yet, so maybe you can accept the fact that I got a little loyalty and I try to do what is in your best interest. But sometimes I wonder whether you really know what Max Britsky Productions represents, because you still run it like that candy store on Clinton Street where you hung out when you were a kid.'

‘That's bullshit, Freddy. There's nobody knows this company like I do. It's my life.'