The Laughter of Carthage (23 page)

Der oyfegebrakhtkayt! Ich haben das Opferbereit, meine Glaube, meine Schöpferdrang, meine Arbeit, mein Genie, meine Jugden, mein Kamerad, mein Kampf, meine Mission, mein Engel, mein Schicksal.
I am strong in this.
Karthago nicht viel von der Art der Leute wusste. Das Geheimnis seiner Kraft? Der shtof!
When they took that from me, I was for a while weaker. But there is such a thing as resurrection. It is what they refuse to understand. The Jew looked at me with kindness, offering security. In this other Arcadia I hear sluggish liquid churn; claws rattle on steel floors. Those alligators smell of old Carthage’s enduring evil. I look over the fence and they are grinning back, their snouts dilating. He was gentle. The better kind of Jew.
Der shtof was never der Mayster. Ikh bin abn meditsin-mayster.
He said he was going to find a job on a newspaper in Odessa. He was prepared to accommodate the Bolsheviks when they arrived. Maybe he was already one of them. I took the tram along the shore. I never saw him again.

Der Engelsfestung eybik iz. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Vos iz dos? La Cité de. .
. The City of the Angels is eternal and must become the New Byzantium. Carthage she absorbs, utilises, rejects what she does not want. The holy wood is where Parsifal discovered the Grail. Here all shall find salvation, on the final coast. We have travelled so long. Carthage cannot conquer here, though she will always threaten. So, at least, I am inclined to believe. It could be I grew euphoric and lazy under the benevolent Southern Californian sun; they say that happens to many. It could be I was seduced by her luxury, her golden charm, her aristocracy. Yet the attraction, I would swear, was positive.

So swiftly did my car assume reality I had soon some leisure time and this frequently was spent with friends, visiting the homes of their peers. For the most part these
N’divim
, these modern princes, possessed a grace and wit usually lacking in their European counterparts. Their world was vital and constantly expanding, through art, industry and intellect. They had every reason to carry themselves with dignity, to build their palaces amongst the wooded hills and feel superior. They had no use for the petty moralities with which a bourgeois rationalises his shortcomings. Yet they never denied or derided their European heritage; indeed, they imported it in such quantities it sometimes seemed there could be nothing left of the Old World; it had been entirely reassembled in the New. Renaissance tapestries, Jacobean tables and Louis Quinze chandeliers, all of them genuine, were common to the homes I visited. Yet in almost every great mansion one found acknowledgement of native America.

When, in the middle of July, 1924, I called on Mr and Mrs Tom Mix, their French furniture and suits of medieval armour, their Scottish shields and claymores shared the same rooms as Indian headdresses, his collection of silver-studded saddles and other elaborate mementoes of the West. They were a gracious, modest couple. Mrs Mix took to me with great warmth. She said I was ‘the image of Valentino’. It was true that I somewhat resembled the star, having similar eyes and colouring, but I was anxious to point out that I did not possess a single drop of Italian blood.

John Hever preferred the company of movie people (I believe he never got over his worship of the screen) and would frequently ask me to go somewhere for dinner or for a weekend. I think he had mixed motives, for he was anxious to prove even to this easy-going world that his relations with Mrs Cornelius were perfectly respectable. I was a kind of chaperone (though, naturally, I found myself prey to the usual disgusting gossip). Thus I at last entered the portals of Pickfair. That unpretentious tribute to good taste, influenced chiefly by a ‘mock Tudor’ style popular in England, never proclaimed itself a palace, nor advertised its wealth. There were touches of the Swiss chalet, tributes here and there to the Spanish adobe dwelling settlers, but in the main Pickfair, in its fifteen acres of landscaped grounds, resembled everything an English country estate should be; even its huge swimming-pool did not seem grandiose. At dinner I got into conversation with the charming athlete, who did not recall our earlier meeting. ‘Dougy’ was a perfect host. Learning of my relish for oceanliners he produced the family photograph album. His favourite trip, he said, ‘because it was our honeymoon’, was on the
S.S. Lapland
with Mary. He was at that time completing
The Thief of Baghdad
, perhaps his most exotic film. The house was piled with drawings. Minarets, domes and crenellated walls reminded me of Constantinople. Here was Asia as it should have been. Fairbanks never spared expense on his sets. He made full-sized cities and towns, castles and mountains. This is what convinced the moviegoer of the reality of the stories. Mary Pickford was at that time turning her back on childhood and attempting a more fashionable ‘jazz-baby’ part with
Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
I had seen her
Rosita
and been deeply disappointed. On behalf of all her fans I begged her to return to her more innocent roles. She responded sweetly and began to explain what she was attempting to do when her husband interrupted us with a display of obvious jealousy which silenced, for a moment, the whole party. There had been no question of my ‘making a pass’ at his wife; even had there been I saw no call for the stage-whisper, nor the reference to ‘some
yiddisher
lounge-lizard’, particularly since almost half our company were of the Jewish persuasion.

This fact had originally startled me. The Jews who settled in the hills around Hollywood were not at all what I recognised from Ukraine. Samuel Goldfish, for instance, was a man of exceptional elegance and education. He told me in confidence how much he admired Shakespeare when he was a boy. His only real ambition was to translate those great plays for the silent drama. ‘They are stories,’ he told me soberly. ‘And stories are stories, no matter how you look at it.’ He and Mucker Hever had already been co-producers of two successful films,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and
The Tower of Lies.
Mucker Hever had told him I was the author of a successful piece, which had been touring to packed houses for over a year. When I described the plot he nodded approvingly. He had a soft spot, he said, for the subject and with the right leading actors it could work very well. He suggested I have the synopsis typed and sent to him. ‘Though if Mucker’s already happy, then I guess I’m happy.’ Then, to break the slight chill which had descended, Mary Pickford clapped her hands and suggested we all file in to another room ‘to watch a flicker’. We saw
Merton of the Movies
with Glenn Hunter and Viola Dana, both of whom were with us in the audience! It was an amusing comedy, what today would be called a ‘satire’, about the industry itself. Some of its references were obscure, but the movie people found the scenes which baffled me the funniest of all. Though I was to become much more familiar with Hollywood’s aristocracy, I look back on those first few weeks of heady glamour as amongst the most wonderful of my life. I will never recapture the surprise at meeting Theda Bara and finding her a sweet, well-mannered lady whose home had a comfortable, almost old-maidish atmosphere, save for one room decorated with
memento mori,
Oriental tapestries, tiger skins and mummy cases. This, she explained modestly, was where she was photographed. She had wanted to play Gish or Pickford parts, but the public insisted she remain always a vamp. I understand these pressures. We are all, to some degree, caricatures of what society demands of us.

One of the few Hollywood
Yehudi
I found vulgar was, in fact, from Kiev. I recognised this type instantly. We knew the likes of Selsnik in Podol, swaggering in loud suits, displaying rings and gold watch chains, smoking the largest cigars they could find, parading their wealth with appalling braggadocio. It was no wonder that occasionally the ordinary people of the city would round on them. Selsnik boasted to me he had sent the Tsar a telegram in 1917. He was full of his own atrocious joke, sprawling in the powerfully scented velvets and satins of Clara Bow’s living-room where Mrs Cornelius and I (without Hever for a change) had been invited for tea. Miss Bow herself was a lively, solicitous hostess. ‘I heard, see, the Tsar is abdicated. So I think to myself, what the hell? I’ll send him a telegram. Know what I said? You and your police weren’t kind to me when I was a boy in Kiev, I said, so me and my people come America. Here we did very well. Now they tell me you’re out of a job. No hard feelings about your cossacks. I’m willing to offer you a position acting in pictures. Name your own salary. Reply at my expense. Regards to the family.’

The others found it funny. I did not. I made an excuse and left.

The Cornelius boy is always asking me about the Hearst place. It was not finished in 1924 and very few people saw it going up. Hearst kept changing the size of the pool, adding new wings before the first ones were completed. Later I was invited to his ‘Enchanted Castle’, with a lot of dull industrialists, engineers and newspaper editors. Marion Davies was charming. Hearst was a Zeppelin, with a wren’s peeping little voice, largely oblivious to the world around him, even the one he had built. At Hearst’s you were never allowed to drink alcohol, but a good many of the movie people used cocaine in secret. By that time I had my own excellent suppliers, of course. In certain circles you were judged by the quality of your ‘stuff very much as a French nobleman would be judged by the quality of his cellar.
Mir ist warm. Vifl iz der zeyger?
Far more exciting to me was my meeting with the reserved old Southern gentleman, that world-genius, resembling a soldier rather than a showman, the soft-spoken First Lord of Tinsel Town, David W. Griffith. He happened to be at the Lasky studio when Hever and I accompanied Mrs Cornelius there to make her screen test.

I could hardly speak. I was in the presence of the greatest cultural figure of the twentieth century, the only one who genuinely deserved the title
Kinomeyster.
I mumbled like a peasant drawn from the fields to greet some mighty
landsman.
He was kind and courteous, cupping his ear to catch what I said. Mrs Cornelius saved the day. ’‘E finks yore ther cat’s whiskers,’ she told my hero. ‘Ter ‘ear ‘im goin’ on, y’d fink the sun shone arta yore -’

In horror I was able to bellow a complete word: ‘Trousers!’

And that was all I ever said to the one human being on Earth whose work truly influenced the course of my life. I believe he was at Lasky’s looking for a job. You would never have guessed from his bearing and stylish tailoring he was down on his luck. A natural prince, whose grasp of human nature was as profound as his political insights, now cap in hand to the immigrants he himself had helped establish in this idyllic World of Dreams. I should not have been so foolish. I blame myself. Mrs Cornelius was very popular with the movie people. They saw her as an eccentric English aristocrat. And everyone knew true English aristocrats could seem like
paskudnick,
they had such foul mouths. So ‘trousers’ it was for
Birth of a Nation.
In spite of Mrs Cornelius’s shining in her test, of watching her later in huge black and white close-up, I was not easily able to escape my depression. I constantly went over the meeting in my mind, rescripting it so that I impressed Griffith enough to bring, for a second, a look of startled emotion to his eyes as he realised here was someone who understood completely everything he had meant.

Valentino in his grandiose nest proved a disappointment. I think he saw me as a rival. He had the manners of a Neapolitan whore and the taste of a Milanese pimp, with his huge self portraits and ramshackle collections of rusting swords and suits of armour. I had tried to be polite to him, suggesting how he might expand his range, given his limitations. I was only too glad to get away from his house. It was depressing. It had a smell of suicide about it. The majority of Lords and Ladies in the World’s Movie Capital were nothing like the sinful, crazed, night-haunted creatures frequently depicted by the press. Most had great poise, humour and kindness. Doubtless the image of Hollywood’s élite giving orgies in their swimming pools or practising perversions on the palm-fringed lawns of their mansions had more to do with the wish-fulfilment of
hoi polloi
than the ordinary lives of people they envied.

Esmé was on her way! A telegram confirmed it. She was coming to me. The remorse I had felt since my meeting with Griffith quickly dissipated. I imagined holding my little mistress in my arms again. I drove along the white, twisting canyon roads of that beloved, adopted home, pushing the sprightly Peugeot almost to her limit in a joyous Escape of Motoring. I explored orchards, the fruit groves of the wide valley, peaceful, self-contained settlements like Pasadena, sleepy farming towns like San Fernando. Out beyond Hollywood there were vineyards which would one day produce wine quite as good as Europe’s. The first cuttings had been brought from Bordeaux and Burgundy and had flourished in that idyllic climate, just as her settlers, from Europe, from the East and Mid-West, also grew healthy and virile. The best of her people were young and strong, like the wine. Their dream was nothing less than to build Utopia. It was a dream we shared. And I had practical plans to make it come true.

Only once did I consider leaving my new home behind and fleeing back to Europe with Esmé. It was a miserable episode. At her suggestion, I one morning agreed to motor out to Anaheim with Astrid Nilsen, the blonde actress. At that time she was said to rival Swanson in her willingness to accept modern, daring roles. She had heard of a good restaurant on our side of the little town and insisted it would be worth the drive. Happy to pass a day or two with a pretty girl (never again would I have to make do with the likes of Mabel and Ethel) I agreed. We left fairly early, driving on dusty dirt roads, through relentless rows of artificially irrigated fields, occasionally relieved by a farmhouse or general store, clean modern villages, each seemingly pressed from the same mould, with a wooden church, a stand of trees, a café. It was twilight by the time Astrid pointed off to the right. She had wonderfully soft, fleshy arms and shoulders. Her strong-boned face was almost Slavic. I saw yellow and red lights, the sign for the road house, but as I turned into the drive was struck by its strange name. ‘How’s that pronounced?’ I asked. ‘And what does it mean?’