Tish Plays the Game (6 page)

“Absolutely,” Mr. Stein said heartily. “Virtue is always triumphant on the screen. It is our greatest commercial asset. Without it, ladies, we would be nowhere.”

“And there must be no love element introduced.”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Stein. “Certainly not!”

Those were almost his final words. We then had tea, and Tish gave him some of our homemade blackberry cordial. He seemed very pleased with it, and on departing remarked, “My admiration for you grows steadily, Miss Carberry. I did not fully estimate your powers when I said you could fill a tooth. You could, with that cordial, make a ouija board hiccup.”

T
HINGS WERE QUIET FOR
a month or two after that, and we understood that the production was being got ready. But Tish was very busy, having thrown herself into her preparations with her usual thoroughness.

She had found a teacher who taught how to register with the face the various emotions on the screen, and twice a week Aggie or myself held her book, illustrated with cuts, while Tish registered in alphabetical order: Amusement, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, devotion, envy, fatigue, generosity, hate, interest, jealousy, keenness, laughter, love, merriment, nobility, objection, pity, quarrelsomeness, ridicule, satisfaction, terror, uneasiness, vanity, wrath, and so on.

I must confess that the subtle changes of expression were often lost on me, and that I suffered extremely at those times, when discarding the book, she asked us to name her emotion from her expression. She would stand before her mirror and arrange her features carefully, and then quickly turn. But I am no physiognomist.

Her physical preparations, however, she made alone. That she was practicing again with her revolver Hannah felt sure, but we had no idea where and how. As has been previously recorded, the janitor of her apartment had refused to allow her to shoot in the basement after a bullet had embedded itself in the dining table of A flat while the family was at luncheon. We surmised that she was doing it somewhere outside of town.

Later on we had proof of this. Aggie and I were taking a constitutional one day in the country beyond the car line when, greatly to our surprise, we heard two shots beyond a hedge, followed by a man’s angry shouts, and on looking over the hedge, who should we behold but our splendid Tish, revolver in hand, and confronted by an angry farm laborer.

“Right through my hat!” he was bellowing. “If a man can’t do an honest day’s work without being fired at—”

“Work?” Tish said coldly. “You were so still I took you for a scarecrow.”

“Scarecrow yourself! When I yelled, you shot again!” he howled. “Deliberate attempt at murder. That’s what it was.”

“It went off by itself the second time,” Tish explained. “I’m rehearsing a certain scene, and—”

“Rehearsing?” said the man. “What for?”

“For the moving pictures.”

He looked at her, and then he bowed very politely.

“Well, well!” he said. “I didn’t recognize you at first, Miss Pickford. And how’s Doug?”

We did not tell Tish that we had witnessed this encounter. She might have been sensitive about mistaking a farmer for a scarecrow.

It was a day or so after, in our presence, that Tish informed Hannah she would take her along as her maid. And Hannah, who in twenty-odd years had never been known to show enthusiasm, was plainly delighted with the prospect.

“D’you mean I can see them acting?” she inquired.

“I imagine so,” Tish said with a tolerant smile.

“Love scenes too?” Hannah asked, with an indelicacy that startled us.

“There will be no love scenes in this picture, Hannah,” Tish reproved her. “I am surprised at you. And even in the ones you see every evening, when you ought to be doing something better, it is as well to remember that the persons are not really lovers. Indeed, that often they are barely friends.”

She then told Hannah to go downtown and buy a book on moving-picture make-up and the various articles required, as, since she was to be a personal maid, she must know about such things.

I confess that Aggie and I were in a state of extreme depression when we left Tish that day. The thought of our dear friend altering the face her Creator gave her was a painful one, and both of us, I think, feared it as an index of a possible general demoralization, as too often happens in the movies. Aggie particularly feared the contacts with men, as mentioned by Hannah, in spite of Tish’s firm attitude. The well-known temptations of Hollywood were in both our minds.

“They aren’t paying her a thousand dollars a week just to ride, and so on,” Aggie said bitterly. “Did you ever see a picture without a love story? It isn’t only her neck she’s risking, Lizzie.”

I must confess to the same uneasiness.

We went to bed early that night, sorely troubled, and I had fallen asleep and was dreaming that Tish was trying to leap from an automobile to a moving train, and that everytime she did it the train jumped to another track, when the telephone bell rang, and it was Hannah. She said that Tish wanted me, and to go over right away, but not to waken Aggie.

I went at once and found all the lights going, and Tish in her bed, bolt upright, with both eyes closed.

“Tish!” I cried. “Your eyes! Can’t you see?”

“Not through my eyelids, she said witheringly. “Don’t be a fool, Lizzie. Look at this stuff and then tell me what will take it off.”

I then saw that the rims of her eyelids were smeared with a black paste which had hardened like enamel, and that they had become glued together, leaving her, temporarily at least, sightless and helpless. My poor Tish!

“What will take it off?” she demanded. “That idiot Hannah offered to melt it with a burning match.”

“I don’t think anything but a hammer will do any good, Tish.”

I discovered then that Hannah had bought the make-up book, and that it laid particular emphasis on beading the eyelashes. With her impatient temperament Tish, although the shops were shut by that time, decided to make the experiment, and had concocted a paste of glue and India ink. She had experimented first on her eyebrows, she had thought successfully, although when I saw her they looked like two jet crescents fastened to her forehead; but inadvertently closing her eyes after beading her lashes, she had been unable to open them again.

She and Hannah had tried various expedients, among them lard, the yolk of an egg, cold cream and ammonia, but without result. I was obliged to tell her that it was set like a cement pavement.

In the end I was able, amid exclamations of pain and annoyance from Tish, to cut off her lashes, and later to shave her eyebrows with an old razor which Hannah had for some unknown purpose, and although much of the glue remained Tish was able to see once more. When I left her she was contemplating her image in her mirror, and a little of her fine frenzy of early enthusiasm seemed to have departed.

It is characteristic of Tish that, once embarked on an enterprise, she devotes her entire attention to it and becomes in a way isolated from her kind. Her mental attitude during these periods of what may be termed mind gestation is absent and solitary. Thus I am able to tell little of what preparations she made during the following weeks. I do know that she went to church on her last Sunday with her bonnet wrong side before, and that during the sermon she was unconsciously assuming the various facial expressions, one after the other, to the astonishment and confusion of Mr. Ostermaier in the pulpit.

But we also learned that she had again taken up her riding. The papers one evening were full of an incident connected with the local hunt, where an unknown woman rider had followed the hounds in to the death and had then driven them all off and let the fox go free.

My suspicions were at once aroused, and I carried the paper to Tish that night. I found her on her sofa, with the air redolent of arnica and witch hazel, and gave her the paper. She read the article calmly enough.

“I belong to the Humane Society, Lizzie,” she said. “Those dogs would have killed it.”

“But what made you join the hunt?”

“I didn’t join the hunt,” she said wearily. “How did I know that beast was an old hunter? I was riding along quietly when a horn blew somewhere, and the creature just went over the fence and started.” Tish closed her eyes. “We jumped eleven fences and four ditches,” she said in a tired voice, “and I bit my tongue halfway through. I think we went through some hotbeds, too, but I hadn’t time to look.”

“Tish,” I said firmly, “I want you to think, long and hard. Is it worth it? What are they going to pay you a thousand dollars a week to risk? Your beauty, your virtue or your neck? I leave it to you to guess.”

“It’s my neck,” said Tish coldly.

“Well, you’ve lost the head that belongs on it,” I retorted. And I went home.

We were to leave on a Monday, and the Saturday before Tish called me by telephone.

“I’ve been thinking, Lizzie,” she said. “A portion of my picture is laid in the desert. We’d better take some antisnake-bite serum.”

“Where do you get it?”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t bother me with detail,” she snapped. “Try the snake house at the Zoo.”

I did so, and I must say the man acted strangely about it.

“For snake bite?” he inquired. “Who’s been bitten?”

“Nobody’s been bitten,” I said with dignity. “I just want a little to have on hand in case of trouble.”

He looked around and lowered his voice. “I get you,” he said. “Well, I haven’t any now, but I will have next week. Eight dollars a quart. Prewar stuff.”

When I told him I couldn’t wait he stared at me strangely, and when I turned at the door he had called another man, and they were both looking after me and shaking their heads.

I
T HAD BEEN THE
desire of Tish’s life to fly in an aeroplane, and we knew by this time that much of her story was laid in the air. But during the trip west I believe she lost some of her fine enthusiasm. This was due, I imagine, to the repeated stories of crashes with which the newspapers were filled, and also to the fact that we passed one airship abandoned in a field, and showing signs of having fallen from a considerable height.

This theory was borne out, I admit, by Tish’s reception of Mr. Stein at the station in Los Angeles.

“We’ve got a small dirigible for the bootleggers, Miss Carberry,” he said cheerfully, “and a fast pursuit plane for you, machine gun and all. Got the plane cheap, after a crash. A dollar saved is a dollar earned, you know!”

Tish, I thought, went a trifle pale.

“You won’t need them, Mr. Stein. I’m going to take the story out of the air.”

“Great Scott! What for?” he exclaimed.

“It is too improbable.”

“Improbable! Of course it is. That’s the point.” Then he leaned forward and patted her reassuringly. “Now, see here, Miss Carberry,” he said, “don’t you worry! We’ve got a good pilot for you, and everything. You’re as safe there as you are in this car.”

Unfortunately the car at that moment failed to make a sharp turn, left the road, leaped a ditch, and brought up in a plowed field. It seemed a bad omen to begin with, and Tish, I think, so considered it.

“My nephew developed jaundice after an air ride, Mr. Stein,” she said as the driver backed the car onto the road, and we pulled Aggie from beneath the three of us. “An attack of jaundice on my part would hold up the picture indefinitely.”

But Mr. Stein was ready for that, as we later found him ready for every emergency.

“We’ve a doctor on the lot, Miss Carberry,” he said. “Specializes in jaundice. Don’t you worry at all.”

Looking back, both Aggie and I realize the significance of the remark he made on leaving us after having settled us at the hotel.

“We’ve made one or two changes in the story, Miss Carberry,” he said. “Nothing you will object to.” He smiled genially. “Have to give the scenario department something to do to earn their salaries!”

Had Tish not been preoccupied this would not have gone unchallenged. But she was staring up just then at the blue California sky, where an aviator was looping the loop, and so forth, and she made no comment.

When we recall our California experience, Aggie and I date our first disappointment from the following day, Tish’s first at the studio.

Though Tish cannot be termed a handsome woman, she has a certain majesty of mien, which has its own charm. Her new transformation, too, had softened certain of her facial angles, and we had felt that she would have real distinction on the screen. But it was to be otherwise, alas!

Aggie and I had been put out, and sat on the dressing-room steps, perspiring freely, while numerous people came and went from Tish’s room. We had heard of the great change effected by the make-up, and our hopes were high. We had not expected her to compete with the various beauties of the silver sheet, but we had expected to find her natural charms emphasized.

But when, sometime later, the door opened and Tish appeared, what shall I say? It was Tish, of course, but Tish in an old skirt and a blouse, with no transformation, and her own hair slicked into a hard knot on top of her head.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and she can never be utterly plain to us. But I must say she was not ornamental.

She did not speak, nor did we. She simply passed us, stalking across the lot to a large glassed-in building, and I went in to comfort Hannah.

T
HE PICTURE, THE SKY
Pirate, having made a great success, I need only briefly outline Tish’s story. As an elderly clerk in the secret service, she is appalled by the amount of rum smuggling going on, especially by dirigible from Mexico. She volunteers to stop it, and is refused permission. She then steals an airship from the Army, funds from the Treasury in Washington, an air pilot from the Marines, and starts west, unheralded and unsung, in pursuit of her laudable purpose.

The various incidents, as the great American public will recall, include her fastening a Mexican governor in a cave by exploding dynamite in the hillside above him; dropping from a bridge to a moving train below to search the express car for liquor; trapping the chief smuggler on top of the structural-iron framework of a building, and so on. In the end, by holding up the smugglers’ dirigible with her own aeroplane and a machine gun, Tish forces them to hand over the valise containing their ill-gotten gains, and with it descends by a parachute to the ground and safety. Later on, as you will recall, she finds the smugglers at an orgy, and with two revolvers arrests them all.