Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

Ed Grace waved back. All right, he understood. He’d been heard.

The Englishman’s boy lowered the Colt which had put a bullet in the belly of the sky, fishing in his pocket as he addressed the bone-boy’s face, tilted at him like a plate on a plate rack. Eating crow wasn’t his dish, never had been. “You beat me cold – twice,” he said. “I don’t know how you done it, but you done it.” He’d found what he was searching for, one of the Englishman’s precious silver dollars. He held it up. “Loser pays. Right?”

The bone-boy lifted his wrist and pressed it to the side of his face.

“You catch my drift?” asked the Englishman’s boy.

The bone-boy gave no sign he did. The Englishman’s boy hesitated, dropped the coin on the striped blanket, strode off purposefully.

The bone-boy didn’t move. The other children pushed their heads in to admire the silver dollar like moths closing on lamplight.

We begin to thrash out our picture in meetings at Chance’s place in the hills. These meetings have a bad-tempered, testy air because James Cruze’s Western, The Covered Wagon , has recently been released and everyone is hailing it as a masterpiece, speaking of it in the awed tones previously reserved for The Birth of a Nation. Its success is eating away at Chance, maybe because the triumph is so unexpected, the picture always having been under a cloud. Only a short time ago, rumours abounded that Mary Miles Minter had turned it down flat and Hollywood insiders were of the opinion its stars, J. Warren Kerrigan and Lois Wilson, didn’t have the box-office appeal to carry the film. There were budget overruns and enormous difficulties on location – heavy snow, dust storms, breakdowns of equipment, trouble supplying cast and hundreds of extras with food in the wilds – disasters which came near to duplicating the trials and hardships of the original pioneers themselves. Besides, it was the received wisdom that the public’s love affair with the Western was over, movie audiences were growing more sophisticated, demanding classier entertainment than horse operas; even the great William S. Hart’s pictures were flagging at the box office. And yet, despite frequent setbacks, Jesse Lasky stood by The Covered Wagon , ploughing more than eight hundred thousand dollars into a picture everybody was certain was doomed.

Hollywood loves disaster. Hollywood loves success. But it loves disaster more. Everybody was anticipating a catastrophe on the scale of Mayer’s and Thalberg’s Ben-Hur , a production running up an unprecedented string of disasters in Italy. During the filming of a spectacular naval battle two men had been killed; then an entire fleet of Roman galleys resting at anchor had sunk overnight. Production had been disrupted by disturbances linked to Benito Mussolini’s new Fascist government and now the whole production crew was packing up to be shipped back to Hollywood to reshoot the picture.

Everybody had been sure a similar fate was staring The Covered Wagon in the face. They were wrong. The dodo bird flew. It flew beautifully, and on its back Lasky and Paramount were soaring too.

The Covered Wagon gnaws at Chance. When it crops up in his conversation it is always with the implication he has been cheated, robbed, swindled of what was his alone, the right to make the first Western epic. Fitz tries to coax and jolly him out of brooding, arguing the success of The Covered Wagon will play neatly into our hands, prove good for business by stoking public interest in the Western, but Chance isn’t mollified. It isn’t profit he is interested in, it is glory, and he resents having it snatched from under his nose. The Covered Wagon has raised the stakes in the glory race, and Chance is determined not to be beaten on territory he considers his own. A good deal of the praise lavished on Cruze’s picture has been for its documentary qualities – the endless wagon train crawling across the plains, the thrilling fording of the River Platte, the use of locations along the original wagon route.

All this stokes Chance’s mania for authenticity; like his idol, Griffith, he demands historical accuracy in every detail. It is a consuming passion that isn’t satisfied cheaply.

“We need Indians, Fitz. Three hundred. Maybe four. Make it four. And real Indians. No Mexicans in wigs on this picture.”

“Where the hell am I going to get real Indians?” grumbles Fitz.

“Lasky got real Indians, that’s all anybody’s talking about. Where the hell did he find them?”

“Colonel McCoy got them for him. Two trainloads. But McCoy has connections with the Board of Indian Commissioners. He’s got pull.”

“Then hire Colonel McCoy.”

“Paramount has him sewed up. He’s running that Indian song-and-dance number at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater and once that’s done he’s taking a boatload of them to Europe to promote the picture there. The Colonel ain’t available.”

“Then find us an equivalent. Call McDavitt in Washington and have him get in touch with somebody at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I didn’t put money into President Harding’s campaign for the good of my health. Pull some strings. Somebody owes me a couple of hundred Indians.”

“Indians are more goddamn trouble than they’re worth. You don’t want nothing to do with them bastards. It’s easier to herd cats than Indians. Most don’t talk no English; they show up for work with dogs, squaws, papooses. Before you know it the bastards are into the firewater and stealing props. You got to negotiate a separate deal with each of them. One wants a cowboy hat for services rendered, the next one wants five dollars. Then they get jealous about what the next chief got and the dickering starts all over again. Cruze had to hustle up an army uniform for one of his bucks or he threatened not to do the big scene. You want a dogfight each and every day of the week, hire Indians.”

Chance isn’t listening. “And another thing,” he says. “Hire me an Indian woman who can act. None of this ‘how’ stuff either. And make sure she’s good-looking.”

“You ain’t asking for much,” says Fitz. “I ain’t never seen a good-looking Indian.”

“And we’ll need another Indian who can act to play the chief.”

“Christ, what’s the matter with Wallace Beery? I seen him in The Last of the Mohicans. He fooled me.”

“I don’t want any iodine-stained Wallace Beery. What’s the name of the Indian in Griffith’s Mended Lute? Young something or other. Young Deer? Try and get hold of him. Give him a screen test.”

But Young Deer is not to be found; reports have it he is in France directing pictures for Pathé. Indian actresses don’t come a dime a dozen either. Mona Darkfeather, a Seminole who worked for the Bison Company in the early days, is too old for the part, as is the other well-known Indian actress, Dove Eye Dark Cloud.

Chance is like a man who claims to want to build a cathedral but spends all his time on the gargoyles. We have no director or scenario yet and here he is worrying about casting. When I suggest my time might be better spent writing a script, he dismisses the idea. “The scenario will be written in due course. But first, the essential elements must be put in place.”

What are these essential elements? Indian artifacts for one. He wants all the Indian artifacts Best Chance can lay hands on. Buyers fan out across the country, chequebooks in hand, to dun private collectors, to seduce destitute reservation Indians who might be persuaded to part with Grandpa’s medicine bundle, coup stick, or eagle war bonnet for a pittance. Three artists are sent to Washington to sketch Plains Indian costumes in the collection of the Smithsonian. A Chicago stock-buyer is commissioned to purchase Mr. Chance his own herd of buffalo.