Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

“Harry,” she shouts after me, “this is nuts!”

I pause, momentarily, to look back at her on the sofa. “Give me this one last thing, Rachel. Please. Don’t try to find me.”

Then I go.

To save some money I sell whatever I can of my household goods and move into a rooming house whose only other boarder is a cadaverous-looking retired Lutheran minister from Minnesota. For the next few months I continue to look for work, but aside from jobs as an extra, everywhere I meet with failure. Evenings, I sit in my landlady’s verandah, depressed, worried, fatalistic, waiting for something to happen; what, I’m not sure. Something. In another economy move I’ve dropped my subscriptions to the movie magazines, but the Lutheran minister’s daily newspaper is full of tittle-tattle about the approaching premiere of Chance’s epic Western. The chat columns retail gossip, there are full-page ads for the picture, and Chance has obviously forsaken his role as the Hermit of Hollywood. Now interviews with him multiply alarmingly. His mild professorial face greets me at the breakfast table, staring out from the morning edition. A buzz is building around the picture and show-biz reporters, after the success of Cruze’s The Covered Wagon and rumours about Chance’s picture, stoke it with headlines announcing the rebirth of the Western.

Then one afternoon Chance’s Hispano-Suiza pulls to the curb outside and a chauffeur in livery comes briskly up the walk with an envelope in his gloved hand. Chance has tracked me down. The envelope contains two passes to the premiere of the Best Chance production of Besieged. There is also a note which explains something else the envelope holds, a cheque for five hundred dollars.

Dear Harry,

Enclosed are two tickets to the premiere of our film; bring your inamorata if you wish. I’m sure you have been informed she has left my employ and is now at Metro, but I bear no grudges. I hope you will be able to say the same and lay aside personal prejudices, and judge for yourself whether or not Besieged crystallizes the idealistic hopes for American film which we shared in our first conversations. Please come, I would like to hear that you approve of what has been accomplished. Oddly enough, your good opinion remains important to me.

You and I share credit for the scenario. Mr. Fitzsimmons tried to dissuade me from this step, but upon reflection I knew I could not deny what you have meant to this picture; it is only right to acknowledge your contribution.

Which leads to the delicate question of money. You will find enclosed a cheque for five hundred dollars. I believe this sum is a fair settling of my account with you, if not yours with me. I am sure you are currently encountering financial difficulties, so please note that the cheque is drawn on company finances and not on my personal account. This, I trust, will dispel any notion you might have that this could be regarded as an act of charity. It is, rather, the closing of the books on a debt.

Yours sincerely,

Damon Ira Chance

The premiere is one week off. I put the tickets and the cheque in my night-table drawer, determined to make use of neither. But as the date draws near I find myself wavering; one minute I am rock-solid in my determination never to give Chance the satisfaction of seeing me at his premiere, and the next this determination dissolves like salt in water. One part of me needs to see what Chance has done, another dreads it.

I don’t know what is happening to me. One evening, sitting in the sun-porch watching darkness descend, I have the thought that the darkness sifting down into that empty street is like the darkness filling my own emptiness. I cover my face with my hands and cry. And that is how my landlady finds me, as Shorty McAdoo’s landlady Mother Reardon found him, in the darkness, his face wet with tears. And like him, I try to deny them.

Tuxedoed, I make my way to Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, two blocks up the street. Searchlights are visible against the blue-black wall of night sky, golden sabres slashing and wheeling, crossing and clashing, bright blades of gleaming light. People overtake me on the sidewalk. Skipping insect-like toward this mesmerizing display, the women utter chirps of excitement as they brush impatiently by me “Oh!” “Look, Herb!” Little jolts of delighted anticipation set their hips to switching, rattle their heels on the sidewalk; they jerk with impatience. Despite trying to lock down their enthusiasm, the men are the same. Their excitement is proclaimed in the rigid set of their shoulders and faces, a pose of nonchalance. A young man in a straw boater trots by me, pretending to scan the thickening crowd for a friend, and, like horses in a paddock, others infected by his example start trotting too.

Suddenly he stops, his eye caught by a long, luscious limousine crawling up the street. All the rest of the trotters halt too, halt and edge toward the curb for a better look. One looses a low, appreciative whistle and his bird-like call is copied – they all trill their homage as their polished black dream glides by. Then the young man in the boater lifts his head – he’s spied another car – and all the other heads turn too, staring up the street, songbirds transformed into birds of prey.

The throng begins to clot, coagulate, as the Pierce Arrows, Stevens-Duryeas, Rollses, Renaults, and Mercedes pour out of the side streets in a parade of luxurious rolling stock running on golden rails laid down on the asphalt by headlight beams. Clusters of star-gazers crane necks for a peek into windows, into back seats. Reports of sightings fly about, fickle breezes which blow heads in this direction and that. “Is that Buster?” “Is that Doug and Mary?” They strain to see, ripple, bend as one, bow down over the curb like tall grass in a gust of wind.

I keep walking, moving as fast as the traffic jamming the roadway, touching shoulder after shoulder to beg passage, beckoned by Grauman’s marquee, hundreds of electric bulbs pulsing out a single word, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged…

Opposite the theatre, onlookers are packed deep on the narrow sidewalk, bobbing up and down on tiptoes, heads tossing like turbulent waves. Blue-jacketed cops patrol a rope strung mid-thigh at the edge of the pavement, good-humouredly keeping the crowd behind it with fatherly nods and gentle taps of the nightstick, friendly reminders not to trespass on the street.

Young couples with infants tucked in their arms; old couples gripping purses and canes, fragile in shiny black clothes and high-topped shoes and boots, red noses sharp, red eyes sharper; men wearing hand-painted ties and others in work shirts and cloth caps; fast-looking, painted girls and respectable young females whose scrubbed cheeks exude rosy virtue: one happy congregation. With this mingling of humanity comes a mingling of scent, bay rum and tobacco, camphor and peppermints, lilac water and stale sweat, chewing gum and dirty diapers.

Chance’s publicity campaign has worked. Despite being no household name, no DeMille, no Griffith, despite having no actors in this picture who are stars of any magnitude, the ordinary people, the giants of the industry, have come.

A great stir of shuddering excitement. The crowd groans, “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!”, a moan of sexual pleasure. Above the roof of the car, a mop of curly black hair, two black eyebrows, and a chunk of black moustache drawn on the alabaster face of a corpse by a cartoonist pops up to stare back across the street at us. It ducks back down to assist a young lady from the vehicle. The young lady is Leonore Ulric. The dapper little man graciously escorts Leonore Ulric out from behind the vehicle to greet us; they wave to us across a river of asphalt, Chaplin grinning impishly. Mad cheering as he wheels Miss Ulric in a military about-face on to the long red carpet running from curb to picture palace, snapping a sergeant-major’s salute to the bank of photographers. “This is too good!” “Catch this one!” The camera bulbs pop and blink like muzzle-flashes of distant artillery on a night horizon.