Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

If Chaplin is here, the evening is already a success. But the magnificent automobiles keep disgorging celebrities on the crimson carpet; they wave to fans, blow kisses, strike preposterous poses for photographers. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, Pola Negri and Will Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are all here. With each new arrival frenzy mounts, the mob calls names like they were the names of children lost in a forest; they skitter forward like iron filings answering the pull of powerful magnets. The press of people behind me drives me hard against the rope, it saws at my thighs; there’s an elbow in my back, a cane tangled between my legs. The smell of desperation pollutes the air. I start to scramble over the barrier before I get dumped over it on to my face.

A cop catches me straddling the rope. “What you doing, Bub?”

“I’ve got to get over to the theatre,” I tell him.

“Sure you do,” the cop says.

“I’ve got tickets.” I stick them under his nose.

At the mention of tickets, a resentful look slides on to his flat face.

“You can’t cross the road,” he says. “We got traffic control here.”

“Look,” I say, “I’ve got a bad leg. It can’t take much more of this pushing and shoving.”

“If you got a bad leg, take it home. Take it home or stay where you are.”

I’m prepared to argue when I spot the Hispano-Suiza gliding up in front of Grauman’s. I nod to the cop, a tacit promise to stay put. He clamps his jaw with authority, takes a couple paces down the rope, glances over his shoulder to make sure I’m not up to any funny business behind his back.

Chance and Fitz get out of the car. They are wearing tails and silk top hats. The enthusiasm of the crowd dips, they don’t recognize these two. The expensive car, the beautiful young girl in the evening dress sweeping forward with a bouquet to present to Chance announce these men are important – but why? Chance accepts the bouquet with a stiff little bow, passes it to Fitz who grapples it clumsily to his chest.

Slowly Chance turns to face us, slowly his hand rises in a hieratic gesture to the marquee. He points and we cease even to murmur, watch in enthralled silence, struggling to decipher this obscure gesture. Now he is shaking his finger at the sign, emphatically, schoolteacher waiting for the answer.

A single voice rises in a shout from the back of the crowd. “Besieged!” Radiant pleasure, pride, happiness flood Chance’s features. He straightens, grows taller. Yes, his body is saying, yes, yes, yes. The finger prods once more, jabbing a smattering of high, thin, involuntary-sounding cries out of the mob. Behind me a hoarse voice, roughened by a foreign accent, joins in, to my left I hear a child’s, a woman’s. Now Chance’s finger is marking time, more voices add to the deep, swelling chorus of, “Besieged! Besieged! Besieged!” People shout it recklessly, happily, making a noise like the noise of empty barrels rolled in an empty street. “Besieged! Besieged!”

Chance raises his hands above his head, clasps them in a prizefighter’s gesture of victory, shakes them at the mob. The mindless roar is physical, a hot wave of breath on my back. I twist around and confront a wall of faces; a painted midway canvas of freaks, a nickel’s worth of depravity, the mouths yawning cavernous and hungry, the eyes blazing.

But now the mad clamouring sputters, fades out, disintegrating into lonesome cries, desultory handclapping. I look back and Chance is strolling up the carpet into a barrage of winking flashbulbs, Fitz walking carefully in the rear, the tall hat balanced on his head, the flowers bundled in a big fist.

Around me everyone subsides into disappointment. It’s over now. A sort of post-coital tristesse settles on us, a listless shame. We avoid each other’s eyes, shrink from touching one another; the knot which briefly held us together is unravelling, people are drifting away like scraps of paper blowing in an aimless wind. Across the street, uniformed flunkies are closing the main doors of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the temple is being secured. It is too late for the picture. I will miss Besieged.

For three hours I sit in a café drinking coffee, keep trying to imagine what the audience is being treated to up on the big screen four blocks away. Every fifteen minutes I check my watch and light another cigarette. People stare at me because of the tuxedo. At eleven I pay the bill and go out into the night. A fitful wind has sprung up, a wind that seems to nudge me in the direction of Grauman’s. Although it feels like rain, I don’t turn for home. Instead I button my jacket, stuff my hands in my pockets, and permit myself to be shoved along by the wind at my back. The self-congratulatory speeches will have ended long ago, the last reel will be playing itself out, soon the theatre will empty. It’s a short walk but feels endless. The avenue is deserted and still, the streetlight poles stark, the ponds of light at their feet bright, shallow, sterile. My left shoe rasps on the concrete, hoarsely, monotonously. I drag it past a line-up of parked automobiles, chauffeurs killing time as they wait for the picture to finish. The police have left, the rope barrier is down, but a few stubborn souls still huddle in the wind, waiting. Tramping up the theatre side of the street, I am treated to a star’s-eye view of the fans. From this perspective and distance they look small and pitiable, like children somebody has forgotten to collect after a birthday party.

I stop and light a cigarette under the marquee. None of the officious staff raising the green-and-white awning against the possibility of rain tell me to move on. It is the tuxedo. They assume I am waiting for a friend.

All at once there’s an excited rushing about of Grauman employees, the doors are opening, the picture is over. The first of the audience spilling out talk animatedly, always a good sign for a picture, while others linger in the lobby, an even more auspicious sign. Out in the fresh air women draw their furs tightly around their shoulders, the men light cigars and impatiently scan the street for drivers and automobiles. One of Grauman’s young men beckons imperiously to the line-up, headlights snap on, the cars move forward like dominoes tipping in a chain reaction. The remnant of fans wave autograph books in the air and cry out beseechingly from across the road.

Here a tuxedo can loiter, smoke a cigarette, cast eyes up to the sky for portents of rain. Betty Blythe, star of the Queen of Sheba , passes close enough for me to touch, and so do Bessie Love and Colleen Moore. Others troop by, gentlemen and ladies I don’t recognize, L.A. businessmen, lawyers, doctors, their wives. People with enough social standing, enough money, to be granted the boon of buying a ticket to a premiere, to be granted the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with Charlie Chaplin, people who fifteen years ago would have dismissed picture people as vulgarians.

I hear bits and snatches of conversation popping up like bright birds in a bush. “Superb!” says someone. “All it needed for perfection was a true star!” is the opinion of another. “Where is he? Where’s Chance?”

I spot Fitz, a head taller than anyone else, doing a chain-gang shuffle through the bottleneck of congestion in the lobby doors. Where Fitzsimmons is, Chance will be too.

I’m correct. Once under the awning Chance holds court, greeting admirers. Actors behave like they do before a camera, pantomiming their awe, their delight, their amazement. When actresses seize Chance’s arm and cuddle against his shoulder, or raise themselves on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek for photographers, he receives their attentions with awkward, old-fashioned, gentlemanly courtliness.