16
“Right before the turn of the century, just a couple years into this crazy game, the state of Maine enacted the first law censoring motion pictures in this country,” Jack Parson said, tugging on his bottom lip.
Grace stood behind him, looking at the back of his head with her arms crossed beneath her breasts. She had gone to his temporary office housed in the lot’s hinterlands to ask about the apprentice electrician — in the vaguest terms possible — and found her director mesmerized. In front of him, a makeshift screen made from a white sheet flickered brightly and silently as bloody mayhem unfolded atop the staircase ashore of the dreadnought Potemkin.
“It was prizefight pictures they had a problem with. A couple of fellows pummeling the sense out of one another, the oldest sport in history. Too violent, they said. And violence, as anyone knows, begets violence.”
Lines of riflemen in white tunics marched down the steps, firing indiscriminately into a fleeing crowd of hundreds. Cripples vied to avoid the running feet while a small boy was trampled underneath them to the horror of his screaming mother.
“But those were merely exhibitions,” Jack continued as the blood flowed down the Odessa steps. “The real strike came around ’15 when Ohio put together a board of censors with the power to arrest anybody who showed a picture they didn’t approve of. You know what the court said? They said that pictures ‘may be used for evil.’ Evil, Gracie. Out here in Movieland, most folks didn’t like the sound of that. So Mutual Film Corp. sued. And they lost. Because pictures are commerce, not art. That was the Supreme Court’s ruling by the way. Pictures aren’t art. Now it’s not just far-flung Ohio. Now it’s the whole of America. And here in Hollywood, we’ve got that Puritan son of a bitch Will Hayes stirring up the pot. Making sure we aren’t inciting loose morals. Mad sex. Murder and the like.”
A pretty young woman covered her infant in its perambulator with her body, panicked and faced with the marching horde. The tsar’s men shot her down and the pram went rolling crazily down the steps as an old woman in pince-nez spectacles ran to the scene, desperate to save the child. She was too late: a soldier drew his sword and smashed the blade across her face, leaving a gruesome jumble of broken glass, flowing blood, impotent shrieks.
Grace’s gorge rose in her throat, the memory of a man called Petey dead on the street still fresh in her mind. She shut her eyes for a moment and felt the sweat bead on her brow.
“There!” Jack cried, jabbing his finger toward the screen. “Did you see it? Did you see that, Gracie? That is the essence of humanity. That is the difference between entertainment and art. It shows you something, it holds up a mirror to your own ugliness. The darkness, Gracie. The art is in the darkness.”
“It’s ghastly, Jack. Shut it off.”
He went rigid for a moment, then slowly turned in his chair to look at her for the first time since she entered. His eyebrows were drawn together in a bunch; his upper lip curled into a sneer.
“Haven’t you been listening to me?” he said, his voice without inflection. “Don’t you understand? What, you’d rather be a chorus girl? Tied to the railroad tracks for Tom Mix to come rescue? Maybe when sound arrives, you’ll just sing some idiotic song?”
“I sang idiotic songs on the circuit for years, Jack. It’s where I got my chops, and I paid for it dearly.” A tiny shudder worked its way up her spine. She shook it out. “I’ve worked my tail to the bone since I was old enough to flash a little leg at a room full of slavering Shriners and I did it so I could be here, batting my goddamn eyes at a camera and not digging potatoes out of the cold ground like my mother till the arthritis turned her hands into claws.”
“You won’t be batting your eyes at my camera,” he said gravely. “That’s not the picture I’m making. It wasn’t before, and it certainly isn’t now.”
“Now that you’ve decided you’re the Da Vinci of the movies?”
“I’ll be the Bosch of the movies. The Dürer of the movies. I’ll open up the mouth of Hell and show it to everyone in America. Then we’ll see what’s commerce and what’s art, won’t we?”
He nodded curtly and turned back toward the screen. The mutineers were preparing the dreadnought’s massive guns against the approaching admiral’s ships.
“Take your place, Ms. Baron,” he said loudly over the clicking of the projector. “We shoot at nine.”
She left for the set without another word.
Frank was nowhere to be seen.
Across the table at FitzGerald’s on Sunset sat Eustace and Joe, preening over one another like a pair of kids, while Grace studied her aunt’s face and thought about killers. Joe Sommer made cheap comments about how Eustace looked a decade younger than her years and Eustace tried to force a girlish blush. Grace squinted her eyes and imagined her aunt when she was ten years younger, with a knife handle in her fist and the blade sunk deep in Billy Francis’ gut.
That was Idaho Falls, 1916. A week before Christmas, as she recalled it, where the local Elks put the woman and her young niece up in a hotel packed with all the other performers for the fraternity’s annual Christmas variety. There were whites and coloreds, aged Jewish comics and children younger than Grace with blonde ringlets and bleeding feet from the ballet shoes that maimed them. The hallway was a mad circus, replete with dogs and a shrieking rhesus monkey called Charley, which Grace knew because its owner screamed its name as he chased the animal up and down the stairs.
And in the middle of it all were Eustace and Little Gracie Baronsky, the Prodigy of Boise, fifteen years old but billed as ten, which absolutely nobody believed for a second. The plan was to work their way east, earning as much as they could from town to town until at last they’d land in New York, where the real action was. Eustace had a letter she kept like an invaluable relic from an agent who wanted to see Gracie for himself. There was talk of Ziegfield’s Follies, who could always use a premium child act — if she was good enough. Auntie Eustace meant to make sure her disciple was better than that. The road to New York was to be the starlet’s trial by fire, and if she didn’t have ‘em on their feet by the end of her every performance, Gracie knew perfectly well how much a switch would sting her rear end in the room after.
To ensure a positive reaction, it was Gracie’s own idea to capitalize upon the patriotic fervor of a country edging toward war abroad. To that end, she carefully tested the waters among locals in taverns and diners the afternoon before a show to see how they felt about America’s involvement in Europe. If they were predominantly for it, her song that night would be “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag,” the popular British war song. If, however, she found the rubes in favor of isolation, Gracie had a backup song of her own composition at the ready: “Stay Home, Johnny Boy, Stay Home.” She even managed to weep real tears at the song’s finale, where she begged her paramour to take care of her rather than a bunch of foreign strangers half a world away. (Her secret was an unhinged pin in her corset that she furtively jabbed into her flesh at the right moment.) If she played her cards right, either one could bring down the house.
The trouble in Idaho City, Gracie found, was that reactions to her innocent inquiries appeared to be split right down the middle. She couldn’t decide which song would earn her ovations and which a chorus of boos — and a whipping. To that end, in a state of near panic, Eustace brought the Elk responsible for their booking to their room to confer. The audience would be filled with his brethren, after all, so who better to give them the scoop?