My pain was admittedly no more than a dull persistent ache now and I was able to go about my ordinary business without too much effort of will while Carmelita Geraghty, Hazel Keener, Lucille Rickson and Blanche McHaffey helped me forget my heartache. My attempts to contact Esmé became a matter of routine. Every day I left a message. I was a great optimist then. The future seemed infinite and could only improve. It is different now. There are no rules, no boundaries to Time. I grew to maturity and old age in a world that sought to give new shape, even a new meaning, to the universe. What was I to do? Like some ancient mariner cast adrift in an open boat, I made my best effort to chart a safe course for myself across an alien sea beneath an alien sky. The schwartzes swagger into my shop. They say this is their territory now. I am sure it is, I say. It is what things have come to.
Do they delude themselves that I have any time for their zoot and jives, that I envy them their acid society held together by soporifics? I was born into a world of work and pain, where pleasure was earned and paid for, where Nature was not to be Nurtured and Sentimentalised but Tamed, and where crime was punished. There is a piece of metal in my womb. They placed a white-hot iron upon my spirit and my agony filled the galaxy, destroying stars, but I survived even that. I was strengthened by it. I died and came alive. I survived a holocaust. I survived the humiliation and the despair. And even now, living this life of a tradesman, buying and selling the discarded costumes and uniforms of the 20th century, I at least have my voice, my memory, our history; and I have survived to tell the truth of it. To these children the powerful personalities who created their world have become mythic ogres and demigods. I have seen the realities of an entire planet undergoing profound and unprecedented agonies, the most momentous changes she has ever experienced in this Age of Man. I have seen the reality of individuals dying in abject terror and spiritual agony, one by one, to make - death by death - first one million, then two million, then ten million: million by million they died, and one by one, in ditches and in woods, in trains and in camps, in churches and barns, flats and huts, in snow and rain or perfect sunshine. Shot, buried or drowned, tormented, dehumanised, corrupted, robbed of self-respect, they died one by one, children and old people; people of every age. Million upon million they watched their loved ones killed. In the name of progress they died for a future that turned to ash even as they themselves perished. That ashen future still clings here and there in those parts of the world most susceptible to temporal cancers. Once those cancers take hold they are almost impossible to eradicate, even with the subtlest, most radical surgery. Not that anyone will listen to those of us who are capable of performing such an operation. This is scarcely an era of bold and unselfish decisions. Greed is now a respectable Virtue and Envy a fine spur to ‘ambition’, or the lust for power. The Lie is commonplace. The old Virtues are mocked and reviled. They roar with laughter at the noblest sentiments and aspirations. It is why I stopped going to watch for glimpses of myself and Mrs Cornelius at the National Film Theatre. The Roads to Yesterday and other great moral fables of our time were the subject of scarcely suppressed mirth. Now occasionally on TV I get to see a 20s movie not entirely murdered by the introduction of a mocking soundtrack. In those days the cinema was worth visiting. It had moral responsibility; it recognised its influence on the public - it offered a new morality, sometimes, too - to lift them above the level of the greedy herd - a level of aspiration. The Roads to Yesterday with Hopalong Cassidy and Vera Reynolds (whom I met years later in the flesh and was able to congratulate on her performance) showed us the world of the past and illuminated the world of today. On the same day I saw a last lyrical tribute to an older West by William S. Hart who had been superseded by the glamorous daredevil Tom Mix in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Range with Charlie Chan. I enjoyed Ricardo Cortez and Betty Carney in The Pony Express. I was astounded by The Lost World, which I had read as a Strand serial, with Wallace Beery and Bessie Love - it captured my imagination that year until I saw We Moderns, that great moral fable for our time with its powerful climax as the jazz-babies dance obliviously on the deck of the great airship unaware of the plane about to crash into the hull! Certainly, it was based on Zangwill’s book. I have never said that all Jews were immoral! I also saw She with Betty Blythe, Lord Jim and The Wizard of Oz, but We Moderns made the lasting impression and I would have gone to see it more times if I had not begun to realise I was running short of money.
By now I also had the company of some of those ‘jazz-babies’ I watched on the screen. Joan Crawford, Clara Bow and Alberta Vaughan were all ladies who found me attractive enough to spend a little time with and through them, of course, I could obtain good-quality cocaine. The excellent cocaine helped me get a better grip on the truth of my situation. The remaining money in my bank account, together with the assets I had brought with me, would keep me for little more than a month (especially with regular visits to Madame France’s) and I had no wish to borrow money from Mrs Cornelius. She had of course made her generous purse available to me. I was anxious to avoid association with Hearst for a while. I recalled my meeting with Mucker Hever’s erstwhile partner, Goldfish. He had suggested I send him my synopsis of White Knight and Red Queen. As always, rather than mourn a ruined opportunity, I concentrated on reviewing my immediate resources. I had no intention of becoming a full-time script-writer, but I had to earn some money quickly and this was the only way in which I might do that. I would, of course, continue to seek for my inventions a backer with more vision than Hever, an ‘angel’ whose interest in my work was moved by something more substantial than an ‘inflatable conscience’. Equally, I was determined not to take advantage of Mrs Cornelius’s offers to have her boyfriend employ me: I had learned my lesson in that area, at least for the moment!
Thus, from the plethora of pretty, talented and sexually experienced young girls who in those days flooded the market, I found a competent typist and had her write out the plot of the play Mrs Cornelius and I had given up and down the State. In essence I performed the whole thing for her, scene by scene, while she took notes. She was able to help a little with my English spelling, which was not perfect in those days, and before long we had produced some dozen pages ready to send to the famous maverick producer, hero and victim of two great film companies, who by this time had changed his name to Goldwyn and was again starting up as a patron of quality films. ‘Rubbish,’ he often argued, ‘has no long-term shelflife. With your quality you have an investment, a high profit margin which will last you for years.’ It was this belief in quality as a matter of commercial good sense which was to win me to him and offer us both a somewhat radically different place in cinema history. My one regret is that Mrs Cornelius and I were cut from von Stroheim’s Greed. The pirate Meyer took it over and cut forty-two reels to ten! It was a travesty of what all who saw the first version agreed was the greatest movie ever made. It was a masterpiece of epic realism. I would even be prepared to say it eclipsed Birth of a Nation, but von Stroheim was never the professional Griffith was.
Madge Puddephet, my secretary, a pretty girl from Missouri, was impressed by my casual familiarity with the personalities of the screen world. She herself was a great admirer of Mrs Cornelius and, soft-hearted as I was, I promised to get her my friend’s autograph. (Madge later became famous as Vivienne Prentiss, with a particularly large following in France. Drink ruined her but when I knew her she was a smart little jazz-baby who was amazed I should even have heard of Hannibal, let alone spent time there. I did not see any point in explaining the circumstances.) She came to my hotel twice a day and of course it was not long before our natural attraction took us, almost without realising it, to bed. Those were the years before Hollywood succumbed completely to the bourgeois ideal, the notion of the ‘normal’, and Madge provided the consolation I needed. She had been trained, like so many of these girls, by her father.