This failure to inspire enthusiasm in directors was Esmé’s constant disappointment and I still had nothing like the influence needed to force some studio boss to acknowledge her talent. In all honesty I did not think screen-acting was the right occupation for my darling, who was far too sensitive for such a life. Much as I loved her I found her thirst for the limelight a trifle disconcerting since I knew she had no way of controlling that fame once she had it and her real inclinations were those of a homeloving little girl who wanted nothing more than to look after her adored husband, her ‘dadda’ as she sometimes called me, and to iron my shirts. For a while she even tried to make me jealous by hinting that the Jew ‘Chaplin’, well known for definitively paedophiliac inclinations, was interested in her. But every girl Chaplin favoured appeared in his films and Esmé was never offered a contract. Arbuckle died a dishonoured martyr while his ambitious rivals went on to greater and greater triumphs. I personally had no liking for the little communist. He never made me laugh. I told him so to his face one night, at a party of Norma Talmadge’s. He remarked that he didn’t mind a bit. ‘As a matter of fact I don’t find you very funny, either,’ was his nonsensical retort. I am not, after all, the comedian! Some mensch! Such mishegass! What can one make of such people?
With my DeLuxe contract signed and sealed I lived a life of gorgeous variety, surrounded by every kind of beauty, enjoying every type of pleasure. At MGM and Paramount marvellous cities were created in a matter of days; whole countries were born out of my brain and my hands, as if I, myself, had been blessed with the gifts of the great Thief, merely to rub a brass bottle and unleash limitless power, to have a thousand slaves at my disposal, a million warriors to command! The most beautiful women in the world, wearing exotically elegant clothing, the costumes of a score of centuries, graced my invented universe and more than one of them found me attractive. In my first featured screen roles with Fox it had been my destiny forever to threaten and never to be fulfilled in my designs upon the female sex, but off-screen it was a rather different story. Those Hollywood girls were perverse. For a night or two at least they found my screen role attractive; they wanted me to be the heartless creature whom Buck Jones or Hoot Gibson gunned down in the last reel and, since they desired it, I was sometimes willing to please them. This ‘Valentino-craze’ was a welcome relief, I’ll readily admit, from a somewhat paternal role with my little fiancée. Now I see how my life was beginning to resemble Faust’s after Mephistopheles became his servant. More than one of my parties might have been the original for the Walpurgisnacht revels. So many stimulants and narcotics were involved that I have only the haziest memories of soft flesh, of wild hair, of sweat, of jewellery and a confusion of discarded silk. I was being given everything I had ever desired and more. I was only twenty-five years old. How could I know that I was so close to falling into the Devil’s power? Satan was even then gaining the ascendancy which, by the 30s, was to make Hollywood little more than a propaganda tool of socialist Jewry. Ah, Goethe, what a message you still have for all of us!
On May 5, 1925, I began my first starring role with DeLuxe in the serial White Aces which ostensibly featured Buddy Brown as the daring young English Ace but it was Max Peters as his friend Count Topolski, the daring Russian flyer, who stole the first episode so that by the fifth reel, ‘Spies from the Skies’, ‘Ace’ Peters was sharing equal billing. In those days the one-reel serial was often used to fill ten or fifteen minutes’ space while the other projector was set up for the main feature, so a serial star was as well known to the public as Valentino or Swanson. Very soon my salary came to one hundred and ten a week and I was again a flyer for ten episodes of The Air Knights, leading my squadron of gentlemen volunteers against the German hordes and then, in Send for the Air Knights, fifteen chapters of equally hazardous derring-do against the new enemies of America, foreign business interests and their criminal stooges. This was followed by some three-reelers, Ace of the Aces, Aces Up, Aces and Kings and others, in which I played a flyer with all the authority of an expert. Because of my value to the studio, it was left to others to do the flying (much of which was borrowed footage, to save money) though I, of course, appeared in the cockpit while the dogfights and so on were projected onto a screen behind me, giving a wonderful illusion of reality. But it was my first starring Western part, where I took to the saddle as The Masked Buckaroo in a hugely successful ten-chapter programmer, which had the public calling for more Masked Buckaroos, that made my half-hidden face more famous than La Roque’s or Cooper’s! Lessor seemed to be having trouble with colleagues at MGM suspecting him of ‘moonlighting’ and wanted to make, he said, the most of our roll. We began to shoot two or three reels a day - completing a serial in less than a working week! These were heady times! What was more, Goldfish sent word that he liked my script but felt someone a little more conversant with English should, as it were, polish it up. He offered me a further $1000, which I decided to accept, which is how Red Queen and White Knight came to appear some while later as Mockery with Ricardo Cortez, Barbara Bedford and, at my suggestion, Lon Chaney in the starring parts. I still have the cuttings about it from a magazine I found a few years ago when I was dealing in general second-hand goods. The Picturegoer described my film as an important story for our times and thought Chaney gave one of his most touching performances as Sergei the Harelip, a peasant with intelligence and spirit, who loves the heroine from afar and eventually dies defending her honour from the Red Army. Photoplay Magazine found the suspense ‘marvellously sustained’. I always felt a little betrayed that in the end ‘Walter Seaman’ claimed most of the story. But by that time I suppose he had learned from Goldfish the art of crediting himself with the work of others! I have never seen the film, in spite of writing many times to the BBC and the National Film Theatre. They went so far as to claim that the picture never existed, though I sent them copies of the cuttings. They told me that there was only a limited audience for the silent films. This, at least, I could believe. The taste of the public has been thoroughly corrupted since the Levant established its home-away-from-home in Hollywood. I am grateful for having experienced a little of the Golden Age before Mephistopheles captured the city as the Turks captured Constantinople in 1493. Then the Jews had flooded in from Spain, having been banished by a triumphant Christian king and a Church determined to cauterise their country’s diseased wounds and rid it forever of the corrupting influences of Hebrew and Moslem alike.
I saw a new Byzantium. I saw her rising from the seas where the nations of the world all meet. I saw her feasted upon by carrion, her stink carried on a foul wind from the East, her glories despised, her achievements forgotten, her meaning distorted. She was to have been the capital of Christendom, the seat of her wisdom. Her works would have brought light to the entire planet. Hollywood’s power could have transformed the globe. I should have been one of her most influential architects. But I do not think I was destined for much happiness. Soon my life became full once more of unwelcome complications. What disgustingly small minds, what small ambitions, what miserable goals most people have! How they hate those who are prepared to risk a little more, to seek both the dangers and the rewards of life! How disappointed I have been to discover that even those I cared for and trusted were not only incapable of sharing my vision and my humanity, but actually feared it! By October 1925 I had become an established and respected figure in Hollywood. I was everything that city most admired. I had looks, success, brains, imagination and my own starring part in feature films. My success as The Masked Buckaroo was followed by four more serial stories, The Masked Buckaroo’s Return, Buckaroo’s Code, Buckaroo Justice and The Masked Buckaroo at Devil’s Jump. These were snapped up by the distributor so that I was next given by DeLuxe the role of Captain Jack Cassidy - the Ace of Aces - in their 15-part Ace Among Aces (with Gloria Cornish!), then The Sky Hawks, and Heaven’s Hell-riders. By now the showcards displayed the name with which I would become most famous. To Hollywood and the world I was ‘Ace’ Peters, The Sky Hawk. The studio made a great deal of my wartime flying career and my pioneering flights, but did not feel it was sensible to mention that most of this had occurred in my native Russia. Popular as I was in the role of flying ace, it was The Mysterious Vigilante - the young cowboy-turned-law-bringer Tex Reardon, in mask and chaps - whom the public most demanded. Within a few weeks I was back in Lone Star Buckaroo, The Fighting Buckaroo and Buckaroo’s Buddy. Even when, one Monday morning, I turned up at ‘Gower Gulch’ with others to begin Song of the Buckaroo to find most of the studio dismantled, the office furniture gone and no sign of an executive anywhere, I was undismayed. We were, it seemed, only minutes ahead of the bailiff. With the director’s help I was able to gather up and hide a good many canisters of film - in most of which I starred. These were smuggled to my car and from there to my home. I was not at that time especially upset. I had already planned to leave DeLuxe and find a better studio. As young Tex Reardon, sworn to bring justice to the West, I had attained great moral and artistic success - in spite of the fact that most of the time my lower face was covered by a bandanna. The enormous popularity of The Masked Buckaroo (based on the adventures by Earl G. Stafford in All-Star Weekly and Munsey’s) made me a hero, frequently invited to open rodeos, which I was obliged to decline because the studio thought my accent was not Western enough. Now I had three careers: to MGM I was a set designer, to Goldfish a writer and to the public a major star! Yet so little interest did Hollywood’s moguls take in one another, let alone the rest of us, that not one of them realised the truth! Many women found my features romantic, they said I was a more refined Valentino. Some were prepared to fight for my favours.