Max (27 page)

‘Wow! You know what that gives us? That gives us maybe the biggest antitrust action of the year.'

‘Except that we ain't taking it. Snyder sails for France tomorrow. He can buy all the cameras we need there, and they're better than any cameras we can buy here. He's also bringing twenty thousand feet of film stock back with him. We hired two guys away from Edison, where the pay is lousy, and we'll set up our own laboratory.'

‘But Max, you got to bring an action against National. We can pin their ears back.'

‘Freddy,' Max said, ‘what for?'

‘They tried to kill us. We return the favor.'

‘Maybe they done us a favor. I asked Murphy about suing them. He says to go up against people like National and the telephone company and Edison and them cookies up in Rochester, we got as much chance as a snowball in hell. Screw them, Freddy. I got more important things to do.'

Among the more important things were two tickets to J. M. Barrie's play
The Admirable Crichton
. It had opened in New York four years earlier, in 1902, to a very good run, and now it was being revived for a limited run of six weeks in the Clarion Theatre on Fourteenth Street. There were plans to tear down the Clarion and erect an apartment house on the site, but Max held an option to buy the old theatre. His option still held for another three months, and during that period the owners took in limited engagements. Crichton was played by Will Fredrickson, a very competent if not great English actor, and the play was directed by a newcomer to the theatre, Gerald Freedman by name. The function of a director in America was still quite recent. While many plays were done with no particular person in charge of the direction, except for the limited participation of the producer, Sally felt that something as untested and complicated as the motion picture they proposed to make required some sort of theatre person to oversee it. Gerald Freedman's parents lived in Flatbush, and they were neighbors of Sally's parents; when Sally's mother heard that she was writing a moving picture, she suggested Freedman as someone who might be helpful. The fact that Freedman was working in a theatre where Max held an option was merely coincidental, but it did help to provide excellent seats.

Sally was uncertain as to what Max's reaction to Barrie's whimsy and satire would be. To her surprise, he loved the play, delighted with the concept of a butler superior to his master, and when they went backstage, he dropped his usual suspicious and cynical approach to shake hands enthusiastically with Gerald Freedman and to insist that he join them for a late supper at Rector's.

Freedman was a year younger than Max, a couple of inches taller, and already balding. He had large, sad brown eyes behind heavy glasses, a long, narrow face, and a prominent nose – a kind of homeliness that was quite attractive and unusual. The revival of the Barrie play was his first important professional job; before it and since his graduation from City College, he had waited tables in the Palm Restaurant on Bleecker Street and had spent all of his spare hours in the theatre, first as a general gofer, then painting scenery, taking small parts when he could get them, and becoming involved in a number of amateur productions at Cooper Union and at the Henry Street Settlement. Thereby his life line had already crossed Max's twice, once on Henry Street and again at the Clarion Theatre; as Max put it, ‘That's got to mean something, Gerald – Gerry – you don't mind I call you Gerry? You call me Max and Sally is Sally. We're going to be working together a lot, so we won't be formal.'

‘Of course,' Freedman said, ‘I have to be honest. I'm very excited at the kind of opportunity you're offering me, but I've never made a moving picture of the kind Mrs Britsky spoke about –'

‘Neither did anyone else.'

‘– or any kind of moving picture. I mean, I have to be truthful. I don't know anything about moving pictures. I have only the vaguest notion of how they are made.'

‘You went to the nickelodeons?' Max asked him.

‘A hundred times, sure.'

‘Did you see
The Great Train Robbery
?' Sally asked him.

‘Oh, yes, yes. Twice.'

‘Well, if you think of
The Great Train Robbery
as being one incident in a long story that makes some sense, well, that's what we hope to do.'

‘I still don't see what my role would be.'

Max laughed and patted Freedman on the shoulder. Already, at only twenty-seven years, Max was assuming a manner both paternal and feudal. After all, here he was at Rector's, high uptown at Forty-third Street, driven here with his guest in his own carriage, hosting a supper party in what to Max was a restaurant more important if less splendid than Delmonico's. Max did not share in the sense of doom that had overtaken his business associates. When Charley Rector paused at his table to say, ‘Good to see you, Mr Britsky, and Mrs Britsky, lovelier than ever,' it was an accolade that he was already taking for granted. He might have had a few hours of doubt after his encounter with Stanford and Calvin, but it had dissipated, and now there were no questions about the ultimate success of their project. He had won this place, sitting here with his wife and young Freedman under the glittering crystal chandeliers, pouring champagne, eating eggs Benedict, taking just a few spoonfuls of the chocolate soufflé he had ordered for dessert, lighting a fine Havana cigar. Let the others have doubts. He knew he would make these moving pictures because he intended to do it, and what he intended, he did.

‘When the time comes, Gerry, I'll tell you what your job is.'

Not that Max had more than the vaguest idea at that moment. But as he saw it, that was not the, important thing. The important thing was to move ahead, to do it.

The small, cramped, makeshift studio that Edison had built in New Jersey to make his ten-minute films made no sense to Max, but then, neither did he have any clear idea of what a proper moving picture studio should consist of. The Philadelphia operation was being conducted in an old barn, but to Max that was as limited and senseless as Edison's studio. His own thinking was influenced by the legitimate theatres he had taken over and converted into moving picture houses. He admired the backstage height of these old theatres, the way scenery could be pulled up out of sight. He liked the thought of a camera shooting down from thirty or forty feet, although he had never seen such a thing. He was falling into the habit of seeing things with the eye of a camera, squaring off a piece of the reality around him and imagining it on a screen. His distaste for the short subjects shown in the Britsky theatres and nickelodeons had increased over the years, the stupidity and pointlessness becoming something he watched with either indifference or annoyance, and as he sought for a place to make his own films, his excitement at what he proposed to do increased. Day after day, he prowled the streets of Lower Manhattan, rejecting all the suggestions that he might find what he was looking for in New Jersey or in the Bronx. Downtown New York was his home base, his place of sustenance. He had to be there. And finally he found it.

It was an old ice house on Eighteenth Street, between Ninth and Tenth avenues, a building forty feet wide, one hundred feet deep, with a ceiling sixty feet high. The ceiling was the roof of the building, and the inner space was clear except for stairs and landings climbing the rear wall. There was a dray loading platform off the back that opened onto Seventeenth Street. When used as an ice house, the ice would be stacked, the large blocks separated with sawdust, from floor to ceiling, and then sold off for shipping from the top down. Now the place was empty, except for piles of sawdust on the floor. The real estate agent who showed it to Max told him that it could be had for fifteen thousand dollars. The new ice houses had hydraulic elevators; this one was too small and narrow to make the installation worthwhile. ‘Which makes me wonder,' the real estate man said, ‘what you intend to do with it.'

‘Make money,' Max answered succinctly.

Feldman was dubious as he drew up the papers for the purchase of the ice house. ‘It's a crazy building, Max. Suppose we have to sell it. Who'll buy it?'

‘In five years, the lot it stands on will be worth twice what we paid for the building. Trouble is, Freddy, you worry about things.'

‘That's what you pay me for.'

Sam Snyder, on the other hand, was delighted with the building. He returned from France a few days after the purchase was completed, bringing with him the cameras and the thousands of feet of film stock, filled with excitement and news: namely, that George Melies, the French filmmaker, was planning the same kind of dramatic film production Sally had suggested. Undoubtedly, it was in the air. ‘The thing is, Max,' Sam said, ‘that that National crowd can't keep our theatres dark. There'll be moving pictures like ours in France and in England too.'

As for the ice house, Snyder pointed out that many things had to be done, electric power brought in for super-illumination, fans for ventilation, sets to be built once they knew what the story would be, electricians and carpenters to be hired. ‘It's easy to talk about,' he said to Max, ‘but when it comes down to doing it, it's one big son of a bitch, and then if those talking cards of Sally's don't work, we can dump the whole thing.'

‘They'll work,' Max assured him.

Meanwhile, Gerry Freedman had become almost a daily visitor at the house on Sixty-sixth Street. Sally had never met anyone quite like him. To some extent, he shared Max's trait of self-confidence, but he brought with it a sensitivity that Max had never exhibited. He seemed to anticipate Sally's thoughts, to know what her response would be even before he made a suggestion. Without his help and encouragement, she certainly would have abandoned the project, dismissing what she had done as absurd and unworthy.

As far as Freedman was concerned, that first night at Rector's found him completely entranced with Sally Britsky. Each to his own taste. Bert Bellamy described Sally as a frightened mouse. Others saw her as an attractive woman. Max accepted the compliments on the subject of Sally's appearance as, in his words, ‘political horseshit,' since most of it came from men connected in one way or another with Tammany. Once, when he used the expression to Murphy, Murphy said, ‘It has a nicer sound in Irish, my lad. Just blarney.' Yet it never entered Max's mind that Gerald Freedman or any other man could fall in love with Sally. Sally was his wife, the mother of his children, even though she had never been very much of a sexual object as far as Max was concerned, and once Richard and Marion had come into the world, Max and Sally's sexual relationship practically ceased. It was two years since Marion Britsky had entered the realm of the living, but Sally still used the aftereffects of birth and nursing as an excuse to refrain from sex.

Max was entirely willing to go along with her, being comfortable in his relationship with Etta Goodman. His horror of venereal disease still persisted from his youth, but in his mind Etta was a nice, clean Jewish girl, and that she might remain that way, he said, ‘From here on in, you don't look at another man. Understood?'

‘Sure, I understand. So why don't you leave that skinny nothing and marry me?'

‘You know I don't like that kind of talk.'

‘So let me tell you something, Mr Britsky. Don't think I never looked in a mirror. I'm five times as beautiful as your schoolteacher, and maybe I ain't a schoolteacher, but I'm as smart as she is, so don't you tell me I can't look at another man.'

The next time he saw Etta, he presented her with a two-hundred-dollar watch pin to wear on her shirtwaist. But, unmollified, Etta snorted, ‘She gets a mansion and a carriage. I get a watch pin.'

When Sally suggested that they might both be more comfortable in twin beds, Max made no protest, although his mother said in no uncertain terms, ‘It's absolutely the most disgusting thing. It's a shame to everyone's eyes.'

‘Sally wants it that way.'

‘She wants the moon, so go give her the moon.'

‘She hasn't been able to sleep so well since Marion's birth.'

‘God forbid she should lose a night's sleep. Your mother could go without sleep for a week, you don't lift a finger. But Sally don't sleep so good, so right away she needs a separate bed.'

Yet the last thing in the world Sally would have considered was an act of unfaithfulness, even as a mild flirtation. In her world, such things did not happen. Freedman was a friend, someone she could talk to. There was nothing wrong with having a friend. Max felt the same way. He was pleased that Freedman and Sally got along so well. He was aware that he needed talent like Gerald Freedman's for this new venture he had embarked on. He was more than conscious of his own lack of education, and he did not deceive himself into believing that his glibness and his gift for dissembling substituted for knowledge. There was a whole world apart from himself, the world of theatre and books and art, and this world was shrouded in a kind of darkness that confused and troubled him. Freedman was an asset, just as Sally was an asset, and more to the point,' Freedman was a man. Max could not cope with the notion that a woman could deal with complex creative problems, just as he could not even entertain the notion that Sally might be unfaithful to him. For all that he valued Freedman's education and potential skill and taste, he could not imagine Freedman as competition for Sally's affection. Freedman simply did not conform to any of Max's definitions of attractive masculinity.

Freedman and Sally worked together for five weeks. The fact that they had no previous models to compare with and no tradition to guide them gave them a degree of freedom they would not have possessed were they doing a theatrical play, and the fact that neither of them possessed the skill or experience to create a traditional drama did not inhibit them. They were not in competition with Shaw or Ibsen; they were not in competition with anyone, not even with themselves, for they had no real critical faculties, and thus they worked on excitedly yet amiably to the final product.