Max (32 page)

‘Wait, wait, wait. Please, Max. What three other pictures?'

‘You can't tie up a house with one picture. They play it a week, and what then? They go to National, and National says fuck off. You want to do business with Britsky go do business with Britsky. So what do I tell them – buy our print and go out of business? So this morning I had a meeting with Freedman and Sally, and I told them to start right in with three more pictures.'

‘What do we use for money?' Stein wailed.

‘You know something, Jake, you and Freddy work that out. Because in ten days from now, we are going to open
The Waif
. One theatre first, and then the next day in the others, but first an opening night at the Palace on Twenty-third Street, and it's going to be as classy as a real theatrical opening, and we're going to have the mayor and maybe the governor and whoever else Murphy thinks should be there, and after the opening, where we run the picture just once, I'm going to give a party at Rector's for three hundred people. We got a goose that's going to lay golden eggs like nobody ever dreamed about.'

Richard Britsky was three years old. His sister, Marion, was a year and seven months. Both of them had their father's blue eyes; both of them were healthy, round-faced children. They had a nurse to take care of them, a Mrs Berger, a German-Jewish widow whom Sarah Britsky hated and who taught the two little children to call Sarah
Omar
, a word Sarah hated; and since Mrs Berger served as an antidote to her mother-in-law, Sally tolerated her rigidity and took comfort in the fact of her ethnic origin. On the other hand, the situation of the nurse or governess in the brownstone with the two beautifully dressed children was never quite real to Sally. As for Max, he accepted it as a matter of course, a natural development. When he had time for the children, he admired them; playing with them was beyond him; but he insisted that their lives should be the absolute opposite of what his had been.

Freedman played with the children, Sally noted. The nurse was off for the day and Sally had the children, but, as Freedman put it, ‘Max says we can't lose a day. He's really terribly insistent.'

‘Yes, Max's world consists of things he wants done yesterday. That's because nobody else is like Max, thank God.'

‘Well, he is unusual.'

‘If you keep looking at me like that, Gerry, we won't get much done.'

‘Which way? Oh, you mean with cow-eyes. But it's not just that, but I saw a painting in the museum and it was so like you, that dress with the stripes –' He took off to catch up with Richard. Marion began to cry. Sally picked her up and rocked her.

‘They'll nap soon. Then we can talk.'

Richard began to cry. Freedman made faces and stuck out his tongue.

‘I know it annoys you if I talk about how I feel about you,' Freedman said, ‘so I'll try not to, and actually –' Richard howled.

‘I think they both want a nap,' Sally said. ‘I'm not the best mother in the world or I wouldn't put them into the hands of that dreadful German. But she's so efficient.'

They carried the children up to the nursery. The children had stopped crying and were gurgling with laughter. They enjoyed having Gerry around. He sang little songs to them and made faces at them and swung them up and down in his arms. ‘You should have children,' Sally said to him. ‘You absolutely should be married and have children, you're so good with them.'

‘Only because they're your children.'

‘Well, there you go again. You mustn't keep doing that, Gerry.' He stood watching, listening, while Sally sang to the children, and when they were asleep, he and Sally tiptoed out of the room.

Sally was very businesslike. ‘You know what Max is like when he sets his mind to something. He wants to start photography in ten days, and then he wants to start a second picture two weeks after that.'

‘He wants the moon, doesn't he? He's also a little crazy when it comes to such things. We have to tell him that it can't be done that way.'

‘Well, perhaps. I'm not sure. You know,' Sally said, ‘the feeling that it's impossible makes it so much more exciting, and last night I lay awake for hours, just thinking about all the marvelous things we can do with that camera. I was thinking about that dreadful
General Slocum
tragedy; it was so heartbreaking, so awful. If we made a moving picture about it –'

‘Oh, no, Sally – all that suffering and horror!'

Sally had referred to an incident that had happened four years ago. There was a prosperous, vital community of German immigrants located between Tompkins Square and the East River, just to the north of the sprawling Jewish community. Each year, St Mark's Lutheran Church, located in the center of their area, organised a Sunday school picnic, and this time, in June of 1904, the community hired an old side-wheeler excursion boat to take the mothers and their children to Locust Grove, on Long Island Sound. Very few men went along; it was for the most part mothers and their children, and 1400 of them were packed into the old boat. Steaming up the East River, the ship caught fire, turned into a blazing inferno, and caused the worst maritime tragedy in the history of the port of New York. Over a thousand women and children died on the
General Slocum
, tearing the heart out of the German community and plunging them into a period of mourning and despair from which they did not emerge for years.

‘Oh, yes, yes,' Sally agreed. ‘It was horrible beyond imagination, but isn't that the substance of so many books and plays? I don't mean to repeat what happened on the
General Slocum
, but a film about a ship on fire – it's so close to all of us in the city. I would want to save most of the people.'

‘I don't know, it's so recent.'

‘But you suggested the war in Cuba.'

‘Yes, I guess you're right. I suppose that if you want to excite people, you show them terrible and exciting things. Do you have a story worked out? We could talk about it.'

It became the second Max Britsky production,
The Tragedy of the Lucy Gray
.

Meanwhile, Max planned the opening of
The Waif
. Fred Feldman worked out a letter as follows: ‘As a theatre critic, you have perhaps ignored the world of the moving picture, the nickelodeon, the storefront projection booth. Certainly, if you happened to wander into any theatre playing what is euphemistically called a motion picture drama, you found good reason to continue to ignore such places. However, I do believe that we have created a moving picture that breaks all the strictures of the past, that establishes a new arena of entertainment, and that has no precedent. It is the first of its kind and is thereby of historic importance. I am enclosing two tickets for the opening night and with them an invitation for you and your companion to a party at Rector's, to follow the showing of our great motion picture, entitled
The Waif.
'

Max signed the letter, which was sent to the theatre critics on the
New York Times
, the
New York Tribune
, the
Sun
, the
Journal
, and the
Herald
. Feldman was dubious about calling it a great motion picture, but Max insisted on inserting the adjective. ‘We are not hiding lights under any bushels,' he said.

Boss Murphy introduced Max to Stephen Allison, who functioned as a sort of link between Tammany Hall and the Social Register, and Allison provided the names of two dozen luminaries who were numbered among the Four Hundred – as the social elite were called, there being, supposedly, only four hundred people worthy of social recognition in the city – and who would almost certainly attend the opening as well as the party to follow. Invitations were also issued to the political elite and to leading people in the Yiddish and English-speaking theatre. Max spent money as if it were going out of style, taking large advertisements in all of the local newspapers to announce the opening at the Palace and then, a day later, the openings at the nine other theatres. He also hired two hundred sandwich-board walkers to parade through the streets of the city. The Palace was sold out days before opening night, and such was the excitement generated that he had to sell advance tickets in the other theatres as well. At that point, every dollar had been exhausted, and Max was borrowing from Bert and Snyder and anyone else he could hit for hard cash. Fortunately, the loan from the Chase Bank came through two days before the opening: half a million dollars to the credit of Max Britsky Productions.

Meanwhile, Max's mother and his three sisters had been running up their own share of the indebtedness – gowns made to order, new shoes, new wraps. Sheila was married to a young man to whom Max had given a job, one Donald Greenway, whom Max had generously termed ‘Donald the schmuck,' and there too the accouterments were charged to Max, as were the trappings of Ruby's wife, the former Kathy Sullivan, whom Sarah avoided like the plague. But Max was indifferent to the expenditure of money. In itself, it had no meaning or lure for him; it was important only as a means to an end. Perhaps his own past made it almost impossible for him to ask what anything cost. In hiring the actors for
The Waif
, he never quibbled about their pay. He gave them what they asked.

And whatever the opening of
The Waif
cost Max, it turned out just as he had planned it. The crowds of onlookers filled Twenty-third Street to the point where the police had to clear a path for the carriages. The gas company had installed special mantles that bathed the street in white light; and one after another, carriages intermixed with automobiles drove up to discharge their elegantly clad occupants. Max himself, in tails that had been made for this occasion, stood at the entrance to the theatre. Most of the people were strangers to him; still, he bathed in the glow of the occasion, and in his mind a process took place that was to repeat itself over and over during the years to come namely, that this thing,
The Waif
, was his creation, aided and abetted by Sally and Freedman and Snyder and a cast property men, electricians, carpenters, but only aided and abetted by all such, and mainly and mostly his own creation, Max Britsky presents. ‘So all of you marching into this theatre, just take note and remember, Max Britsky presents –'

Finally, he entered himself, not to sit down, but to join Sally and Freedman and Snyder, all of them standing behind the last row of the orchestra. At stage left of the old stage – for the Palace had been a great legitimate theatre – a violinist stood by a grand piano, and as the audience finished seating itself, he began to play, accompanied by the pianist, none other than Isadore Lubel, first of Max's piano players, doing a medley arranged by Lubel himself out of
La Belle Helène
, by Offenbach. While it was not quite in the mood to introduce
The Waif
, the fact that Offenbach was Jewish persuaded Max to allow Lubel to have his way. While Max's musical acumen left something to be desired, his sense of style and hype was well developed. He had printed programs for the opening, and it pleased him to have there ‘Overture by Offenbach, arrangement by Lubel.' More to the point, Lubel had found a fiddler who could adapt instantly to the changes of mood, time, and intensity that Lubel performed on the piano.

The film began and ran its course for the following eighty-six minutes. Max, Sally, Freedman, and Snyder stood and watched with the nervous intensity of loving parents. They listened for the nose-blowing and throat-clearing and whispered triumphantly, ‘Tears. Tears.' When it finished, the audience broke into a storm of hand-clapping and shouts of ‘Bravo! Bravo!' ‘Go on, Max,' Snyder urged him. ‘Go on up there. They want someone to take a bow. This ain't no nickelodeon audience. These are uptown swells, the same as an opening in a legitimate house.'

‘Come on,' Max said to Sally, taking her arm. ‘You began it, you done it. Take some credit.'

She shrank back, pleading, ‘No, Max. I couldn't. I just couldn't.'

‘It's eating candy. Let them see I got a wife.'

‘No. Please!'

‘OK,' Max agreed, thinking, I got nothing – nothing, and then he marched down the aisle, vaulted onto the stage, and spread his arms for an end to the cheers.

‘Thank you,' Max said. ‘I thank you with all my heart. Tomorrow,
The Waif
opens in all ten of the Britsky theatres. Our second film masterpiece is already in production, and a third one is on the drawing board. Thank you for watching our great effort tonight.'

The party at Rector's was no less a success. There was nothing quite like Rector's in America or, as some held, in all the world; and Max's entree there, into the gates of heaven, as New York measured such things, came out of a meeting with Charley Rector arranged by Boss Murphy. Max Britsky and Charley Rector fell into an instant communion. They harked back to similar beginnings. Charley Rector had driven a horsecar on the Seventh Avenue line, but life smiled on him when he opened a seafood restaurant in Chicago and discovered that by the simple expedient of cooking oysters lightly in real cream with a bit of delicate seasoning, one had a dish that kings could envy. His oyster stew brought him fame and fortune, and he took his money back to New York, where he created the most famous restaurant of the time, Rector's, a long, yellow, two-story building facing Broadway between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets. On the main floor, in the great spread of mirrors and chandeliers, one hundred tables were set, that the elegant, the famous and infamous, the talented, the rich, and the mighty might dine. Upstairs, on the second floor, those without fame or elegance might have the privilege of dining at Rector's or, on special occasions, the whole of the second floor was given over to private parties, such as Max Britsky's party on the opening night of
The Waif
. That was the case tonight, and Max paid seven thousand dollars for sixty tables of invited guests. Charley Rector's son, George, his round, fat face wreathed in smiles over his huge belly, greeted the guests with the ultimate acknowledgment of belonging, a warm, slightly moist handshake. The accolade was not without significance in the social circle as well as the sporting crowd of New York City. To be known and greeted by the Rectors, father or son, was no small achievement, and for Max a significantly large achievement. Not only was he here, but two full tables that he had placed at the disposal of Sally's family had brought them – Sally's father and mother and aunts and uncles and cousins – to Rector's, a place as far beyond their dreams or aspirations as Delmonico's, more elite than Rector's but less famous and enticing – had brought them here where Max could greet them in his cutaway coat and forgiving smile. He forgave them their early opinion of himself and the other Britskys.