Jerusalem Commands Page 10

  My natural skill as a draughtsman, the basics of which I had come by, of course, at the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, impressed Menzies. He said I had the kind of imagination that was best suited for movie work. I thought big, he said, but more importantly I produced designs which could be built and used. He was a great believer in the fluid camera and while he admired his master, Grot, he felt that Grot’s particular talent produced a beautifully static set. It was from Menzies that I learned most about designing for the films.

  When I heard he was out at Korda’s studios during the War I tried to contact him. He was not very far from where I was living in Hammersmith at the time but even though I explained I was calling from a pay box at enormous cost I could not get anyone to bring him to the telephone. He was a fellow spirit. In the late thirties he would be the guiding hand behind a picture that came closer to the spirit of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation than anything I have ever seen.

  The title was not to my taste and the thing was spoiled a little by the inclusion of that insipid halbjuden ‘Howard’ with his dyed blond hair, but Gone With the Wind was a wonder to me when I saw it at the Kilburn State soon after arriving in England in 1940. In its silent predecessor Gloria Cornish played the part of Nellie and now another Englishwoman, Vivien Leigh, reminded me so much of my Esmé, and yet she also had the determination of Mrs Cornelius. Of course, Clark Gable was magnificent. A flyer, in real life, like myself. With Fairbanks (and myself ) he represented the American virtues of manly courage and rugged good-humoured honesty. Now save for John Wayne such virtues have all but disappeared from the screen. I remember Goering, also a flying man, in that jocular but at the same time deeply serious way of his, saying, ‘What are we going to do about America?’ This, I need hardly say, was at a time when Hitler had not been goaded into war by those interests most resistant to his ideals. Wohin gehen wir jetzt? I could have told him then.

  At first Menzies gave me a few individual scenes to develop for Schenk’s comedy Her Sister From Paris with Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman. This did not require any great imaginative efforts, especially for the scenes Menzies entrusted to me, but it got me work on The Eagle, Valentino’s next film, in which we could indulge our lavish fantasies. We designed and built some of the screen’s most gorgeous sets.

  They were romantic, extravagant (though not especially costly) and were the very spirit of everything I had ever demanded from the moving picture play. Unfortunately, although our designs were made and used, the script was lightweight and the film was not a particular success. I can, incidentally, be identified in several scenes as Valentino’s stand-in. Valentino chose to blame me for his failure, since the studio had refused to let his ludicrous spouse work on another picture. Not wishing to make an overt enemy of the more powerful Menzies, she took against me. Menzies however proved a good friend and by then every studio in Hollywood knew what Valentino and the pseudo-aristocrat were like. I did not, in the end, work with Menzies on the remaining Valentino picture, but he did give me scenes for Graustark and What Price Beauty? in which Mrs Cornelius had an important rôle but in which my only featured scene was cut. Gradually I grew to love my new medium. I became familiar with every creative and practical function. I built palaces, monuments, whole cities, I even populated them—sometimes as hero, sometimes as villain—and, for a while at least, my genius was satisfied. Lon Chaney became my patron—possibly because I did not condescend to him as some of the parvenu starlings did. He had been a professional most of his life, which had not been an easy one, and like me had begun his career as a travelling player. Perhaps he recognised in me some version of his younger self. Whatever it was, he took me in hand and for a while was my guiding light through the hazardous maze of Hollywood. Though he himself nursed an abiding love for a legless married woman and was frequently in despair, he yet found time to advise me on matters of etiquette, on brothels and their inmates, on drinks and their various properties. While he did not introduce me to the pleasures of opium and hashish, then undergoing a small vogue with the fad for things Oriental freshly stimulated by the discovery of the treasures of Tutenkhamun, he had excellent advice about the properties of the drugs and the character of those who dealt in them. Together we toured Chinatown. Menzies enjoyed such drugs. With their help he created two of the most memorable Arabian Nights fantasies ever seen by an awed public. One was for Fairbanks, the other for Korda. Both were called The Thief of Bagdad. (The nickname was enjoyed by Samuel Goldfish for a while, though he was not of Mesopotamian Jewish origin. Neither Goldwyn nor Goldfish is an Iraqi name!) Though Chaney advised me to stay away from such people, to sign a contract with one of the smaller studios and got me a screen-test with DeLuxe, there was hardly time to think. I was being given design and acting jobs as fast as I could say ‘yes’. It would have been foolish to say ‘no’ since there was no telling when it might not suddenly end. As a freelance I was frequently paid in cash. But a studio contract, as an actor and director, would bring me all kinds of security and that was, after all, what Esmé so keenly desired. It offered decent security and steady weekly money. I would accept it. Meanwhile I was saving my dollars. I had them in the Bank of Southern California earning eleven per cent interest. I was becoming for the first time in my life a citizen of material substance and responsibility. Increasingly I had the company of Esmé whenever she could get away from G.W. Meulemkaumpf, who had become her official sponsor in the US, and could withdraw his patronage if he discovered she was already engaged. While I understood the difficulties of her position the situation remained painful, even with the resourceful Jacob Mix as a reliable intermediary. In my worst moments I remembered that she was after all virtually my own creation. Had she not been Esmé Loukianoff’s half-sister, she would still be in Galata contracting diseases and earning pennies from a hundred nations’ sailors.

  Sometimes, when she proved particularly whimsical or took Meulemkaumpf’s part too enthusiastically, I was tempted to remind her that if I had not found her she would bear a close resemblance by now to her hideous witch of a mother. But that would have been unfair. I loved her, after all, with a love above self, nation or even, sometimes (I will admit), duty. And my love translated itself into intense passion during our brief times together. Sometimes my love was so overwhelming I made her laugh.

  My capacity to love impressed the usually cynical Mrs Cornelius. She doubted in all her life she’d seen a man make more of a fool of himself over a woman, particularly a bloke who was doing so well. It was not in my nature, I explained, to hurt my little girl. She would have no reminders of her origins from me. To raise such questions would be to threaten that delicate and most precious illusion of all: of my Esmé (who gave satisfaction to anarchist Cossacks) reborn (virgin once more) in the slums of Constantinople. I am not an idiot. ¿Cuanto se tarda? I can tell truth from fiction. I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day in everything that’s light and shade. I’ll be looking at the sun but I’ll be seeing you. ¿Es viu? No, és mort. ¡Era blanca com la neu! Si hi ha errores els corregiré. Elmelikeh betahti! Elmelikeh betahti! Oh, how I loved them. I lived to make them immortal. I did not become a Musselman. That wire, those pits, were not for me. Mistakes, however, are rarely rectified under such conditions. The Germans worshipped bureaucracy as if it were the ultimate reality. Did Nietzsche teach them nothing? I kept my identity. I am not ashamed of anything. Let them call me golem. At least I am a self-made golem. Ayn ferbissener goylem. And what does it mean in the end? Must every town in Germany called Büchenwald bear the burden of one such place?

  Paid as a freelance by Menzies to fill in jobs for him or to design specific sets, I was like some apprentice to Raphael except that I suspect I was better rewarded for my unacknowledged labours. Menzies was scrupulously fair. I was able to move a little more freely than most Hollywood employees. The so-called ‘Studio System’ had not yet taken complete hold of the industry and designers at least could still work for different producers, though there was
a tendency to stay with one company. I enjoyed producing the sets for Browning’s The Show, which I got not through Menzies but through Chaney, who was a friend of Browning. Even Goldfish did not know I was working for him. The producing studio was the recently formed MGM, now Goldfish’s most hated rival. By a rare coincidence this was also one of the few films starring Mrs Cornelius that I was closely involved in; she appeared under another name with John Gilbert and Lionel Barrymore. ‘Renée Adorée’ remains to this day a mysterious and under-rated actress.

  As Gloria Cornish Mrs Cornelius played second lead to Clive Brook and Greta Nissen in a Paramount picture called The Popular Sin and then her Swedish director took her back to Universal. In a very short time they made a series of sophisticated modern dramas. While she was not always top of the bill, Gloria Cornish became identified with the stylish, highly refined school of acting then being promoted on the London stage in the persons of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. She was a WAMPUS Baby Star with Joan Crawford. She received considerable critical acclaim for Fifth Avenue Models, Peacock Feathers, Woman Chasin’, Watch Your Wife, The Woman Who Did, The Blonde Saint, Carmen Valdez, She Who Stoops and Into Her Kingdom, while I too began at last to have some small successes in my own right, at first under the name of Max Peters. This change was Chaney’s doing, while he insisted I appear in The Phantom of the Opera, which I also helped design, working with the great Ben Carré and a good-natured man called Danny Hall, who would one day be famous for his work on City Lights and All-American Co-Ed. Chaney had made friends with him on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the three of us became bosom buddies for a while, visiting restaurants and nightclubs together and enjoying the pleasures of the town as best hardworking people could. I had begun to work at night with my designs while performing on screen during the days. I have always been granted plenty of energy and the wonderdrug which Freud and Trotsky succumbed to, through inherent weakness of character, has always been a friend to me. Thus I was able to satisfy my darling whenever the opportunity arose and continue to fulfil my duties. Madge, unfortunately, had to be dispensed with. She became unreasonably jealous, more and more dependent on drugs and given to outbursts of pointless rage, perhaps because she was threatened by my association with DeLuxe, perhaps because my fortunes steadily improved and I was obviously destined to be one of Hollywood’s favoured. For a time I managed to see something of my former secretary to sustain her interest with increasingly outré sexual encounters, and attempted to keep her working for me, but she demanded too much. I regret that one night, after I had exhausted myself at Fox all day on a particularly unpleasant horse as Dirk Collingham in Buck Jones’s Lone Star Breed, I told her I no longer wished to use her services. I had been offered $95.00 a week contract with DeLuxe, to star in a new serial idea they had, but saw no point in rubbing salt in her various wounds. Lon Chaney’s friend Sol Lessor had liked what he had seen and was, he said, ‘ready to work’. No older than me, Lessor was one of those ambitious young producers involving himself in a dozen ideas at once. DeLuxe was not his only company. We became friendly in the fifties again when he was over here with RKO making Tarzan movies. He was always generous with his expenses. Madge might not have gone at all but for Chaney and Hall dropping round to suggest a visit to a particularly good cabaret. She threw the hundred dollars I had given her onto the Axminster and stepped through the front door as if she had accidentally walked into a trench of dog-droppings. This caused some hilarity from my friends who enjoyed speculating on why she was so furious. I took this fun in good part, but I was sorry our relationship ended on such an unpleasant note. Madge had been a great comfort and distraction in the times when Esmé was indisposed. Her anger was, as I said, simply jealousy, but then ironically she was beginning to do somewhat better in the acting profession than Esmé. My darling had yet to find a director or a photographer who could capture what was essentially a subtle and sometimes transient beauty. Mrs Cornelius, far from ethereal in real life, was one of those lucky women who could convey enormous presence on the screen while appearing completely casual and insouciant, perfect for the parts her ‘Seaman’ (as Sjöström now styled himself ) had in mind for her.

  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 rôles 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 rôle 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 rôle 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 rôle 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 agai
nst 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 $1,000, 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.