Jerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3 Read online

  Sometimes, when she proved particularly whimsical or took Meulemkaumpfs 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 Noel 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 mi
llion 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.

  As
usual women were to cause a downturn in my fortunes but in retrospect perhaps I should thank them, even ‘Vivienne Prentiss’, who was perhaps the initiator of my discomfort. Looking back in the light of reason I know I would not have survived the advent of the Talkers, an idea which, ironically, I had myself suggested to an uninterested Goldfish earlier that year. To those peasants any foreigner was a Jew and I had already been insulted as The Masked Bucka-Jew and, The Heebe Who-Flew, not to mention more obscene concoctions, so I need explain to no one how my natural voice would be received and perhaps for this reason, too, Goldfish - happiest in Yiddish - took to me. But I would not have volunteered for my future. Towards the end of 1925 a number of events combined to decide my destiny. The discoveries of Tutenkhamun had led to a wave of story projects set in ancient Egypt, most of which were merely the vehicle for a sex-object and which were of doubtful authenticity. I remember seeing The Queen of Sheba with Fritz Leiber and Betty Blythe, who was supposed to be the new Theda Bara, and thinking how ludicrously bad it was. Leiber’s Solomon was clean-shaven and the costumes the invention of an incompetent design department. Columns bore pictograms which were not even vaguely Egyptianate but derived from Norse and Irish myths! Yet the thing was a great success. There was a plethora of what were called in the trade ‘Sheikh movies’ following the popularity of Valentino’s paean to miscegenation (which must have done untold harm). We had East of Suez, Desert Dust, Her Favourite Camel, Queen of the Pyramids, When the Desert Calls, Feisal, Silk and Sand, Carstairs of the Camel Corps, Burning Gold, Passion’s Oasis, and hundreds more. They were not merely Hollywood productions but from every other country where films were made. Yet there had not been a good picture set in the time of the Pharaohs, unless one counted certain of De Mille’s Biblical subjects. I mentioned this casually to Seaman one day and he became unusually enthusiastic. It seemed he was bored with the flood of sophisticated comedies he had directed and wanted to do something more substantial, an epic. In those days the successful epic was what a director’s reputation finally rested upon. Though no Griffith, he had already seen some of the exhibits brought back from Egypt by Carter and Carnarvon and testified to their beauty. He was gloomily fascinated, too, by a curse which had taken the lives of several members of the expedition and their associates. Carnarvon had been struck down almost as soon as the Tomb was opened and his dog, who had also been there, fell dead mysteriously. Bethell, his secretary, died in peculiar circumstances. Westbury killed himself. Carter’s partner, Mace, died just as he was about to X-ray a mummy. Then Carnarvon’s wife and his two brothers died and Arthur Weigall died of fever. That same night we sketched out an idea for an ambitious story set partly in Ancient Egypt and partly in the present, concerning a love-story between a Queen and her High Priest and a passion so powerful it would last two thousand years. We would work in the idea of the cursed tomb, the consequences of disturbing the dead, and we would call it Tutenkhamun’s Queen. I was already visualising the magnificent sets I could build, the lavish costumes and the gorgeous interiors we could make. I do not remember now whether it was Seaman or myself who conceived the notion of setting our story against the authentic landscapes of Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the Pyramids. I could see no reason against the idea. It made artistic sense. The light was, if anything, better than California’s and, with the British in charge, there should be no working difficulties. Seaman grew enthusiastically determined to show the story to Goldfish, who was specialising only in epics. I thought no more of it except to hope that ‘Walt’ himself might be struck down by the Curse of Tutenkhamun. I resented his proprietorial attitudes towards ‘his’ star, my friend, who would always see her film career as a ‘bit of a larf’. Mrs Cornelius took her luck, she said, as it came. She saw no point in trying to hang on to it. It should be enjoyed to the full while it was available. This is the simple philosophy which kept her sane and by which she survived.