he: A Novel(12)

He steps into the sunlight, and takes their luck with him.





26


He meets Carl Laemmle only briefly. Carl Laemmle is a busy man.

The functionary who deals with him does not notice his clean shoes, or his pressed suit, or his shirt bleached for the whiteness of it. It does not matter. Carl Laemmle has spoken, and he is to be hired.

A fee is agreed. It is not much. It never is.

It does not matter.

Four pictures.

Four pictures for the Universal Film Manufacturing Company.

Four pictures for the units known as the L-KO Motion Picture Kompany and Nestor Comedies.

Four pictures that are already written, but not with him in mind. He will dine on another man’s leavings.

It does not matter.

He does not ask if there is a role for Mae. If he succeeds, Mae will rise with him. This is what he tells himself.

He tells himself that it does not matter.

Four pictures. He plays a suitor, a farm worker, a waiter, and a sanitarium supervisor. He plays them well, or as well as anyone can, and that is the problem: any actor could play these roles, and as yet he has no character. He no longer even has his own name.

And there is no love for him on the lot. The faces here are leaner yet than those in the theater.

Rube Miller does not want competition.

Neal Burns does not want competition.

Walter Belasco does not want competition.

Even Charlie the elephant does not want competition, because there are only so many peanuts to go around.

Someone whispers that Chaplin considered hiring him for his stock company, but decided against it. Carl Laemmle, he is told, is doing Chaplin a favor by taking him on, because Chaplin feels sorry for him. He is a charity case. He should go back to vaudeville, to rat-gnawed bags of corn for popping, and dressing rooms shared with midgets and jugglers and ventriloquists, and nickel meals at lunch counters in towns only a generation advanced from dust.

And although he wishes to be like Chaplin, neither is he like these others. He wishes to be in pictures, but he does not hate the stage. He is A.J.’s seed, and has never forgotten Pickard’s Museum, and the act worked up before dolls, and A.J.’s voice asking where he got his gags, the gags he procured, the gags he invented. He has Mae. They can work the theaters; the Pantages Circuit is waiting.

The four pictures are completed by October. When will they be released? A shrug. Perhaps it will be as it was with Nuts in May. Perhaps they may never be released, and Chaplin will cover the bill with a check, Chaplin’s conscience at ease, a debt never owed now paid to Chaplin’s satisfaction.

By November, he and Mae are lying once again in unfamiliar beds, in rooming houses where men bathe weekly, and only by night.





27


Hal Roach will live so long that Hal Roach will be permitted to dictate his own history, like God conveying His Word to the evangelists. They will record as gospel Hal Roach’s tales of mule-skinning and Yukon prospecting, of ice-cream truck driving and saloon swamping – a term that Hal Roach will generally resist explaining for fear that it may purge the exoticism, because a saloon swamper is so much more esoteric an entity than a janitor, and ‘swamping’ sounds better than emptying spittoons and cleaning blood and shit and vomit from toilet stalls.

Hal Roach, a colorful man trapped in a black and white world, apprehends the value of anecdotage.

Hal Roach comes up the hard way, and learns from those who fall on the climb. Hal Roach acts opposite Jack Kerrigan, the fairy. Hal Roach likes Jack Kerrigan, and does not enjoy seeing him cut loose. Hal Roach is a kind man, but obsessed with refinement. Mack Sennett, Hal Roach’s great rival, is vulgar; Hal Roach is sophisticated. Hal Roach stresses this distinction to anyone who will listen, so it must be true.

Under the guidance of Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd begins to learn and develop. No longer content to imitate Chaplin, Harold Lloyd experiments with a new character. Harold Lloyd finds a pair of dark-framed glasses. Harold Lloyd picks up a boater.

Aided by Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd becomes a star.

But he does not become a star.

He is now twenty-eight, and has begun to despair. Hal Roach gives him work on five one-reel pictures, but when he watches himself on the studio screen he discerns only a poor man’s Harold Lloyd, a pale Chaplin; an anybody, a nobody.

It is summer 1918, but his pictures with Hal Roach will not be seen in summer 1918, or in fall 1918, or even in winter 1918. Time will crawl, dust will gather, and eventually these pictures will be greeted with a kind of muted enthusiasm, which is no enthusiasm at all. But he knew this would be the case, knew it as soon as he left the lot without the promise of more pictures, knew it as soon as he climbed on the streetcar without a glimmer of recognition from those around him, and none likely to become manifest in the future.

He sees the looks on the stairs as he climbs to his room, the eyes of the failed and yet-to-fail. He has squandered their luck, and his own. They have gambled on him once more, and they have lost. They can only hope that some of the luck might come crawling back to them, like a strayed dog that finds its way home again, beaten and hurt, grateful for a familiar corner in which to lick its wounds and recover.

Hal Roach didn’t renew, he tells Mae.

– Hal may yet. Maybe Hal just needs time to think.

– If Hal needs time to think, there’s no thinking to be done.