he: A Novel(28)

Leo McCarey is often present too, sitting in the director’s chair. Leo McCarey and Hal Roach are close, but Leo McCarey and Charley Chase are closer still. In the evenings, over bootleg hooch, Leo McCarey and Charley Chase compose popular songs together.

If he regards Charley Chase closely, he regards Leo McCarey with even greater care, because Leo McCarey is the best director on the Hal Roach lot. Leo McCarey and Charley Chase are one organism, so it is difficult to tell where the work of Leo McCarey ends and the work of Charley Chase begins. Leo McCarey is a rock. Charley Chase has the ideas, and the technical acumen to bring them to the screen, but Leo McCarey anchors the pictures. Also, Leo McCarey does not fuck petite blondes, nor does he smoke marijuana from meerschaum pipes. On the other hand, if there is a cable, Leo McCarey will trip over it, and if there is a bottle, Leo McCarey will break it. Leo McCarey is the only man he knows who has fallen down an elevator shaft and survived. Leo McCarey is the only man he knows who has fallen down an elevator shaft, period. Jimmy Finlayson says Leo McCarey is still alive only because God isn’t trying hard enough. Jimmy Finlayson says this is proof that God is a Catholic.

So he waits for Joe Rock to concede defeat, and he writes, and he directs. He is no Charley Chase, no Leo McCarey, but like Charley Chase, he can act, and when required, he can demonstrate to his stars what he wishes them to do. He directs Mabel Normand, Madcap Mabel. He directs Clyde Cook, the Australian Inja Rubber Idiot, whose name he once read on music hall bills back in England. Clyde Cook can take falls like Buster Keaton. Clyde Cook’s bones bend, but do not break.

And he directs Babe.





56


It is early 1926. He attends a preview of Charley Chase’s new picture, Mighty Like A Moose. Hal Roach is present, and Charley Chase, and Len Powers, the cameraman, and Beanie Walker, the writer, although much of the script is borrowed from Max Linder, who is dead and cannot complain. Max Linder marries a woman half his age, and then convinces her to commit suicide with him in Paris on October 31st, 1925. Max Linder and his bride take Veronal and inject morphine before cutting their wrists. As a result, Jimmy Finlayson remarks that Max Linder is so dead they ought to bury him three times. The New York Times describes Max Linder’s passing as a ‘death compact with his lovely wife’, as though she were personally known to the newspaper and her loss is therefore more acutely felt by it; or because she was lovely while Max Linder was not, which might well be true. Max Linder was a great comedian but, in the end, a poor husband.

Aside from Hal Roach, and Len Powers, and Beanie Walker, and Charley Chase, and Leo McCarey, and him, the theater is loaded with family members and crew. Charley Chase holds a hand counter. So does Beanie Walker.

The picture starts. Charley Chase is a husband who decides to alter his appearance with plastic surgery. Vivien Oakland is his wife, who does the same. They meet, not recognizing each other. They flirt. They go to a party. The party is raided. Charley realizes that his amorous companion is, in fact, his wife, and stages a fight between the two versions of himself to teach her a lesson, but she spots the ruse. Charley gets it in spades. The End.

Mighty Like A Moose is twenty-four minutes long. Charley Chase wants sixty laughs in those twenty-four minutes, but will settle for fifty. Using his hand counter, Charley Chase estimates that the picture already contains more than fifty laughs. So does Beanie Walker, which causes everyone to wonder if there might not be sixty laughs in the picture after all. They work this out over dinner – Leo McCarey, Hal Roach, Charley Chase, Beanie Walker, Len Powers, the ghost of Max Linder, and he. Remove a minute from the picture, they decide, and the laughs will go up. They will reshoot. Not much, but enough.

He takes in everything: the care, the attention to detail, the ambition. He had tried to institute these processes with Joe Rock, but Joe Rock had neither the money nor the vision to indulge him.

Here it is not an indulgence. Here it is a necessity.

How many pictures will be released by Hollywood this year? He estimates four hundred, give or take. Last year, Hal Roach alone produced over seventy pictures. Mighty Like A Moose will be twenty-three minutes long when the Audience finally sees it. The Audience will watch Mighty Like A Moose, laugh, forget it, and want more.

Just twenty-three minutes.

But each minute must be perfect.

He returns to the apartment. Lois is reading.

He takes Lois to bed, to the dark.

To lose himself in the flawlessness of her.





57


At the Oceana Apartments, a young man comes to visit: a writer for television, a fan of his work. The young man is polite, overwhelmed. He tries to put the young man at his ease.

They talk about his pictures. He hates to see them broken up by the advertisements on television. He can understand why it is done, but there is no logic to the interruptions beyond the requirements of time slots. The advertisements interrupt scenes and gags. They destroy the rhythm of what he has created with Babe. The distributors have even butchered the longer features to create shorter shows so that all sense is lost. He has written to them, offering to edit the pictures again for television just so the gags will work better. He will do this for free, he tells them. He has time, and it will not take long. He has watched these pictures often enough. He has already reedited them in his mind. He does not want money. What would he do with it?

The distributors do not reply. He is not surprised. He had only hoped that they might respond.