he: A Novel(33)

Afterwards, Lois can’t stop talking about the picture over coffee and pie, as though a Vitaphone needle has injected her also.

But he is ruminating. He is brooding on his craft.

Already this year he and Babe have made some of their most ambitious and successful pictures yet: Do Detectives Think?

Putting Pants on Philip.

The Battle of the Century.

Call of the Cuckoo.

The Second Hundred Years.

And Hats Off.

It is to Hats Off in particular that he now turns. The new lightweight cameras make the picture possible. They allow Babe and him to be filmed carrying a washing machine up a flight of steps at Vendome Street in Silver Lake, all in the misguided hope of selling it to Anita Garvin. But with sound, that picture could not have been made. He can discern this flaw in The Jazz Singer. The Jazz Singer is fixed to stages. It is filmed theater.

Safety Last! could not have been made in the era of sound.

The General could not have been made in the era of sound.

Sunrise could not have been made in the era of sound.

The Crowd could not have been made in the era of sound.

If talking pictures are to be the new reality – and, once unbound, the genie cannot be returned to the bottle – it means that ambition will be constrained by this technology, at least for a period.

Hal Roach, faced with the prospect of spending money, does what Hal Roach always does under these circumstances. Hal Roach rails. Hal Roach wails. Hal Roach tries to bury his head in the sand, like the ostrich that gave Billie Ritchie cancer.

But even Hal Roach knows.

Hal Roach will spend the money in the end, all for sound.

He speaks to Babe of it. Babe, too, has witnessed The Jazz Singer. Babe understands.

The problem – if problem it is, if problem it is to be – is that finally, after many years, each has found a character. For him, it is idiocy without harm, stupidity without malice, love without deceit. For Babe, it is a combination of the myth of his father and a version of himself unmoored from self-doubt and liberated from a surfeit of intelligence. Yet each character alone would not be enough: only together, bound by the inability of one to survive without the other, shackled by a desire to escape this interdependence while secretly acknowledging its impossibility, do they come to life.

So this is to be his identity, shared with, and defined by, another. He feels his features settle into the mask. He breathes. There is no sense of constriction or loss.

This is as it should be.

This is right.

Meanwhile, away from the cameras, he and Babe prepare for the day when they may be permitted – or forced – to speak.





71


At the Oceana Apartments, he recalls Hats Off. He has not seen it in decades.

No one has.

Hats Off has been lost. The Rogue Song, a picture he and Babe made with Lawrence Tibbett, is also gone. Someone at MGM informs him that old nitrate film stock in the studio vault has ignited, incinerating who knows how many pictures, The Rogue Song included.

He liked Lawrence Tibbett. Lawrence Tibbett could sing.

But Lawrence Tibbett is dead. Lawrence Tibbett – arthritic, alcoholic – stumbles in his apartment in July 1960 and hits his head on a table. Lawrence Tibbett possessed a copy of The Rogue Song, but it decomposed after Lawrence Tibbett died.

Which is unfortunate, he thinks, but apposite.

Other pictures he made are missing music and effects, or entire scenes. When he inquires about them, he receives the written equivalent of a shrug, if he receives any reply at all. These things happen, they tell him. Pictures get mislaid. Pictures get damaged. Pictures go up in flames. He accepts this, just as he remembers that distributors once destroyed prints after pictures finished their runs.

Yes, he says, yes. Thank you for letting me know.

The truth is that no one cares enough.

But he would just like to see Hats Off one more time.

He would just like to see The Rogue Song one more time.

He has seen so many of the rest, over and over. He always watches them when they come on television. Yet countless details of these others, the lost pictures, he has forgotten. To view them now would be to watch them anew.

To view them would be to see Babe again.

To view them would be to be with Babe again.





72


In December 1927, his wife gives birth to their first child. They name her Lois.

He holds his daughter in his arms, and finds himself returning to Chaplin, and how Chaplin once held his firstborn in his arms, his baby son.

Just like this, just as he now holds Lois.

And of how that child, Chaplin’s child, lived for just long enough to be named, and no longer.

He wants to call Chaplin. He wants to tell him.

I understand, he wishes to say. I am sorry for all your pain.

But he does not make the call.

And later, he will remember this moment. He will remember it as he holds his own infant son, and will wonder at the entanglements of fate.





73


Hal Roach has his faults, principal among them being a profound imbalance between the length of his arms and the depth of his pockets. Jimmy Finlayson claims that Hal Roach orders his trousers to be made that way, and is forced to sit down just to reach his small change.

Which Hal Roach then uses to pay his employees.

It is now clear that Jimmy Finlayson is never going to be a star. Such an outcome was, by Jimmy Finlayson’s own admission, always unlikely, but a man can hope, and a man can dream. A new hierarchy has been established at Hal Roach Studios, and Jimmy Finlayson sits below two men in derby hats. But these two men remain loyal to Jimmy Finlayson, just as Hal Roach does.