he: A Novel(35)

Karl Dane is dropped by MGM and ends up selling hot dogs outside the studio, then kills himself.

Colleen Moore’s career dies with the flappers.

John Gilbert’s dies with the melodrama.

Lon Chaney just dies.

Douglas Fairbanks just dies.

Renée Adorée just dies.

So their voices, he knows, have nothing to do with their failure to make it in talking pictures. Except for Raymond Griffith, the Silk Hat Comedian, who, at his best, is as good as Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd.

But not Chaplin.

Raymond Griffith can’t get a job in talking pictures because Raymond Griffith has no voice. Raymond Griffith is incapable of speaking above a whisper, and is therefore the perfect silent comedian. Eventually, Raymond Griffith chokes to death over dinner at the Masquers Club because he fails to chew his food properly.

But these ones do not concern him, or not as much as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

Not as much as Chaplin.

Buster Keaton signs to MGM and regrets it. Buster Keaton drinks so much that Buster Keaton marries a woman who doesn’t even remember his name.

Harold Lloyd gets old, and loses the hunger to create. Harold Lloyd will live off his investments and go on to take thousands of nudie photographs of women known and unknown.

Chaplin tries to ignore sound, and makes City Lights. It is a brilliant mistake. But Chaplin is Chaplin, and the same rules do not apply.

And he and Babe watch Hal Roach chew an entire hive of wasps as the studio invests in new sound equipment, and when Hal Roach is ready to record their voices, he and Babe will speak, and movement will be matched to dialogue, and dialogue will be matched to voices, and voices will be matched to faces, and the characters will not change because the characters cannot change, because they are fixed, and have always been fixed, and will always be fixed.

This he understands. This is the pact he has made.





76


At the Oceana Apartments, he writes gags that will never be performed because Babe is gone. But with each gag that he writes he hears Babe’s voice, and smells Babe’s cologne, and watches Babe’s movements. In the silence of his living room, he stands before the window, practicing the steps, blocking the scenes, testing the lines.

And Babe is his echo.

He has stopped smoking. For decades he chain-smokes three packs a day, mostly Chesterfields, sometimes Pall Malls, until his fingers turn ochre. One day he wakes up and can smoke no longer, does not even feel the urge. He cannot comprehend it. His only concern is that he has long associated the act of writing with holding a cigarette in his hand. He worries that the compulsion to smoke may be linked to the compulsion to write, and without one the other may cease.

But he continues writing.

Get the door, Babe’s voice says.

He leaves the room, and returns carrying a door.

Babe’s shadow ripples its approval.

Yes, says Babe’s voice.

Yes.





77


By 1929, the old vaudeville theaters are being transformed into picture houses. Some of the owners hold out, but they are doomed; and some try to serve two gods, but they, too, are doomed.

Alexander Pantages, King Greek himself, is charged with raping Eunice Pringle in the broom closet of one of his theaters. Eunice Pringle is seventeen years old and wishes to be a dancer. Alexander Pantages, who has never learned to read or write but is now worth $30 million, is sixty-two years old and wishes to retain control of his theater empire in the face of pressure to sell from Joseph Kennedy and RKO.

Alexander Pantages is sentenced to fifty years in prison for the rape of Eunice Pringle. Alexander Pantages is acquitted on appeal, but Alexander Pantages is ruined.

Joseph Kennedy and RKO get their theaters.

He likes Alexander Pantages, who gave Mae and him a berth on his circuit, and would regale him with tales of fucking Klondike Kate Rockwell during the Yukon Gold Rush, when Alexander Pantages was a younger, more agile man. He finds it difficult to picture the aging Alexander Pantages raping Eunice Pringle in a broom closet.

Perhaps, it is suggested, Joseph Kennedy and RKO wanted those theaters very badly indeed.

By 1929 he is a father, and a star. He has a beautiful wife. He has a St Bernard dog named Lady. He has a big house on North Bedford Drive.

And he is fucking Alyce Ardell.





78


Alyce Ardell – or Marie Alice Pradel as was, another name sloughed in a town strewn with the discarded skins of former identities – is a French actress. He and Alyce Ardell have a shared history with Joe Rock. Perhaps Joe Rock was also fucking Alyce Ardell back then; he cannot be sure. He thinks Joe Rock was in love with Alyce Ardell at the very least, and who could blame him? Alyce Ardell is beautiful, and her accent makes men weep, but she is not much of an actress, and never was, so if Joe Rock was putting her in pictures, it wasn’t because of her talent.

Marcel Perez directed Alyce Ardell in the Joe Rock pictures. Babe knows Marcel Perez from the Bungles comedies they made together for Louis Burstein, when Marcel Perez had two legs. Now Marcel Perez has only one leg. Marcel Perez loses the other leg to cancer.

These are the kind of people who end up working for Joe Rock on Poverty Row.

Marcel Perez tells Babe that Alyce Ardell is a fine actress, as long as she does not move. Babe jokes about this on the Hal Roach lot until Babe realizes that he is fucking Alyce Ardell, at which point Babe stops joking. But Alyce Ardell is very good in bed, and she seems to care for him. If Alyce Ardell is acting the role of his lover, she is a better actress than Marcel Perez gives her credit for.