he: A Novel(37)

He touches the card with his fingers, turning it to the light, just as, at the Oceana Apartments, he reaches out a hand as though to stop the ghost of himself from intruding on another man’s life, even one bound so intimately to his own. He can visualize the card before him. Why should this moment have lodged when so many others have drifted away?

I am so thankful I have had you all these years may God be good enough to let us go through life together. I love you so, Oh I love my darling Daddy.

Your own honey girl,

On our seventh anniversary, may there be seventy more. And lots of little Hardys to carry it on …

Just one ‘I love you so’. He had it wrong, but not so very wrong.

This is Myrtle, Myrtle the drunk. He wonders how many shots Myrtle had consumed when she wrote this anniversary card to Babe. Just enough, probably: another hour or two and Myrtle would have been writing Babe a very different note, if she could write at all.

There would be no little Hardys. Babe must have known, even then. Babe and Myrtle might have discussed the possibility of children when Myrtle was temporarily sober following one of her periods in the sanitarium, or when she was telling Babe how sorry she was after she relapsed, and Babe would have lied and told his Sweetest Little Baby that, yes, they would try, and, yes, she would be a wonderful mother, and yes, yes, yes, but Babe knew. There would be no children, not with this woman, and none at all if Babe remained with her.

Yet Babe could not abandon Myrtle.

So Babe would go to work, and sing ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon’ to the children of other men.





80


Hal Roach watches the first of the Victor sound trucks arrive at his studio.

Hal Roach examines the microphones, and the soundproofing on the stages to block out the noise of the trains passing on the tracks behind the lot. Hal Roach oversees the installation of the power grids for the recording equipment, and the new projectors equipped for sound playback.

Hal Roach has spent a fortune converting his studio to sound. So, too, has Mack Sennett, who beats Hal Roach to the punch by getting the first talkie short into theaters in 1928, but Hal Roach believes that sound will ultimately be the death of Mack Sennett because Mack Sennett’s brand of slapstick will not survive the advent of talking pictures. Speech requires dialogue, and dialogue requires a subject. Storyline is all. A string of sight gags will no longer suffice.

Hal Roach hires Elmer Raguse to supervise the sound recording at the studio. Elmer Raguse is a diabetic and a perfectionist. Elmer Raguse may also be a genius, but nobody stays around Elmer Raguse long enough to tell for sure because Elmer Raguse isn’t a sociable man, not at first meeting, not even at later meeting, and certainly not with actors who forget where the microphone is, and effects men who set off explosions too close to his recording equipment, thereby blowing the delicate valves. But Hal Roach doesn’t care if Elmer Raguse never again speaks to another person as long as the Audience can hear what the actors are saying.

It doesn’t take much time before Hal Roach begins to regret the invention of speech – speech of any kind, never mind recorded speech. The illumination is wrong because the recording cameras are so big that the lights can’t be brought close enough to make the actors resemble human beings. It takes a team of men to shift a single camera while shooting; otherwise, the microphone picks up the sound of the motor. Hal Roach makes three pictures before someone realizes that the microphone itself can actually be moved. Until then, the actors are forced to loiter in its general vicinity like commuters waiting for a bus, or as though each of them has one foot nailed to the floor. Hal Roach also suspects that the actors may be frightened of changing position and accidentally breaking a piece of Elmer Raguse’s equipment, in which case Elmer Raguse will shout at them, and actors are delicate creatures that don’t care to be shouted at. Hal Roach considers having a word with Elmer Raguse about this until Hal Roach remembers just how much the equipment has cost him, at which point Hal Roach decides that the more frightened everyone is of Elmer Raguse, the better.

He is not enamored of his first experience of talking pictures. Despite all the preparation, all their honing of the script, he is still thrown when he steps on the soundstage to begin filming Their Last Word, the working title for what will become Unaccustomed As We Are, because nobody likes Their Last Word as a title, and it makes no sense to call a comedy in which they speak their first words Their Last Word. Even Leo McCarey admits this.

It is the stillness that makes filming difficult, the smothering of sound at the call for quiet on the set. Filming a silent picture is like filming life: there is noise in the background and noise in the foreground. Conversations continue regardless of the actors’ presence. Nails are hammered, boards are laid. Trains whistle, dogs bark.

But a sound picture must be filmed in quiescence, and for the first time in years he is uncomfortably aware of the proximity of the lens, the faces of the crew, the claustrophobia of his environs. A new tension has infected the set, and the actors are its first victims. The director will no longer be able to shout guidance or tweak gags while the camera is running. The crew will not be permitted to laugh, and if the crew cannot laugh, then how may he know that what he is doing is funny? The problem will be compounded once they commence making pictures on location: the crew will be aware of the necessity of silence because paychecks depend upon it, but a crowd lured by the sight of a camera will not be subdued so easily.