he: A Novel(38)

He cannot see any natural light because the picture is being made on just five indoor sets. He can no longer even see the cameramen because each operator has to climb inside the box of the camera and seal it shut behind him. And now four cameras are required where previously two, or just one, would have sufficed: two for long shots, two for close-ups.

Finally, they are filming at night because Hal Roach is making an Our Gang picture at the same time, and Hal Roach possesses just one set of sound equipment. The kids can only work until five o’clock, which means that he and Babe and Thelma Todd and Mae Busch and Edgar Kennedy will be forced to give up six evenings for this picture. Mae Busch suggests to Hal Roach that Hal Roach hire dwarfs instead of kids for the Our Gang picture, and film them from a distance. Hal Roach pretends not to hear. Hal Roach has to be pretending, because nobody can fail to hear Mae Busch. Mae Busch’s voice could guide ships to shore.

Lewis Foster, who is directing, calls for quiet, and now more than ever he misses the voices and the din. He and Babe make their entrance, and he can feel the sweat pooling at his back, and his make-up has congealed to deprive his face of expression, and his throat has dried, and he knows that when he opens his mouth only a hoarse shriek will emerge, like the cry of a disappointed bird. Babe is talking, but he cannot follow Babe’s words. He has a line, but what use is a line if it cannot be spoken?

Babe finishes talking.

Babe waits.

He opens his mouth, and two syllables emerge, his first words of recorded speech on film.

– Any nuts?





81


It is early the following afternoon. They are watching the first dailies. More importantly, they are listening to the first dailies. The cast is present, and the director, and the writer, and the four cameramen, and Hal Roach.

Hal Roach is unhappy with Edgar Kennedy’s voice. This is how Hal Roach expresses his unhappiness:

– Jesus, Edgar Kennedy sounds like a fairy.

Edgar Kennedy is a light-heavyweight boxer who once goes fourteen rounds with Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler. If anyone has ever previously expressed the view that Edgar Kennedy sounds like a fairy, particularly within earshot of Edgar Kennedy himself, then that person has not stayed vertical for very long, and may in fact be dead.

But this is Hal Roach, and this is a picture, and Edgar Kennedy has never heard himself speak on screen before. Hal Roach is right: Edgar Kennedy does sound like a fairy, even to Edgar Kennedy. So Edgar Kennedy spends the rest of the day practicing a deeper voice, and when the evening’s filming begins, Edgar Kennedy recites his lines like one who has been gargling gravel, and Edgar Kennedy will sound that way for the rest of his career until Edgar Kennedy dies, too young, of throat cancer.

Because, as has already been established, fate likes a joke.

Filming is completed. His voice is fine, and Babe’s voice is fine. They sound as they should, although perhaps Babe’s voice is softer and higher than his appearance might suggest, just as Babe’s movements are more graceful, and Babe’s footsteps lighter. Babe’s Georgia accent also grows more pronounced as Babe tries to ingratiate himself with Thelma Todd, who plays Edgar Kennedy’s wife. He notices it during filming, but says nothing of it to Babe. It is one more example of Babe’s brilliance, and Babe’s process of building a character by augmenting it with small blocks of the real.

His own performance, he recognizes, is less nuanced. Even after all this time, he does not yet have Babe’s skill of working with small gestures, but the problem appears more pronounced in this picture. He puts it down to his concerns about his voice, but he also accepts that he will never be an actor the way Babe is an actor. He will always be a denizen of the stage transposed to the medium of film. Babe, subtle and unselfish, helps to mask his flaws. Babe is the reason he is a star.

With filming at an end, Babe’s work is done. Babe retires to Myrtle, and golf courses, and gambling, although not necessarily in that order, while he works on the edit.

The edit is a challenge.

No cut can be made without an awareness of how it may affect the sound, so the picture is harder to tighten. The previews are even worse, because the laughter of the Audience drowns out the dialogue, and the next line is obscured. In future, he decides, they will have to leave pauses between lines so that the Audience can laugh, which means the pictures may have to become less naturalistic as a consequence, and more like stage performances.

And even after previews and cuts, edits and reshoots, Unaccustomed As We Are is still not as he might have wished it to be, but the critics love it, and the Audience loves it, and Hal Roach loves it. Hal Roach loves it so much that Hal Roach rushes its release ahead of the three silent comedies he and Babe have already completed, and which now seem dated. So besotted are the theaters with sound that they pay Hal Roach more for this two-reel comedy than they would for a feature, because with Unaccustomed As We Are Hal Roach deviates from his old formula of selling a year’s slate of pictures in advance and instead makes the exhibitors begin to pay picture by picture.

And Hal Roach is right about Mack Sennett. Talking pictures herald Mack Sennett’s demise, and Mack Sennett dies bankrupt.





82


At the Oceana Apartments, he recalls an exchange from Unaccustomed As We Are. Even decades later, he experiences no difficulty in summoning to mind the lines.

Edgar Kennedy, believing the boys to be hiding a woman with whom one of them may be having an affair, helps them to cover their tracks, not realizing that the woman under concealment is his own wife.