In Theda Bara's Tent (as Reviewed by Publisher's Weekly)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 When the flu epidemic lifted and all the regulations meant to protect us from one another no longer applied, Filpots business returned. He played host all day and night to the many people who appreciated the generous size of his whiskey shots. Travelers rented rooms next to mine and I had to share the bathroom at the end of the hall. The cook returned, and fumes from the kitchen rose to the top of the house, so my sleeping hours were plagued not only by bursts of laughter from the bar but by the overwhelming smell of fried onions. I opened the window, but it didn’t help, and once when I was on line at the bank depositing my paycheck, the person close behind me said, I smell onions.
    I worked on many different projects at Fox, but a couple of them stand out. One was the Hammond circus-train wreck. A locomotive engineer fell asleep and plowed into a circus train near Hammond, Indiana. Eighty-six people died, some burned beyond recognition, and one hundred twenty-seven were injured. We rushed cameras out there but had to supplement some of the real footage with fake shots of trains in flames and kerosene lamps igniting because much of the fire was caused by the lamps that lit the sleeper cars of the circus train. I had an argument with a woman in the art department about whether or not to show an elephant wandering around lost. There were no elephants on the train, but she said it didn’t matter. It would add pathos. “You must be new,” she said. “We’re not in the business of journalism here. It’s entertainment.” We compromised by editing in footage from our archives of frightened monkeys screeching. I was proud of the resulting newsreel because for the first time, one of my titles was used: “Circus of Horrors.” I liked it because it described the crash as well as the crowd of spectators watching the charred bodies being unloaded.
    I was still living at Filpot’s when the Volstead Act was passed in 1919 over President Wilsons veto, and Prohibition became the law of the land. Shanley’s Grill closed. They couldn’t make a living without selling alcohol. Filpots business disappeared. His brother in Florida convinced him to get in on the real estate boom there. Dont believe it, Filpot, one of his poker buddies said. Theyre selling you swamps. Its just swamps. Pay off the cops here like everyone else does, and keep on serving booze. But he put his tavern up for sale.
 The bars in New York turned into speakeasies. At Paddys, we had to say the password Lorraine, the name of Paddys wife, before Goo Goo Maloney would open up. We endured periodic raids by local cops who lingered for a free drink or two.

Prohibition was a popular newsreel topic. Fox News filmed an anti-Prohibition rally in Boston at Faneuil Hall, men carrying signs proclaiming the “Death of Liberty.” They filmed G-men dumping liquor onto the street and carting bottles out of saloons as well as G-men destroying a moonshine still in Alabama.
I asked Freckles and his gang if I could join them on a rum-running operation. Youre going to put me in the movies, Harry?
Hold on, said Fists, the one who had knocked me off the stool. Theyll snag us.
I always wanted to be in pictures, said Goo Goo. I got the looks for it.
You boys set it up, and Ill come along with our best cameraman.
He know how to keep his mouth shut? asked Milo whose nose was flat against his face. The others glared at Milo for daring to question me.
The problem was finding a cameraman. “It’s done at night, Harry,” they said to me. “It’s dark. And dangerous. You know the kind of people these are? They aren’t pretending to be crooks. They are crooks. I was baffled that the same cameramen who put themselves in the middle of brawls during labor strikes would not take a chance with my idea. They take the hooch from a ship in the pitch dark, they put the hooch in a truck, they drive the hooch to a warehouse. Period. End of story. Its not theater. Wait a minute. Why don’t you ask that rookie?”
    A few days later, I was passing the screening room, and the door was open, so I went in to view what was supposed to be footage explaining the meaning of the term bootlegging.  On the screen was a small house on a residential street with two young women in front. Along came an older woman wearing a dress that looked like a prison matron’s uniform. “That’s my mother,” a voice in the dark said. “We’ve told her for years she looks like a prison guard in that thing.”  The older woman on the screen stopped in front of the girls, frisked one of them who acted blasé, then frisked the other one and Voila! She found a flat bottle of Old Crow whiskey stuffed into the knee-high stocking of the girl. This was bootlegging, carrying the stuff next to your calf. Though the cameraman was looking through the camera lens, he hadn’t noticed a cat in the window of the house behind the girls. The cat looked straight at him, washed its face, stared out again and scratched its ears with a vigorous hind foot.  It was a comical cat that made crazy faces, especially when digging into its ear with its hind foot. We were all laughing, and the cameraman said, That is one of the best cats weve ever owned. The lights came on, and Mr. Fox stood up and said in a loud voice, “You won’t think it’s so funny when I take it out of your pay. You don’t waste my film, pal. Not my film.” He stalked out, leaving a sickened wake behind him. The other people in the room shuffled around and departed and the cameraman, his face red, pulled on his black beret. He stood up and sighed. “I thought my sister looked pretty good,” he said. This was the first time I’d seen Kenny since I’d been working at Fox.
    “Hey, do you remember me?”
    “There’s not going to be anything left in my check. My sister’s going to brain me. She told me not to do it. She said there’s a shortage of raw film stock. You think he’s going to fire me?”
    “I don’t know. Don’t you remember me?” I reminded him about our meeting in the park, but he only pretended to remember. “Oh, right. Sure.” I told him my idea of shooting a rum-running expedition.
    “I own lights that could do that,” he said.
    “But the problem is they’re gangsters. Maybe they aren’t going to want to be all lit up while they’re smuggling booze.”
    “Are you kidding? Everyone loves to be in the movies. They’ll eat it up.”
    He showed up on the appointed evening in polka-dot bow tie, black beret smashed straight down over his forehead, rust-and-white-striped jacket, black jodhpurs and brown lace-up boots. He was skinny with a narrow face, eyes set close together, and when my gang of thugs saw him, they fell for his celebrity getup and imagined they were in the presence of a great cameraman, even though he was only about my age. He wouldnt wear them clothes, Milo whispered to Freckles, if he wasnt famous. We began to load Kennys camera equipment into the back of Milos truck, and I noticed that Kenny had brought along his prized possession, a French airport light made of metallic mirrors that reflected a brilliant eight hundred million candlepower beam. I took him aside and said again, These are criminals. They will not enjoy being illuminated while committing a crime.
Kenny whispered, Says who? We climbed into the truck for our three-hour drive to the coast of New Jersey.
Freckles gang was responsible for picking up the contraband at the beach, loading it into their truck, then delivering it to a warehouse in Hells Kitchen. Unlike other couriers in New York, Freckles gang never filched the bottles, and thats why they were employed by the most successful and famous smuggler, Captain William McCoy, a former boat builder and excursion-boat captain from Florida, who charged more than other smugglers because he never added water to the booze. He was caught by the Coast Guard once, so he began to anchor his schooner, Tomoka, outside U.S. territorial waters and employed men with small boats to shuttle the real McCoy to shore.