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

CHAPTER NINE

Nathan Gordons wife Sally was the moving force behind the Jewish hospital movement in Boston. Louie and I stood at her front door in Jamaica Plain cowed by the size of her house.  Louie straightened his tie, brushed the dust from his shoes, fidgeted, rebuttoned his jacket and smoothed his hair. We expected a butler, but Mrs. Gordon herself opened the front door, a plain person entirely without vanity. She led Louie and me to a sunporch full of flowers in Chinese vases, indoor trees in pots and wicker furniture upholstered with stylish blue dragons. She sat on one side of a coffee table, and Louie and I sat together on a love seat on the other side, both of us so intimidated by her wealth that we perched on the edge of the seat. From a shapely teapot, she poured tea into delicate cups, and I winced at having to accept that ladylike cup in my calloused hands stained by black hoof polish. Mrs. Gordon offered us sugar cookies on a tray that was obviously the work of a child in shop class. It was made of wood with a rooster painted in the middle, and the handles had been glued on unevenly. Seemed an odd choice for company, considering the valuable trays she probably owned. Did she use this tray because she thought Louie and I were not good enough for the antique Wedgewood? Several of us have been fortunate in America, she said.
I love America, Louie said and wiped the sugar off his lips with the back of his hand before he remembered he had been given a linen cocktail napkin and patted his lips in the dainty way he thought correct.
We have formed the Jewish Hospital Association for the purpose of raising money to erect, equip and endow a Jewish hospital in Boston.” Just then a door slammed, and we heard a child shout, “Mamma! I’m home!”
“Marion,” Mrs. Gordon called turning toward the sound, “please do not slam that door!” A little girl of about eight ran into the room and stopped when she saw us. “Come meet Mr. Mayer and Harry Sirkus. Come on.” The girl came shyly forward and was introduced. Then she said, “Hey! You’re using your birthday present tray!”
Mrs. Gordon said, “Of course I am. I’m serving tea.” The child squirmed with pleasure and ran out of the room. “Excuse us, please,” Mrs. Gordon said. “Now where was I? Oh, yes. At first, we went upstairs and down, door to door soliciting. Then we sold miniature bricks at fifty cents a piece. Each brick was inscribed “Brick for Jewish Hospital.” Now we have many prominent Jews contributing. Her eyes were deep brown, full of intelligence and intensity. But there are still Boston Jews who believe it is a breach of honor to mention creed or race in a city where all are served by the existing hospitals.
Jew aint a dirty word, Mrs. Gordon, Louie said.
She burst out laughing, Call me Sally, please. You know, we dont own this place. Nathan rents these gigantic houses all furnished, and the children and I adjust. You see those big urns over there? Theyre the same ones that are in that John Singer Sargent painting of those little girls, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Can you imagine if my children broke them? I tiptoe around this place. I used to be a nurse and had an apartment of my own. Since Ive been married, I have never lived in a house of my own. You should have seen the size of the place before this one! She laughed. Maybe thats why I want a hospital of my own!
Louie and I settled back more comfortably. Sally, Im going to tell you something, Louie said, setting down his cup and leaning toward her. Im sitting here, and I see you, and I know, sure as Im sitting here, a Jewish hospital is going to be established in the city of Boston. How do I know this? Because, he pounded his heart with his fist, it is right. He who saves one life—so my mother of blessed memory said to me—is considered as though he saved the world. I will turn my pockets inside out for you.
Thank you, she said.
I pledge to you fifteen thousand dollars.  What? Where was he going to get that? She was surprised too. You have my word. If there is anything else I can do, just ask.
Would you consider being on our board of directors?
Me?
Yes, of course. All thats required is a willingness to do the work. Volunteers, Ive discovered, are enthusiastic for about two years. Then we need new blood. Consider yourself a member of the Beth Israel Hospital board, Louis.

And that’s how Louie came to mingle with the millionaires who would eventually launch his career as a movie producer. One of them was my boss, Mr. Levin. Motion pictures are a risky business,” he said when I told him I was going to quit my job at the barn. “I’m not saying you should continue working here. I’m just saying that if things don’t work out, you always have a job with me.”
“Thank you, sir. Behind us was the clang of the blacksmith banging molten iron rods into horseshoes, fitting each hoof individually, clanging some more, fitting again, clanging again—the horses amazingly patient.
“I know you’ve always been interested in motion-pictures and the entertainment world. We got a little taste of it first hand with Niko.”
“Yes, sir. We did.”
“Of course, you would have to move on. It’s only natural.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, my voice trembling as I extended my hand, “for saving my life.”
Mr. Levin took my hand and pulled me against him for a quick, shy hug. I expect we will continue being friends.
Yes, sir. I expect so too.
You have my telephone number. You know where I live.
I moved from the tack room to a house on Washington Street owned by Louies secretary, Fanny. Fanny slept in her childhood room, dolls and stuffed animals still arranged on her pillow. Fannys mother, Mrs. Mittenthal, was about seventy. She was so nice and such a good cook that most of her boarders had lived with her for more than ten years and contributed their skills to the upkeep of the house. One was a carpenter so the roof never leaked. Another was an upholsterer so the chairs and sofas all looked new. Another was a plumber. An Irish maid lived in a room off the kitchen. She made our beds, did our laundry and kept the house clean.
Mrs. Mittenthal believed that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, so she included it in the rent: coffee, corn muffins, cinnamon rolls—all baked each morning. She was a timid little person. If someone was behind on rent, Fanny took care of it. Fanny dealt with the gasman, the milkman, the coal vender, the garbageman. They were a great team, Fanny and her mother. Fanny and I shared the front office of the American Feature Film Company, but I don’t think I got in her way too much because I was always out running errands.
Louie met Nathan Gordon at the hospital-board meetings and persuaded him to invest the forty thousand dollars required for partnership in Metro Pictures. This seemed a good idea to Nathan Gordon because he, too, wanted control over the product he sold. Owning a share of Metro Pictures would allow him to influence the kind of pictures produced and the price of those pictures. He knew what Boston audiences wanted to see and the price they were willing to pay at the box office. Mr. Gordons contract stated that he had exclusive rights to Metro’s movies in New England; they could be shown only at his theaters. I knew what his contract said because I had to deliver it to him after Fanny finished typing it, and I read it on the bus and understood the gist of it.
 It’s always hard to imagine great stars at the beginning of their career working freelance and wondering about the next paycheck. Such was Charlie Chaplin once, and that time coincided with Louie and Nathan Gordon’s becoming partners in Metro Pictures. Charlie Chaplin, not under contract to any particular studio, signed on to make pictures for Metro. So did the heart-throb Francis X. Bushman, voted a favorite film star by the readers of Ladies’ World magazine. The pictures that those two stars made for Metro paid Mr. Gordon back more than double his investment. I met Mr. Gordon many times and thought he was a bit self-inflated, if not downright pompous, and it was obvious that he felt superior to Louie, that he thought Louie was uncouth. But he gained new respect through their collaboration and opened his businessmans heart to Louie. Together, they formed the Gordon-Mayer Theatrical Company. We moved to bigger quarters, and Fanny got an office of her own. I learned about booking vaudeville acts, making arrangements for them when they arrived in town, distributing motion pictures, calculating box-office returns and juggling the myriad costs of show business.

    Louie also met Mr. Levin on the hospital board, but Mr. Levin could not understand Louie’s enthusiasm for motion pictures. He couldn’t understand at all why movies were so popular, why anyone would prefer them to stage plays. Louie didn’t argue with him about artistic merit. He simply showed him statistics to prove that motion pictures were a developing business and a good opportunity for investment. More than half a billion admissions were paid at the box offices of motion-picture theaters. More than seventy-five thousand miles of film were manufactured and exhibited. The return on investment for The Squaw Man, a picture Louie distributed, was almost sixteenfold. The Whispering Chorus grossed three times its cost.
     Mr. Levin was inclined to be convinced because he was somewhat bored by the carpet business. When I worked for him, he often talked to me in a nostalgic way about the challenges he had faced as a young man when mass-produced carpet was a new invention. Wealthy people scorned it. They covered the holes in their wooden floors with hand-woven Oriental rugs, each one an expensive example of good taste. Mr. Levin knew that middle-class homeowners and merchants would welcome carpet manufactured on power looms in mills in Clinton, Massachusetts. At age twenty-two, he went to Clinton to convince the Bigelow brothers to ignore his youth and allow him to distribute their product in New England. What heady days those were! How scary not to know the outcome. How marvelous when he received a big order from the Boston Public Library, from Shreve, Crump & Low,Trinity Church in Copley Square, the Hotel Vendome, the State House, Filene’s department store. How clever he’d been to make the delivery of the carpet glamorous by using Clydesdale horses.
    Mr. Levin identified with Louie. They were the same age when they had taken their daring first step, when they had risked all. They both understood that their product was not for the very wealthy but for the middle class and for those who longed to become middle class. Mr. Levins enthusiasm escalated when Louie took us to New York to see how pictures were put together. We traveled by train through Connecticut where swamps of cattails like hot dogs on poles stood in reedy pools by the edge of the tracks.
    From Grand Central Station, we took a taxi, and I was surprised how deep my reaction to New York was. I didn’t even know I had missed it until I saw it again: the massive buildings; people on crowded sidewalks rushing to appointments, wrapped in cloaks of privacy; people not rushing but strolling, stopping to buy nuts from a vendor; billboards shouting for attention: “The Edison Phonograph Puts Music in Every Home.” Poor people, rich people, black people, white people. There was construction everywhere, gaping foundations, walls part way up, awnings being affixed to windows, men handling pickaxes, shovels, teams of unkempt horses pulling wagons of lumber. Haverhill was sleepy compared with Boston, but Boston was sleepy compared with this.
In Brooklyn, on a street full of children playing stickball, we stopped at a nondescript building. It was impossible to imagine from the outside the frenetic activity inside. Five motion pictures were in production at the same time, each with its own cast of actors, stage sets, cameras, lights and technical men hurrying here and there with coils of wire, film reels and costumes. Next to some of the stages were musicians, mostly violinists, playing sad music to help actors cry. Louie was greeted by several men and went with them to a meeting in another part of the building, while Mr. Levin and I were escorted to one of the sets where we sat at the edge and watched. I was surprised how well Louie knew the men who greeted him, how comfortable he was at that studio. Louie had a way of making you feel important and that his very life depended on your opinions and your help. Now I was reminded how much of his life had nothing to do with me at all.
Mr. Levin and I sat by the edge of the stage surrounded by actors in costumes lounging around, looking in mirrors; directors calling through megaphones; cameramen. The director at the stage where we were sitting called his company around him. Script in hand, he gave out the roles: Mr. Evans, you are a lover. Miss Miles, you are his affianced bride. Mrs. Marsh, you are the mother.
A mother? she said. How can I play a mother? Im not old enough to play a mother.

A young mother, the director said. Mr. Conway, you are the father. Mr. Washburn, you are a villain. He walked onto the stage, a raised platform with oversize electric lights set up around it. Miss Miles, you stand here. Mr. Evans, you enter stage left through the door and tell Miss Miles that you must leave for a long time. Youre going to jail for something you didnt do, but you dont want her to know that. Miss Miles, you ask him why he has to go just when your wedding is planned. He doesnt tell you, you insist, and at last he explains that hes been unjustly accused of a robbery. Its mistaken identity. Ready?
The actors walked through the scene, the director adding business and building the tension. Then the lights were blasted onto the stage, the cameras were cranked up, and the scene was filmed. The next scene was the inside of a fabric store. Miss Miles, you work in the store, the director said. Mr. Washburn, you own the store. You love Miss Miles, thats why youve connived to get rid of her fiancé by staging a robbery and getting him sent to the clinker. Where are those bolts of fabric? A young man hurried onto the stage with bolts of fabric. I sat there enthralled. Being an actor seemed such a strange profession, how they could switch on and off, how they blew up the details—a lift of the hand, the eyebrows, the edges of the mouth—how they could make themselves burst out laughing when nothing was funny.

In the cab going back into Manhattan, Mr. Levin said,  Why, its noble, its worthy. !ts a whole world of make-believe, all those people working just so well be entertained.”
 “Not just us,” I said. “Poor people too.”
 We arrived back in Boston that night and walked together to Tremont Street, where our progress was arrested by a crowd of angry people, at least five hundred of them, in front of the Tremont Theater. Protesters held signs that read Fight Race Hatred and This Film Panders to Depraved Tastes. The Birth of a Nation was playing here after forty-four consecutive weeks in New York. Louie said, Lets see what all the fuss is about.
You cant cross those picket lines, Louis, Mr. Levin said as we were jostled by a protester holding a sign that read Griffith Foments Race Antipathy. People screamed at us as we stood in line and kept screaming when it was our turn at the box office, where Louie exhibited his Gordon-Mayer pass that got us into all movie theaters free. Mr. Levin turned in the other direction and left us. For a second, I was affected by his scruples and wondered if I should go with him. But I was too curious about the picture to miss it.
Louie said, “Look at this, Harry. They’re lining up to pay two bucks. All these people. Did you ever think you’d see the day when they’d pay the same for a motion-picture movie as for a stage play? Was I smart to get into this business, or what? Huh?”
“We.”
“We?”
“We’re in the business.”
“That we are, my boy. That we are,” and he had to reach up a little to put his arm around my shoulders.

We entered the gorgeous Tremont Theater where Sarah Bernhardt once played Tosca on the stage. Under twinkling chandeliers, ushers, some dressed like Confederate soldiers and others like Union soldiers—caps, boots, epaulets—stood at attention. We were escorted to our reserved seats by a female usher in a long, frilly plantation dress. She handed us both a souvenir program full of illustrations and photographs. This cost a fortune of money, Louie whispered. Read it to me.
Says the music is made up of classical pieces and popular songs arranged especially for the picture.
The lights dimmed, the orchestra played an overture, and the picture began. A white woman reached out to hug a black child but drew back in disgust because the child smelled so bad. I did not like seeing that and expected that the next scene would show the woman being punished for hurting the child’s feelings. Or that it would show the black child taking a bath and then being hugged. It took several more scenes before I realized that we were supposed to think she was justified in not wanting to get near the child and that nothing, no amount of bathing, could make the child attractive because it was a black child.
 The camera took us to the South before the Civil War, where we saw happy slaves, white actors in black face. They had easy hours, plenty of time for tap dancing, comfortable quarters and kind masters who played with puppies and kittens. This also struck me as strange because I believed that I had got a glimpse of slavery in Haverhill during the summer days when I had worked in the hay fields. I expected a scene to show how exhausted the slaves were, how burned by the sun, but there were no scenes like that. It was in Haverhill, pitching hay, that I first understood the Passover service that my father had conducted every year in which we gave thanks for being released from slavery in Egypt. As the movie continued, I was sorry for the soldiers who died but glad that the North was fighting the South to end slavery. I was impressed, as the movie reviews said I would be, by the spectacular cast-of-thousands battle scenes. The actor soldiers spread over hills seemingly as far as the horizon.  When the slaves were freed, the first thing they did was lust after white women and dominate the state legislature. In the House of Representatives, they dressed in clownish plaid suits, guzzled from flasks, sat with their feet up and danced around like idiots. To save themselves from the power-hungry and sex-mad Negroes, the white men organized the Ku Klux Klan. The music became rousing, and a bugle blast from the theater orchestra announced the valiant riders of the Klan as they swept across the screen, saving white girls from the terror of the black mob. Negroes subdued, the final scenes were supposed to be a kind of Utopia in which people—some looking like Koreans, others like early Romans—were blessed by Jesus Christ. The orchestra played Gloria from Haydns Mass in C, the lights came up, and I turned to Louie and met his astonished gaze. I said, “Have you ever seen anything so…” And before I could finish his face lit up. He thought he was agreeing with me when he said, “You’re damn right, Harry. A gold mine!

Back at the office, he said to Fanny, Find out what it costs to get the New England rights to this golden goose. Surely Louie knew what he was doing. I was probably wrong about the picture. Everyone seemed to love it. They lined up at the box office. And surely the director, D.W. Griffith, deserved the benefit of the doubt. Fanny said, What do you want with something that appeals to the basest passions of the semiliterate?
“What are you talking about. You don’t know nothing. President Wilson showed this picture at the White House.”
“But he regrets it.”
“Who says?”
    “He says,” said Fanny rattling a newspaper on her desk to show she’d read this information. “He didn’t have any idea what the thing was about. He did it as a favor. Thomas Dixon used to be his student.”
    “Aw, what do you know? You ain’t ever seen battle scenes like that before, did ya? Huh? Did ya?”
    “I’m telling you, Louis,” she said, “even President Wilson has come out against this picture.
Louie looked at me to see if I agreed, but I was too confused to respond. Anyway, maybe he would not be able to get the rights. And even if the rights were offered to him, he might not be able to afford to buy them. So there was plenty of time to argue about the morality of Birth of a Nation.
When the picture finished its run at major theaters and came up for sale, most of Louies investors refused to give him the fifty thousand dollars required for New England distribution rights, not because they thought the picture objectionable but because they believed there wasn’t any money left in it. They said the picture had played itself out.
But Louie knew differently. He and his family still lived in Haverhill where most people did not have the time or the money to travel into Boston. Neither did the citizens of Bangor, Rutland, Waterbury, Concord, Hartford, Augusta or Montpelier. They, too, wanted to see the picture that the whole country was talking about. They had read the reviews in newspapers: The march of Sherman from Atlanta to the sea made the audience gasp with wonder and admiration. Nothing more impressive has ever been seen on the screen.  
When I overheard Louie say to Nathan Gordon, Im putting in twelve thousand dollars of my own money, I got to work finding out as much as I could about the picture. I wanted to prove myself wrong. Surely I had misunderstood the intent because, if the picture really was as racist as it seemed, why would my friend Louie, who knew discrimination firsthand, want to distribute it to even more people?
I discovered that the film was based on a novel written by Thomas Dixon who, like his father before him, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The original title of the film was The Clansman, and it opened with that name in Los Angeles. The black members of the audience became enraged, and before the picture opened in New York, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People tried to prevent its being shown. They exerted so much pressure that the director, Griffith, agreed to cut a few of the shots of white girls being attacked by wild Negroes, and he cut most of the epilogue in which an actor dressed as President Lincoln declared that he did not believe in racial equality and suggested that the solution to America’s race problem was to send Negroes back to Africa. Dixon, the author of the original novel, shared in the profits of the picture and openly discussed his reasons for writing it.
“It was written by a member of the Klan, Louie,” I said one day when we were going over hotel arrangements for various vaudeville players. “I understood it correctly, Louie. The author is quoted as saying that he thinks the dominant passion of colored men is to have sex with white women.” Louie was only half listening. “He said the purpose of his book was to create a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored men. He wants to prevent the mixing of white and Negro blood by intermarriage.”
“Stop hocking me.  What’s this? You don’t need to put Will Rogers into such an expensive room. He’s a cowboy. He don’t know from luxury. You should marry your own kind. Remember that.”
“Dixon claims the NAACP wants to lower the standard of American citizenship by mixing white and black blood.
“Harry, will you shut up? How the hell am I supposed to know what the NA whatever you call it does? Huh? What are you saying for God sakes? You think Negroes should marry white people? They got laws against that. It ain’t natural. Are we going over these bookings, or are you spouting nonsense?”
    “I’m saying it’s a nasty picture, and you shouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
    “What? Why not?”
    “That’s what I’m talking to you about.”
    “What’s to talk? The picture broke all theater records in every city it played. You don’t know a fortune of money when you see it, after all I’ve taught you?”
    “Dixon wants all black people in America to go back to Africa.”
    “So? What do I care what they do?”
    “He says they want to go back to Africa.”
    “So? Maybe they do. How the hell should I know? You think they like the snow? Did you get a car to meet Houdini at the train?”
    “You’ll be showing racist propaganda, Louie.”
    “Harry, will you calm down? What’s the matter with you? He don’t portray them all as bad. You see good ones in there. You were sitting next to me. You seen them. The ones who were ready to die protecting their white friends. Griffith applauds them characters in the picture. He applauds their devotion.”
    “Louie! You’re a Jew! How would you like it if all those black people in the picture were Jews rampaging around. You wouldn’t be showing it all over New England if they were Jews!”
    “If they was Jews? What are you talking? Jews don’t act like that!”
    “Neither do Negroes!”
    “How do you know? Were you in the South when them things was going on? What do you think, the slaves were smart? You think they knew how to make laws?”
    “Louie!”
    “Harry, will you sit down? What’s got into you? Why are we even talking about this?”
    “Because you can’t go around making people look worse than they are. How would you like it if Griffith made a picture showing all the Jews in their yarmulkes rubbing their hands together going into the banks and grabbing all the money and taking baths with money while all the farmers lose their farms.”
    “Aw, don’t talk stupid.”
    “It’s the same thing. It’s the same principle.”
    “Principle? Listen to yourself. The principle is freedom of expression. That’s the principle. Didn’t you learn nothing in school?”
    “You’re defending it based on freedom of speech?”
    “I ain’t defending nothing! Especially not to you, you little pisher. I don’t got to defend one goddamn thing! Now either we’re working, or we ain’t! Go on, go on. Get outta here! Get outta my face. I can’t stand the sight of you.”
    “I can’t stand the sight of you either! You’ll do anything for money. You don’t care about justice!”
    “How dare you say that to me! Goddamn it! Me, who has tried to uplift the public with everything I do. Me, who brought the Boston Opera all the way to Haverhill, brought the real opera to the people, and now you accuse. You stand there and accuse me. Get the hell out of my sight!” His face was red, and his eyes bulged. “Get out of my sight before I break your skull!” Then he lunged and would have caught me, but I ducked in time and ran out and slammed the door shut. He came after me, and I ran but stopped when I heard a loud thud. I turned and saw Louie collapsed on the floor. “Fanny! Fanny!” She came running, saw him and said, “Oh, for heaven’s sakes. Not again.”
    “What’s the matter with him? What’s the matter with him?”
    “He’s just fainted. It isn’t anything. Go get a towel in the bathroom and put some cold water on it and lay it on his forehead. Go head. I’ve got to finish typing the contract for First National.”
    I did as she said, and when Louie came to, he looked up at me and said, “What have I ever done to you that you should hurt me so much?”
           Mr. Gordon gave him the money he needed to buy the New England rights to Birth of a Nation. He and Gordon formed a company, Master Photoplays, with Louie owning twenty-five percent. He distributed Birth of a Nation to towns in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont, earned a quarter of a million dollars, moved Maggie and the girls to a big house in Brookline and set about organizing the Louis B. Mayer Film Company, although he had no actors, directors or screenwriters.