The Edge of Ruin Read online

  THE EDGE OF RUIN

  THE EDGE OF RUIN

  IRENE FLEMING

  MINOTAUR BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations,

  and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE EDGE OF RUIN. Copyright © 2010 by Kathleen Dunn.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue,

  New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Design by Rich Arnold

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fleming, Irene, 1939–

  The edge of ruin / Irene Fleming.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-57520-5

  1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Women motion picture producers and directors—Fiction. 3. Motion pictures—Production and direction—Fiction. 4. New York—History—1898–1951—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.A414E34 2010

  813'.54—dc22

  2009047481

  First Edition: May 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ray Roberts, my very first editor

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To all my friends who read this novel early on and helped me plug up the plot holes—Jim Clare, Lee Parks, Annie Stewart, and the incomparable Harold Dunn—thanks. Thanks to the scholars whose interest in early movies moved me to write it. You can find a bibliography of their work on my Web site, www.irenefleming.com. Also thanks to Charles Salzberg and Michael Neff at Algonkian, who bucked me up when I needed confidence. But, mostly, thanks to Peter Rubie, my agent, to Janet Hutchings, who introduced me to him, to Keith Kahla, my editor, and to all the helpful souls at Minotaur.

  THE EDGE OF RUIN

  ONE

  One sunny afternoon in the fall of 1909, Adam Weiss came home to the three-story Dutch Colonial house he shared with his new wife in suburban Philadelphia, hung his derby hat on the hat rack, and announced to her that he was selling his string of nickelodeons—and everything else the couple owned—to go to New York City and set himself up as a movie producer. Emily was stunned. It was as if he had said, “Hello, sweetheart, I’m home, now say good-bye to the crystal chandelier, the oriental carpets, the mahogany furniture we bought only three months ago, say good-bye to your cook and your maid. We’re going into the movie business.”

  Emily gazed around the parlor at these beloved objects (all except the cook and the maid, who were at work in the kitchen), and then up at her husband’s face, seeking some overt sign of insanity in those beautiful hazel eyes, some telltale quiver of madness in that silky dark mustache. Last week they had celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday. She had heard of men losing their minds as they approached the age of thirty.

  She was not reassured by Adam’s insistence that he had what it took—expertise, professional connections—to succeed as a producer. “I’ve been an exhibitor for so long that I think it’s time for me to move on, try something new. Distribution doesn’t interest me, but the opportunities in production are enormous.” He paced the floor, trembling with excitement.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble, Adam?”

  “Nothing you could call trouble. A small problem with Thomas Edison and his Motion Picture Patents Company.”

  “You didn’t pay the Trust this week?”

  “Of course I paid them. Two dollars a week to Mr. Edison’s Trust for every one of my theaters. If I didn’t pay I couldn’t show Patents Company licensed movies. But you know what? I’m tired of it. It’s a protection racket. I’m not paying them next week, or ever again. Good-bye, Mr. Edison.” He touched the fingers of one hand to his forehead and snapped them outward in a farewell salute. There was an unusual brightness in his eye, surely a sign of something abnormal.

  “Just like that,” she said. Why had she left a paying job in the chorus to marry this man? It was true that she was not a huge success as a chorine, being too slim and lacking in bosom, but everyone had admired her luxuriant auburn hair.

  “Yep, just like that.” Adam lit up a Lucky Strike and began to wave it around. “I’m not alone in this, you know. Movie men all over the country are going independent. In Chicago, there’s a whole—”

  “But why get into production?”

  “The independent distributors need product.”

  “Product?”

  “Movies to rent out to the exhibitors.”

  “Ah.”

  “Dramas. Comedies. Audiences want to see a new movie every night, and a story movie, too, not a travelogue or a replay of the coronation of King Edward. You wouldn’t believe the income potential in making these things. To say nothing of the creative opportunities.” He tapped his cigarette, sending the ashes into the rubber plant. “Of course I’ll need your help, as an experienced show person.”

  “So when you make these movies, you have an outlet all lined up for distributing them?”

  “I’ll tell the world I have.” He opened his briefcase and handed her a copy of a contract he had signed with someone named Howard Kazanow. Emily spread it out on the Queen Anne tea table—one of the things Adam meant to sell, along with the rugs, the silver, the rest of the furniture, the brand-new Locomobile, even Emily’s own beloved mink coat—and read it through twice.

  The contract was terrifying. It required Adam’s movie company to deliver four one-reel movies by the twenty-third of the month: two Westerns, a comedy, and a drama. If they failed, Mr. Kazanow took the whole movie company, which meant everything they owned, since Adam was proposing to sell it all to finance the company. “Did you show this to a lawyer, by any chance?”

  “Howie Kazanow is a lawyer,” Adam said. “He’s a very smart businessman, Emily. I knew him in college.” Completely mad, Emily thought. Mother was right. I should have waited longer before I married him. There was plenty of time. I’m only twenty-five. I could have stayed in the chorus of the touring company of Monkey Days and gone on with the others to Chicago.

  He threw his cigarette on the carpet and ground it underfoot. “Don’t look at me like that. I have to do this, sweetheart. Later on we’ll have kids, responsibilities. I’ll be stuck in Philadelphia forever.”

  “But, Adam. All our money.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Next month I’ll cover you with diamonds. Look at this.” He produced a cardboard box and opened it to reveal, not diamonds, but a ream of snowy stationery bearing a letterhead in the very most modern typeface. “What do you think of this? Rag paper, twenty-pound bond.”

  “Melpomeen,” she read. “Melpomeen Moving Picture Studios.” In the middle of the M was an elegant curlicue.

  “No, sweetheart, Melpomene. It rhymes with hominy.”

  “Who’s going to know that?”

  “Anyone with a classical education. Melpomene is the muse of tragic drama.” So it was to be a tragically dramatic enterprise, somehow making use of Adam’s two years of college.

  “There’s no street address.”

  “I bought a typewriter last week, sweetheart. As soon as we get our money we’ll build a studio with a real street address, and whenever we need to write letters you can type it in.”

  Insane. But how good-looking he was. How she loved the cleft in his chin, his noble chin that made him look like those tall, handsome young millionaires in the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson. “Is it truly possible to make four movies in three weeks?”

  “People do it all the time,” he said. “With an indoor studio and arc lights, they make four movies every week. You and I can do that, too, Emily. Melpomene is your business as much as m
ine. We’re as smart as any of those guys making movies in New York.” She had never seen him so wildly happy, even on their wedding night.

  And so she swallowed her misgivings and agreed to become a partner in this mad enterprise, to write scenarios, hire actors, sew costumes, do the lettering for the intertitles, and design Melpomene’s trademark M that was to appear in every shot.

  It took a week for them to dispose of their property in Philadelphia, from discharging the cook, the maid, the chauffeur, and Adam’s valet through finding buyers for the house and the car to watching the workmen roll up the parlor rug and march out the front door carrying it on their shoulders, the last of the Weisses’ possessions. The last, that is, if you didn’t count Adam’s extensive wardrobe. For although Adam insisted that Emily must sell her fur coat, which he gave her before they were married, he himself refused to part with so much as a silk hat.

  At Grand Central Depot in Manhattan, while Adam arranged for transportation to the hotel, Emily bought some magazines and sat down on a wooden bench, polished by many rumps, to catch up on her reading. Somehow she felt that a return to life in New York City would be easier to face if she had full knowledge of all the new trends. A sour cloud of stale cigar smoke washed over her.

  She buried her head in the latest copy of McClure’s. The magazine was full of stories of labor unrest, capital abusing labor, labor attacking capital, labor and capital banding together to prey on the ordinary citizen. According to McClure’s, anarchy was on the rise, thanks to the Industrial Workers of the World and other organized tentacles of the Red menace.

  But according to Hampton’s, anarchy was not a danger at all, and, far from bringing down industrial civilization, the IWW was civilization’s last great hope. Neither story had it right, in Emily’s opinion. She knew about unions; she knew about anarchy. When she was still single and living in New York three of her roommates were garment workers. She used to attend anarchist Emma Goldman’s bracing lectures, before the police began closing them down.

  It was true that Miss Goldman’s exhortations aroused even in her law-abiding Yankee vitals a latent urge to go out and smash the state. From their cheers and clapping she could almost have said that similar feelings were stirring in the corseted breasts of the other women present, leisured uptown women for the most part, since the workingwomen were still in their sweatshops. But what was the end result? When the speeches were over and the lecture hall was dark, very few of those ladies rushed out and became Wobblies of the IWW, or even Democrats. For one thing, as women, they didn’t have the vote. Now, that would be something to struggle for.

  Emily put McClure’s and Hamptons aside with a sigh and picked up Theatre Magazine. Aha! Here was a story of how The Heiress’s Cousin had closed at Belasco’s Stuyvesant after three performances. Surely the closing would provide a rich source of unemployed actors (for instance, the leading player, aging matinee idol Robert Montmorency, “Fast-handed Bob” as the chorines in Philadelphia used to call him). Emily remembered Montmorency, the eyebrows, the little mustache, his acting skills impressive as long as he was sober, some said. Now, if only he were hungry enough to take a job in moving pictures, he might be induced to play villains with the Melpomene company. Emily noted that the theatrical agency handling Montmorency was the same one that had found her the job in the chorus of Monkey Days. She would call on them tomorrow, looking stunningly rich and dignified in her gray faille walking suit.

  But was it still in fashion? She turned her attention to The Delineator. Happily, the magazine was showing a suit not unlike her own in cut and color, as well as a number of lovely frocks designed to be worn without corsets. New Women were discarding their corsets, those steel-boned instruments of torture that mangled the internal organs, and so was Emily, who preferred to wear a bust bodice and drawers under her rational dress. A woman who declined to cripple herself with corsets had the physical strength to support a really good hat.

  Emily sighed over the picture of an embroidered chiffon tea gown, wispy, flowing, tight only in the bosom. Such gowns were made to be worn at home. When Adam provided her with a home again, if that day ever came, she would have one made up in the palest lavender and invite someone over for tea.

  She tucked the magazines into her bag, waved away another cloud of cigar smoke, and straightened her really good hat. Here came Adam with a porter.

  At 1466 Broadway, right on the new subway line and a short walk from the major theatrical agents and suppliers, the Knickerbocker was the hotel of choice for affluent show folks. Adam told the desk clerk they wanted a room with a private bath. The bath was for developing film, he whispered to Emily on the elevator, when she complained about the expense. The bellhop showed them to a lovely room on the eleventh floor, with yellow-figured wallpaper, handsome woodwork, high ceilings, and a shiny, ornate brass bed. Emily sat on it, trying the springs, while Adam threw up the window sash.

  “Look here, darling,” he said.

  “What?”

  He took her hand and drew her to the window. “Manhattan. The world. Soon it will all be ours.”

  Emily looked out at the building across the way, the purpling twilit sky beyond it, and then down at the street. Noises drifted up, horse sounds, car horns, shouts, a fire wagon clanging past. Streetlights winked on. She shivered; the air was cold. Adam put his arm around her, held her tight, and made her lean out of the window. “Just look,” he said. “Way over there is Delancey Street, where my parents lived. I’ve come a long way since those days.”

  She didn’t want to look. “Thanks, I’ve seen it,” she said. “I lived in Manhattan once, too, you know.” Not only that, but high places made her uncomfortable. The sight of those tiny people and objects moving to and fro, the sight of the hard sidewalk far below her, beckoning. . . . “Let go of me.”

  “Oh, well, if you feel that way,” he said.

  “It’s cold out there,” she said. “And I have to hang these clothes up.” She busied herself putting the room in order, turning her back on the view from the high window.

  TWO

  The following morning, while his wife was pinning up her hair and preparing to go see her old casting agent about some suitable actors, Adam Weiss went forth in pursuit of a cameraman. Silent partner Howie Kazanow had given him the street address of a technician by the name of Angus Johnson, who owned his own movie camera and filmed for independent companies sometimes.

  The trolley line passed very close to Angus Johnson’s house. Adam stepped off the car into a quiet neighborhood. No trees relieved the view of endless brick row houses, endless swaths of wiring swooping from one telephone pole to the next, endless cobblestone streets buried in dirt and horse dung, but at least there was no swarm of tenement dwellers shouting in foreign tongues and reeking of garlic. A tired old horse clopped along, pulling a knife-grinder’s wagon, raising a small cloud of dust. The sound of the knife-grinder’s bell brought out a woman with a handful of kitchen knives, and the wagon stopped. Her house was next door to Johnson’s.

  A turn on the crank of the bell summoned a short, fat, scowling person to the door, drying her hands on a flowered apron.

  “I’ve come to see Mr. Johnson,” Adam said.

  Her scowl deepened. “There’s no one by that name here.”

  “Just a minute,” Adam said. He stuck his foot in the door as she tried to close it. “Mr. Howard Kazanow told me I could find Mr. Johnson at this address. I have some work for him.”

  “That’s different,” the woman said. “Angus! There’s a man here wants to hire you to do some work.”

  A tall man in shirtsleeves, as gaunt and gangly as the woman was squat and pudgy, shuffled into the hall. His big-knuckled hands were marked with burn scars and strange chemical stains. “Who did you say sent you?”

  “Howard Kazanow.”

  “Oh. That’s all right then. Thank you, Martha; I’ll take care of the gentleman.”

  “Humph,” the woman said, and waddled into the back part of the
house.

  Mr. Johnson brushed a hank of long gray hair out of his eyes and squinted at Adam. “What sort of work?”

  “I’m filming some pictures. Mr. Kazanow assured me that your camera work was the best.”

  “Come inside.” Adam stepped into the hallway. Mr. Johnson put his head out, looked up and down the street, and quickly shut the door. “When do you want to film your picture?”

  “On the first sunny day. Tomorrow or the next day, if possible. Time is of the essence. My plan was to have the actors meet us in the Bronx, by the zoo. It’s fairly rural, and we can stage some scenes out behind the—”

  “Oh, no,” Mr. Johnson said. “Not the Bronx. You can’t make movies in the Bronx, not with things the way they are.”

  “What things?” Adam said.

  “Mr. Thomas Edison’s studio is in the Bronx. Right by the zoo.”

  “Surely Mr. Edison and his people will be too busy with their own work to bother with—”

  “Did Mr. Kazanow tell you everything?”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Come into the parlor, Mr. Weiss. Sit down. Martha! Bring us some tea.”

  Adam would have preferred whiskey, or even a martini, that astringent new drink that the Italian bartender at the Knickerbocker had introduced him to the night before while Emily was sleeping, but the sun was not yet over the yardarm, wherever the hell that was; in fact it was hardly ten thirty in the morning. He selected a platform rocker with hand-tatted antimacassars from among several other maroon plush chairs in the parlor and accepted a hostile cup of tea from Martha. He took a sip; it was nasty. She must have kept it simmering on the back of the stove for days.

  Mr. Johnson sat in silence for a moment, composing his thoughts. At last he spoke. “You know anything about Mr. Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, Mr. Weiss?”