The Edge of Ruin Read online

  “Enough, I guess. I owned a string of moving picture theaters in Philadelphia.”

  “But your production company is not one of Edison’s. Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Adam said. “Melpomene is an independent company. That’s the whole point of this endeavor.”

  “If you’re not one of his companies, Mr. Edison will do everything he can to keep you from making movies. He will try to stamp you out. That’s what conditions are like right now in the moving picture industry.”

  “Is that so.” Adam lit a cigarette. Had he come all this way, risking everything, only to fall victim to Edison again? No, by God. “I think Mr. Edison will find Melpomene Moving Pictures a little harder to stamp out than he thinks.”

  “Not if you set up to film in the Bronx, right under his nose, Mr. Weiss. Even at that, you’ll find Edison’s lawyers and detectives everywhere you go in the city. Or they’ll find you. Aside from the lawsuits, his people have been known to break cameras, ruin film, and worse. Some of them are nothing but hooligans.”

  “But there are independent companies making movies here, aren’t there?”

  “Yep, there are, but they only last as long as they can keep Mr. Edison’s detectives away from their movie cameras.”

  “What are these detectives looking for?”

  “The Latham Loop.”

  “That bit of slack in the film that lets it slide smoothly through the projector.”

  “Yes, and through the camera, exposing one frame after another.”

  “Did Edison invent that?”

  “Nope. Latham did. I nearly did it myself, when I was working at Mr. Edison’s laboratory in West Orange. But Mr. Edison keeps control of the patent.”

  “Clever of him.”

  “Has to. Make no mistake, Mr. Weiss, Mr. Thomas Alva Edison lives by his patents. If it wasn’t for his movie and phonograph patents Mr. Thomas Alva Edison would be stone broke.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “All the same. He lost millions of dollars in the iron ore scheme, every cent he got for the sale of Edison General Electric and a lot more besides. Now he’s plowing everything back into his alkaline batteries.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that this is very important to him, crushing my little business.” Adam considered asking Johnson about the iron ore scheme and the batteries, but the fact was he didn’t care. The important point seemed to be that Mr. Edison was willing to go to great lengths to protect his own interests. Understandable, but damned inconvenient. “Tell me this, though. How do the other in dependent movie companies get around the problem of the Trust?”

  “They work on the outskirts of the city. They sneak around. Sometimes they hide their real camera in a milk wagon or a stand of bushes, and pretend to film with another camera without the Edison patented shutter. Of course the fake cameras take terrible pictures. But usually the independents make their movies where Edison’s detectives can’t find them. Not right out in plain sight in the Bronx.”

  “I see,” Adam said. “Very well, Mr. Johnson, we’ll line up another location. I’ll let you know where, and you can meet us there. Is there a telephone number where I can reach you?”

  Mr. Johnson handed him a piece of paper. “This is the number of the candy store across the street. They’ll call me to the telephone, or if I’m not home they’ll take a message.”

  After the phone number Johnson had written a street address. “What’s this address?” Adam said.

  “A shop where you can buy film. Tell them I sent you; they keep it under the counter.”

  “I have to use contraband film?”

  “Mr. Eastman and Mr. Edison are like that,” Johnson said, holding up his chemical-stained hand with the first two fingers crossed tightly together to indicate a close relationship. “Great hunting and fishing pals. Eastman won’t sell his film to movie companies who aren’t in the Trust. My source smuggles the Lumière film stock over from France.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s good film, but it’s got no sprocket holes. You have to punch them yourself.”

  “Punch them myself?”

  “I guess you can borrow one of my punches,” Mr. Johnson said. “Here you go.” He handed Adam a naked greasy mechanism, clumsy to hold and heavy.

  “Thank you. Er—” Before Adam could demand wrapping paper Mr. Johnson hustled him to the front door.

  “We can start tomorrow if the weather is good. Of course, that’s up to you. Oh, and you might think about hiring some big, strong fellows in case some of Mr. Edison’s boys come around, McCoy or Duffy particularly. Duffy can be pretty unpleasant. But McCoy is the worst.” Mr. Johnson opened the front door and glanced up and down the street. No McCoy; no Duffy. Nothing was in sight except a horse-drawn ice wagon slowly passing. “I’ll be waiting for your call,” Johnson said. “Be sure you aren’t followed.” SHULTZ’S ICE read the sign on the wagon. Harmless-looking, Adam thought, but you never knew where Edison’s secret army of detectives might be lurking.

  Adam waited until the menacing ice wagon was out of sight before he slipped out the door and made for the trolley. No detectives, no persons other than Adam himself, got on at his trolley stop. He went straight to the shop that carried the Lumière film, stopping only to buy a newspaper in which to wrap the borrowed sprocket-hole punch, so as to keep the grease from getting on his good suit.

  The shop was a hole-in-the-wall on a busy street at the edge of Greenwich Village, barely visible between a fruit stand and a store selling ladies’ hats. As he slipped inside Adam saw a uniformed policeman out of the tail of his eye, slowing down, stopping. He started guiltily, but the policeman had paused only to take a piece of fruit.

  A young salesclerk wearing a celluloid collar and cuffs, arm garters, and center-parted hair stood behind the counter. Adam waited until the policeman had moved along, and then he said to the clerk, speaking low, “Angus Johnson sent me.”

  At the sound of the cameraman’s name the clerk laid his fore-finger next to his nose. After some further discussion he readily provided twelve thousand feet of film, enough and to spare for shooting and processing the four one-reel movies. Adam paid him and stepped out into the immigrant-crowded street, glancing around to be sure there was not a policeman in sight. There was not.

  Melpomene Moving Picture Studios was officially in business.

  THREE

  That night Emily and Adam dressed for dinner, like the plutocrats they longed to become. Emily had never seen a handsomer man than Adam in evening clothes. She still had her green gown of slipper satin, but no fur coat to wear over it.

  “My cloth coat won’t look right,” she said.

  Adam collapsed his opera hat and put it back in the hatbox. “Fear not, my dear. We’ll dine in the hotel.”

  A puff of face powder took the shine off Emily’s nose; a simple headdress of rhinestones and ostrich feathers completed the effect. She stood back from the mirror to admire herself. “Won’t it be expensive, dinner at the Knickerbocker?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Adam said. “The tab won’t come due until after we fulfill our contract with Howie Kazanow. In a few weeks we’ll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” He looked over her shoulder into the mirror to adjust his tie.

  “What if we fail?”

  “We can’t fail, sweetheart. But if we do”—he kissed her on the ear—“one more debt will be as nothing.” Emily imagined the two of them in rags, fleeing their creditors, riding the rods of a boxcar into the West. Perhaps it would be romantic.

  A small string orchestra was playing as Emily and Adam swanned into the Knickerbocker dining room. The puffed-up maître d’hôtel led them through ferns and white gleaming tables, past couples less pretty than they were, to the very best table in the house. As they passed, heads turned and the clinking of silverware stopped.

  “We’ll start with the oysters Rockefeller,” Adam told the waiter. “After that, poularde à la bonne femme . . .”
and he launched into a stream of restaurant French, which Emily knew he had learned at college, waiting on tables to put himself through. Adam’s French was about as fluent as the Italian Emily had picked up working in the corps de ballet of various operas. Nevertheless, she had never known him to order a bad meal. “. . . And bring us a bottle of Château Grand Vin Clos de la Garde to start with,” he concluded.

  The waiter left. Emily asked whether in all that stream of verbiage Adam had ordered anything for dessert.

  “Not yet. So tell me about the actors you engaged.”

  “I went to my old agency,” Emily said. “The one where I used to sit in the outer office day after day waiting for work. I told that awful Rita I was there to hire some people. You should have seen her face.”

  “Must have been gratifying.”

  Emily smiled. Gratifying didn’t begin to express it. “There were two young Indian fellas waiting to see Mr. Schwartz. Perfectly adorable. Just the thing for the Westerns, I thought, so I told them to—”

  “Actors?”

  “Adam, we’re making movies. They don’t have to be actors, they just have to look good.”

  “Not actors.”

  “High steelworkers. They just finished the Blackwell’s Island Bridge, and they thought they might like to try show business for a change. You should see their posture. Maybe they can do stunts.”

  “Did you hire any actors, sweetheart?”

  “Yes! Robert Montmorency. You must have heard of him. A famous man, Broadway star, Shakespearean actor—”

  “My mother admired him,” Adam said. “What’s he done lately?”

  “The Heiress’s Cousin, at the Stuyvesant. Not his fault it closed. Before that, I didn’t ask. Then there’s Vera Zinovia. Beautiful girl, pale skin, dark eyes, masses of raven hair.”

  “Russian?” The wine steward arrived and began his performance with the wine, uncorking it, offering Adam the stopper to sniff.

  “Very Russian,” Emily said. “She trained at the Moscow Art Theater.”

  “Does she speak any English?”

  “Enough to take stage directions. Also she knows many expatriate actors who live on the Lower East Side. She promised to introduce me to them. We still have to find a juvenile, and she says she knows some good ones. And after Vera, Fay Winningly.”

  “I think I remember her. She’s been in other movies.” The wine steward poured about a tablespoonful of wine into Adam’s glass. Adam swirled it around, sniffed it, tasted it, and nodded approval.

  “Fay is a very successful movie actress,” Emily assured him while he did the business with the wine. “She has a waiflike quality that comes across well on film. Her last job folded up because the producers went bankrupt; some trouble with lawsuits from the Trust, she said. I thought Edison only made trouble for the exhibitors and distributors.”

  “Edison makes trouble for everyone,” Adam said. “Mr. Johnson gave me an earful this morning.” The oysters arrived. Adam frowned and busied himself with them.

  “What did he say?”

  Adam swallowed an oyster and gestured with his cutlery. “Edison has his knife out for the independent producers right now. You know the Kodak film? George Eastman is in bed with the Patents Trust. We have to use smuggled French film. Also we have to watch out for Edison’s Trust detectives. They’re all over the place, inspecting the cameras, reporting to Edison’s lawyers, sometimes even vandalizing movie company property.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’ll beat him. ‘Our strength is as the strength of ten because our hearts are pure.’ ” The waiter whisked the oyster shells away and then the partridge came, followed by the other courses, each more succulent than the last. After the Clos de la Garde Adam ordered a well-chilled bottle of Mumm’s Extra Dry. Emily loved champagne; she drank it down with a light heart. And why not? Adam was perfectly correct. Under the circumstances the bill for the dinner was the least of their worries.

  “So you haven’t hired a juvenile?” Adam said at last. The role of the juvenile was for a handsome, innocent-faced young man to pair up with the lovely Fay Winningly in different scenarios.

  The waiter placed her charlotte russe in front of her. Emily took a delicate spoonful. “No one was quite right.”

  “How could that be?”

  “It just was. I must have looked at a hundred head shots. No one was right. They all looked too young, or too old, or too jaded, or too feebleminded. I was ready to go out and cast the first good-looking young man I met on the street. After all, this is the movies. Do we really need a trained actor? But Vera Zinovia told me she knew somebody. She said for us to meet her in Greenwich Village at the Café Boheme on Christopher Street tomorrow evening at eight. She told me many foreign actors congregate there, including her cousin Boris, the finest actor in the northern hemisphere.”

  “So. Another day before we can start filming.”

  “We can use the time to round up some costumes and scout out a good location. Somewhere far from Mr. Edison’s detectives. How much trouble is this Patent Trust going to be? We might want to throw in our lot with them, Adam. It might be easier to cooperate with the Wizard of Menlo Park than to try to outwit him. Why wouldn’t we want to do that?”

  “Other than the fact that the Motion Picture Patents Company is the earthly embodiment of evil, you mean?”

  “Surely Mr. Edison can’t be that bad. After all, he invented the lightbulb, by whose light we are eating this excellent dinner, he invented the phonograph, everyone says he’s a genius—”

  “Did you ever see that film where he electrocuted the elephant?”

  Emily shuddered. She had.

  “He electrocuted that blameless elephant, as well as a number of dogs, and they tell me he even helped design the electric chair, all so that he could get the better of Mr. Westinghouse, a business rival.”

  “And now in our small way we are going to become his business rivals, too,” Emily said. “Don’t you think he will try to electrocute us, too, figuratively speaking? Don’t you think we should—”

  “Even if it were possible for Melpomene to throw in its lot with the Trust,” Adam said, “and I think it isn’t, not at any price, I can see myself joining them as a producer and then hearing from Mr. Edison that there’s not enough moral uplift in my work, or enough electrocuted animals, or enough boxing cats. Remember the boxing cats? I want to make good movies. I want to make Art. If I only wanted to make money I would have stayed in Philadelphia with my string of nickelodeons.” He looked very serious, very artistic.

  “I love you, Adam,” Emily said. He squeezed her silk-clad knee under the table. “We’ll keep out of Mr. Edison’s way then.”

  “Sure we will. We’ll find a better location than the Bronx. How about Jersey?”

  “Menlo Park is in Jersey,” she said.

  “Edison left Menlo Park some time ago, sweetheart, as everybody knows. He’s based in West Orange.”

  “But—”

  “I mean someplace like Fort Lee or Coytesville. That’s a long way from West Orange. We can take the ferry across the Hudson. The people who sold me the film said there are independent movie companies filming over there already. You couldn’t ask for better scenery. They have everything. Woods, fields, rocky cliffs, village streets, attractive storefronts, everything.”

  Rocky cliffs. Indeed there were, Emily thought, and the Palisades were the rockiest and most clifflike of them all. It was there on a picnic with Ricky Schwartz that she had suffered her first serious episode of height fear, three years and a whole career in show business ago. But Adam didn’t have to hear about Ricky, or about Emily’s fear of heights, which she had transcended, mostly, the day she wed Adam and became a secure married woman. “Will we use the cliffs in our pictures?”

  “We will,” he said, “and the storefronts, if we like them, and every interesting scene we can find in the out-of-doors. When these first four pictures are finished and distributed we’
ll have the money to build our own studio for indoor work. Maybe we’ll build it right there in Fort Lee.”

  Visions of wildly creative moviemaking replaced all thoughts of the terrifying cliff. Emily was beginning to see that Adam was an artist, not a common, ordinary madman at all. She could help him make art. With a lot of luck, she could help him make money, too.

  They went up to bed and made steamy love until the hotel room warmed up. In the dark bathroom, with the smell of Adam’s sweat still on her skin, Emily punched holes in the raw film stock while Adam lay in bed in his socks and garters writing movie scenarios. This is how it’s supposed to be, Emily thought. This is living. She was tremendously excited.

  By the time Emily had finished punching holes Adam was snoring, lying on his back with one arm over the top of his head. One more task remained to be done before she could curl up beside him. Every moving picture studio of any consequence had a trademark to keep the unscrupulous from pirating their films, AB for American Biograph, the rooster for Pathé, the flying V for Vitagraph, and so forth. Besides appearing in all the titles, the emblem was displayed in nearly every shot. For scenes filmed indoors in a studio the trademark was painted somewhere on the woodwork or hung on the wall like a picture. For outdoor scenes it was nailed to a tree or stuck in the ground attached to a sharp stake. If you wanted your work to be respected, you had to have a professional-looking emblem. Emily sat down gently on the foot of the bed, took scissors and cardboard, and by the pale orange light of the dressing table lamp cut out the trademark M for Melpomene.

  FOUR

  The Café Boheme was in a cellar just off Christopher Street, down a short flight of stone steps from the sidewalk. Adam pulled the door open and held it for Emily. She hoisted her skirt a few inches, to keep it from the dry leaves and general filth swirling in the stairwell, and stepped inside.

  A steamy smell of coffee, tobacco smoke, unwashed workers, and cheap perfume rolled over her. The large room beyond the door was packed with such a crowd as she had never seen before gathered in one place. Sloe-eyed factory girls from the Lower East Side, exotic, Mediterranean, in cheap and threadbare jackets, were keeping company over cups of coffee with fresh-faced New England boys wearing the school colors of Harvard and Yale knitted in striped six-footer mufflers. Artistic types were huddling over the latest copy of Camera Work, the magazine of avant-garde photographs, some of them women, all of them smoking cigarettes. Men in work clothes, a few women among them, were crowding around the iron stove in the far corner. Everyone seemed to be talking at once at the tops of their lungs. The level of sound was almost unbearable. Adam said something.