Walter Belasco does not want competition.
Even Charlie the elephant does not want competition, because there are only so many peanuts to go around.
Someone whispers that Chaplin considered hiring him for his stock company, but decided against it. Carl Laemmle, he is told, is doing Chaplin a favor by taking him on, because Chaplin feels sorry for him. He is a charity case. He should go back to vaudeville, to rat-gnawed bags of corn for popping, and dressing rooms shared with midgets and jugglers and ventriloquists, and nickel meals at lunch counters in towns only a generation advanced from dust.
And although he wishes to be like Chaplin, neither is he like these others. He wishes to be in pictures, but he does not hate the stage. He is A.J.’s seed, and has never forgotten Pickard’s Museum, and the act worked up before dolls, and A.J.’s voice asking where he got his gags, the gags he procured, the gags he invented. He has Mae. They can work the theaters; the Pantages Circuit is waiting.
The four pictures are completed by October. When will they be released? A shrug. Perhaps it will be as it was with Nuts in May. Perhaps they may never be released, and Chaplin will cover the bill with a check, Chaplin’s conscience at ease, a debt never owed now paid to Chaplin’s satisfaction.
By November, he and Mae are lying once again in unfamiliar beds, in rooming houses where men bathe weekly, and only by night.
27
Hal Roach will live so long that Hal Roach will be permitted to dictate his own history, like God conveying His Word to the evangelists. They will record as gospel Hal Roach’s tales of mule-skinning and Yukon prospecting, of ice-cream truck driving and saloon swamping – a term that Hal Roach will generally resist explaining for fear that it may purge the exoticism, because a saloon swamper is so much more esoteric an entity than a janitor, and ‘swamping’ sounds better than emptying spittoons and cleaning blood and shit and vomit from toilet stalls.
Hal Roach, a colorful man trapped in a black and white world, apprehends the value of anecdotage.
Hal Roach comes up the hard way, and learns from those who fall on the climb. Hal Roach acts opposite Jack Kerrigan, the fairy. Hal Roach likes Jack Kerrigan, and does not enjoy seeing him cut loose. Hal Roach is a kind man, but obsessed with refinement. Mack Sennett, Hal Roach’s great rival, is vulgar; Hal Roach is sophisticated. Hal Roach stresses this distinction to anyone who will listen, so it must be true.
Under the guidance of Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd begins to learn and develop. No longer content to imitate Chaplin, Harold Lloyd experiments with a new character. Harold Lloyd finds a pair of dark-framed glasses. Harold Lloyd picks up a boater.
Aided by Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd becomes a star.
But he does not become a star.
He is now twenty-eight, and has begun to despair. Hal Roach gives him work on five one-reel pictures, but when he watches himself on the studio screen he discerns only a poor man’s Harold Lloyd, a pale Chaplin; an anybody, a nobody.
It is summer 1918, but his pictures with Hal Roach will not be seen in summer 1918, or in fall 1918, or even in winter 1918. Time will crawl, dust will gather, and eventually these pictures will be greeted with a kind of muted enthusiasm, which is no enthusiasm at all. But he knew this would be the case, knew it as soon as he left the lot without the promise of more pictures, knew it as soon as he climbed on the streetcar without a glimmer of recognition from those around him, and none likely to become manifest in the future.
He sees the looks on the stairs as he climbs to his room, the eyes of the failed and yet-to-fail. He has squandered their luck, and his own. They have gambled on him once more, and they have lost. They can only hope that some of the luck might come crawling back to them, like a strayed dog that finds its way home again, beaten and hurt, grateful for a familiar corner in which to lick its wounds and recover.
Hal Roach didn’t renew, he tells Mae.
– Hal may yet. Maybe Hal just needs time to think.
– If Hal needs time to think, there’s no thinking to be done.
What will you do? Mae asks, but he has no answer for her. The fault, he feels certain, lies with him. He has failed Isadore Bernstein, failed Carl Laemmle, failed Hal Roach. It is not enough to want to be a star. It is not enough to hunger for it. The fire that blazed in Chaplin, the spark that has ignited in Harold Lloyd, appears dormant in him, or absent entire.
A diary sits on Mae’s dressing table. It contains the details of bookings confirmed and yet to be confirmed, of living without being alive. The Pantages Circuit. He reads the names now of theaters and towns, a litany of the tiredly familiar: The Regina in Brandon, Manitoba.
The Orpheum in Detroit, Michigan.
The Margaret in Anaconda, Montana.
The Capitol in Logan, Utah.
A.J. is wrong. Some names possess no poetry, or none better than doggerel. He can already smell every venue, and they all smell the same.
We’re okay, you and I, says Mae.
I can’t do it, he tells her, not anymore.
– What choice is there?
– I have another offer.
– You didn’t tell me.
– I didn’t want to.
– Why not?
– It’s a step back. No lead. No name above the title. Maybe no name at all.
– Sennett?
– Vitagraph.
Vitagraph, and Larry Semon.
28
At the Oceana Apartments, he sits at his desk. On it stand a clock, a lamp, a black telephone, and a typewriter to answer the steady flow of correspondence from those who remember him as he once was.
In the face of such demands, Babe would have fled the room.
Babe does not enjoy writing to fans. Babe does not even like signing autographs, not when there are bets to be placed, and rounds of golf to be played, and football games to be watched, and hands of poker to be won. But Babe is also ashamed of his lack of education, and Babe fears to see it confirmed in his writing.
This is important, he tries to explain to Babe, as a pile of photographs appears on the table before them, each one requiring two signatures.
– Not one. Two.
It’s not important, says Babe. Only what appears on the screen is important.
Babe works, and works hard. Babe sits up long into the night memorizing scripts and visualizing scenes in his head. Babe wants the pictures to be the best they can be.
But when filming is done, so too is Babe. Babe is practical. Babe never really wishes to be a star, never expects it. Babe desires only to be employed. If this were to end tomorrow, Babe would go back to playing bit parts and heavies.
And now, at the Oceana Apartments, he watches Babe’s shade rise from a studio table and put on his jacket, the pile of photographs left untouched.
You’re afraid, Babe says, that if you don’t sign for them, they won’t come to see the pictures anymore.