Mae plays a dancer, and dances well, but the female lead is Katherine Grant, and Mae has sixteen years, one marriage, and one child on Katherine Grant. Mae has years of half-empty theaters, miserable dressing rooms, and cold lodgings on Katherine Grant. One year earlier, Katherine Grant was crowned Miss Los Angeles, and went on to compete in the Miss America pageant. It does not matter that nudie pictures of her subsequently appeared, and attempts were made to extort money in return for the plates. The problem vanished, because Katherine Grant had signed a five-year contract with Hal Roach Studios.
Mae watches her common-law husband act alongside Katherine Grant, and understands that it is the beginning of the end for her.
When he returns home that evening, he finds Mae weeping.
She weeps, and she cannot stop.
43
He works without rest. He is driven. This time, he knows he is not going to be cast aside after three or four pictures. He notices also that Jimmy Parrott is drinking more than is advisable, and chews diet pills for breakfast. As Jimmy Parrott becomes more unreliable, so too does his own star rise.
Yet it remains a low star: low wages, low advances, low percentages. Harold Lloyd, who has his own unit at Hal Roach Studios, is making as much as Chaplin, while he is not even clearing $200 a week.
But then, he has not made a picture like Safety Last!
He sees Safety Last! at a studio screening: March, 1923. He goes into the theater feeling as though he has found a home at last on the lot – greeted with enthusiasm, the prodigal son returned, Hal has high hopes for you – and emerges after seventy-three minutes with the realization that his ambitions so far have been modest, and his talent is more modest still.
It does not matter that the most dangerous stunts in Safety Last! are performed by a double.
It does not matter that Harold Lloyd, a control freak, cannot bring himself to watch this double work.
It does not matter that the clock face from which Harold Lloyd hangs is a fa?ade constructed on the rooftop of another building.
It does not matter how the trick is done, only that the trick is done, and done well.
Climax upon climax, gag upon gag: the picture is a source of wonder to him, dreamed into life by a man with a false forefinger and thumb who is almost blind in one eye, all because of a prop bomb carried in the right hand on the wrong day.
(When he meets Harold Lloyd for the first time on the lot, he asks for any advice that might prove useful. This is what Harold Lloyd tells him:
– Always check the fuse.)
He knows what they say about Harold Lloyd: that Harold Lloyd has become too big for his boots; that Harold Lloyd requires multiple takes to film the simplest of scenes; that Harold Lloyd cannot even position a camera without hours of debate.
Even when Harold Lloyd is praised, the plaudits are conditional.
Harold Lloyd is not a comedian, Hal Roach informs his listeners one afternoon. Harold Lloyd is an actor. Harold Lloyd is the best actor I’ve ever seen in a comic role, but still just an actor pretending to be a comedian.
What of it? he thinks.
I am a stage comic pretending to be a screen actor.
Mae is a married woman pretending to be my wife.
Chaplin is a daemon pretending to be a human being.
Is this fair? No, of course it is not fair.
Chaplin, like Harold Lloyd, is a genius. But Harold Lloyd is not a genius like Chaplin. No one is.
And perhaps that is for the best.
44
Still Mae makes her demands, still Mae seeks her roles, but a new bitterness creeps into her claims upon him.
Mae wants her cut.
They fuck less often now. He tries to stay out of her way, using work as his excuse – and it is a valid one, for the most part, although he still likes a drink, even needs a drink, especially before returning home to this woman.
– Why don’t you get rid of her?
It is Jimmy Finlayson who asks, Jimmy Finlayson with his Scottish burr, and his false mustache, and two toes missing from his left foot. Jimmy Finlayson has moved from Jack Blystone to Mack Sennett to Hal Roach, and now Hal Roach has promised to make Jimmy Finlayson a star, like Ben Turpin. Jimmy Finlayson doesn’t entirely believe Hal Roach, but whatever happens, it’s better than working and dying in a Larbert foundry.
They are drinking in the basement of Del Monte’s in Venice. He thinks Del Monte’s has improved since it was forced to become a speakeasy. The company is better.
Jimmy Finlayson has married a woman named Emily Gilbert, who is nineteen and believed herself to be marrying a man of thirty, because Jimmy Finlayson, like an elderly spinster seizing the moment, has shaved some years from his age. Maybe Emily Gilbert wasn’t thinking at all, because fond though he is of Jimmy Finlayson, Jimmy Finlayson is nobody’s idea of an Adonis. Now Emily Gilbert is living with Jimmy Finlayson and Jimmy Finlayson’s sister, Agnes, in a house in Los Angeles that would be too small for all three of them even if it were ten times the size and occupied an entire city block. This is why Jimmy Finlayson is sitting here in the speakeasy of Del Monte’s, just as he is sitting with Jimmy Finlayson for very similar reasons.
Jimmy Finlayson is convinced that the marriage to Emily Gilbert will not endure for very much longer. Jimmy Finlayson is grateful for this. Jimmy Finlayson also believes that, in a similar manner, the man beside him would be happier if Mae were no longer in his life.
I can’t divorce her, he tells Jimmy Finlayson. We’re not married.
If that joke was ever funny, it has long since ceased to be.
I wasn’t talking about divorcing Mae, says Jimmy Finlayson. I was talking about killing her.
He almost chokes on his bourbon – in Del Monte’s the liquor is good, for those who can afford to pay – until Jimmy Finlayson gives him that squint, and he has to hide his face in a handkerchief, he is laughing so hard.
It is September 21st, 1923. They are at leisure because Mother’s Joy has finished production. The picture is poor, but he has not yet begun to worry. Roughest Africa is about to be released, and the word is that Motion Picture News will describe it as a humdinger. And he works well with Jimmy Finlayson, so well that Hal Roach has begun to pair them regularly.
But there is no respite from Mae, not at home and not in the studio. Mae is with him for Mother’s Joy, and will be with him when Near Dublin begins filming on Monday. At least Mae has a named role in Mother’s Joy. In Near Dublin she will be credited only as a Villager, along with Hal Roach’s other makeweights.
Why didn’t Mae ever get a divorce? Jimmy Finlayson asks.
– Her husband wouldn’t grant her one.
This is not, of course, the only reason why he and Mae have remained unmarried. He is sure that Rupert Cuthbert might be persuaded to let Mae go, for money if for no other reason. Mae knows this, too. He could probably afford to make it happen. He does not think it would take much for Rupert Cuthbert to sign the papers. But some fuss might arise, and the gossip hounds would sniff it out. Hal Roach would not like this.
In truth, he would not like this either.
How bad is it between the two of you? asks Jimmy Finlayson.
– Bad. Bad as it’s ever been. What about you and Emily?
– The last time I fucked her, I got frostbite.
He laughs again.
– How old is Emily now?
– Twenty-three, going on a hundred.
– And how old does she think you are?