Then the Truart Film Corporation signs Larry Semon for a six-feature deal worth more than $3 million over three years. Babe and Larry Semon celebrate with a round of golf, and dinner after. Larry Semon travels to New York to sign his name to the contract with a gold pen filled with gold ink, all while wearing a gold suit. Parties are given in Larry Semon’s honor, and Larry Semon is placed in the back of an automobile and driven through Times Square.
But Babe worries. Larry Semon cannot deliver six features in three years. Larry Semon cannot deliver six features in six years. Larry Semon may not be able to deliver six features in the rest of his lifetime, not even if Larry Semon lives to be a hundred.
The Truart deal, signed with a gold pen in gold ink by a man wearing a gold suit, comes to nothing because Larry Semon has reckoned without Vitagraph. Vitagraph may be weary of its former star, but if Truart is willing to pay Larry Semon $3 million, then maybe Vitagraph should look again at its paperwork. Vitagraph does, and finds that Larry Semon owes the studio more pictures. Truart tears up the contract. Larry Semon is in trouble, and if Larry Semon is in trouble, so, too, is Babe.
But Chadwick Pictures Corporation, headed by I.E. Chadwick, believes in Larry Semon. It believes in Larry Semon almost as much as Larry Semon does.
Larry Semon plows his time and his efforts – along with much of his own money, and I.E. Chadwick’s money also – into The Wizard of Oz.
Directed by Larry Semon.
Produced by Larry Semon.
Written by Larry Semon.
Starring Larry Semon.
Larry Semon even marries his co-star, Dorothy Dwan.
And Babe is by his side throughout, because Babe is loyal. Babe watches the chaos and beauty unfold together, and sees Larry Semon’s reach exceed his grasp. The deadline for a Christmas release is missed.
Because Larry Semon believes in the myth of Larry Semon. Larry Semon believes in his ability to be like Harold Lloyd, to be like Buster Keaton.
To be like Chaplin.
But while Harold Lloyd may take extreme pains to put his pictures together, driving crews crazy in the process, and testing the patience of Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd can still produce six features in a year.
Buster Keaton can produce four.
And Chaplin is Chaplin.
Chaplin – the master – is making a picture called The Gold Rush, but has been plagued by misfortune and his own ambition. Thousands of feet of film shot on location at Truckee have been discarded as unusable, and Chaplin is now in the process of recreating the Klondike on a studio lot.
Chaplin is also said to be having trouble in his private life. (But when is Chaplin not, for Chaplin tries to fuck any young woman who makes the error of standing still for too long.) Chaplin has been fucking an actress named Lita Grey. Lita Grey is fifteen years old. Chaplin first meets Lita Grey when she is eight, and gives her a part in The Kid when she is just twelve.
Chaplin should be in jail.
But Chaplin is Chaplin.
Larry Semon does not care who Chaplin is fucking. Larry Semon just wants to make pictures like Chaplin’s, like Harold Lloyd’s, like Buster Keaton’s. But these men have a vision, and Larry Semon does not. All Larry Semon can do is extend his slapstick gags over a longer screen time, and that simply will not suffice.
The Wizard of Oz dies a death. The Chadwick Pictures Corporation goes bankrupt. Even Vitagraph, now without a star, collapses.
Larry Semon, who, in 1915, earns thirty-five dollars a week as a cartoonist; who, a decade later, buys a gold suit in which to sign a contract worth a million dollars a year; who teaches Babe Hardy to play golf; who is generous to his co-stars as long as they acknowledge their position in the hierarchy; whose greatest fault is a craving to be better than his talent allows; is broke within two years, and dead within three. Larry Semon, who sees his father die poor, and stinking of fish guts, in turn dies poor in a sanatorium, weakened by pneumonia and tuberculosis, his mind broken.
And Babe Hardy, now without a mentor, finds a new home.
With Hal Roach.
52
He watches The Wizard of Oz and feels sorry for Larry Semon, and sorry for Babe. He commiserates with Babe when they meet on the lot. Babe is working with Charley Parrott, Jimmy Parrott’s brother, the one who does not have epilepsy, does not drink to excess, and is not addicted to diet pills.
Babe shrugs.
– What can you do?
He sees The Gold Rush, and feels sorry for himself. This, he thinks, is greatness. He wishes he could tell Chaplin in person, but Chaplin now orbits in a higher realm.
Artistically, at least.
Chaplin’s recent marriage to Lita Grey is already collapsing, and it is said that Chaplin is now fucking Georgia Hale, who replaced Lita Grey as the lead in The Gold Rush when Lita Grey’s pregnancy could no longer be disguised. Chaplin is fucking Georgia Hale while Charlie, Jr, his second child – his third, if one counts the boy, Norman, who lives for only three days – is still wet from Lita Grey’s womb. The arithmetic on Charlie, Jr’s birth is complex. The boy is born on May 5th, 1925. Lita Grey turns seventeen on April 15th. The age of consent in California is eighteen, but Chaplin marries Lita Grey in Mexico when she is sixteen, mostly to avoid going to jail, and only after Chaplin fails to bully her into having an abortion.
Meanwhile, Chaplin is also fucking Mary Pickford.
These details of Chaplin’s life are disturbing.
In order to laugh at Chaplin, one must try to forget them.
53
But who is he to excoriate Chaplin, a mortal before his god? Who is he to question Chaplin’s ways?
He did not know Chaplin’s poverty.
He did not bequeath a mother to the lunatic asylum, a small boy leading a disturbed woman by the hand to the gates of Cane Hill, there to be consigned to the aphotic regions of its wards, the aspect of its buildings being inimical to daylight.
He did not endure the orphanage, or the streets.
He did not suffer want.
Perhaps this is why Chaplin’s ambition so exceeds his own: because Chaplin must scale such heights as to render the depths concealed, and thereby obliterate memory.
Perhaps this is why Chaplin’s appetites are so ravenous: because Chaplin starved in tenements where even the rats went hungry, and was mothered by a mind in decay.
Perhaps this is why Chaplin’s need is so great: because Chaplin survived on so little for so long.
And perhaps this is why Chaplin despoils young girls in his bed: because Chaplin had no childhood of his own, and so is driven to consume the childhood of others in reprisal.
Such pain, such pain.
54
So Mae has been erased from this new version of his life under construction, just as Madelyn has been erased from Babe’s. He does not miss Mae, but the touch of her lingers. He feels it upon him, even with Lois. Mae has been part of his life for too long to be banished so easily. He tries to avoid Franklin Avenue, where he lived with Mae for years. It helps that it is so far north, away from Lois’s apartment.
A little.
It helps a little.
He is astray, dislocated. Mae has left him with a name that is not his own, and now he cannot escape it. He has no character on the screen, and a manufactured identity away from it. All is pretense, but we must be careful what we pretend to be, because that is what we must become.
This he understands.
All is pretense.