He reads about Jack Kerrigan while Mae dresses before him. He likes watching her dress, enjoys watching her apply her make-up, this careful construction of the self. Mae purrs as she moves, lost in the acts.
Now that they share the same name, he has almost begun to think of her as his wife, although they remain unmarried. But the business with Jack Kerrigan causes him concern. He is no fairy, unlike Jack Kerrigan, but some motion picture contracts contain morals clauses. They are puffery, for the most part – if they were invoked for every lapse, no pictures would ever get made – but the threat of them remains.
He is not a star. This room still smells of the detergent Mae has purchased, and which they have applied together to every surface in the hours since their arrival. They are to be here for a week, and Mae has refused even to remove her shoes until the room is scrubbed to her satisfaction. After this, they make love.
In their clean room.
In their unclean bed.
But if he were to become a star, what then?
Universal has tolerated Jack Kerrigan’s sexual proclivities, but they have remained a cause for concern, particularly as they are common knowledge in the motion picture community. In shooting his mouth off, Jack Kerrigan has drawn attention to himself. Jack Kerrigan may be a fairy, but that doesn’t mean Jack Kerrigan has to disport like a damsel in the Denver Times.
That evening, after the show, the conversation at the boarding house is of how Jack Kerrigan’s career is over. Jack Kerrigan’s decline will be gradual, his termination carefully managed, but Jack Kerrigan is done. By talking like a fairy, Jack Kerrigan has given the studio permission to treat him like a fairy. Worse, a Jack Kerrigan picture is finished and ready for release the following year. To add to the studio’s misfortunes, the picture is titled A Man’s Man.
He returns to his room, leaving a drink unfinished. Mae is already in bed, concealed beneath a thin sheet.
He sits by the window and monitors the rise and fall of her breathing, a pale witness to the comber of her form.
24
He and Mae go to the pictures. They watch a Rolin company short starring Harold Lloyd. Harold Lloyd has previously made a series of pictures for Hal Roach as Willie Work and now, following an unsuccessful flirtation with Mack Sennett, has returned to Hal Roach’s stable as Lonesome Luke. He thinks Harold Lloyd is good, but can tell that the actor is copying Chaplin. After all, everyone has copied, is copying, and will copy Chaplin. Even he.
Especially he.
Later, over coffee, he is quiet. He believes that Harold Lloyd cannot endure as Lonesome Luke. No one can compete with Chaplin. He has tried, and failed, and he knows Chaplin better than anyone, for he has walked in Chaplin’s footsteps.
Maybe you should try calling Chaplin, Mae suggests.
Mae means well. He understands this, but it does not stop him from feeling a muted rage. He tries to hide it, but she knows his every expression.
That night, the Audience does not laugh as hard or as often as before, and Mae does not speak to him in the dressing room, or on the walk back to their rooming house, or in their bed.
When he touches her, she pretends to be asleep.
25
Carl Laemmle saves him.
Isadore Bernstein’s dreams of a motion picture empire may be so much smoke, but Carl Laemmle sees Nuts in May, even if no one else does.
He gets the call.
– Mr Laemmle likes you. Come in and talk to us.
He shines his shoes, the shoes that have not yet been stolen because he no longer leaves them outside his door at night. He pays to have his suit pressed, and examines it at the laundry counter to ensure that the fabric is spotless and without wrinkle or burn. He irons his own shirt, even though Mae offers to do it for him. He will perform all these duties himself because he is superstitious, and he has worked so hard, and he fears that if he does not take care of every detail his future will slip through some small fissure and he will be forced to watch as it tumbles into the void until at last its light is lost.
He does not sleep that night.
He bathes in the morning. The proprietor of the rooming house is not used to men wishing to bathe in the morning. The proprietor regards it as a tendency worthy of comment and suspicion for a man to bathe excessively – or even, it is speculated, given the state of the proprietor’s personal hygiene, to bathe very much at all.
Word spreads through the rooming house, among the failed and the yet-to-fail. They wait for him. He can hear them gathering in the halls, on the stairs, crow women and crow men.
Mae helps him dress. From his suit she picks stray lint and infinitesimal molecules of dust and dirt that have conspired to undo the good work of the laundry and might present sufficient cause for Carl Laemmle to refuse him entry to the studio.
Finally, he is ready. Mae moves in to kiss him, but stops just as her lips are poised to brush his skin, as though even this might be too much for the fragile warp and weft of present and future. Instead she tells him that he is as good as any, that she loves him.
And Mae does. Child-weighted and child-scored she may be, a creature of craft and ambition, but Mae has already begun the process of willing into being the man he is to become. Without Mae, he is weaker. Without Mae, he would still be merely A.J.’s son.
They stop him on the stairs, the failed and yet-to-fail. They speak of acts they have stolen from others, of gags old before they were told, of motion pictures and missed chances. They wish him luck only that they might benefit from it, but the wiser ones understand luck to be in finite supply, and whatever he gains must be procured from the rest. If he is to succeed, then all others in this house on this day must founder.
He steps into the sunlight, and takes their luck with him.
26
He meets Carl Laemmle only briefly. Carl Laemmle is a busy man.
The functionary who deals with him does not notice his clean shoes, or his pressed suit, or his shirt bleached for the whiteness of it. It does not matter. Carl Laemmle has spoken, and he is to be hired.
A fee is agreed. It is not much. It never is.
It does not matter.
Four pictures.
Four pictures for the Universal Film Manufacturing Company.
Four pictures for the units known as the L-KO Motion Picture Kompany and Nestor Comedies.
Four pictures that are already written, but not with him in mind. He will dine on another man’s leavings.
It does not matter.
He does not ask if there is a role for Mae. If he succeeds, Mae will rise with him. This is what he tells himself.
He tells himself that it does not matter.
Four pictures. He plays a suitor, a farm worker, a waiter, and a sanitarium supervisor. He plays them well, or as well as anyone can, and that is the problem: any actor could play these roles, and as yet he has no character. He no longer even has his own name.
And there is no love for him on the lot. The faces here are leaner yet than those in the theater.
Rube Miller does not want competition.
Neal Burns does not want competition.