The Best of Kage Baker

Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst



Opening Credits: 1926





“Take Ten!” called the director, and lowering his megaphone he settled back in his chair. It sank deeper into the sand under his weight, and irritably settling again he peered out at the stallion galloping across the expanse of dune below him, its burnoosed rider clinging against the scouring blast of air from the wind machines.

“Pretty good so far…” chanted the assistant director. Beside him, Rudolph Valentino (in a burnoose that matched the horseman’s) nodded grimly. They watched as the steed bore its rider up one wave of sand, down the next, nearer and nearer to that point where they might cut away—

“Uh-oh,” said the grip. From the sea behind them a real wind traveled forward across the sand, tearing a palm frond from the seedy-looking prop trees around the Sheik’s Camp set and sending it whirling in front of the stallion. The stallion pulled up short and began to dance wildly. After a valiant second or so the rider flew up in the air and came down on his head in the sand, arms and legs windmilling.

“Oh, Christ,” the director snarled. “Cut! Kill the wind!”

“You O.K., Lewis?” yelled the script boy.

The horseman sat up unsteadily and pulled swathing folds of burnoose up off his face. He held up his right hand, making an OK sign.

“Set up for take eleven!” yelled the assistant director. The horseman clambered to his feet and managed to calm his mount; taking its bridle, he slogged away with it, back across the sand to their mark. Behind them the steady salt wind erased the evidence of their passage.

“This wind is not going to stop, you know,” Valentino pointed out gloomily. He stroked the false beard that gave him all the appearance of middle age he would ever wear.

“Ain’t there any local horses that ain’t spooked by goddam palm leaves?” the grip wanted to know.

“Yeah. Plowhorses,” the director told them. “Look, we paid good money for an Arabian stallion. Do you hear the man complaining? I don’t hear him complaining.”

“I can’t even see him,” remarked the assistant director, scanning the horizon. “Jeez, you don’t guess he fell down dead or anything out there?”

But there, up out of the sand came the horse and his rider, resuming position on the crest of the far dune.

“Nah. See?” the director said. “The little guy’s a pro.” He lifted the megaphone, watching as Lewis climbed back into the saddle. The script boy chalked in the update and held up the clapboard for the camera. Crack!

“Wind machines go—and—take eleven!”

Here they came again, racing the wind and the waning light, over the lion-colored waves as the camera whirred, now over the top of the last dune and down, disappearing—

Disappearing—

The grip and the assistant director groaned. Valentino winced.

“I don’t see them, Mr. Fitzmaurice,” the script boy said.

“So where are they?” yelled the director. “Cut! Cut, and kill the goddam wind.”

“Sorry!” cried a faint voice, and a second later Lewis came trudging around the dune, leading the jittering stallion. “I’m afraid we had a slight spill back there.”

“Wranglers! Jadaan took a fall,” called the assistant director in horrified tones, and from the camp on the beach a half dozen wranglers came running. They crowded around the stallion solicitously. Lewis left him to their care and struggled on toward the director.

The headpiece of his burnoose had come down around his neck, and his limp fair hair fluttered in the wind, making his dark makeup—what was left after repeated face-first impact with dunes—look all the more incongruous. He spat out sand and smiled brightly, tugging off his spirit-gummed beard.

“Of course, I’m ready to do another take if you are, Mr. Fitzmaurice,” Lewis said.

“No,” said Valentino. “We will kill him or we will kill the horse, or both.”

“Oh, screw it,” the director decided. “We’ve got enough good stuff in the can. Anyway, the light’s going. Let’s see what we can do with that take, as far as it went.”

Lewis nodded and waded on through the sand, intent on getting out of his robes; Valentino stepped forward to put a hand on his shoulder. Lewis squinted up at him, blinking sand from his lashes.

“You work very hard, my friend,” Valentino said. “But you should not try to ride horses. It is painful to watch.”

“Oh—er—thank you. It’s fun being Rudolph Valentino for a few hours, all the same,” said Lewis, and from out of nowhere he produced a fountain pen. “I don’t suppose I might have your autograph, Mr. Valentino?”

“Certainly,” said Valentino, looking vainly around for something to autograph. From another nowhere Lewis produced a copy of the shooting script, and Valentino took it. “Your name is spelled?”

“L-e-w-i-s, Mr. Valentino. Right there?” he suggested. “Right under where it says The Son Of The Sheik?” He watched with a peculiarly stifled glee as Valentino signed: For my “other self” Lewis. Rudolph Valentino.

“There,” said Valentino, handing him the script. “No more falls on the head, yes?”

“Thank you so much. It’s very kind of you to be worried, but it’s all right, you know,” Lewis replied. “I can take a few tumbles. I’m a professional stunt man, after all.”

He tucked the script away in his costume and staggered down to the water’s edge, where the extras and crew were piling into an old stakebed truck. The driver was already cranking up the motor, anxious to begin his drive back to Pismo Beach before the tide turned and they got bogged down again.

Valentino watched Lewis go, shaking his head.

“Don’t worry about that guy, Rudy,” the director told him, knocking sand out of his megaphone. “I know he looks like a pushover, but he never gets hurt, and I mean never.”

“But luck runs out, like sand.” Valentino smiled wryly and waved at the dunes stretching away behind them, where the late slanting sunlight cast his shadow to the edge of the earth. “Doesn’t it? And that one, I think he has the look of a man who will die young.”

Which was a pretty ironic thing for Valentino to say, considering that he’d be dead himself within the year and that Lewis happened to be, on that particular day in 1926, just short of his eighteen hundred and twenty-third birthday.

If we immortals had birthdays, anyway.