he: A Novel Page 3

  Making a Living.

  Kid Auto Races at Venice.

  Mabel’s Strange Predicament.

  And thus he sees the Little Tramp being born.

  12

  At the Oceana Apartments, all tenses coalesce.

  He is.

  They were.

  He was.

  They shall not be.

  He thinks: Babe, I cannot be myself without you.

  He thinks: Babe, I am no longer myself without you.

  13

  In 1913, Babe marries Madelyn Saloshin: a little – a lot – older than Babe, because seven years is an age to a young man of twenty-one. Madelyn Saloshin is not pretty, but this is of no consequence. Madelyn Saloshin likes Babe, and Babe likes Madelyn Saloshin, and the very large are sometimes very lonely.

  So Babe marries Madelyn Saloshin.

  Babe marries a Jew.

  Did it ever enter into proceedings? he asks Babe, when Babe is no longer married to Madelyn Saloshin.

  – What?

  – Her religion.

  Babe gives him the frown, the one familiar to the Audience: the face of a man presented with thin soup, who will eat it because, in famine, even thin soup is a feast.

  Yes, Babe replies, it mattered to me.

  – How?

  He is curious, but also fearful. There is no shortage of Jews in Hollywood, and no shortage of those who hate them, either, but such individuals are generally discreet in their discrimination, and gentlemanly in their cruelty. No, this club is not for you, but down the road, well …

  – Because she had to learn to step lightly, just as I did. Because, had I asked, they would have said she was beneath me.

  A flicker of the eyes, Babe’s voice softer now.

  – And some of them did say it.

  Them. Who are they? The same ones, he supposes, who in 1915 hanged Leo Frank from a tree in Marietta, Georgia, partly for being accused of killing a thirteen-year-old girl, but mostly for being a Jew in charge of a pencil factory.

  And Miss Emmie, the doting mother: was she disappointed in her son’s choice of a Hebrew bride? Oh yes, and Miss Emmie will die disappointed in Babe, for this as for so many other deficiencies of character, although neither of them will ever refer to the sundering in such explicit terms.

  I say, I say, I say: what’s worse than marrying a Jew?

  Marrying an old Jew.

  Take your bows.

  Take your bows, and leave.

  14

  He tells himself that he cannot understand the reasons for Chaplin’s rise. He sees in this other only the reflection of his own longing. He can do what Chaplin does. He could show them, if he were given the chance. He has Chaplin’s grace, Chaplin’s –

  Self-belief?

  Arrogance?

  Appetite?

  No, he has few of Chaplin’s appetites – or not yet – beyond the desire for more success.

  Beyond the desire for any success.

  Any at all.

  He listens, too, to the wrong voices, and loudest is A.J.’s. The father has forged the son in his image. Like God, there is the stage, and there has always been the stage, and there always will be the stage. So while Chaplin glides through motion pictures, he stumbles over splintered boards in Lake Nipmuc, Massachusetts, and raises sawdust in Cleveland, Ohio.

  He can do what Chaplin does. He has watched him for years. He has played the same roles. He is the shadow of this man.

  And so he must become him.

  He joins Edgar Hurley and Edgar Hurley’s wife, Wren, to form the Keystone Trio of 1915.

  Absent the ability or opportunity to forge a paradigm, each will instead offer a simulacrum.

  Edgar Hurley will be Chester Conklin.

  Wren Hurley will be Mabel Normand.

  And he will be Chaplin.

  They present the screen upon the stage. They offer flesh and blood in place of light and shadow. (‘He impersonates Charlie Chaplin to the letter.’) He is a success, but only as another man. He is a good Chaplin and so, by definition, he is a failure as himself.

  He feels his feet sliding, the ground shifting. The Audience laughs, but it laughs before he commences his routine. It laughs when he appears. It laughs because Chaplin makes it laugh. Without Chaplin, there would be no laughter at all.

  Edgar Hurley hears the laughter, and wants it as his own. Edgar Hurley has also studied the master well. If the Audience is laughing at Chaplin, then it does not matter who wears the mask.

  They head north – Pennsylvania, New York – and Edgar Hurley simmers, and Edgar Hurley argues, and Edgar Hurley will not be denied. Finally, Edgar Hurley becomes Chaplin, and Edgar Hurley takes the stage.

  The Audience laughs. It laughs when Edgar Hurley appears. It laughs because Chaplin makes it laugh.

  He watches Edgar Hurley mimic him mimicking Chaplin. It breaks him, and in breaking he understands.

  He abandons the Hurleys.

  The Hurleys fire him.

  Does either version change the plot? There is no plot, so it does not.

  He is tired. This is too much for him. He could go home. His family is there. The music halls are there.

  The war is there.

  He remains.

  15

  Back in Milledgeville, home to Miss Emmie and the ghosts of dead brothers, Babe is the electrician at the Electric Theater, the job of projectionist being so new that the word in question has yet to be properly coined, so ‘electrician’ will have to suffice for now. Five cents entry, in an age when viewing a musical comedy in New York, or Boston, or Chicago costs a dollar, and Milledgeville most assuredly does not have a stage to compare with the big cities, or even the smaller ones. One-reelers and two-reelers: adventures, educationals, comedies, westerns. The Audience loves each and every one, but the westerns most of all.

  Abernathy Kids to the Rescue.

  Bill Sharkey’s Last Game.

  Broncho Billy’s Redemption.

  Babe watches the pictures from his post by the lantern, his face incandescent in the darkness. Babe sees John Bunny in Teaching McFadden to Waltz and Captain Jenks’ Dilemma. It is said that John Bunny is earning $5 a day at Vitagraph, rain or shine. There are no more unpaid rehearsals for John Bunny, and there is no more sleeping in train stations or scrabbling for nickel dinners. John Bunny has left vaudeville behind, and burned the shoes that once stumped its territories.

  Like Babe, John Bunny is a large man, although nature has cursed John Bunny with a nose to match. John Bunny’s visage, memorable in its ugliness, is insured. John Bunny is a product of the stage transplanted to the screen, broad in body and expression, performing for the peanut gallery.

  John Bunny, it is whispered, is also a prick of the highest order. Untypically for an actor, John Bunny does not drink. John Bunny does not need to be a drunkard to be a prick.

  Babe will not be like John Bunny. Babe will not be a prick.

  But neither will Babe be an actor like John Bunny. Babe will be a new beast, a child not of the stage but of motion pictures. Babe will be a creature of small gestures, of slight movements. Babe will raise an eyebrow where John Bunny waves his arms like a man drowning. Babe has stood beside the lantern and felt its warmth. When Babe looks the camera in the eye, Babe will not fear it.

  Because behind that eye is the Audience.

  Babe leaves the Electric Theater. Jacksonville, Florida, home of the pictures, future of the business, is not far south, but Babe still needs to eat. Cutie Pearce’s roadhouse offers Babe a singing gig to supplement his earnings at the Orpheum Theater. At $40 a week, even before the cash from Cutie Pearce, Babe may be earning more than John Bunny did at the beginning of his career, although John Bunny – prick or no prick – is now rolling in clover.

  Babe spends his nights singing and dancing and pratfalling, and his days at the Lubin Manufacturing Company by the Florida Yacht Club, watching the pictures being made. But Babe is too far from the actors to see them properly, so Babe offers to fet
ch water for the crew. Eventually, a fat boy is needed for a role, and Babe is a fat boy.

  Outwitting Dad, April 1914.

  This Babe remembers.

  16

  How small he seems next to Babe, how slight. He catches the surprise in the faces of those who meet him without his partner, when the shadow is his alone. It works in his favor. It enables him to hide. With his hair slicked back and his head down, he can ghost through crowds. By the time his presence registers, if it registers at all, he has already passed by. He keeps moving. He has learned not to stop.

  Except, perhaps, for women.

  Like Chaplin, he now has that weakness.

  17

  He has known women: not as many as Chaplin – there are entire regiments that have not known as many women as Chaplin – but some. He has an eye for them, and they for him. He also has money, although not much, and can drink, and drink more when required. But these women are passing trade, and none lasts.

  Until her.

  Jesus, but there’s a hardness to her. It’s in the cheekbones, bladelike. He can glimpse the skull beneath the skin. She has feral eyes.

  She is a Hayden Sister, although the Hayden Sisters do not exist, or not as blood sisters.

  Her real sisters are dead, she tells him. Annie and Edith. Older. Buried back in Brunswick.

  He does not know where this is.

  Melbourne, she says. Australia.

  Australia. He almost went there. Did not almost go there. Did not go there.

  She laughs. They dance. They fuck.

  She is May Charlotte Dahlberg.

  She is May Charlota Dahlberg.

  She is May Cuthbert, wife of Rupert Cuthbert.

  But Rupert Cuthbert is dead. Nineteen fourteen, one year after she and Rupert Cuthbert disembarked from the RMS Niagara in Seattle. So sad, she says, although they were already drifting apart before they left Australia.

  Except Rupert Cuthbert, it emerges, is not dead, but merely elsewhere. What of it? This is the stuff of a better tale: a widow, talented, making her own way, far from home.

  There is a son, also Rupert. Rupert, Jr is nine.

  Rupert, Jr, like his father, is elsewhere.

  You understand, she says.

  He understands.

  She is Charlotte Mae Dahlberg.

  She is Mae.

  18

  What was Babe before him? What was he before Babe? It is as though, shortly after their first meeting, they became conjoined, so that all other possible existences ceased at that moment. Is this of consequence? Of course it is.

  And of course it is not.

  Half of these existences – Babe’s more than his, because Babe was captured by the light long before he – are anyway unreal. Like the flesh, film is a temporary medium.

  It rots, it burns.

  Babe sometimes amuses himself by trying to recall, in alphabetical order, the names of the films made before his old life ceased, and a new one began.

  A Bankrupt Honeymoon.

  A Brewerytown Romance.

  A Day at School.

  A Fool There Was.

  A Janitor’s Joyful Job.

  A Lucky Strike.

  A Maid to Order.

  A Mix Up In Hearts.

  A Pair of Kings.

  A Tango Tragedy.

  A Terrible Tragedy.

  All for a Girl.

  Ambitious Ethel.

  An Aerial Joyride.

  – Is that it?

  Babe is sure that he has missed one.

  Along Came Auntie.

  – How many?

  Three hundred, Babe thinks.

  A Sticky Affair.

  And what can Babe recall of their making?

  Aunt Bill.

  Almost nothing, apart from sweating in Jacksonville for the Lubin Company, and Siegmund Lubin promoting him as Babe Hardy, the Funniest Fat Comedian in the World. Siegmund Lubin – never a man to tell one lie when two will serve better – informs the Florida Metropolis that Babe was personally chosen by him from a number of heavyweight performers, and adds that Babe is six feet, nine inches tall and weighs three hundred and fifty pounds. The Metropolis dispatches one of its best and brightest to confirm the existence of the freak.

  For most of his life, until Death sets about its business, it is the only occasion on which Babe can recall someone expressing disappointment at his size.

  Babe takes whatever role is offered: fat cop, fat grocer, fat woman, fat baby, fat lover. Babe is fat for Lubin, fat for Edison, fat for Pathé, fat for Gaumont-Mutual, fat for Mittenthal, fat for the Whartons, fat for Novelty-Mutual, fat for Wizard, fat for Vim. If Babe finds employment because Babe is fat – and Babe does – then it stands to reason that Babe will be more frequently employed if Babe is fatter, so Babe puts on weight.

  With Billy Ruge, Babe becomes one half of Plump and Runt. Babe avoids the sobriquet Fatty only because of Roscoe Arbuckle over at Keystone, and for this much Babe is grateful. By the time Roscoe Arbuckle is accused of killing Virginia Rappe, crushing her so badly in the process of raping her (because Roscoe Arbuckle has earned his moniker) that Roscoe Arbuckle ruptures her bladder, Babe will be established in his own right.

  Roscoe Arbuckle’s downfall is a set-up, of course. They all know it. The predatory Bambina Delmont, a professional blackmailer, sees an opportunity to squeeze Roscoe Arbuckle for money, or make what she can off his reputation by selling a story to the newspapers, and so contrives a narrative that involves Roscoe Arbuckle’s massive weight, and Roscoe Arbuckle’s thick cock, and perhaps, for added spice, the insertion of a champagne bottle into Virginia Rappe’s quim. But Bambina Delmont has a tongue so crooked it could be used to uncork wine, and even the prosecution knows that as a witness – and, indeed, as a human being – Bambina Delmont is next to useless. This doesn’t stop Matthew Brady, the San Francisco DA, from dragging Roscoe Arbuckle through three increasingly ludicrous trials, all because Matthew Brady wants to run for governor, and Roscoe Arbuckle’s hide will make a fine rug for Matthew Brady’s new office.

  And even though Roscoe Arbuckle is eventually cleared, and an apology offered to him by the jury, Roscoe Arbuckle’s career is over, and Roscoe Arbuckle takes Fatty with him.

  Rape isn’t funny.

  Manslaughter isn’t funny.

  Venereal disease isn’t funny.

  Virginia Rappe’s many backstreet abortions are not funny.

  No matter that Roscoe Arbuckle has no connection to any of these sorrows, and is entirely innocent. Roscoe and, by association, Fatty are no longer funny.

  Babe will watch all of this unfold, and think: Be careful.

  They will not laugh when you finally fall.

  19

  At the Oceana Apartments, he wonders still at the obsession with plot.

  Louis Burstein, General Manager of the Vim Comedy Company, employer of Fat Comedian Babe Hardy, would, he thinks, have found common ground with Hal Roach, the two producers in accord. Louis Burstein once tells the Sunday Metropolis newspaper of Jacksonville, Florida that Louis Burstein has ‘studied the problem of how to produce good comedies thoroughly’. Louis Burstein’s conclusion, after long hours of deep reflection, is that ‘every one of our comedies must have a plot’.

  ‘Must’? Why ‘must’? Perhaps it is a desire to impose an order, a purpose, upon art because life resolutely refuses to oblige. Reality is random. Reality is chance. Even now, with the slivers of his existence floating before him, Babe’s story ended and his in its final act, he cannot make sense of it all. He sees only wreckage. After all, he has somehow contrived to be married seven times (or is it eight? Yes, eight it is.) to four different women.

  To marry the wrong woman once may be regarded as a misfortune.

  To marry her twice looks like carelessness.

  To marry her three times is madness.

  The Santa Monica apartment in which he lives rents for $80 a month. His name is in the phone book. If he was ever a star – and he remembers
being a star, so this must have been the case – the light of it has long since faded, and what remains is only a gentle senescence.

  A plot requires constancy, a through line. Where is the through line here?

  He knows the answer, of course.

  Babe. Babe is the through line.

  And where is Babe?

  Babe is forfeit to the shadows.

  20

  Mae, now his common-law wife, lies beside him in their common-law bed. His eyes are very blue, and Mae’s eyes are very black. Later, during the agonies of their uncoupling, he will think of Mae’s eyes as polluted, and wonder, had he stayed with her, if his eyes might slowly have muddied to match her own.

  Earlier, they watch Chaplin on screen. The Pawnshop. Chaplin is good, better even than he remembers.

  So good. So very good.

  You could be like Chaplin, Mae tells him.

  I was like Chaplin, he wants to say, but does not. I tried to be Chaplin. I could imitate his steps, pantomime his gestures, mimic his every expression, but I was not Chaplin.

  You are as good as Chaplin, Mae tells him.

  He was as good as Chaplin, he tells himself, when he could smell Chaplin, and touch Chaplin, and break bread with Chaplin. But Chaplin on screen is different. Chaplin has left the world of mortals. Chaplin is divine.

  It is said that Mutual is paying Chaplin almost $700,000 a year. It is wealth beyond imagining.

  Mae’s nipples are hard, child-darkened. They leave marks on the skin of his chest. Her breasts are veined, her belly soft.

  He cannot marry Mae because she is already married. He cannot leave her because he is bound to her. They work well together. Mae is a trouper, and trusts his instincts on stage.