In Theda Bara's Tent (as Reviewed by Publisher's Weekly)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

But Anita Stewarts under contract, Louie said the next day at breakfast in the Astor Hotel. Why would she break her contract with Vitagraph?
You saw her.
But how do you know that has anything to do with Vitagraph?
Because her mother was complaining to William Fox.
You dont know. You dont know, Harry. Maybe she complains all the time to anyone whos around. Maybe the girl has a disorder. Look at my daughter. She stutters. Why does she stutter? Is it a bad environment at home? No. She stutters. He handed me another roll and indicated with an authoritative gesture toward my mouth that I should eat it.  He was still trying to fatten me up. “Why would a star like Anita Stewart give up a contract with Vitagraph, one of the biggest studios in the country, and come work for the Louis B. Mayer Film Company that never even made one picture yet.”
    “Because we’ll promise her happiness,” I said.    He laughed and took a noisy slurp of coffee.
    After breakfast, he went to an exhibitor’s meeting, and I was free to wander around. I took the trolley down to the docks to visit the place where I first met Uncle Sonny. Maybe I was looking for a clue to solve the mystery of his disappearance but it couldn’t be found there because all was different. No sailing schooners, side-wheelers, or passengers with luggage but horses, at least twenty thousand of them assembled in a grossly overcrowded makeshift stockyard. Soldiers were loading them into transport ships.
     Most of the horses did not wear halters so when a terrified animal broke from the herd and galloped away, it took a long time for the soldiers to catch it. A couple of the smaller horses were so frightened they ran right off the dock into the black water and drowned, their wide eyes horrible to remember. Some were so scared of stepping onto the gangplank that they fainted, and the soldiers had to haul them back onto the dock where they stood over them cursing and hosing the manure off them. The men had to manage thousands of animals that were as scared of one another as they were of the place, and fights broke out: ears pinned back, teeth bared, hind legs thrust out and landing with a smack.
    Much to my amazement, no one stopped me when I walked up the gangplank. Above deck, there were hundreds of wooden wagons being mended by soldiers. Other soldiers were sorting acres of leather reins, bridles, saddles, woolen blankets, sacks of feed and piles of laundry. Some were tearing old shirts into rags. Below deck were the corrals, hundreds of animals bunched together, some soldiers forking hay to them and others shoveling manure into wheelbarrows. It seemed a very dangerous assignment to take care of horses that were seasick and frightened. A young soldier, sitting on a bale of hay, noticed me, raised his eyebrows and waited for me to explain myself.     “I wouldn’t like to have your job,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t like to be you when they catch you,” he said. “What are you doing in here?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He snorted. “Maybe you’re a volunteer come to help us quote unquote get the job done “
    “Is this where you sleep?”
    “Go on, kid. Get out of here. You don’t want to be down here when the rest of them come in.” 
“Don’t they get sick?”
“Does a bear shit in the forest? Takes us twelve days to get across. Usually about one hundred fifty of them die and maybe forty will get sick or injured.”
“So what do they do with them?”
He made a gun out of his hand and shot himself in the head, “Tchoo!”
“Did you ever kill one?”
“One? Try dozens.”
“You’ve killed dozens of horses?”
“You’d kill them too, kid, if you saw what they looked like—half a face, some of them. You think the Boche artillery discriminates? You think those minnies say to themselves, ‘Oh, let’s not strike there. That’s a poor defenseless horse?’ When the minenwerfer burst close by, the noise is so terrifying that some of the horses die of fright.”  He took off his cap and rubbed his shaved head and slapped the cap back on. “The Huns use a shell that contains gas. But our gas masks are so uncomfortable and hot, some fellows don’t put them on, and others put them on, but the masks dont work.” He sighed, stood up and sat down. “Go on. Get out of here,” he said to me.
“What happens when the masks don’t work?”
“You go blind. You get burned.”  He had been comfortable sitting on a bale of hay, and I came along and made him remember things he didn’t want to think about, and now I didn’t know how to back away. This trip to New York was quite an eye-opener. One day Theda Bara gets stripped of her make-believe, and the next day I see cavalry horses not as the gallant steeds of the screen but as pathetic food for the cannon. “You get good at identifying the shells,” the soldier said. “There’s a certain sound to the ones that will whiz on by and another sound to the ones that will drop near you. Some of the shells explode with a sound of crockery being broken. Some shells sound like a fast train. We know when to ignore machinegun and rifle bullets and when a steady phewphewphew means the Boche are right next to us. Sometimes our own men fire machine guns at us by mistake.” He took a watch out of his pocket, looked at it, wound it and put it back. “You can’t tell me the Lusitania wasn’t carrying munitions,” he said. “Claim it was an innocent passenger ship.  The State Department warned all those tourists. They knew it was carrying munitions to England. You ask me, the Boche had a right to sink it. It wasn’t enough reason to get us into this thing.”
“What do you do with all the horses?”
     “We deliver fresh horses and mules to the front and return wounded animals to the veterinary hospital.  Over there we sell the dead ones to an old farmer who comes by in his wagon, lifts two or three at a time cranking a winch he made. Sells the hides. We set out from the remount station about four in the afternoon and travel at night. We use Missouri mules as lead animals, a team of them before and a team behind. Hitched to them are eighty horses divided four abreast all roped together. The mud comes up to your knees. Some shadow or flapping fabric spooks one of them or a bee stings one, and they all go crazy because they’re roped together, and the spooked one spooks all the others. They go crazy. The whole hitch goes wild. When they see smashed armored tanks upended in the mud, they get terrified. Sometimes we have to tread on a new cemetery, acres of wooden crosses set in rows, the earth freshly turned. They don’t like soft footing. Traveling at night makes matters worse because the horses stumble over stones or spent munitions or sink a foot in a rabbit hole, and when one goes down, it pulls others down.”
    “Hey, Al,” a soldier called from the horse pen, “you’re on break, not on vacation. It’s my turn.”
    “When we arrive in France,” Al said to me, “another remount division meets us on shore, and while the officers sort the horses, we enlisted men scrub the ship so it will be clean for the next cargo. It takes us four days to get the horse shit out of here, and then they load us into Army trucks and take us to headquarters. Last time I was in a little town called Claye Souilly.” He saluted me and said, “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square,” and walked away.
    I hurried up to the deck and managed to navigate through the crowd of soldiers and horses out to the street. I was possessed by the idea that this young man was going to die, that he was almost a ghost, almost just a photograph that his family would look at with regret. I wanted to scream up to God, “Why are you always so unfair?” I walked as fast as I could uptown along a pathway next to the Hudson River where barges were being towed by tugboats. The tugs reminded me of Uncle Sonny. Where the hell was Uncle Sonny? It was a beautiful fall day—blue sky, warm—and I thought that if I went to Central Park and wandered among the autumn trees, I could get the gloom out of my head. It was a long walk from the pier uptown, and I found myself pretending to be a soldier slogging along mile after mile, waiting my turn to take revenge on the Boche.
     Central Park blotted out the city, and it was with some relief that I wandered on leafy paths and came at last to a lake that had been co-opted for a movie shoot.
About twenty young actors, all too young to be drafted, were lounging around in military uniforms, some American, others German. The uniforms were too big for most of them, the cuffs of the sleeves and trousers turned up. They were eating candy and horsing around. Parked on the road next to the lake was a truck with a sign on the side: “Biograph Newsreel Service.” One of the crew, a small wiry boy who looked about my age, was wearing a black beret, knickers and lace-up boots. He was testing bayonets to be sure the blades retracted when he jammed them into a leather trunk. Some of the film crew were wading into the lake, planting bladders filled with gunpowder, while others practiced tossing soldier dummies into the air. The director put his megaphone to his lips and shouted, “Attention! Get up you sluggards, and let’s see if we can get it right this time.” The soldiers stood up and put on their helmets. “You enter the water here and charge across to that outcropping of stones like we practiced. The boys arranged themselves and the crew member who had been testing the bayonets gave the few that he had to some of the actors, most of whom couldn’t resist jabbing him. The boys who did not receive a bayonet complained and tried to grab bayonets from the others. The cameraman put his eye to the lens and said, What the hell is that glinting over there? The director looked through the lens and shouted, “Kenny! Go over there, and pick up that candy wrapper.”
     Kenny, the young man in the beret, said, “Let me see it first.”
    The cameraman clapped his palms on his cheeks and said, “Holy Mary, mother of God, I am going to go crazy with this. I am going to go crazy.”
    “I’ll do it fast,” Kenny said running to the camera and peering in. “Oh, I see what you mean,” he said and ran to the edge of the water and got the candy wrapper, which he held up for the actors to see as an example of bad behavior.   When all was arranged, the director shouted, Action! The boys charged into the water, the bladders of gunpowder exploded underwater making it seem as if bullets had struck. Pop! Pop! Some of the soldiers stuck bayonets in others, while dummies were thrown into the air as if blown to bits by gunfire. Cut! Howd that look? The cameraman held thumbs up, and the boys rejoiced by splashing one another and playing catch with the dummies.
    Kenny shouted, “Hold on, Bernie! You have to take it again!”
    “Why, may I ask?” said the cameraman, who was about twice Kenny’s age.
    “Why? You didn’t see that?”
    “Oh, may the holy mother preserve us.”
    “You didn’t see that American kid stick another American kid? How could you not see that? You were looking through the lens. This is supposed to be a newsreel. It’s supposed to be true. You think our boys over there kill each other while they’re running across a brook? I don’t know. Maybe they do. But I don’t think so. I don’t know. What do you think, Frank?” he asked the director. “You think they go around killing their platoon mates? You don’t think they know each other? Haven’t they been sleeping in the same trench together for weeks?”
    The director heaved a sigh and called through his megaphone, “Take ten. We’re doing it again, you boneheads, and this time, only kill Germans. Get it? Look at the helmets before you jab.” The crew dispersed to various lounging spots, and it happened that Kenny chose a spot of grass near me to lie down flat on his back. He pulled his beret over his face, clasped his hands on his narrow chest and lay there like he was in a casket.
Why dont you take pictures of the real war, I asked. “Why don’t you go down to the piers and take shots of those horses drowning in the Hudson?”
He was as surprised as I was by the belligerent tone of my question, and he pulled the beret off his face and squinted up at me with one eye closed. Then he sat up, took a package of French cigarettes out of his pocket and offered me one. I sat down next to him and accepted a light. Military wont let us anywhere near it. The only boys who get real footage are military cameramen. That footage never reaches the theaters. If it isn’t destroyed during combat, its destroyed by military censors.”
“So none of those newsreels about the war are true?”
“Sure. Some of them are. But it takes a long time to get the reels back here, and we have a theater schedule to keep. We make one of these a week.” Cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he extended his hand and said, “Kenny Anderson,” and pumped my hand up and down.
“Harry Sirkus.”
“I’m a cameraman,” Kenny said.
“Really?”
“Well, a cameraman in his youth.”
“Have you been with Biograph a long time?”
“My whole life, if you count being my sister’s baby brother. She runs the art department over there. She makes those tiny rubber people they throw out of ships when they fake a naval battle. She makes little clothes for them, depending on where it’s supposed to be. Like that bomb that went off on Wall Street? She made some little briefcases for the corpses. You ever see that reel of the San Francisco earthquake? I was, maybe, ten when she did that. Even the mayor of San Francisco was fooled. No one noticed there were no people in the shots. The real footage is crowded with people, horses, automobiles, trolleys. My sister was upset there wasn’t time for her to make some fire trucks.”
“It wasn’t real?”
“Pathé got some real shots. They were there, but we got ours to the theaters first. We got the scoop. By the time Pathé got theirs ready to go, it was yesterday’s news.”
“Those fires weren’t real?”
“I take it you found it memorable. I’ll tell her.”
“But I saw it. I saw the buildings burning.”
“She is going to be so happy when I tell her this.” He saw I was confused. “It was all shot in the studio. She made those buildings out of cardboard. The ground was made out of clay that dried, and when they pulled the clay apart, it looked like a fissure in the earth. The crew set fire to the cardboard buildings. All these years, she’s been embarrassed about how there were no trolleys or horses or anything.”   
“You mean it was fake?”
He looked at me in a way that made me feel too young. “Must have moved you. That’s the goal. If you aren’t moved, it’s not entertainment.”
“But how can boys being killed in the war be entertainment?”
“Good question.”
“What’s your answer?”
“I don’t know. Ask yourself.” He squashed his cigarette butt into the grass.
“Are you going to fake their mothers crying?” I said aggressively, my tone the result of feeling humiliated by my innocence.
 He pulled his beret straight down over his wing-like ears and stood up. “If we do,” he said, “I’ll backlight it so the hair looks like a halo, sort of Virgin Maryish.” He did not smile, but I knew he was teasing me for being so earnest.
 I wished I could be Kenny’s friend. I missed having friends my own age. As he walked back to the lake, I called after him: “Kenny!” He turned, but all I managed to say was “Good luck!”