Jerusalem Commands

FIVE

I AM NOT ESPECIALLY PROUD of the ways in which I earned my living in 1925. There was little honour in it. Yet I do not think I knew a time since my childhood when I felt more light-hearted or thoroughly fulfilled. Spending so much of the year in a state of near-perfect euphoria, I almost forgot I was born to suffer for science and humanity, destined to build my great flying cities, not create the baroque palaces and Gothick villages, mediaeval castles and Futurist ballrooms that Fantasy demanded. Yet, during that year in Hollywood it seemed possible to realise every single dream I had ever entertained and to do so easily. I could have been happy there and lived out my life there, with Esmé, my wife, my children; an honoured illusionist as famous as Walt Disney or von Stroheim and probably richer. With his wealth ‘Uncle Dizzy’ created a Land populated by his petit-bourgeois dreams of a prosaic future. I should have built Pyatnitskiland! Each part of my world would have demonstrated an invention of my own - the solid-hulled, turbo-powered aerial cruiser, the Atlantic aeroplane refuelling platforms, the radio oven, the space-rocket, the radio satellite relay, the desert liner, the television, the dynamite engine and the super-rapid ocean-clipper - and would have realised my greatest vision. Uncle Dizzy and Uncle Joe had that dream in common: they longed for a world populated entirely by programmable robots. Ultimate predictability as a guard against death. However, I dreamed of ultimate freedom. My great cities of the skies would at last release humanity forever from its chains, from the sucking hampering mud of its origins. Almost single-handedly I could have built a glorious future, transforming the planet in a thousand ways, harnessing all the bountiful resources of the American continent. There would have been no Second World War, no triumph of Bolshevism. Indeed, Bolshevism would have crumbled under the weight of its own delusions. Russia and America would have formed a noble alliance, a united Christian nation. I should have been content to have been recognised merely as the architect of all this. I have never desired political power, certainly not for its own sake. But circumstances would alter my life radically. Another future would be built: its proudest achievements a man-sized, incoherent duck and a monstrous mechanical ape.

This god is Set, who is also Sekhet, the goddess. Sekhet is called ‘the Eye of Ra’ and is the instrument of mankind’s destruction.

Sometimes I go to the Polish Club in Exhibition Road, just up from the Science Museum. It is still possible to get a good, cheap meal there and meet a few like-minded souls. They know I am not really Polish, but are prepared to turn a blind eye. They recognise suffering. All Slavs are welcome. The rooms of the club are tall and cool, even in summer, and there is a garden. I once took Mrs Cornelius with me as my guest. Nobody was rude to her. That cannot be said for everywhere one goes in London today. She found the atmosphere a little depressing, I think.

She still lives for the present. Though she is proud of her past and enjoys her memories she does not dwell on them. I became too morbid at the club, she said. I explained the difference between the spiritual contemplation of history and mere self-pity but she did not really listen. She, too, has had excessive pain in her life. Perhaps she, like me, cannot afford to dwell overmuch on certain aspects of the past. But she enjoys our reminiscences. Sometimes we sit together in her flat in Colville Terrace and talk. If the sound of the steel bands rehearsing and the prostitutes quarrelling with their pimps is not too loud we often continue well into the night. Mrs Cornelius recalls her successes, the times when she was a great star of the stage as well as the screen, but she has kept relatively little personal memorabilia. She reminds me of my own fame. Indeed, I have more recorded about her in my scrapbooks than I have of myself. She enjoys leafing through these glue-crusted heavy pages, screaming with laughter at her make-up, her dresses, her more outrageous stage-names. I suppose it is healthy, this response, but I find it a little disconcerting. My friend puts too little value on her talents. Always, she has done this. That is why I want to tell the world what she was. My own future was stolen from me but she, careless goddess that she was, threw hers away as casually as she tossed a cigarette over a ship’s rail. Yet she has never said she regretted it. Her regrets are of a different order, usually concerning some gentleman she failed to attract for a night’s passing pleasure. She has been loved by some of the greatest men in modern history, been the mistress of the most influential financiers and politicians, and if she were not discreet, she could fill the tabloids daily with her memories. Yet she seems to have little respect or nostalgia for them. ‘Blokes’re fer yer ‘olidays, like icecream and drinkin’ yerself silly. Too much of ‘em and it makes yer sick.’ She has as much and as little to say about the Persian playboy who first took her out of Whitechapel and abandoned her in Odessa as she does about Trotsky, whose paramour she became. ‘They corl it I-ran now, an’ well named it is, too. ‘Oo fuckin’ wouldn’t run if they ‘ad the chance? But ‘e ‘ad some fuckin’ gelt, the bastard. An’ ‘e never whinged on like Leo, ‘oo couldn’t bloody stop. Especially after ‘e got ter France. Remember Cassis, Ivan?’

E partito il treno? C’é tempo per scendere? Attraversiamo la frontiera? She was no yachna. And I live because of her. She is, I say, the actual keeper of my life. She laughs when I try to explain. She slaps my shoulder and calls me her sentimental little Russki. She has always been my friend.

We travelled towards Fastov through avenues of lime trees with a red flag flying from the mast of our Mercedes. She smelled of summer, of the roses, though she was wrapped in the finest fur. Later, you could inhale the bloody stink of dead horses piled into ditches by the side of the road and sometimes there were festering human corpses among them, those poor ignorant followers of Petlyura. He said he would give them land, but he was a friend of the rich. He gave them snow. His promises were insubstantial and melted away with the spring sunshine. If he had listened, if he had genuinely loved our Ukraine, as I loved her, I would have saved him so easily! He abandoned my Violet Ray. They were all greedy for our wheat and steel, those Moscow Jews. They are greedy still. But she says I am morbid and lets me talk only of the good times, the best of which were in Hollywood when I became a prince, a star, a man of substance and influence to rival all the other great aristocrats of Hollywood whom I admired, especially Griffith. Once I was his peer I invited the great director to my home, but even then he had become reclusive and suspicious. I should have taken a lesson from him. You are a king in Hollywood only while your work is popular, while you obey the studio’s power. Take some action in the name of art, idealism or even social conscience and make money and you are still celebrated for your virtues. But follow your conscience and fail to make money and you are destroyed overnight. You become a villain. This was the bitter truth Griffith had learned. But I was happy, perhaps because the future faded and the past became less painful, no more than a record of my triumphs. I learned from the great myth-makers of Hollywood how to present my curriculum vitae in the best and most dramatic light. Tom Mix was from Peoria and Greta Garbo from Detroit, but the world was told otherwise, not because they were liars but because they knew this was the only means by which they could maintain their authority with the public and, ultimately, the studio. But the studio, of course, could create other, less beneficial myths if it felt so disposed, so one always had to be a myth or two ahead of them. I had accounts in stores. I had my car. I had my little house in Venice. I had admirers. My social standing rose so high that I was sought after at dinner-parties. Frequently I attended these with Mrs Cornelius, also a star, and occasionally I saw my Esmé!

My success had come about largely through good fortune, through my natural gregariousness and through a certain talent for acting, part of which had been developed during my periods of hardship and captivity and which was, since one was so frequently in the power of those who did not speak your language, highly dependent on mime. By early 1925, while on the set assisting Poldark, I had been ‘roped in’ for Ben Hur both as a galley slave and as a Christian. This led to me serving for a while as a stand-in. There are parts of The Dark Angel, Beau Geste, The Master Singer and Tricks which owe their special vibrancy to the fact that my back and half-face were used in place of a star too drunk, drugged or hung-over to perform as his public expected. I was already appearing in small parts by April 1925 when Goldfish had returned and commissioned a draft script of White King, Red Queen with a view to putting me on the strength. I visited him at the new offices which he shared with Cecil B. De Mille - a great white marble ‘colonial’ mansion which stood on Washington Boulevard not far from MGM and was, by coincidence, the old Thomas Ince Studio, sold to settle the dead director’s debts. He was in a fatherly mood. ‘Pleasure is pleasure and business is business.’ He spoke the idiomatic Yiddish of the Warsaw gutter. ‘You’ve got to divide up professional and amateur. I used to be taught the rule - the amateur you screw, the professional you hire. Me, I preferred to screw the professionals and let the others waste their time with amateurs. Two birds in one bath. You are not, I believe, whatever else, an amateur, Max, I hope.’

I assured him I was a pro’s pro of the old school.

‘Anyway I thought that was a better use of the time and time was money. Now, I’ve learned moderation. I married an amateur and now I don’t have to screw the professionals!’

I found Goldfish’s confidences both baffling and irresistible.

‘As a man of the world, Max, you know what I mean?’

I assured him I understood him most profoundly. His sentiments, I said, were an exact version, almost word for word, of my own. Only he had phrased it better. I congratulated him on his extraordinary literary turn of phrase. He said in all modesty that he was, by and large, a self-made man. ‘Reading is the answer. Travel, like I did, in gloves, and you get to reading a lot. And seeing movies, of course. Bit by bit you understand how ignorant you are. Bit by bit you start to remedy it. That’s me now, Max - remedied. Though they stole every idea, every property, every star and every hour of every hard-working day I put in for them - Art for Art’s sake remedied me. Quality, now, is what we do here. Small but prodigious, like in gloves. That way you make more profit for less work, believe me.’

I not only believed him, I said, I applauded him. We parted very cordially.

Mrs C. was Gloria Cornish now, of course, and in some ways the instrument of my success (or diversion, if you like). While Goldfish had been impressed by my writing and had commissioned a draft script with a view to ‘putting me on the strength’, it was Lon Chaney, the great character actor, who saw my drawings one evening and suggested immediately that I should be designing whole storyboards. I had until then been working as a part-time apprentice to Poldark. Chaney introduced me to a pleasant Scot called Menzies, a student of the great Grot, who was primarily known for his delicate children’s illustrations. Menzies was at that time trying to work with Valentino’s wife, who claimed to be some sort of Russian aristocrat, a painter, stage-decorator and haute couturière whose ideas were so extravagant that even when the sets were built they could hardly be filmed. The colour of the sets was important, since they tended to show up in certain pronounced ways. In her designs for Monsieur Beaucaire she had ignored all considerations of cost or technical capability and produced Valentino’s first failure. The sophisticated comedy was scarcely appropriate material for that elevated lounge-lizard, who looked exactly like the Italian gigolo he had been in real life and whose taste and manners continued to reflect his origins. Later Bob Hope far eclipsed him in the role. Some of us Hollywooders were able to rise above our humble beginnings. Valentino sank beneath the weight of his own unfounded self-esteem. Mayn schvitz der spic gonif trenken!

My natural skill as a draughtsman, the basics of which I had come by, of course, at the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, impressed Menzies. He said I had the kind of imagination that was best suited for movie work. I thought big, he said, but more importantly I produced designs which could be built and used. He was a great believer in the fluid camera and while he admired his master, Grot, he felt that Grot’s particular talent produced a beautifully static set. It was from Menzies that I learned most about designing for the films.

When I heard he was out at Korda’s studios during the War I tried to contact him. He was not very far from where I was living in Hammersmith at the time but even though I explained I was calling from a pay box at enormous cost I could not get anyone to bring him to the telephone. He was a fellow spirit. In the late thirties he would be the guiding hand behind a picture that came closer to the spirit of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation than anything I have ever seen.

The title was not to my taste and the thing was spoiled a little by the inclusion of that insipid halbjuden ‘Howard’ with his dyed blond hair, but Gone With the Wind was a wonder to me when I saw it at the Kilburn State soon after arriving in England in 1940. In its silent predecessor Gloria Cornish played the part of Nellie and now another Englishwoman, Vivien Leigh, reminded me so much of my Esmé, and yet she also had the determination of Mrs Cornelius. Of course, Clark Gable was magnificent. A flyer, in real life, like myself. With Fairbanks (and myself) he represented the American virtues of manly courage and rugged good-humoured honesty. Now save for John Wayne such virtues have all but disappeared from the screen. I remember Goering, also a flying man, in that jocular but at the same time deeply serious way of his, saying, ‘What are we going to do about America?’ This, I need hardly say, was at a time when Hitler had not been goaded into war by those interests most resistant to his ideals. Wohin gehen wir jetzt? I could have told him then.

At first Menzies gave me a few individual scenes to develop for Schenk’s comedy Her Sister From Paris with Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman. This did not require any great imaginative efforts, especially for the scenes Menzies entrusted to me, but it got me work on The Eagle, Valentino’s next film, in which we could indulge our lavish fantasies. We designed and built some of the screen’s most gorgeous sets.

They were romantic, extravagant (though not especially costly) and were the very spirit of everything I had ever demanded from the moving picture play. Unfortunately, although our designs were made and used, the script was lightweight and the film was not a particular success. I can, incidentally, be identified in several scenes as Valentino’s stand-in. Valentino chose to blame me for his failure, since the studio had refused to let his ludicrous spouse work on another picture. Not wishing to make an overt enemy of the more powerful Menzies, she took against me. Menzies however proved a good friend and by then every studio in Hollywood knew what Valentino and the pseudo-aristocrat were like. I did not, in the end, work with Menzies on the remaining Valentino picture, but he did give me scenes for Graustark and What Price Beauty? in which Mrs Cornelius had an important role but in which my only featured scene was cut. Gradually I grew to love my new medium. I became familiar with every creative and practical function. I built palaces, monuments, whole cities, I even populated them - sometimes as hero, sometimes as villain - and, for a while at least, my genius was satisfied. Lon Chaney became my patron - possibly because I did not condescend to him as some of the parvenu starlings did. He had been a professional most of his life, which had not been an easy one, and like me had begun his career as a travelling player. Perhaps he recognised in me some version of his younger self. Whatever it was, he took me in hand and for a while was my guiding light through the hazardous maze of Hollywood. Though he himself nursed an abiding love for a legless married woman and was frequently in despair, he yet found time to advise me on matters of etiquette, on brothels and their inmates, on drinks and their various properties. While he did not introduce me to the pleasures of opium and hashish, then undergoing a small vogue with the fad for things Oriental freshly stimulated by the discovery of the treasures of Tutenkhamun, he had excellent advice about the properties of the drugs and the character of those who dealt in them. Together we toured Chinatown. Menzies enjoyed such drugs. With their help he created two of the most memorable Arabian Nights fantasies ever seen by an awed public. One was for Fairbanks, the other for Korda. Both were called The Thief of Baghdad. (The nickname was enjoyed by Samuel Goldfish for a while, though he was not of Mesopotamian Jewish origin. Neither Goldwyn nor Goldfish is an Iraqi name!) Though Chaney advised me to stay away from such people, to sign a contract with one of the smaller studios and got me a screen-test with DeLuxe, there was hardly time to think. I was being given design and acting jobs as fast as I could say ‘yes’. It would have been foolish to say ‘no’ since there was no telling when it might not suddenly end. As a freelance I was frequently paid in cash. But a studio contract, as an actor and director, would bring me all kinds of security and that was, after all, what Esmé so keenly desired. It offered decent security and steady weekly money. I would accept it. Meanwhile I was saving my dollars. I had them in the Bank of Southern California earning 11 per cent interest. I was becoming for the first time in my life a citizen of material substance and responsibility. Increasingly I had the company of Esmé whenever she could get away from G. W. Meulemkaumpf, who had become her official sponsor in the US, and could withdraw his patronage if he discovered she was already engaged. While I understood the difficulties of her position the situation remained painful, even with the resourceful Jacob Mix as a reliable intermediary. In my worst moments I remembered that she was after all virtually my own creation. Had she not been Esmé Loukianoff’s half-sister, she would still be in Galata contracting diseases and earning pennies from a hundred nations’ sailors.

Sometimes, when she proved particularly whimsical or took Meulemkaumpfs part too enthusiastically, I was tempted to remind her that if I had not found her she would bear a close resemblance by now to her hideous witch of a mother. But that would have been unfair. I loved her, after all, with a love above self, nation or even, sometimes (I will admit), duty. And my love translated itself into intense passion during our brief times together. Sometimes my love was so overwhelming I made her laugh.

My capacity to love impressed the usually cynical Mrs Cornelius. She doubted in all her life she’d seen a man make more of a fool of himself over a woman, particularly a bloke who was doing so well. It was not in my nature, I explained, to hurt my little girl. She would have no reminders of her origins from me. To raise such questions would be to threaten that delicate and most precious illusion of all: of my Esmé (who gave satisfaction to anarchist Cossacks) reborn (virgin once more) in the slums of Constantinople. I am not an idiot. ¿Cuanto se tarda? I can tell truth from fiction. I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day in everything that’s light and shade. I’ll be looking at the sun but I’ll be seeing you. ¿Es viu? No, és mort. ¡Era blanca com la neu! Si hi ha errores els corregiré. Elmelikeh betahti! Elmelikeh betahti! Oh, how I loved them. I lived to make them immortal. I did not become a Musselman. That wire, those pits, were not for me. Mistakes, however, are rarely rectified under such conditions. The Germans worshipped bureaucracy as if it were the ultimate reality. Did Nietzsche teach them nothing? I kept my identity. I am not ashamed of anything. Let them call me golem. At least I am a self-made golem. Ayn ferbissener goylem. And what does it mean in the end? Must every town in Germany called Büchenwald bear the burden of one such place?

Paid as a freelance by Menzies to fill in jobs for him or to design specific sets, I was like some apprentice to Raphael except that I suspect I was better rewarded for my unacknowledged labours. Menzies was scrupulously fair. I was able to move a little more freely than most Hollywood employees. The so-called ‘Studio System’ had not yet taken complete hold of the industry and designers at least could still work for different producers, though there was a tendency to stay with one company. I enjoyed producing the sets for Browning’s The Show, which I got not through Menzies but through Chaney, who was a friend of Browning. Even Goldfish did not know I was working for him. The producing studio was the recently formed MGM, now Goldfish’s most hated rival. By a rare coincidence this was also one of the few films starring Mrs Cornelius that I was closely involved in; she appeared under another name with John Gilbert and Lionel Barrymore. ‘Renée Adorée’ remains to this day a mysterious and under-rated actress.

As Gloria Cornish Mrs Cornelius played second lead to Clive Brook and Greta Nissen in a Paramount picture called The Popular Sin and then her Swedish director took her back to Universal. In a very short time they made a series of sophisticated modern dramas. While she was not always top of the bill, Gloria Cornish became identified with the stylish, highly refined school of acting then being promoted on the London stage in the persons of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. She was a wampus Baby Star with Joan Crawford. She received considerable critical acclaim for Fifth Avenue Models, Peacock Feathers, Woman Chasin’, Watch Your Wife, The Woman Who Did, The Blonde Saint, Carmen Valdez, She Who Stoops and Into Her Kingdom, while I too began at last to have some small successes in my own right, at first under the name of Max Peters. This change was Chaney’s doing, while he insisted I appear in The Phantom of the Opera, which I also helped design, working with the great Ben Carré and a good-natured man called Danny Hall, who would one day be famous for his work on City Lights and All-American Co-Ed. Chaney had made friends with him on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the three of us became bosom buddies for a while, visiting restaurants and nightclubs together and enjoying the pleasures of the town as best hardworking people could. I had begun to work at night with my designs while performing on screen during the days. I have always been granted plenty of energy and the wonderdrug which Freud and Trotsky succumbed to, through inherent weakness of character, has always been a friend to me. Thus I was able to satisfy my darling whenever the opportunity arose and continue to fulfil my duties. Madge, unfortunately, had to be dispensed with. She became unreasonably jealous, more and more dependent on drugs and given to outbursts of pointless rage, perhaps because she was threatened by my association with DeLuxe, perhaps because my fortunes steadily improved and I was obviously destined to be one of Hollywood’s favoured. For a time I managed to see something of my former secretary to sustain her interest with increasingly outré sexual encounters, and attempted to keep her working for me, but she demanded too much. I regret that one night, after I had exhausted myself at Fox all day on a particularly unpleasant horse as Dirk Collingham in Buck Jones’s Lone Star Breed, I told her I no longer wished to use her services. I had been offered $95.00 a week contract with DeLuxe, to star in a new serial idea they had, but saw no point in rubbing salt in her various wounds. Lon Chaney’s friend Sol Lessor had liked what he had seen and was, he said, ‘ready to work’. No older than me, Lessor was one of those ambitious young producers involving himself in a dozen ideas at once. DeLuxe was not his only company. We became friendly in the fifties again when he was over here with RKO making Tarzan movies. He was always generous with his expenses. Madge might not have gone at all but for Chaney and Hall dropping round to suggest a visit to a particularly good cabaret. She threw the hundred dollars I had given her onto the Axminster and stepped through the front door as if she had accidentally walked into a trench of dog-droppings. This caused some hilarity from my friends who enjoyed speculating on why she was so furious. I took this fun in good part, but I was sorry our relationship ended on such an unpleasant note. Madge had been a great comfort and distraction in the times when Esmé was indisposed. Her anger was, as I said, simply jealousy, but then ironically she was beginning to do somewhat better in the acting profession than Esmé. My darling had yet to find a director or a photographer who could capture what was essentially a subtle and sometimes transient beauty. Mrs Cornelius, far from ethereal in real life, was one of those lucky women who could convey enormous presence on the screen while appearing completely casual and insouciant, perfect for the parts her ‘Seaman’ (as Sjöström now styled himself) had in mind for her.

This failure to inspire enthusiasm in directors was Esmé’s constant disappointment and I still had nothing like the influence needed to force some studio boss to acknowledge her talent. In all honesty I did not think screen-acting was the right occupation for my darling, who was far too sensitive for such a life. Much as I loved her I found her thirst for the limelight a trifle disconcerting since I knew she had no way of controlling that fame once she had it and her real inclinations were those of a homeloving little girl who wanted nothing more than to look after her adored husband, her ‘dadda’ as she sometimes called me, and to iron my shirts. For a while she even tried to make me jealous by hinting that the Jew ‘Chaplin’, well known for definitively paedophiliac inclinations, was interested in her. But every girl Chaplin favoured appeared in his films and Esmé was never offered a contract. Arbuckle died a dishonoured martyr while his ambitious rivals went on to greater and greater triumphs. I personally had no liking for the little communist. He never made me laugh. I told him so to his face one night, at a party of Norma Talmadge’s. He remarked that he didn’t mind a bit. ‘As a matter of fact I don’t find you very funny, either,’ was his nonsensical retort. I am not, after all, the comedian! Some mensch! Such mishegass! What can one make of such people?

With my DeLuxe contract signed and sealed I lived a life of gorgeous variety, surrounded by every kind of beauty, enjoying every type of pleasure. At MGM and Paramount marvellous cities were created in a matter of days; whole countries were born out of my brain and my hands, as if I, myself, had been blessed with the gifts of the great Thief, merely to rub a brass bottle and unleash limitless power, to have a thousand slaves at my disposal, a million warriors to command! The most beautiful women in the world, wearing exotically elegant clothing, the costumes of a score of centuries, graced my invented universe and more than one of them found me attractive. In my first featured screen roles with Fox it had been my destiny forever to threaten and never to be fulfilled in my designs upon the female sex, but off-screen it was a rather different story. Those Hollywood girls were perverse. For a night or two at least they found my screen role attractive; they wanted me to be the heartless creature whom Buck Jones or Hoot Gibson gunned down in the last reel and, since they desired it, I was sometimes willing to please them. This ‘Valentino-craze’ was a welcome relief, I’ll readily admit, from a somewhat paternal role with my little fiancée. Now I see how my life was beginning to resemble Faust’s after Mephistopheles became his servant. More than one of my parties might have been the original for the Walpurgisnacht revels. So many stimulants and narcotics were involved that I have only the haziest memories of soft flesh, of wild hair, of sweat, of jewellery and a confusion of discarded silk. I was being given everything I had ever desired and more. I was only twenty-five years old. How could I know that I was so close to falling into the Devil’s power? Satan was even then gaining the ascendancy which, by the 30s, was to make Hollywood little more than a propaganda tool of socialist Jewry. Ah, Goethe, what a message you still have for all of us!

On May 5, 1925, I began my first starring role with DeLuxe in the serial White Aces which ostensibly featured Buddy Brown as the daring young English Ace but it was Max Peters as his friend Count Topolski, the daring Russian flyer, who stole the first episode so that by the fifth reel, ‘Spies from the Skies’, ‘Ace’ Peters was sharing equal billing. In those days the one-reel serial was often used to fill ten or fifteen minutes’ space while the other projector was set up for the main feature, so a serial star was as well known to the public as Valentino or Swanson. Very soon my salary came to one hundred and ten a week and I was again a flyer for ten episodes of The Air Knights, leading my squadron of gentlemen volunteers against the German hordes and then, in Send for the Air Knights, fifteen chapters of equally hazardous derring-do against the new enemies of America, foreign business interests and their criminal stooges. This was followed by some three-reelers, Ace of the Aces, Aces Up, Aces and Kings and others, in which I played a flyer with all the authority of an expert. Because of my value to the studio, it was left to others to do the flying (much of which was borrowed footage, to save money) though I, of course, appeared in the cockpit while the dogfights and so on were projected onto a screen behind me, giving a wonderful illusion of reality. But it was my first starring Western part, where I took to the saddle as The Masked Buckaroo in a hugely successful ten-chapter programmer, which had the public calling for more Masked Buckaroos, that made my half-hidden face more famous than La Roque’s or Cooper’s! Lessor seemed to be having trouble with colleagues at MGM suspecting him of ‘moonlighting’ and wanted to make, he said, the most of our roll. We began to shoot two or three reels a day - completing a serial in less than a working week! These were heady times! What was more, Goldfish sent word that he liked my script but felt someone a little more conversant with English should, as it were, polish it up. He offered me a further $1000, which I decided to accept, which is how Red Queen and White Knight came to appear some while later as Mockery with Ricardo Cortez, Barbara Bedford and, at my suggestion, Lon Chaney in the starring parts. I still have the cuttings about it from a magazine I found a few years ago when I was dealing in general second-hand goods. The Picturegoer described my film as an important story for our times and thought Chaney gave one of his most touching performances as Sergei the Harelip, a peasant with intelligence and spirit, who loves the heroine from afar and eventually dies defending her honour from the Red Army. Photoplay Magazine found the suspense ‘marvellously sustained’. I always felt a little betrayed that in the end ‘Walter Seaman’ claimed most of the story. But by that time I suppose he had learned from Goldfish the art of crediting himself with the work of others! I have never seen the film, in spite of writing many times to the BBC and the National Film Theatre. They went so far as to claim that the picture never existed, though I sent them copies of the cuttings. They told me that there was only a limited audience for the silent films. This, at least, I could believe. The taste of the public has been thoroughly corrupted since the Levant established its home-away-from-home in Hollywood. I am grateful for having experienced a little of the Golden Age before Mephistopheles captured the city as the Turks captured Constantinople in 1493. Then the Jews had flooded in from Spain, having been banished by a triumphant Christian king and a Church determined to cauterise their country’s diseased wounds and rid it forever of the corrupting influences of Hebrew and Moslem alike.

I saw a new Byzantium. I saw her rising from the seas where the nations of the world all meet. I saw her feasted upon by carrion, her stink carried on a foul wind from the East, her glories despised, her achievements forgotten, her meaning distorted. She was to have been the capital of Christendom, the seat of her wisdom. Her works would have brought light to the entire planet. Hollywood’s power could have transformed the globe. I should have been one of her most influential architects. But I do not think I was destined for much happiness. Soon my life became full once more of unwelcome complications. What disgustingly small minds, what small ambitions, what miserable goals most people have! How they hate those who are prepared to risk a little more, to seek both the dangers and the rewards of life! How disappointed I have been to discover that even those I cared for and trusted were not only incapable of sharing my vision and my humanity, but actually feared it! By October 1925 I had become an established and respected figure in Hollywood. I was everything that city most admired. I had looks, success, brains, imagination and my own starring part in feature films. My success as The Masked Buckaroo was followed by four more serial stories, The Masked Buckaroo’s Return, Buckaroo’s Code, Buckaroo Justice and The Masked Buckaroo at Devil’s Jump. These were snapped up by the distributor so that I was next given by DeLuxe the role of Captain Jack Cassidy - the Ace of Aces - in their 15-part Ace Among Aces (with Gloria Cornish!), then The Sky Hawks, and Heaven’s Hell-riders. By now the showcards displayed the name with which I would become most famous. To Hollywood and the world I was ‘Ace’ Peters, The Sky Hawk. The studio made a great deal of my wartime flying career and my pioneering flights, but did not feel it was sensible to mention that most of this had occurred in my native Russia. Popular as I was in the role of flying ace, it was The Mysterious Vigilante - the young cowboy-turned-law-bringer Tex Reardon, in mask and chaps - whom the public most demanded. Within a few weeks I was back in Lone Star Buckaroo, The Fighting Buckaroo and Buckaroo’s Buddy. Even when, one Monday morning, I turned up at ‘Gower Gulch’ with others to begin Song of the Buckaroo to find most of the studio dismantled, the office furniture gone and no sign of an executive anywhere, I was undismayed. We were, it seemed, only minutes ahead of the bailiff. With the director’s help I was able to gather up and hide a good many canisters of film - in most of which I starred. These were smuggled to my car and from there to my home. I was not at that time especially upset. I had already planned to leave DeLuxe and find a better studio. As young Tex Reardon, sworn to bring justice to the West, I had attained great moral and artistic success - in spite of the fact that most of the time my lower face was covered by a bandanna. The enormous popularity of The Masked Buckaroo (based on the adventures by Earl G. Stafford in All-Star Weekly and Munsey’s) made me a hero, frequently invited to open rodeos, which I was obliged to decline because the studio thought my accent was not Western enough. Now I had three careers: to MGM I was a set designer, to Goldfish a writer and to the public a major star! Yet so little interest did Hollywood’s moguls take in one another, let alone the rest of us, that not one of them realised the truth! Many women found my features romantic, they said I was a more refined Valentino. Some were prepared to fight for my favours.

As usual women were to cause a downturn in my fortunes but in retrospect perhaps I should thank them, even ‘Vivienne Prentiss’, who was perhaps the initiator of my discomfort. Looking back in the light of reason I know I would not have survived the advent of the Talkers, an idea which, ironically, I had myself suggested to an uninterested Goldfish earlier that year. To those peasants any foreigner was a Jew and I had already been insulted as The Masked Bucka-Jew and, The Heebe Who-Flew, not to mention more obscene concoctions, so I need explain to no one how my natural voice would be received and perhaps for this reason, too, Goldfish - happiest in Yiddish - took to me. But I would not have volunteered for my future. Towards the end of 1925 a number of events combined to decide my destiny. The discoveries of Tutenkhamun had led to a wave of story projects set in ancient Egypt, most of which were merely the vehicle for a sex-object and which were of doubtful authenticity. I remember seeing The Queen of Sheba with Fritz Leiber and Betty Blythe, who was supposed to be the new Theda Bara, and thinking how ludicrously bad it was. Leiber’s Solomon was clean-shaven and the costumes the invention of an incompetent design department. Columns bore pictograms which were not even vaguely Egyptianate but derived from Norse and Irish myths! Yet the thing was a great success. There was a plethora of what were called in the trade ‘Sheikh movies’ following the popularity of Valentino’s paean to miscegenation (which must have done untold harm). We had East of Suez, Desert Dust, Her Favourite Camel, Queen of the Pyramids, When the Desert Calls, Feisal, Silk and Sand, Carstairs of the Camel Corps, Burning Gold, Passion’s Oasis, and hundreds more. They were not merely Hollywood productions but from every other country where films were made. Yet there had not been a good picture set in the time of the Pharaohs, unless one counted certain of De Mille’s Biblical subjects. I mentioned this casually to Seaman one day and he became unusually enthusiastic. It seemed he was bored with the flood of sophisticated comedies he had directed and wanted to do something more substantial, an epic. In those days the successful epic was what a director’s reputation finally rested upon. Though no Griffith, he had already seen some of the exhibits brought back from Egypt by Carter and Carnarvon and testified to their beauty. He was gloomily fascinated, too, by a curse which had taken the lives of several members of the expedition and their associates. Carnarvon had been struck down almost as soon as the Tomb was opened and his dog, who had also been there, fell dead mysteriously. Bethell, his secretary, died in peculiar circumstances. Westbury killed himself. Carter’s partner, Mace, died just as he was about to X-ray a mummy. Then Carnarvon’s wife and his two brothers died and Arthur Weigall died of fever. That same night we sketched out an idea for an ambitious story set partly in Ancient Egypt and partly in the present, concerning a love-story between a Queen and her High Priest and a passion so powerful it would last two thousand years. We would work in the idea of the cursed tomb, the consequences of disturbing the dead, and we would call it Tutenkhamun’s Queen. I was already visualising the magnificent sets I could build, the lavish costumes and the gorgeous interiors we could make. I do not remember now whether it was Seaman or myself who conceived the notion of setting our story against the authentic landscapes of Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the Pyramids. I could see no reason against the idea. It made artistic sense. The light was, if anything, better than California’s and, with the British in charge, there should be no working difficulties. Seaman grew enthusiastically determined to show the story to Goldfish, who was specialising only in epics. I thought no more of it except to hope that ‘Walt’ himself might be struck down by the Curse of Tutenkhamun. I resented his proprietorial attitudes towards ‘his’ star, my friend, who would always see her film career as a ‘bit of a larf’. Mrs Cornelius took her luck, she said, as it came. She saw no point in trying to hang on to it. It should be enjoyed to the full while it was available. This is the simple philosophy which kept her sane and by which she survived.

Esmé continued to beg me to get her a part in one of my pictures and I promised I would try, not having the heart to tell her how I had been turned down by Colony, Monogram and Universal so far. These were lean times for actors. She said that Meulemkaumpf was growing ‘moody’ and suspicious and Mix confided that the sausage king had offered him a handsome bonus to spy on her and report her movements in detail. I did my best to find work for her through my continuing role as designer and writer, but was informed by everyone that pretty foreign girls were a dime a dozen in Hollywood. To get work they must have exceptional talent of some kind. I knew that this was not the whole truth of it, even if the footage of Esmé’s several tests did not reveal my girl to be a natural actress. Things came to a head one afternoon, however. Esmé, dressed in her special frock, was squatting on the carpet and I had my trousers ready when we were interrupted by an urgent Jacob Mix rapping on the bedroom door and whispering as loudly as he dared that we were discovered. Then the flat vulgar tones of a Mid-Western industrialist all but drowned him. ‘You’re fired, Mix. And that floozy in there had better not trouble to come back either. I’ve cancelled her contract.’

I was never to meet Meulemkaumpf. By the time I pulled up my trousers and stormed into the living-room the tycoon had gone, driving one car and with the detective he had hired following in the other. Mix, still in his smart chauffeur’s uniform, stood there grinning at me. ‘Well, now, boss,’ he said, ‘it looks like you have yourself a couple of new dependants.’

‘My clothes!’ Esmé was in despair. ‘How will I get my clothes?’

‘Missy,’ said Mr Mix with an expression of humorous sympathy on his broad, honest face, ‘you’ve got your clothes. You’re standing in them.’

With a deep sigh of resignation, my darling returned to our bed and did not rise for almost two days. The emotional shock had proven too much for her. The following morning I read in the Los Angeles Times that Mucker Hever was back from Europe where he had married an Austrian aristocrat and had bought himself a house near Versailles. By the Wednesday of the next week I received a call at MGM, where I was working on the Beverly of Graustark sets, designed as a Marion Davies vehicle, and Hever’s familiar, faltering voice, no longer friendly, asked me to meet him at his office the following morning. I told him that I would be busy until the afternoon (when I had a further screen-test with First National). He said that three o’clock would suit him. Believing that he had seen the stupidity of cutting off his nose to hurt his face and that he wanted to resurrect our steam car, and in spite of being told by First that nobody needed ‘a Russian cowboy’, I was in good spirits when I called on Hever.

He had lost weight but he wore the same suits. They made him look like an elephant with a wasting disease. His lugubrious eyes regarded me across the familiar desk with what I mistook for a knowing amiability. He told me that he had been in Paris, that he had met some acquaintances of mine. Grinning, he opened a folder and showed me a series of press cuttings concerning my ill-fated airship venture. I was viciously and untruthfully characterised by the French newspapers as a rogue, a confidence man, a cheat. I dismissed the reports. ‘My friend Esmé Loukianoff will tell you that they are lies. And Count Nikolai Petroff can also vouch for me.’

‘Petroff? He’s as crooked as you are.’

Then my friend’s name, too, was now blackened! ‘The allegations were part of a plot. They were always nonsense.’

‘As nonsensical as my involvement with the Ku Klux Klan?’ He planned to blackmail me! But what did he want? ‘You and your fancy woman suckered me good, Max, I’ll say that. But I won’t let you do it to anyone else in this town.’

I was astonished by the man’s pettiness, and said so. It was not I, after all, who had taken up with a Swede.

‘I’m giving you a month,’ he said. ‘And if you and your damned accomplice aren’t out of LA by Thanksgiving Day, this stuff, and a whole lot of other stuff too, goes to Callahan at the Justice Department. Remember Callahan, Mr Pallenberg?’ He gloated like a von Stroheim travesty, almost drooling with the taste of his triumph.

‘Who offered you all this rubbish?’ I was beside myself. Scarcely able to think, somehow I saw Brodmann’s hand in this chain of events. He, clearly, was hampering my progress. The Chekist had dogged me all the way from Ukraine. I could still see his knowing eyes, the only witness to my humiliation. My buttocks burned with painful reminiscence.

‘You’ve made more enemies than friends out there, Max.’ He shrugged. ‘Does it matter now?’

‘Brodmann is here! You are being deceived by a Bolshevik, I promise you. You have been misinformed. It is their way. They will go to any lengths. Look at the Zinoviev letter if you want proof such things are done!’

He stared at me for a moment as if he was going to answer, then he shook his head and shrugged. ‘Get out of my office, Max.’

I demanded he hand over all my papers, especially my designs. He claimed he had burned them. ‘A pile of ash is all that’s left of that whole damned stupid scam.’ His voice was a disgusted whisper.

I was helpless. I was furious. Yet I attempted to reason with him, not for my own skin but for my friend’s. ‘For pity’s sake, Hever, save your spite for me if you will - but spare that honourable lady. Try to rise above your petty jealousy. Is it her fault she found another fellow more attractive? Besides,’ I added, ‘we are both men of the world, both gentlemen. We can neither of us afford a scandal.’ I hoped he would take my meaning.

But he merely laughed in my face and brandished the file. ‘I’m giving you a break, Max. I have the goods on you now. When I show this to the papers, who the hell is going to believe anything you say? Sure I don’t want a scandal. Not a whole heap, anyway. That’s why I’m giving you time to move on. But if this blows to the papers and Hays gets hold of it - as he inevitably will - believe me, you’ll never work in this town again. And if you want a taste of what I mean, check back with FBO and Universal to see if they’ll give you a contract.’ His voice had become a threatening bleat.

It was my turn to smile. I admitted that he had me by the boules d’amour, as they say in France. ‘Hollywood, Hever and Hays might turn against me, my elephantine friend, but History will remember you only as a foolish hulk; nothing more than a hazard on the highway of Genius!’

(I should have demanded those plans. Of course he had not burned them! He and his companies have been living off my inventions ever since. But I was still confused when I walked proudly from his office, my future in ruins.)

My first act was to call Cosmopolitan and make an appointment for the promised job; my second was to call Miss Davies, but in spite of our professional closeness she said she had never heard of me. Mr Hearst similarly had never heard of me. His secretary added that Mr Hearst was used to fantastic attempts to blackmail him, especially since Mr Ince’s heart attack had created so many baseless rumours, and that such people were dealt with by due processes of law. Even I, innocent of guile as I was, understood the threat. Thus I was betrayed and abandoned in the same day!