The Englishman’s Boy

have passed through have been painted white. So far I have seen no paintings, no rugs, no photographs, no furniture, except for the one lone chair stranded on that vast floor. My heart has begun to beat dully, heavily, and my mouth has gone dry.

Fitzsimmons stops, knocks softly on one of the doors. A voice calls to enter and we do. Chance sits on a sofa with his back to the door, facing a screen hung on the opposite wall. This is the first furnished room I have encountered in my passage through the house. One wall is filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a sliding library ladder; another is covered with maps of the western United States; the last has a huge leaded window looking out on to the night. There is a projector mounted on a trolley standing near the sofa, three armchairs covered in chintz, a gleaming oak floor, and a mahogany liquor cabinet behind whose doors bottles gleam.

Fitz says, “What was it tonight?”

Chance doesn’t bother to turn around when he answers. “Judith of Bethulia.” The voice sounds tired. Then he musters energy. “I want you to make a note, Fitz. In this movie Griffith put Bobby Harron in a tunic. Big mistake. Harron has terrible legs. See to it that none of my directors puts a male lead into a short tunic until you’ve inspected his legs. Nobody else but you.”

“Got it.”

“Not a mental note, Fitz. A paper note.”

Fitz takes out a note pad and scribbles. “I brought Vincent,” he announces as he writes.

“Please introduce us,” says Chance, still not bothering to turn around. With Fitz’s hand on my elbow I find myself being steered to the front of the sofa where a man in a three-piece oatmeal tweed suit is sitting. His thinning hair is neatly brushed, the clothes are elegantly cut, his brown brogues are polished to a chocolate richness. He might be a professor at an Ivy League school – a professor of good family and substantial private means. His tailoring, his grooming are all that they should be. Only his grey complexion falls short of the mark, the unhealthy colour of a man who never sees much sun.

“Mr. Vincent,” he says, “how good of you to come and see me on such short notice. Please sit down,” he says, patting the sofa beside him. “Too bad Fitz couldn’t have got you here earlier, you could have joined me in viewing one of Mr. David Wark Griffith’s films – an older one, but then I don’t find that Mr. Griffith ages.”

Fitzsimmons says, “You ought to take a holiday from the Griffith. Look at something different for a change.” Towering over us, he sounds and looks a bit like a disapproving parent. “I want to get preached at, I go to church,” he adds.

“Fitz prefers the Keystone Kops, Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd,” Chance explains cheerfully.

“Fatty Ar buckle, that’s the guy who really makes me laugh.”

“Nobody is laughing at Mr. Arbuckle any more, Fitz. My word, no. The joke’s on Mr. Arbuckle now.”

What Chance is referring to is a sexual scandal that rocked Hollywood only the year before. A starlet, Virginia Rappe, died as a consequence of a drunken party in the comedian’s hotel room in San Francisco. Accusations were made that Arbuckle had raped Miss Rappe with either a Coca-Cola or champagne bottle (some said an icicle) and ruptured her bladder, resulting in peritonitis and death. Much of America stirred with anti-Hollywood hysteria, pulpits rang with denunciations; there were reports of women attacking the screen when Arbuckle comedies were shown and Wyoming cowboys riddling them with bullet holes. Despite Arbuckle’s acquittal in a series of trials, Paramount cancelled the jolly fat man’s three-million-dollar contract and junked three of his pictures already in the can. Suddenly, Fatty Arbuckle had become Starving Arbuckle, a star who couldn’t get work.

“And thanks to Mr. Arbuckle we find ourselves saddled with that insufferable Hays,” says Chance. “Not the man I would have picked for the job, but then Messrs. Zukor, Loew, Goldwyn, Laemmle, Fox, and Selznick did not consult me. I am not part of their cabal.”

His dismissal of Hays takes me aback. Hays, the little man with bat-wing ears and rodent teeth, is uniformly detested by writers, actors, and directors, regarded as a tool of studio heads, a way of disciplining troublesome “creative” people. So it comes as a great surprise to hear a studio head disparage him.

Fearing possible government censorship of the movies in the wake of the Arbuckle scandal, industry leaders quickly hired President Harding’s former postmaster general, Will Hays, to clean up Hollywood’s image. What came to be known as the Hays Office immediately issued dictates prohibiting carnality on-screen or off. Morality clauses were soon a feature of studio contracts; unseemly private behaviour could get you fired, or the vague clause could be used as legal grounds to get rid of people causing other problems.

“I grant you,” says Chance, “that there may be a philosophical justification for censorship. If we claim that Shakespeare and Milton improve the mind, then it is only fair to assume that inferior goods may damage it. But censorship for business reasons is another matter. And if we must have it, I would prefer the censor to be able to distinguish between the good and the bad. Mr. Hays does not set my mind at rest on that point. As owner of my own movie company, I did not expect to be dictated to by a small-town Hoosier whose aesthetics were formed by the Knights of Pythias, the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, the Moose, and the Elks. That is not why I came to Hollywood.”

Before I can stop myself, I ask him the question all of Hollywood has been asking behind his back. “Why did you come to Hollywood, Mr. Chance?”

“Why, to assist Mr. Griffith in his great work, Mr. Vincent. To make American movies.” He pauses, studies my reaction. “The look on your face suggests you are not sure what I mean. You are thinking, Aren’t all movies made in Hollywood American movies? They are not, Mr. Vincent. Think of Mr. Lasky returning from Europe to hold a dockside conference to announce he’s corralled the best writers England can boast – James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Compton Mackenzie, E. Temple Thurston, Max Pemberton. How can English writers author American movies? And then Samuel Goldwyn hires Maurice Maeterlinck to write pictures for him because Monsieur Maeterlinck owns a Nobel Prize for Literature. I hear Goldwyn keeps him on hand to introduce to distinguished visitors as, ‘The world’s greatest writer. He works for me.’ ”

Fitz abruptly says, “Who wants a drink?”

“Denis recalls me to my duties as a host. I have been remiss. As you see, I can get carried away,” Chance apologizes, offering a smile. “We have some very good Scotch that some of Fitz’s friends got us from Canada. Or perhaps you would care for something else?”

“Scotch and water is fine.”

“Soda with mine. As usual, Denis.”

He turns back to me as Fitzsimmons busies himself mixing drinks.

“You see, Harry… do you mind if I call you Harry? You see, Harry, I want to make pictures rooted in American history and American experience. Just as Mr. Griffith showed us how to. I’m tired of all these people making movies about Marie Antoinette. Prisoner of Zenda stuff. Chocolate-coated kitsch. Costume dramas, knights and castles, Robin Hood. Why not a film biography of George Washington instead of Henry VIII? Do you see what I mean?”

I nod. Fitz serves the drinks, then retreats to a chair in the corner. All but his shoes and pant legs vanish in shadow.

“That is what I mean when I say I wish to continue Mr. Griffith’s work,” Chance explains with just a touch of smugness.

It is hard to remember that Griffith only died in 1948, five years ago. I don’t suspect the name means much to anyone now, except the most avid film buffs. He died an alcoholic, guiltily ignored by the very business which he pioneered, a neglected, pathetically grandiloquent figure. But for about a decade he dominated movie-making in a way no one has since, or is ever likely to do again. He began to direct when movies were shot with a stationary camera as if they were stage plays, actors and actresses making exits and entrances. It was Griffith and his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, who take the lion’s share of credit for inventing the vocabulary of movies – close-ups (audiences wanted to know what had happened to the actors’ feet), rapid cuts from scene to scene and character to character, the “fade-out,” the “soft focus,” tracking cameras. He even used a variation of colour photography, printing night scenes on blue stock, day scenes on yellow. It was Griffith who first demanded that movies be regarded as art and Griffith who gave some credibility to the claim they could be. He produced some of the first Hollywood spectaculars with The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, as well as small, intimate movies like Broken Blossoms. His pictures were a reflection of their maker, a mixture of bombast, hokum, sentiment, and high artistic purpose.

Griffith was an obsessive eccentric and one of his obsessions was history. He employed a large staff to research his period dramas and dunned archaeologists and historians for blurbs to advertise the “accuracy” of his