The Electric Hotel Read online

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  For James Magnuson, who taught us how to love the work

  The cinema is an invention without a future.

  —attributed to Louis Lumière

  Author’s Note

  According to the Library of Congress, more than 75 percent of all silent films have been lost. Much of that is due to the unstable medium itself—celluloid nitrate is both highly flammable and prone to decay. Every now and again, a film thought to be lost forever shows up somewhere in the world, in an archive drawer or as a foreign print sitting in a far-flung attic or basement.

  The Electric Hotel is the name of a silent “trick film” made by the early Spanish director Segundo de Chomón and released as El hotel eléctrico in 1908. Thought to be lost for many years, the film was rediscovered and now resides in the Filmoteca Española film archive. I’ve borrowed the germ of the film, and the title, for my own dramatic purposes.

  1

  The Knickerbocker

  Each morning, for more than thirty years, Claude Ballard returned to the hotel lobby with two cameras strapped across his chest and a tote bag full of foraged mushrooms and herbs. His long walking circuit took in Little Armenia, where he photographed rug sellers smoking cigarettes in the dawning light or, more recently, the homeless college dropouts and beatniks along Sunset Boulevard, striplings, the doorman called them, the ambassadors of Hollywood ruin. This morning—a crisp sunny day in December of 1962—he’d also foraged up into the hills and canyons and now sat in his usual chair, leaning over a coffee table with a pair of nail scissors, trimming the stems of oyster mushrooms and the lacy fronds of wild fennel. He wore a threadbare glen plaid suit with Swiss mountaineering boots, a crumpled white handkerchief flaming like a moth orchid from his breast pocket.

  * * *

  His appointment was late so he began to delicately insert the trimmed plants into envelopes, the hotel manager’s English setter, Elsie, nuzzled and sleeping at his feet. Claude could remember a lineage of hotel setters and bloodhounds, purebreds that slept in the lobby and rode the elevators when they were bored or hungry. Speck, the first mascot, was a forager in his own right, moving between the eleven floors where residents and guests left out their breakfast dishes. D. W. Griffith, who’d made the first American epic, used to coax Speck into his room with bacon and eggs. When he died of a stroke under the lobby chandelier in 1948, all but forgotten, the dog kept vigil outside his room every morning for a month.

  * * *

  Claude watched Elsie breathe and twitch at his feet, transported into a dream chase, he imagined, by the smell of damp underbrush and ragweed that clung to his trousers and boots. He looked out through the glass doors for a sign of his visitor, but only the doorman, Sid, was standing there in his gold-trimmed cap and epaulets. From this vantage point, he appeared to Claude like a war-weary admiral standing alone on a dock, staring out to sea, hands clasped behind his back. He still dressed as if he opened doors for Bob Hope and Jack Benny.

  * * *

  But the truth was the Knickerbocker Hotel’s best days were far behind it. If the lobby had once resembled an elegant Spanish Colonial outpost, with its stenciled, hand-painted ceilings and Moorish tapestries, it now resembled a Madrid funeral home on hard times. Frayed cordovan carpets, dusty ferns in copper pots, velvet gondola couches marooned in pools of fifteen-watt lamplight. Celebrities once sat in easy chairs smoking cigars or reading Variety, but now an unemployed screenwriter was taking his pet iguana for a morning stroll and Susan Berg, an actress of the silent era, stood in her robe whispering a monologue to an empty chaise longue.

  * * *

  Over the rim of Claude’s bifocals, Susan appeared as a winking silhouette, a corona of daylight streaming in behind her from the street. Her words were mostly lost, her face turned away, her voice soft and worn. She delivered this speech a few mornings a week, always in the same alcove, where insurance clerks or secretaries on their way to the Guaranty Office Building might glimpse her through the front windows. These were the last lines she’d ever spoken on camera, dialogue intended not to be heard but to be printed on intertitle cards. Claude sometimes caught a single phrase or word from the murmured speech, and the line Why single me out for revenge? had stayed with him. She’d told him that it was from a 1922 Western called Comanche Bride, but Claude couldn’t recall it. By the time of its release, his directing days were over and the medium was dead to him.

  * * *

  There were other refugees of the silent era still living at the hotel—a one-time makeup artist who cut hair in her room, a master carpenter who did odd jobs around the neighborhood, a widowed British actor who’d barricaded himself in his two-room suite during the Cuban missile crisis back in October. Claude kept an eye out for them, offered to pick up prescriptions or newspapers on his walks, brought takeout up from the lobby when one of them was under the weather, but although they were friendly they never talked about the old days. And they never mentioned Susan Berg’s lobby monologues or the silent era memorabilia Claude had stashed away in his small suite.

  * * *

  When Claude thought about the hotel’s heyday, he remembered the house band, the Hungarian Symphonette, playing out on the Lido patio while celebrities danced or, later, Houdini’s widow holding a séance on the rooftop to commune with the escape artist, or the time that Elvis recorded “Love Me Tender” in room 1016. He’d witnessed and photographed the passing of a golden, burnished epoch. A passenger sitting at the window on a train at dusk, it seemed to him now. In 1954, Claude had met Marilyn Monroe in the elevator after she’d eloped with Joe DiMaggio, a canvas bag of mushrooms hung over Claude’s shoulder, and she’d been kind enough to ask him about his foraging expeditions. Somewhere in his suite, he had an undeveloped negative of the actress holding up a black elfin saddle mushroom as if it were a dead mouse. Later, in the lobby, she blew him a kiss and called him the mushroom hunter from the elevator, oblivious to the fact that he was a film pioneer.

  * * *

  When the newspapers reported Marilyn Monroe’s suicide in her Brentwood home back in August, he’d thought about her in the elevator, imagined her forever rising between floors toward the sundeck. He remembered her holding a towel and a transistor radio, smelling of rose-hip shampoo and cigarettes, girlish and shy behind her oversized sunglasses. That was how history showed up at the Knickerbocker, fleetingly and behind smoked glass. The hotel was once a place to be seen and now it was a place to hide or disappear, sometimes forever.

  * * *

  For the most part, the suicides on the eleventh floor were gruesomely quiet affairs—barbiturate overdoses or the lancing of arteries in a bathtub. But in November, a costume designer had left the world noisily and it rattled Claude in a way he couldn’t explain. He’d been out on the sidewalk talking to Sid, returning from one of his walks, perhaps holding up an exemplary sprig of chervil into the sunlight, when he looked up and saw Irene Lentz—he would learn her name later—sitting on the ledge of a bathroom window on the top floor. She sat there calmly for a moment, kicking her bare feet back and forth, testing the air as if it were a swimming pool, and then she edged off the sill. She shot down toward the concrete awning, flailing and screaming, and Claude felt his hands rise involuntarily above his head as she fell. She landed right behind the neon Hollywood sign wi
th a sound that left nothing to the imagination.

  * * *

  1962 had already featured a man going into space orbit and the Russians pointing nuclear missiles at Florida, but it was somehow the sight of Irene Lentz’s covered body being lowered by medics on a gurney with ropes that shook something loose in him. For months, he’d been reading but not responding to the earnest, flattering letters of a film graduate student, and it was the afternoon of the suicide when he finally wrote back to suggest a meeting. It was time to tell the story of how he’d ended up on this desolate shoreline, time to wave back at the spinning world.

  * * *

  In one of his letters, Martin Embry had referred to Claude’s first silent feature, The Electric Hotel, as a lost masterpiece, and now Claude found it difficult to square that phrasing with the fact that his correspondent was fifteen minutes late. Did one keep an eighty-five-year-old master waiting? As if summoned by this thought, Sid opened one of the glass doors for a shaggy blond man in his twenties, wearing a tan suede coat and a bolo tie. The doorman pointed in Claude’s direction and then fell in behind the visitor. Claude busied himself with his mushrooms and fennel fronds because it was bad manners to be late but it was worse manners to notice.

  * * *

  Claude looked up and smiled when he heard the sound of boot heels on the terra-cotta tiles. He sometimes photographed this kind of apparition out on Hollywood Boulevard, among the music and creative types, the urban cowboy with the unruly sideburns and big belt buckle who’s just moved out of his parent’s basement in Van Nuys. To Claude’s mind he didn’t look anything like a Ph.D. student in film history. The doorman gestured to Claude, and the man in western wear grinned and nodded.

  —Mr. Claude Ballard, in the flesh, said Sid. Cinematic genius, forager of edible plants, and permanent resident of this fine establishment since 1929.

  —You’re making me feel like I’m part of a museum exhibition, said Claude.

  —I’m Martin Embry. It is an enormous and distinct pleasure.

  He extended his hand to Claude and they shook. Sid picked up a newspaper and returned to his post at the front doors.

  —Please, have a seat, Claude said.

  Martin sat in the armchair opposite and leaned down to rub Elsie’s rump. The dog quivered but continued to sleep.

  —She is dreaming of chasing a rabbit, Claude said, which I am inclined to think always ends with a meal. Before she got so old I used to take her out foraging.

  —I grew up with dogs. I miss them out here.

  —You are not from here?

  —Texas. I moved out here for graduate school.

  A silence settled between them as they both watched the sleeping dog.

  —I must apologize for not replying to your letters sooner, Claude said. You see, I have been out of the correspondence business for many years.

  —I understand completely.

  —Very kind. Would you mind terribly if I took some footage of you?

  —Are you making a film?

  —I like to document what happens to me each day. Call it an old habit.

  * * *

  Claude lifted the 16 mm Bell & Howell from around his chest and filmed several seconds of Martin blinking and smiling into the lens. Then he took out a small spiral notebook from his jacket and jotted down the date, time, and subject.

  —I wondered if I might take you out for breakfast. I’d love to ask you about your career.

  —There’s a diner around the corner, Claude said. I have trained them to make omelets the way I like them.

  Claude rested the camera against his rib cage and attached the lens cap. He gathered his envelopes of herbs and mushrooms, stood up, stepped over Elsie, and continued to the corner of the lobby, where Susan Berg was looping through a second murmured run at the monologue. Claude heard Martin’s boot heels behind him as he delicately touched the arm of Susan’s robe.

  —Wonderful, wonderful work this morning, Susan. I see something new every time. Now, I’m headed out for breakfast at the diner and I wondered if you would like me to see if they have any bones for your soup broth?

  Her papery, girlish face lived inside a halo of silver-white hair. She blinked and swallowed, her eyes a startling blue that put Claude in mind of tropical fish darting behind aquarium glass.

  —I’d like that very much, thank you, Claude.

  Claude handed her a small sprig of lilac verbena and she brought it to her nose.

  —Go on up to your room and I’ll stop by after breakfast.

  Susan nodded and the scene dropped away from her face and hands as she headed for the elevators.

  * * *

  They walked into the high chrome of the Los Angeles morning and headed for Claude’s usual diner on Hollywood Boulevard. Claude took a few images with the still camera as they walked along—their own reflections in the chrome whorl of a hubcap, a sparrow standing up to a pigeon over a bread crust in the gutter, a cat sleeping on a sunny stoop. A few of the indigent men on the boulevard waved to Claude, and one of them, a dropout named Billy, a tall kid in overalls and an army surplus jacket, asked for his photo to be taken. Claude obliged and told his subject to look off into the distance instead of at the camera. Pretend you are staring back at Iowa, Claude said, snapping the image.

  * * *

  The diner straddled a corner, a wedge of checkerboard linoleum and two rows of booths forming a wide V along the big windows. A middle-aged waitress named Gail showed them to Claude’s favorite booth, in the apex of the V, where he could see the street as well as the rest of the diners. She handed them menus and he handed her a paper envelope of herbs and mushrooms for the kitchen. Claude cleaned his black-rimmed bifocals with a paper napkin—framing a distorted Martin briefly inside one smudged lens—before unstrapping his cameras and placing them on the leather bench. He watched Martin scanning the laminated menu.

  —I am biased, but I recommend the omelet they call the Frenchman.

  —Did they name it after you?

  Claude smiled, gave a modest, Gallic shrug.

  —It’s possible I gave them the idea of adding fresh herbs and mushrooms with grated Gruyère. They pay me a little for my foraged herbs and they give me a regular’s discount.

  * * *

  Gail arrived back at the table and they both ordered omelets and coffee. When the coffee arrived, Claude took a meditative sip and lingered his eyes on the street. A few bright-scarved secretaries were coming out of the studio and record label offices for a cigarette break, walking a little dazedly into the sunshine. Claude picked up the still camera, took some shots of the women smoking at the curbstone, wrote the details in his notebook.

  —Strangers have always interested me, Claude said. The way they illuminate their own sorrows or joys when you least expect it. It might be half a second of staring into space, then it vanishes. In English, we say perfect strangers, which is very apt, I think.

  He looked over at Martin, who was sipping his coffee.

  —Nobody remembers my work anymore. How do you know it?

  —I’m writing my dissertation on innovation in American silent film before 1914.

  —And there is someone in existence who would read such a thing?

  —Other film scholars mostly. Listen, my classmates aren’t going to believe I’m having breakfast with Claude Ballard.

  Claude waved a hand dismissively.

  —How did you come to these studies?

  —My grandparents raised me and they owned a movie theater out in the Hill Country, west of San Antonio. I was a certified projectionist by the time I was ten. You could say the silents are in my blood.

  —I didn’t become a projectionist and cameraman until I was nearly twenty.

  —I’m guessing cinema hadn’t been invented when you were ten.

  —That’s correct. My first job with a camera was in a hospital in Paris where they were studying hysteria. Then I took a job as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers. I was the first agent to
show projected images in America and Australia. The brothers sent projectionists all over the world … India, Cuba, Brazil, China, Russia … sometimes the locals treated us like gods, sometimes like heretics …

  * * *

  Before too long their omelets arrived and they ate for a few minutes without talking.

  —This is by far the best omelet I’ve ever eaten, Martin said.

  —The secret is creating a little egg pouch around the cheese and herbs. And lots of butter. And the outside of the omelet should never be browned. Like most Frenchmen, I have opinions about food …

  Martin took a bite and wiped his mouth with his napkin.

  —They still teach you in film schools, you know.

  A consideration of a smile played on Claude’s lower lip.

  —And what do they teach?

  —That you practically invented the close-up.

  —Heavens no, that was not me.

  —That you were the first one to use a professional stuntman and to shoot at night.

  —More or less this is true.

  —I assume that was before the first war?

  —Yes, before we all drowned in our own excesses.

  Claude looked out at the street across the rim of his coffee cup.

  —And what do they teach you in film school about the end of my career? The dénouement?

  —That you never worked again after The Electric Hotel. That you went to film in Europe during the first war and had some kind of nervous breakdown …