Part 22 (1/2)
”That's my business,” said Marr.
”Have it your way,” a.s.sented Brock with ironic mildness. ”Now, Chappy, follow me a minute and you'll see how you dished your own beans: You call up Worth 10,000--that's a private matter, as you say. But Central gets the call twisted and gives you another number--that's a mistake.
And the number she happens to give you is the number of my new branch office down in the financial district--that's an accident. And the fellow who answers the call at my shop happens to be Costigan, my chief a.s.sistant, who's been working on the Propbridge case for five weeks now--and that's a coincidence. He doesn't recognize your voice over the wire--that would be luck. But when, like a saphead, you pull your new moniker, but with the same old initials. .h.i.tched to it, and when on top of that you ask for George Spillane, which is Cheesy by his most popular alias--when you do these things, why Chappy, it's your own fault.
”Because Costigan is on then, bigger than a house. You've tipped him your hand, see? And with our connections it's easy--and quick--for Costigan to trace the call to this hotel. And inside of two minutes after that he has me on the wire at my uptown office over here in West Fortieth. And here I am; as a matter of fact, I've been here all of fifteen minutes.
”It all proves one thing to me, Chappy. You're wiser than the run of 'em, but you've got your weak spot, and now I know what it is: You think in a groove, Chappy, and this time, by looking at the far end of the groove, you can see little old Warble-Twice-on-the-Hudson looming up.
And you won't have to look very hard to see it, either.... Well, I see Gulwing has taken a tumble to himself and has gone on a run to look for his umbrella. Suppose we start on our little taxi ride, old groove thinker?”
CHAPTER VII
MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY
The real purpose of this is to tell about Mr. Lobel's attack of apoplexy. What comes before must necessarily be in its nature preliminary and preparatory, leading up to the climactic stroke which leaves the distinguished victim stretched upon the bed of affliction.
First let us introduce our princ.i.p.al. Reader, meet Mr. Max Lobel, president of Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., also its founder, its chief stockholder and its general manager. He is a short, broad, thick, globular man and a bald one, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, carrying a gold-headed cane and using a private gold-mounted toothpick after meals.
His collars are of that old-fas.h.i.+oned open-faced kind such as our fathers and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., used to wear; collars rearing at the back but shorn widely away in front to show two things--namely, the Adam's apple and that Mr. Lobel is conservative. But for his neckwear he patronizes those shops where ties are exclusively referred to as _scarves_ and cost from five dollars apiece up, which proves also he is progressive and keeps abreast of the times. When he walks he favors his feet. Mostly, though, he rides in as good a car as domestic currency can buy in foreign marts.
Aside from his consuming desire to turn out those surpa.s.sing achievements of the cellular-cinema art known as Lobel's Masterfilms, he has in life two great pa.s.sions, one personal in its character, the other national in its scope--the first a craving for fancy waistcoats, the second a yearning to see the name of Max Lobel in print as often as possible and in as large letters as likewise is possible; and for either of these is a plausible explanation. Mr. Lobel has a figure excellently shaped for presenting the patternings of a fanciful stomacher to the world and up until a few years ago there were few occasions when he might hope to see the name Lobel in print. For, know you, Mr. Lobel has not always been in the moving-picture business. n.o.body in the moving-picture business has always been in the moving-picture business--excepting some of the child wonders under ten years of age.
And ten years ago our hero was the M. Lobel Company, cloak and suit jobbers in rather an inconspicuous Eastern town.
What was true of him as regards his comparatively recent advent into the producing and distributing fields was true of his major a.s.sociates.
Back in 1911 the vice president and second in command, Mr. F. X.
Quinlan, moved upward into a struggling infantile industry via the stepping-stone of what in the vernacular of his former calling is known as a mitt joint--summers at Coney, winters in store pitches--where he guided the professional destinies of Madame Zaharat, the Egyptian seeress, in private, then as now, Mrs. F. X. Quinlan nee Clardy.
The treasurer and secretary, Mr. Simeon Geltfin, had once upon a time been proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra Misfit Clothing Parlors at Utica, New York, a place where secondhand habiliments, scoured and ironed, dangled luringly in show windows bearing such enticing labels as ”Tailor's Sample--n.o.bby--$9.80,” ”Bargain--Take Me Home For $5.60,” and ”These Trousers Were Uncalled For--$2.75.”
The premier director, Mr. Bertram Colfax, numbered not one but two chrysalis changes in his career. In the grub stage, as it were, he had begun life as Lemuel Sims, a very grubby grub indeed, becoming Colfax at the same time he became property man for a repertoire troupe playing county-fair weeks in the Middle West.
As for the scenario editor and continuity writer, he in a prior condition of life had solicited advertis.e.m.e.nts for a trade journal. So it went right down the line.
At the time of the beginning of this narrative Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., had attained an eminence of what might be called fair-to-medium prominence in the moving-picture field. In other words, it now was able to pay its stars salaries running up into the multiples of tens of thousands of dollars a year and the bank which carried its paper had not yet felt justified in installing a chartered accountant in the home offices to check the finances and collect the interest on the loans outstanding. Before reaching this position the concern had pa.s.sed through nearly all the customary intervening stages. Nearly a decade rearward, back in the dark ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jura.s.sic Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders tracking under the chieftains.h.i.+p of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the trick staircase, the educated mustache and the performing doormat.
Next--following along the line of least resistance--the adventurers went in more or less extensively for wild-western dramas replete with stagecoach robberies and abounding in hair pants. If the head bad man--not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two, but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell, the unspoiled child of Death Valley--wore the smartest frontier get-up of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki s.h.i.+rts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish War, all very well and good. The action was everything; the sartorial accessories were as they might be and were and frequently still are.
Along here there intruded a season when the Lobel shop tentatively experimented with costume dramas--the Prisoner of Chillon wearing the conventional black and white in alternating stripes of a Georgia chain gang and doing the old Sing Sing lock step and retiring for the night to his donjon cell with a set of s.h.i.+ny and rather modern-looking leg irons on his ankles; Mary Queen of Scots and Catharine de' Medici in costumes strikingly similar; Oliver Goldsmith in Sir Walter Raleigh's neck ruff and Captain Kidd's jack boots.
But this season endured not for long. Costume stuff was nix. It was not what the public wanted. It was over their heads. Mr. Lobel himself said so. Wake him up in the middle of the night and he could tell you exactly what the public did and did not want. Divining the popular will amounted with him to a gift; it approximated an exact art; really it formed the corner stone of his success. Likewise he knew--but this knowledge perhaps had come to him partly by experience rather than altogether by intuition--that historical ten reelers dealing with epochal events in the life of our own people were entirely unsuited for general consumption.
When this particular topic untactfully was broached in his presence Mr.
Lobel, recalling the fate of the elaborate feature ent.i.tled Let Freedom Ring, had been known to sputter violently and vehemently. Upon this production--now abiding as a memory only, yet a memory bitter as aloes--he had spared neither expense nor pains, even going so far as personally to direct the filming of all the princ.i.p.al scenes. And to what ends? Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily press and those who merely sent in offensive letters--college professors and such like cheap high-brows--had raised yawping voices to point out that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to spread the alarm pa.s.sed en route two garages and one electric power house; that Was.h.i.+ngton crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing forty-eight stars upon its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln signing the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.
But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe--or is it the third?--it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary development attained by this component unit of that industry when I state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ingenues from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles with plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead in the approved Hudson seal effect--splendid, manly youths these, who might have dodged a draft or two but never yet had flinched from before the camera's aiming muzzle. But even though it had to be conceded that Goldilockses and Prince Charmings endure and that while drolls and jesters may come and go, pies are permanent and stale not, neither do they wither; still, and with all that, such like as these were, in the Lobel scheme of things, merely so many side lines and incidentals and by-products devised and designed to fatten out a program.
Where Mr. Lobel excelled was in the vamp stuff. Even his compet.i.tors admitted it the while they vainly strove to rival him. In this, his own chosen realm of exploration and conquest he stood supremely alone; a monarch anointed with the holy oils of superiority, coroneted with success's glittering diadem. Look at his Woman of a Million Sins! Look at his Satan's Stepchild, or How Human Souls are Dragged Down to h.e.l.l, in six reels! Look at A Daughter of Darkness! Look at The Wrecker of Lives! Look at The Spider Lady, or The Net Where Men Were the Flies!
Look at Fair of Face Yet Black of Heart! All of them his, all box-office best bets and all still going strong!
Moreover by now Lobel Masterfilms had progressed to that milestone on the path of progress and enterprise where genuine live authors--guys that wrote regular books--frequently furnished vehicles for stardom's regal usages. By purchase, upon the basis of so much cash or--as the case might be--so little cash down on the signing of the contract and the promise of so much more--often very very much more--to be paid in royalties out of accrued net profits, the rights to a published work would be acquired. Its name, say, was A Commonplace Person, which promptly would be changed in executive conclave to The Cataract of Destiny, or perhaps Fate's Plaything, or in any event some good catchy t.i.tle which would look well in electrics and on three sheets.