O, Africa! Read online

  ALSO BY ANDREW LEWIS CONN

  P

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Lewis Conn

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Conn, Andrew Lewis.

  O, Africa! : a novel / Andrew Lewis Conn.—First edition.

  pages cm.

  1. Twins—Fiction. 2. Motion picture authorship—History—20th century—Fiction. 3. Motion picture industry—History—20th century—Fiction. 4. Africa—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.O542O23 2014

  813′.6—dc23 2013028712

  ISBN 978-0-804-13828-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3829-1

  Jacket design by Elena Giavaldi

  Jacket illustration by Ben Wiseman

  v3.1

  To Jennifer Conn,

  my Micah and Izzy, this time around

  Whenever there’s too much technology,

  people return to primitive feats.

  —DON DELILLO, Great Jones Street

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I THE OLD WORLD

  1. ARCADIA

  2. HIDDEN CITIES

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PART II THE NEW WORLD

  1. PAPERS AND PERSUASION

  2. UPRIVER

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  3. FACES

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  PART III MAGIC AND DUST

  1. IN THE COURT OF THE CROWN

  2. RAZOR BLADES AND LEMONADE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  3. HOLLYWOODLAND

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  4. THE RETURN

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  5. HOME

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Acknowledgments

  Louder than words.

  “Action,” his brother says in a whisper, followed by a knock on the piano crate. Then again, this time louder, “Action,” trailed by a tapping on the trunk: one, two, three. “C’mon, kid, we’re ready!”

  It was hot inside the Bechstein box, and Izzy, with his claustrophobia and nerves, wasn’t doing well. Wedged in a contortionist’s pose, the cameraman’s limbs wrapped round the Bell & Howell—one glove on the hand crank as controlled as a butler winding a clock after putting out the last light, the other jamming a tripod leg into a corner of the crate with the force of a fisherman spearing a swordfish. As he peered through the lens turret poking out of the hole that’d been cut from the side of the box, it occurred to Izzy—Isidor Grand, the more sober, reflective, and retiring of the twins—that his position pressed inside the dark black box was not dissimilar to the workings of the human eye, with its iris, cornea, pupil, and lens functioning in concord, gathering images, bringing them into focus, inscribing scenes on the black retinal wall, and propelling them back out into the world for the purpose of inspection, investigation, joy.

  Apart from the heat, which was stifling, and the dark, which was terrifying, Izzy enjoyed remaining hidden, preferring to concede the center of attention to Micah—his red-haired brother with his rooster raucousness, Cheshire teeth, and Barnum whiffs of sawdust and hucksterism—Micah, the movie director, who enjoyed nothing more than racing around a set, distressed sandwich in one hand, megaphone in the other, carrying on five conversations at once, giddy from the fumes coming off his own moxie, lack of sleep, and professional charm. This was no set, however. This was Coney Island. At the beginning of summer. On a Sunday.

  For the location shooting of Quicktime, the brothers’ twelfth feature, every precaution had been taken to mask the production’s twin crowd generators: the movie camera itself and the film’s comedic star, Henry Till. Izzy had instructed his crew that only natural light would be used for street scenes, and he had taken care to hide the camera at every opportunity. Till, meanwhile, was instructed not to place his trademark black horn-rimmed glasses on his talc-white face until Micah provided a cue that they were ready to do a take.

  Filming had gone disastrously so far. It took all day to nail a quick bit of business at Broadway and Forty-Third Street in which the comedian accidentally blows into a whistle, bringing traffic to a halt. The second day’s tracking shot of Till strolling with his girl down Fifth Avenue in the Twenties (camera nestled in a baby carriage) was busted up when a loaded paddy wagon rolled into shooting range and wouldn’t clear out. A simple series of establishing shots on day three was called off on account of an Olympian midday thunderstorm. Now in serious danger of falling behind schedule after just a half week’s work, the company retreated to the Brooklyn Armory on Fifteenth Street and Eighth Avenue, where they worked on a rear-projection chase sequence.

  A modest man but a world-class perfectionist, Till hated the artificial look of process shots and generally avoided them, even in the thrill comedies that had made him famous. But they had no choice; they couldn’t risk tying up midtown traffic for entire days for the picture’s finale. Instead Till sat atop a wooden crate, gripping flying reins and rocking to and fro while stock footage projected behind him. Add a bit of camera undercranking and the audience would be treated to an eighty-mile-per-hour drive through Manhattan’s man-made canyons.

  Never would a chase be more fitting. The story of New York’s last horse-drawn carriage and a family’s resistance against being bought out by a railway monopoly, Quicktime would honor the values of the past while serving as an ode to the accelerated pace of modern life. About this, Micah, Izzy, and Till agreed: Quicktime was no comedy. A celebration of propulsion, a précis on beginnings and endpoints, the picture would exist as a catalog of vectors, a continuous riot of locomotion. And as if in tribute to the Grand brothers’ undertaking, on the very day the company invaded Coney Island, Miss Amelia Earhart had taken to the skies from Newfoundland, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. It occurred to Micah and Izzy as filming commenced against this backdrop of the pilot’s conquering of space and distance that they and the rather handsome aviatrix were in pursuit of the same lofty goal.

  The location setting was not unfamiliar to Oscar Spiro, the company’s first assistant director, ace electrician, focus puller, and indispensable jack-of-all-trades. A hate-filled, volatile-tempere
d dwarf, Spiro despised Coney Island and its seminal importance in his biography. Spiro’s parents, Count Milo and Mercy Midge, had been headliners in Midget City, the amusement park’s half-scale re-creation of some lost fifteenth-century Mitteleuropean city populated by three hundred stunted performers. Situated in this carnival dwarf ghetto were dollhouse-scaled homes and stamp-size shops, a miniature Athenian-style city hall, and a Yiddish theater that featured the world’s finest diminutive Hebraic thespians. There was even a fearsome pint-size police department that patrolled the place on foot, responding to threat and insult through dispensation of their own outsize sense of midget justice.

  “The sulfurous pit of my degraded youth,” Spiro groaned when Micah originally proposed shooting there, recalling with a chill his childhood memories of elephants and camels plodding through the streets, the perpetual sound of roller coasters’ prehistoric groans, the beer-and-sausage smells of the immigrant poor. “Why must I return?”

  With his China doll’s hands, Spiro could rack focus in tight corners that others couldn’t reach; with his tiny frame, he could pitch the camera in places fellow operators wouldn’t contemplate; with his eagerness to swing the newer, lightweight, handheld models around like dance partners, he could set the fixed film frame aspin. And so the Grand brothers’ films gained notoriety for their wild camera setups, resplendent comic violence, and champagne-bottle explosiveness. Theirs was a jaunty American comedic expressionism, worlds away from the proscenium-bound, diorama-style filmmaking of just twenty years before or the pomp and polish of the medium’s leading figure.

  “Yes, well, of course Chaplin is a genius,” Micah said during a deli debriefing after seeing The Gold Rush. “The trouble is, he keeps reminding you of it.”

  “He does lay it on a bit thick,” Izzy agreed, slathering mustard on a corned-beef sandwich. “The orphans and blind girls and wretched poor …”

  “I’ll take my comedy without the side of schmaltz, thanks,” said Micah, gouging a corner out of a pastrami on rye. “The plight of the common man, the universal struggle, and all that bunk! You really want to help people, make them laugh for an hour and a half, forget their troubles. Besides, takes a lot of salt making millions parading around in a pair of torn trousers.”

  “I agree,” Izzy said. “Besides, there’s something vulgar about the man. Now, Keaton on the other hand.”

  “Yes, I know.…”

  Izzy found Buster Keaton’s stoicism unbearably moving. Mystical, even; an expression of philosophy. Keaton’s ramrod bearing and T-square mouth suggested something fundamental about the pain of comedy, its seriousness, ironclad systems of retribution that attended defying the laws of gravity. And the Great Stone Face got Izzy thinking about history in weird ways, too, as if something of the Founding Fathers, the carnage of the Civil War, the trenches and mustard gas of the Great War, had etched its way into Keaton’s unsmiling demeanor. In Keaton’s haunted, handsome face—still as a daguerreotype—Izzy found a figure as archetypal and solemn as Lincoln.

  The star of Quicktime was an altogether different creature. If Henry Till displayed neither the precision-instrument bearing of Keaton nor the poetic lyricism of Chaplin, neither could he be counted as one of the goons and grotesques supporting the comic pantheon’s second tier, baby beasts like Fatty Arbuckle and Harry Langdon. The secret of Till’s appeal was his very ordinariness. He could appear equally convincing as a department-store clerk or a college freshman, a policeman or a cab-driver, a bachelor or a boyfriend. Till’s “glasses” character, introduced in 1920, was a new kind of silent-film figure: not maudlin nor eccentric nor outsize, but a bright go-getter on the make, a smiling, athletic young man in a white suit who looked like he’d just quit divinity school to hustle encyclopedias door-to-door. Till had bounce. The most conventional, least palpably perverse of the great film comedians, slender, inconspicuously handsome, with grasshopper legs and a strong square jaw, Till was cinema’s first true everyman.

  The work was not without risk. In August 1919, Till nearly killed himself while taking a publicity photo on the set of Jumping Beans when a smoke bomb accidentally exploded in his hand. Till’s thumb and forefinger, and half the palm of his right hand, were blown off, and he was temporarily blinded, with second-degree burns covering much of his face. Six months later Till returned, wearing a white prosthetic specially designed by Sam Goldwyn (who had once worked for a glove company), which included a false thumb and an artificially built-out palm. He taught himself to play sports and sign autographs with his left hand and continued to perform his own stunts (including the famous hanging-from-the-clock-hands climax of Without a Net!). Within a month of his return, Till married his frequent co-star Emily Davies, started a brood, and became the most dedicated of family men, keeping a giant Christmas tree on year-round display in his Los Angeles compound. One of the best-paid actors in Hollywood, who earned more from savvy real-estate investments than he did in pictures, Till wore his mammoth paychecks as casually as a pair of slippers. Conservative with money, faithful to his wife, a churchgoer and a teetotaler, a man of eminently gentle midwestern courtesy, Henry Till stood on this summer day outside a Luna Park concession stall, shuffling around unrecognized in a seersucker suit, awaiting the arrival of a co-star who was in every conceivable way his opposite.

  They were waiting on Babe Ruth. Ever since the ballplayer had named Till his favorite film star (“Kid moves like an outfielder”), it had become Micah’s mission to secure Ruth for a cameo in Imperial Pictures’ next production. Quicktime wouldn’t be the first motion picture the athlete had appeared in. Ruth had already played imaginary versions of himself in a couple of lousy pieces of public-relations legerdemain that attempted to portray the hard-drinking, hard-living ballplayer—who as a child was turned over by saloon-owning parents to a Baltimore orphanage—as an aw-shucks country boy complete with a saintly widowed mother, pig-tailed kid sister, and a mutt named Herman.

  But this would be different: For Quicktime the boys had asked Ruth simply to appear for a few minutes as himself, part of the tapestry of New York life they hoped to capture in the film. When word came down from Ruth’s camp that the Great Bambino would be happy to participate and that he’d be available for a few hours before game time on the production’s final day of location filming, Sunday, June 17, 1928, Till’s stable of regular gag men fell into a tizzy. Quicktime had no script. There were never any scripts. “We have islands we need to get to,” Shecky Sugarman said of the team’s working method. That is, they’d work toward agreed-upon plot points, linking together a succession of complex jokes, setups, and payoffs, fleshing out the set pieces and bits of physical business as they went along.

  Once the terms had been agreed upon, the ballplayer’s public-relations man asked that an emissary from the production meet Ruth’s car on Surf Avenue to escort him past the fairground’s crescent-mooned entrance and into the heart of Luna Park, to the candy-striped concession booth where shooting would take place. Owing to the Babe’s love of kids, this important assignment was entrusted to Billy Conklin, the production company’s freckled seventeen-year-old best boy, who was himself, like the ballplayer he idolized, an orphan.

  “Where do you need me?” asks Ruth.

  Nattily dressed in a three-piece houndstooth suit, droopy-lidded and snub-nosed, more boxer than ballplayer, on this day the Sultan of Swat is suffering from razor burn and a bad hangover, rendering his cheeks pinker and more porcine than usual. Six feet two inches tall, 235 pounds, with a forty-eight-inch waist, Ruth looks like half a ready-made comedy duo when placed beside the skinny string-bean actor.

  “Christ Almighty,” Micah whispers to his knife-size assistant as Spiro takes a light-meter reading. “It’s like Jack and the Beanstalk.”

  “I suppose that makes me the magic seed?”

  “No, magic seed’s what you spilled last night.”

  “Your idea to shoot this thing in Coney?” Ruth asks Micah in a voice that’s rich and warm and vaguely south
ern as a gaggle of children stare agog at their hero.

  “Yeah.”

  “Some day!”

  “Indeed …,” says Micah, studying the convex planes of the ballplayer’s face. “So, Mr. Ruth, we’ve worked out some business we’d like to have you try here, what our scriptwriters call a ‘substitution gag,’ involving a misunderstanding at a ball-toss game.”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Micah, Micah Grand. I’m the picture’s director.”

  “Well, let’s not make a study of it, Doc. Let’s just shoot the damn thing and see how she lays.”

  “Indeed!”

  Working out the mechanics of the scene, Ruth proves himself to be a natural, expertly blocking himself in relation to the camera, flattering himself with the best angles and shadows, and affording himself pride of place in all his shared frames with Till. The ballplayer shows a trusting, natural rapport with the child extras that Billy had wrangled for the day from Manhattan’s Society for the Relief of Half-Orphan & Destitute Children, and he works hard to put at ease the picture’s leading lady, Mildred Mack, making a show of shielding her between takes from the glassy midday sun spray. (“My only regret, doll,” he tells the button-shy, teacup-quiet four-foot-eleven pixie, “is it’s clear skies all the way. Else I’d have a chance to lay my jacket over a puddle for ya.”)

  And it is Ruth who suggests the scene’s comic highlight: the kicker to the topper. Babe’s idea is to get into a pointing contest with Till outside the game booth, culminating in the ballplayer poking a finger through the actor’s eyeglass frames, revealing them to be without lenses.

  “Okay, so you do that,” says Till, riffing off Ruth’s suggestion, pantomiming. “Then I’ll come crashing down on your foot, like this.”

  “Just watch the gams, kid,” Ruth jokes. “They’re all a lady’s got.”

  “Good, good, good,” Micah chimes in. “And then Babe”—already on a first-name basis—“lets out a howl and throws another baseball, knocking over the bottles in the adjacent booth.”