When Rose Michel was finished, at Benton's suggestion, I gave a dinner at Healey's on Columbus Avenue. Benton, Ralph Barton, and Stuart Holmes were the invited. Before accepting, Barton asked if it was to be a stag party. I said I would try and get hold of a couple of females. He said he would bring his own if it was all the same to me, so I said everyone had better do the same. But he turned up alone. What with bill collectors and alimony, he said, he was trying to find a monastery with a healthy climate. Benton came alone also. When I asked about his girl he said now that he had her house-broke he thought it better to leave her home. He seemed quite interested in the blond who was with me.
When the ladies retired for a few minutes the rest of us made for a door with MEN marked on it. After the concession to nature Ralph, Stuart and I were at the wash basins. Benton was lighting a cigarette, "Noxious individual," said Ralph looking at him. "Doesn't even wash his hands after it."
"I'm more particular," said Benton. "I wash mine first."
The party broke up around 1:00 a.m. Benton and Ralph headed for the Lincoln Arcade, Stuart uptown, and my blond and I for my room on East Nineteenth Street. She was a high spirited young person who held nothing back when the mood was on her.
The following Wednesday was a hot day. Hotter still under the glass roof of the Pathé Studio. At noon Stuart, Benton, J. Gordon's chauffeur and I went over to the saloon on the corner. After the third beer I asked the barman what folks used for a can around there. He nodded toward a downward flight of steps.
Instead of the customary feeling of relief, I experienced a burning sensation. The procedure proved so painful that I renounced it, and came back upstairs, trying to remember if I had been eating asparagus. I ordered an other beer... and then another. After the third I became communicative. Benton, Stuart and the chauffeur listened to me with keen interest, exchanging knowing nods.
"Let's have a look," said Benton.
"Come on down to the can," said the chauffeur. "I'll tell you."
Once there, Stuart began to laugh.
"I suspect the presence of that highly domesticated animal, the gonococcus," said Benton.
"My God," I said.
"Sure," said the chauffeur. "You ain't a man till you had it four times."
"If it feels this way I don't want to be a man," I said.
"I got a doc's a wiz," said the chauffeur. "Fixed me up in ten days— a Roussian. Fifty bucks. I'll drop you there on the way home. Regular guy—give you credit if you ain't got the ready dough, like he does all the society janes....And cut out the alcohol."
"The blond?" Benton inquired as we went upstairs.
"No one else," I said.
"By God!" he said, "And I came damn near talking her into coming up to see my pictures while you were arguing with the headwaiter. Lucky you came back when you did."
"Yes," said Doctor Markovitch, looking through his microscope. "Gonococci. Quite a number of them."
"How many?" I asked.
"Oh, a few million," he said.
I sat down abruptly.
"Do not become upset," he said. "They always come by millions; and by millions I kill them."
"You came near killing me," I said, "—with that million scare."
"No reason to be scared," he said. "Look at them now."
I adjusted the lens of his microscope.
"They are very interesting," said the doctor. "I never get tired of studying this microscopic world which is filled with the enemies and friends of man."
Later I learned that a series of pogroms were responsible for Dr. Markovitch having switched his allegiance from the Little Father of All the Russians to the Statue of Liberty. And yet, a good portion of his income went to Russia every year for the upkeep of fifty beds in a venereal hospital in Moscow. He had been a pupil of the non-Ayrian German, Professor Erlich, and had worked with him on the perfecting of 606, which remained for many years the standard treatment for the other, more malignant, social disease.
"In ten days I cure your chauffeur friend because he do exactly what I tell him. If you do what I say, I cure you too. With gonococci you must not walk about," said the doctor.
"You mean I must lie down?" I said.
"Lie down or sit down," he said. "Do all what I tell you, and for $50. I cure you. If you do not do what I tell you, I do not cure you for $75."
"I don't get you, Doc," I said.
"It is very simple," he said. "You give me now $75. If you do what I say, in one week I cure you and give you back $25. If you are not cured, it mean you do not do what I say, so I keep the extra $25. I am a very busy man and I have no time for patients who do not follow my instructions."
****
For a week I lay on my back, gave myself three injections a day, read four plays from which to choose William Farnum's next picture, and worked on the subtitles of Rose Michel. At the end of the week not one solitary anaemic gonococcus was revealed by Doctor Markovitch's microscope.
"I am so happy," he said. "I give you back $25."
"Doc," I said, "the chauffeur said you were a wiz. He's no fool."
"I am not," said Doctor Markovitch. "I am just a man who know his business. Social diseases are not shameful and are easily cured if we take them in time. In America they are more dangerous, because American people are ashamed to come to the doctor until the pain force them—when it is often very late."
Before I left him he said to me:
"Remember this: For one month, whenever you feel that way, take a very cold showerbath. After that it will be all right."
During the next few weeks I wrote scenarios for William Farnum, Robert Mantell and Nance O'Neil. I assisted J. Gordon halfway through the Mantell picture. Then Mr. Fox took me off it to doctor up a sick scenario, and from that moment on kept me writing all the time—a job that had no attraction for me; but seeing he had raised my salary I did not like to kick. After the fifth or sixth scenario I told him I wanted to get out and direct. He said I had plenty of time, but finally promised that if I wrote an original story for Mantell or Bara that was good enough to produce he would let me direct it.
Stuart Holmes was cast for the heavy in the first Mantell picture, The Blindness of Devotion. He had been after me to build up his part while I was writing the scenario, which I did.
Mr. Mantell had a stiff leg which he called his flat tire, and moved about as little as possible in the scenes. When J. Gordon planted him down in the foreground he stayed put, which gave Stuart many a chance for upstage improvisations. It took a couple of weeks for Mantell and his wife, Genevieve Hamper, to get wise to him. After they had seen the third batch of rushes they had J. Gordon place Stuart in the foreground with his back to the camera when Mantell had an important scene to play. As a result, Stuart was furious with Mantell, and said to me:
"This guy only gets by because everyone thinks he's Mansfield."
The screen sensation of those days was Theda Bara. While every siren with a Broadway reputation was being interviewed for the role of the vampire in A Fool There Was, she walked into the Fox casting office without any reputation at all, and walked out with a contract to play the part. From this naive kindly girl, what Hollywood today calls sex-menace, fairly radiated. Very shortsighted, her eyes suggested the eyes of a sleepwalker, and when she appeared you somehow felt that the shades of Baudelaire, Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker were hovering around. The only thing wrong with Theda, from the exploitation angle, was her place of origin—the practical prosaic U.S.A. Another had to be found for her. Endor, Prague, The Rhine, Spain and Greece were known to have produced sorceresses, and were considered. But it was finally decided to keep her provenance a mystery, so she became vaguely European and used heavy veils and a French professor. Mr. Fox pulled Barnum's mermaid stunt over again with her, but on a grander scale and with more subtlety. For, unlike Barnum, he made no definite statements about his seventh wonder. Suggestions were thrown out that worked with effect upon public imagination, and Theda Bara paraded across the screen as the great seductresses of history and literature, from The Queen of Sheba and Salome to Carmen.
When she reproachfully asked me why I had never written a story for her, I replied that I had. She wanted to know the name of it. Titles seemed to mean more to her than yarns.
"Black Orchids," I said.
"I will do it next," she said.
I said it might be a good idea to read the script before making up her mind, but she said her mind was already made up, and she would talk to Mr. Fox. When he had read my three-reel Vitagraph version Mr. Fox decided it was just the thing for Bara and told me to go ahead with a scenario and he would let me direct the picture. I tackled the job with a will, for I was fed up with writing for others to have the fun of producing what I wrote. I wanted to get out on the set and have the fun myself.
Theda Bara was then playing in a screen version of Carmen, which was being rushed out, as Lasky Famous Players were making one at the same time with Geraldine Farrar. Black Orchids was to be her next.
Raoul Walsh, who had made his Fox début successfully with Regeneration, a film version of Paul Armstrong's underworld play, My Mamie Rose, was directing Carmen. Walsh was Mr. Griffith's aptest pupil and as such wore his head shaved and wrote the day's work on his cuff instead of using a scenario on the set. He also employed the Griffith method of casting types rather than known players, and did away with makeup as much as possible. His direction of Regeneration showed flashes of genius. He was not the ideal director for Bara, any more than I would have been myself, for in those days a Walsh film was distinctly a director's—not a star's picture. But of the two Carmens, his production impressed me more from the standpoints of technique, atmosphere and characterization. It may not have been more Spanish than the Lasky picture, but it was less cut and dried and stagey.
Just before Carmen was finished Mr. Fox sent for me. I found him reading my working script of Black Orchids. The moment he looked at me I saw something was wrong.
"Rex," he said, "I have a big favor to ask of you."
I waited apprehensively for what was coming.
"My next six months in this business are going to be very critical....I promised to let you direct a picture if you wrote a story I liked. I like Black Orchids. But I can't spare you to direct now. You're my best scenarist and I want you to start right in on the next Farnum story."
He tapped the script of Black Orchids.
"I have a story ready for Bara's next, but I'm up a tree for a Mantell subject. I want J. Gordon to make Black Orchids with Mantell. His wife will play the Bara part."
This was too much for me.
"If you want me to keep on writing scenarios I'll do it," I said." "But I can't let J. Gordon or anyone else make Black Orchids. It's my own story and I know it will make a fine picture."
"That's why I want you to let me have it, Rex," he said.
"I'll let you have it if you let me direct it," I said. "I don't want anyone else to make that picture."
"You were drawing salary here while you wrote it," he said.
"Call up A.E. Smith at the Vitagraph. He has a copy of it," I said.
"Well, it's stolen from Marie Corellis' Vendetta," he said.
"It is not," I said, "for the simple reason that I've never read Vendetta."
"If you won't let J. Gordon do it, I'll have him do Vendetta with Mantell, which will take the edge off it," he said.
"I don't see how," I said. "I just told you I never read Vendetta."
"The last scenes where the marquis throws his wife and her lover in the vault are the same," he said.
"In the dungeon," I corrected.
"The idea's the same," he said.
Suddenly a thought came to me.
"Have you read Vendetta yourself, or has someone been talking to you?" I asked.
"I need no one to draw my conclusions for me. I'm old enough to draw my own," he said. "All I have to say to you is this: I've given you a square deal. I've kept my word with you, and always will. I intend letting you direct; but I'm asking you now to help me out."
"I can't let you have Black Orchids for someone else," I said doggedly. "I'll do anything else you want me to do."
"Think it over," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
"It's no use," I said.
"I thought I could count on you in a pinch," he said bitterly. "You're letting me down bad."
At the door I looked back at him.
"I'm going to make my name as a director with Black Orchids. That's why I can't give it to you for J. Gordon," I said.
Mr. Fox took the script from his desk and brought it to the door. He handed it to me without a word. Then he walked back to his chair....
And so ended one of the happiest associations of my life. One from which I learned more than from any other in my motion picture career. Lee Lawrie and William Fox gave me the grounding in sculpture and drama that helped me get ahead of others who had been less fortunate in their apprenticeships. William Fox gave me, too, my first real chance in life and taught me enough to enable me to make the most of opportunities that came my way when I left his company.