THE METTLE OF A HERO
An explosion shook the town, then came the fire engines. Everybody ran
and of course we ran too. We saw a big, Colonial house in a blaze, then
a second explosion! And a thick black mass of smoke blew off the roof.
People ran hither and thither in wild excitement; a fireman dashed into
the flames and carried out a dying girl; her face was bleeding and her
clothes were in burnt shreds. More dying people were miraculously saved,
then suddenly like a huge screen the whole house fell flat. It had no
behind and no inside and the whole scene was only the “movies.” The
injured face of the heroine was only red paint and the house a property
one built for the purpose.
“This is nothing,” said a member of the company to me, “if you want to
see something exciting, go to the chalk cliffs just on the road to Santa
Maria tomorrow morning. We’re going to work on the ‘Diamond From the
Sky.’ That’s our star over there! You don’t want to miss any pictures
when he is in it.”
I saw a young man leaning against a telegraph pole chewing a straw. He
looked almost too lazy to be alive.
“He’s always like that!” said the member of the company. “You wouldn’t
think there was an ounce of go in him! He’s always whittling a stick, or
chewing a straw, and if he was to be killed, he’d never move a muscle!”
“He looks kind of comatose, doesn’t he?” said the manager, who overheard.
“Well, you go out to the chalk cliffs at about eleven tomorrow if you
think he’s comatose, and see him come to.”
Naturally we went. We found the place easily by the number of people
gathered at the spot. A shelf road was cut on the face of the high
chalk cliffs, above a seventy-foot sheer drop into the water. We saw
the comatose one, looking just as indifferent as ever, get into a car
and start for the narrow road up on the edge of the cliff. Then another
followed him. At a word from the director, they raced across the high
narrow shelf, the comatose one swerved to the very edge, toppled and
plunged over the abyss! No stopping the picture at the brink and putting
a dummy in his place. A feeling of such nausea caught me I could not look
to see him land. How he escaped with his life he alone knew. The car
struck the rocks and smashed to pieces, but they say he threw himself
like an eel clear of the wheel and safely into the water. They then
fished him out, he got into another car just as he was, and started
home as though nothing had happened. When we reached a railroad track
where they were going to take another picture, the same actor was this
time to drive so near the track that the locomotive might in the picture
seem to hit the car. The camera man was ready to turn the crank of his
camera, the locomotive was almost at the crossing, when dash! went the
devil-driver toward the track. Stop? Nothing of the sort! He met it as a
ram meets an enemy, head on. The locomotive carried his mangled self and
wrecked machine up the track. The engineer, shaking as with the palsy,
almost fell out of his cab. The company and we, too, rushed up to where
the wrecked machine and injured man lay. Blood was streaming from his
head, his arm distortedly twisted under him, and he was writhing in pain,
but when the camera man reached him all he said was:
“This’ll be great stuff! Make a close-up quick!” They made the pictures
and then he lost consciousness.
Although decorated with many bandages, he is up and about, looking as
comatose as ever.
We went to a film rehearsal at the Flying A. In front of us sat the
heroine, the hero, the villain, and all members of the company. The
director read the words that would be printed between sections of the
finished reel and the pictures were shown in negative only. Every now
and then the actors made a few remarks such as, “That’s a fine action,
Steve”; “Gee, Steve, that’s great!” “I like Flora down by the brook”;
“Nice scene, Flora!” Finally the heroine died.
“Nobody can die with so much sob stuff as Flora,” said our friend in a
whisper.
Flora heard and answered: “Some time I’d like a part that I don’t have to
die in. That’s the seventeenth time I’ve died this season.”
Of the many moving picture plants we saw, the Flying A was the smallest
but most interesting. The difference between the Universal City and
Flying A studio is that between Barnum’s Circus at the Madison Square
Garden and the Little Theater—or better, the Grand Guignol in Paris. The
Universal City is a gigantic organization that can produce anything from
tiger-hunting in the jungle, to plays like “Quo Vadis.”
But why—Oh, why don’t the moving picture people have someone show them
how the houses of the socially prominent really look? Where do they
devise the manners, customs, and nightmare interiors that could not be
found outside of the society atmosphere of Dingy Dunk or Splashville
except in the “movies”?
Leaving Santa Barbara about two o’clock we arrived at Paso Robles long
before dark. The next morning, however, we left early in order to spend
part of the day with some friends who have a cattle and alfalfa ranch
about midway to Monterey. I should think the cattle would all topple over
dead and the alfalfa shrivel to cinders. Cool California? The thermometer
was easily 120, and that cloudless sky a blinding blaze of torture. Our
friends were quite tranquil about it. “It _is_ pretty hot here just now.
You see we are pocketed in between the hill ranges, but it is beautifully
mild all winter.”
To us the mild winter did not seem to compensate, since we could not
understand anyone’s surviving so long as until then.
[Illustration: ON THE SEVENTEEN-MILE DRIVE AT MONTEREY]
That afternoon’s drive was the hottest I hope ever to have to live
through. To put your hand on unshaded metal was to burn it, as though on
a hot flat-iron. The main road, El Camino Real, was good all the way to
Salinas, but the branch road from there to Monterey was bumpy and bad
until within a mile or so of our destination.
Of Monterey and its peerlessly beautiful seventeen-mile ocean and cedar
drive, there is no need to write. Like Niagara and the Grand Canyon, it
has been written about and photographed in every newspaper and periodical
in the world. Also, as was the case further south, hot as it might be
inland, the coast was deliciously cool. The weather changed fortunately
by the time we again drove inland and up the perfect boulevard to San
Francisco. They tell me, however, that so far as the neighborhood of
San Francisco is concerned no one need ever dread heat, a scorching
temperature being unknown. Wind you may have, and sometimes fog, but
extremes of either heat or cold, never! Besides other blessings in this
particular spot of this wonderful land you can also choose your own
temperature. If you like warm weather, walk in the sun. If you like cold
weather, walk in the shade. On the former side of the street, you will
find a muslin dress just right; on the latter you will be comfortable in
a sealskin coat. This is not a joke, as I had always thought it to be,
but quite true.