One Summer: America, 1927 (47 page)

Bow was originally billed as the “Brooklyn Bonfire,” then as the “Hottest Jazz Baby in Films,” but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the “It Girl.” “It” was first a two-part article and then a novel by
a flame-haired English novelist named Elinor Glyn, who was known for writing juicy romances in which the main characters did a lot of undulating (“she undulated round and all over him, twined about him like a serpent”) and for being the mistress for some years of Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. “It,” as Glyn explained, “is that quality possessed by some few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force. With it you win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man.” Asked by a reporter to name some notable possessors of “It,” Glyn cited Rudolph Valentino, John Gilbert, and Rex the Wonder Horse. Later she extended the list to include the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

It
the novel was a story in which the two principal characters—Ava and Larry, both dripping with “It”—look at each other with “burning eyes” and “a fierce gleam” before getting together to “vibrate with passion.” As Dorothy Parker summed up the book in
The New Yorker
, “
It
goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam-launches.”

The motion picture was completely different. Although Glyn received a screen credit for
It
, the story as filmed bore no relation to anything she had ever written. All that remained of Glyn’s earlier effort was the title. In the movie, Bow played the part of Betty Lou, a lively and good-natured department store salesclerk who decides to woo and win the store’s dishy owner, one Cyrus Waltham.

The movie was an enormous hit in 1927. With
Wings
, it confirmed Bow as Hollywood’s leading female star. She received forty thousand letters a week—more than the population of a fair-sized town. In the summer of 1927, her career seemed set to go on indefinitely. In fact, it was nearly at an end. Winsome and enchanting as she was to behold, her Brooklyn accent was the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard, and in the new world of talking pictures that would never do.

Considering that moving pictures and recorded sound had both independently existed since the 1890s, it took a surprisingly long time for
anyone to work out how to put them together. The problem was twofold. First was the matter of sound projection. Nothing existed that would allow clear, natural-sounding speech to be played to an auditorium full of people, particularly in the new cavernous spaces of the 1920s. Equally intractable was the challenge of synchronization. Designing a machine that could precisely match voices and moving lips defeated all attempts at solution. As events demonstrated, it was easier to fly a man across the Atlantic than to capture his voice on film.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention.

Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization.

De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film,
sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation.

One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of
The Jazz Singer
, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from
Carmen
sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the
Times
. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.”

Despite Hall’s enthusiastic praise, the Vitaphone technology was actually already obsolescent. Vitaphone’s sound was recorded onto discs, as on a record album, and one motor turned both projector and phonograph together, which kept them in sync so long as the disc and film were both positioned exactly right and started at precisely the same instant, which was always easier said than done. Where the system shone was in providing rich, vibrant sound with enough amplitude to fill the largest auditorium, and that was what audiences found miraculous.

Vitaphone sound itself was soon overtaken by better sound systems, all of which were based on De Forest’s original concept of imprinting sound directly onto film. Had De Forest been more focused, he would have died a much wealthier man.

The Jazz Singer
was by no means the first sound movie. It wasn’t even the first talking picture—but that was a nicety lost on its adoring audiences. For most people,
The Jazz Singer
would be the picture that made talking pictures real.

The Jazz Singer
was originally a Broadway play by Samuel Raphaelson called
The Day of Atonement
. Warner Bros. decided to make it into its first talking production because they had the eager participation of Al Jolson, then one of the performing world’s greatest stars.

Jolson was born Asa Yoelson, the son of a rabbi, in Lithuania, in 1885 or 1886 (he was never clear about this) and came to the United States with his family when he was about four. At the age of nine, he ran away from home and worked at odd jobs, including in a circus. Eventually juvenile authorities found him working in a bar in Baltimore, and deposited him in the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys—the same school that would become home to Babe Ruth the following decade. Unlike Ruth, Jolson stayed just a short while.

Jolson was not an adorable person. His idea of a good joke was to urinate on people, which may go some way to explaining why he had four wives and no friends. But he had a wonderful voice and, by all accounts, a powerful stage presence, and he became America’s most popular performer. Warner Bros. knew it was lucky to get him.

It has often been written that Warner Bros. was so broke before the making of
The Jazz Singer
that Al Jolson had to lend the company money to pay for sound equipment, but that seems not to have been the case at all. Warner Bros. was a small studio but not a destitute one. In fact, in 1927 it had the biggest star in Hollywood after Clara Bow—the performing dog Rin Tin Tin. This beloved German shepherd starred in one successful movie after another—four in 1927 alone—and in one poll
was voted the most popular performer in America. According to Susan Orlean in her popular biography of the dog, Rin Tin Tin was also voted the Academy Award for best actor before the new motion picture academy had second thoughts about what that said about the talents of its human stars and insisted that the award go to a person, Emil Jannings.

The great irony of all this is that apparently Rin Tin Tin wasn’t one dog but many. In 1965, Jack Warner confessed to a reporter that his studio, fearful of the loss of the real Rin Tin Tin, had bred eighteen look-alikes and had substituted them freely in the making of the movies. It was also said by many of those who worked with him that the original Rin Tin Tin was the most ill-tempered animal they had ever encountered. At all events, whether Rin Tin Tin was one dog or several, the franchise made Warner Bros. wealthy.

The Jazz Singer
did, however, represent a considerable gamble. It cost $500,000 to make and, at the time of its filming, could be shown in just two theaters in the world. Jolson, for all his star quality, was himself a gamble. He had never acted in front of a camera before. There was no point. He had no talent that suited silent movies. But now he shone.

The Jazz Singer
took four months to shoot. The sound portion of the filming was all done in just two weeks between August 17 and 30. It took such a short time because there was so little sound to be recorded. Altogether the movie had just 354 spoken words, nearly all coming from Jolson. The dialogue was not terribly polished, to say the least. A sample: “Mama, darling, if I’m a success in this show we’re gonna move from here. Oh, yes, we’re gonna move up in the Bronx. A lot of nice green grass up there and a whole lotta people you know. There’s the Ginsbergs, the Guttenbergs, and the Goldbergs. Oh, a whole lot of Bergs, I don’t know ’em all.” (Accounts vary as to whether Jolson’s words were spontaneous or scripted.)

As Jolson was filming his talking sequences in Los Angeles, four hundred miles to the north, in Sacramento, Buster Keaton was filming what may be the single most memorable scene in any silent film—certainly one of the most perfect comic scenes, not to mention most dangerous. It was the scene in
Steamboat Bill Jr
. in which the front wall of a house
falls onto Keaton, but he survives because he is standing in the space of an open window. To make the scene maximally thrilling—and it truly is—the window was made just two inches wider than Keaton on either side. Had the wall warped or buckled slightly or the point of impact been fractionally miscalculated, Keaton would have been killed. Perhaps nothing says more about silent movies and those who performed in them than that actors routinely risked their lives for the sake of a good joke. That didn’t happen in talking pictures.

Steamboat Bill Jr
. was one of Keaton’s finest movies, but it was a failure at the box office. By the time it came out, people were already abandoning silent pictures. At the time he filmed
Steamboat Bill Jr.
, Keaton was earning well over $200,000 a year. By 1934, he would be bankrupt.

Talking pictures were the salvation of Hollywood, but that salvation came at considerable cost—in anxiety for stars and producers, in new equipment costs for studios and theaters, in job losses for thousands of musicians whose accompaniments were no longer needed. The greatest fear for the industry in the beginning was that sound movies would prove to be a passing fad—an unnerving possibility given the amount of investment necessary to get into talking pictures. Every movie theater in the country that wanted to show sound movies had to invest between $10,000 and $25,000 in equipment. For the studios, a fully equipped sound stage cost a minimum of half a million dollars—and that was assuming the studio could even get the necessary recording equipment since demand very quickly outran supply. One desperate producer, unable to acquire sufficient sound-recording equipment, seriously considered filming his movie as usual in California but with the sound recorded, via telephone line, on equipment in New Jersey. Luckily, he managed to get hold of some sound equipment and didn’t have to discover, as he most assuredly would have, that his long-distance scheme could never result in a decent reproduction.

Once equipped, studios often discovered that they had to find new, quieter locations and quieter working conditions within those locations.
“When a scene is to be shot, the carpenters have to suspend their hammering, and the scene painters must stop singing at their work,” explained one observer earnestly. Delivery trucks couldn’t sound their horns or rev their engines. Doors could not be slammed. Even the most carefully muffled sneeze could spoil a scene. At first, many pictures were shot in the dead of night to minimize the complications of background noises.

Another mighty blow was the loss of foreign markets. More than a third of Hollywood’s income came from abroad. For a silent movie to be sold overseas, it simply needed new title cards inserted, but, pending the invention of dubbing and subtitles, sound movies could only be shown where people spoke the language in which the movie was made. One solution was to make multiple versions of a movie, using a single set but with up to ten different troupes of actors from different language groups filming one version after another.