American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (2 page)

But D.W.’s days of playing detective, of scrambling for journeyman roles in itinerant stock companies, of pursuing his more heartfelt ambition of writing stage plays, were now forever part of his past. Growing up in rural Kentucky, he had had fantasies, he would concede, “of fame and glory.” By the time of his first meeting with the celebrated detective, D.W. was on his way to achieving these ambitions—and more. Still, the shape and circumstances of his sudden success had taken D.W. by surprise and no doubt would have struck even Burns, with his greater capacity for skepticism, as nothing less than further proof of an “interfering Providence.”

It had been only two years earlier that a thirty-three-year-old D.W., driven more by desperation than desire, had found his way into the fledgling business of making movies. Full of high hopes, he had come to New York with his new actress bride, Linda Arvidson, in the summer to 1906 to be a playwright. But the farce he had written had run for just days in Washington and Baltimore. More dispiriting, another recently completed play about the American Revolution had failed to attract a producer. It would be months before companies would be hiring actors for summer stock productions. And he was broke. He worried to a friend, “I’d lose standing as an actor with theater people if they see me in a movie,” but he didn’t know where else to turn. Resigned, he took the subway line up to the Bronx to the Edison Studio.

His intention, however, was not to be cast in a film but rather to sell a script. He had worked it all out: Since there was no on-screen dialogue, he’d block out a scenario in hours; writers were never credited and therefore his playwright’s reputation would not be tarnished; and the best incentive, a script could be sold for as much as thirty dollars. But no one at Edison was interested in his adaptation of
Tosca.

Instead, he was offered a part. He was cast as the intrepid hero who climbs a formidable mountain to rescue a baby from the talons of an inert, and very obviously stuffed, eagle. He got an explanation about “foreground” and instructions to “keep in the lines” that marked the stage, and then without further preliminaries, the camera began shooting. After four days of shooting scenes both outdoors in NewJersey and in the Bronx studio, the one-reel film—905 feet—was completed. His week’s pay was twenty dollars. “No one will ever see me,” he rationalized to his wife Linda. In hopes of finding more easy paydays until the couple went off to summer stock, he joined the other actors who gathered at the nine
A.M.
casting calls at film studios around New York.

It was a good time to break into movies. The first large-screen movie theater had opened on Herald Square in New York City twelve years earlier. But much of the energy of the pioneers in the film business had been dissipated in bitter legal wrangling over patents on cameras and projectors. It was not until the end of 1908 that the major, feuding production companies had pragmatically banded together in the Motion Picture Patents Company. The MPPC members agreed that Thomas Edison—who had played only a small role in the actual inventions—would receive a royalty for his film equipment patents and that movies would be leased (not sold!) to exchanges that would distribute them to nickelodeons and the newer picture palaces. With that legal arrangement signed, the companies could now concentrate on making money and making movies.

And business boomed. For only a nickel, people discovered that they could buy nearly an hour of fun. They could watch three short reels of silent film and then sing along to the lyrics of a popular song that flashed onto the screen. By 1910 nearly 30 percent of the nation—an audience of 30 million people—went each week to one of the nearly nine thousand nickelodeons scattered around the country.

As people made this new form of entertainment part of their lives, entrepreneurs discovered that movies were a get-rich-quick scheme that really worked. For an investment of about two hundred dollars, and with little more effort than it took to hang a white sheet from the rafters, they could transform a storefront into a nickelodeon. Harry Warner was selling clothing in Pittsburgh near Davis’s Nickelodeon when he presciently decided to change his line of work. “I looked across the street and saw the nickels rolling in,” said the future movie studio mogul.

A constant problem, however, was the shortage of new films. The seven MPPC production companies were releasing between eighteen and twenty-one films each week, nearly two thousand a year. And audiences were still eager for more.

It was this small community of filmmakers, a fraternity of hustling businessmen and down-on-their-luck talent, an enterprise focused on churning out brief escapist bits of amusement, that D.W. reluctantly joined. He worked steadily during the spring of 1908 as an actor in Biograph productions and even succeeded in selling the company several scenarios. As he became part of the Biograph troupe, D.W., to his surprise, began to feel that there was something compelling, even intellectually exciting, about the world into which he had stumbled. “It’s not so bad, you know,” he told his wife, “five dollars for simply riding a horse in the wilds of Fort Lee [New Jersey] on a cool spring day.” He suggested to Linda that she try to be cast in a film. But, he warned, “don’t tell them you’re my wife. I think it’s better business not to.”

When the time came to sign on for summer stock in Maine, D.W. was reluctant to go. “If this movie thing is going to amount to anything . . . we could afford to take chances,” he reasoned to his wife. Linda agreed. “You don’t know what’s going to happen down at the Biograph . . . Let’s stick the summer out.”

So they stayed in the hot city, and events unfolded with all the rapid improbability and melodrama of a silent film plot line. “Old Man” McCutcheon, the director of the Biograph films, suddenly took ill; drink was the rumored cause. The company needed someone to take his place. In the early days of one-reel movies, a director’s responsibilities were neither demanding nor creative. He’d choose the actors, make sure they stood within the marked lines on the set, and then step aside as the cameraman shot the film. Nevertheless, like a stage manager in the theater, a director’s authority was necessary to move a production forward; and Biograph was contracted to release two new one-reelers each week. When none of the regular players wanted the job, it was suggested that D.W. seemed “to have a lot of sense and some good ideas.”

After some hesitation, D.W. agreed to try to replace “the Old Man,” but just temporarily. He was given a scenario about a child who was stolen by Gypsies, then rescued after tumbling over a falls in a barrel.
The Adventures of Dollie
was shot in four days, the whitewater exteriors in Hackensack in New Jersey, and Sound Beach in Connecticut. Piano wire steadied the floating barrel so the cameraman could get his shot. Linda played the distraught mother. The night the film was finished, D.W. would recall, his memory perhaps more accurate as metaphor than as fact, “I went up on the roof of my cheap hotel to watch Halley’s comet flash through the sky. Down in the street Gypsy fortune-tellers were predicting a new era.”

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By the fall afternoon nearly two years later when D.W. met with Billy Burns, the “new era” had begun to take shape. With a storyteller’s instinctive gift and an innovator’s technical talent, D.W. had by that time directed nearly two hundred short films. Many of the works were remarkable: perfectly executed, affecting, and fully realized stories. He was starting out on a great and transforming cultural adventure, a man in the process of creating a new art form and a new industry. And now the country’s most celebrated detective had come to D.W. to ask for his assistance.

It was Billy Burns who did most of the talking that afternoon. He made his proposal to D.W., and the director did not take long to consider it. Like the detective, he prided himself on being an intuitive psychologist; “I know how people think,” he would say in an attempt to explain a bit of his talent. He believed film was “a universal language,” that it had “a power” and could “strike hearts.” Yes, he quickly decided, it was a plan that could work. D.W. told the detective that he would help him catch the murderer.

As they baited their trap, halfway across the country Clarence Darrow, the country’s famous crusading attorney, the champion of populist (and often lost) causes, was trying to reinvent his life. Three years earlier he had charged into battle in defense of William “Big Bill” Haywood, a union official accused of murdering Frank Steunenberg, the fiercely antilabor former governor of Idaho. Full of Old Testament fervor, Darrow had raised his voice until it grew hoarse, pleading with the jury in the sweltering Boise courtroom, “Thousands of men, and of women and children—men who labor, men who suffer, women and children weary with care and toil—these men and these women and these children . . . are stretching out their helpless hands to this jury in a mute appeal for Bill Haywood’s life.” Haywood was acquitted. But Darrow nearly died.

Exhausted from the Haywood trial, Darrow had plunged into preparations to defend two of the union official’s associates, when he took sick. At first he was diagnosed with the flu. Then he developed a violent pain in his left ear. “Excruciating,” “unbearable,” “a continuous orgy of pain” was how Darrow described his condition.

Doctors in Idaho, however, could not diagnose the cause. The only treatment was the codeine shots administered by his wife Ruby. The filing of the hypodermic needle points with emery paper, the boiling of the needle, the measuring of the liquid—it started as a nighttime ritual. As the months passed, as the doctors remained puzzled, the doses of codeine and the frequency of the injections increased.

Unable to continue with the trial, Darrow decided to seek help from specialists. “Los Angeles,” he decided, “looked beautiful from Boise . . . its sunshine and warmth, its flowers and palms . . . there I might recover.” But he barely survived the sixty-hour train ride. And the physicians at California Hospital were baffled. They suggested it might be a case of badly overwrought nerves and the pain largely imaginary. In agony, Darrow was convinced he would die in Los Angeles.

The weeks passed, grim and hopeless, and Darrow decided that he might as well return to his home in Chicago to live out his last days. Resigned, he bought tickets for the train leaving at eleven that night. He returned from the ticket office when all at once he felt a new sensation in his ear. It was swelling. The next day the doctors operated. He had been suffering from a freak case of mastoiditis. If he had boarded the train, the cyst would have broken and he would have died on the way to Chicago.

But as he recovered, Darrow discovered more disconcerting news: He was broke. The stock market had plunged, and his wife, wary about exacerbating his illness, had not gotten him to sign the documents necessary for the sale of his investments. “Now I’ll have to begin all over again,” he moaned to Ruby.

And so at fifty-three, he started over. Once tall and hulking, his illness had left him weary and diminished. His face was etched with wrinkles, transfigured by his many battles. Yet like both Burns and Griffith, he believed in “the controlling power of fate in the affairs of life.” As he saw it, instead of death, he had been granted “a continuance.” Now he would change his life.

He would no longer champion causes. He would no longer cast himself as an avenging courtroom hero. He would make money handling corporate clients and grow old with Ruby. And he would never again return to Los Angeles. The city provoked too many memories of a time when he had settled into despair.

Yet before the next year was over, Darrow would return to Los Angeles. All his self-surrendering promises would be broken. All his reasonable plans would be demolished. And he would be brought lower than he had ever been brought before.

By then the detective and the director had moved on from their brief collaboration.

D.W., as requested, had provided Billy with a one-reel film about a kidnapped girl. The specific title has long been forgotten, but then there were many to choose from; villains terrorized helpless young women with a disturbing frequency in the director’s work. With the can of film under his arm, Billy hurried down the block to the Fourteenth Street nickelodeon. He persuaded the owner to substitute the film for one of the reels in the scheduled program.

That evening Billy tailed the man he suspected of murdering Marie Smith. It was a night full of routine, a copy of the previous one. Dinner at Luchow’s and then on to the nickelodeon. Only tonight the suspect didn’t enjoy the show. The detective sat directly behind him, watching his target squirm in his seat. The suspect raised his head and stared at the ceiling, unable to watch the screen. And Billy knew he had his man. The movie had reached out to him, frayed his defenses, left him on edge. Within days Billy Burns would get the killer to confess.

But this case would be only a footnote to more momentous historic events when the lives and careers of William J. Burns, D.W. Griffith, and Clarence Darrow would intersect within months in Los Angeles. All three men would be caught up in “the crime of the century,” the mystery, and the trial that followed. And in that swirl of events, three men, each deeply flawed, each goaded by a powerful ego, each in his way a practitioner of the actor’s craft, each possessing a unique genius, would not only reshape their own lives and that of the times in which they lived, but they would help permanently transform the nature of American thought, politics, celebrity, and culture.

But first came the terrorist attack. The explosion. The twenty-one deaths. And the manhunt that would lead like a trail of bloody footprints back and forth across America.

PART I

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“DIRECT ACTION”

ONE

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I
T WAS NEARLY
midnight on September 4, 1910, in Peoria, Illinois, when the dark sky above the train yard opened and a pelting rain suddenly poured down. Surprised, the night watchman ran to a boxcar for shelter. That decision saved his life. He was safely inside when the bomb exploded. It was a clock bomb, rather crudely made but fueled by ten gallons of nitroglycerin. It had been placed under a nearby railway car transporting an eighty-ton girder.