pirates what Valentino had done for rajahs and desert sheiks. As the girls had said, Valentino had even been mooted for the current project, when it was being thought of as a modern version of The Pirates of Penzance but without the songs (this being cinema and therefore, in 1924, blessedly without sound—although I had no doubt technology would catch up with us before long, inflicting audiences with a flood of opera-movies and driving tin-ears like me out of cinema houses forever). However, when Fflytte managed to smuggle Valentino into an elaborately negotiated secret meeting (secret due to the draconian contracts tying actors to their studios) the two men ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension, Valentino not understanding Fflytte’s English accent and the Englishman unable to decipher whatever language it was that Valentino spoke. The meeting was not a success.
Instead, Fflytte would make his own star. His eye had lit upon a rather stupid young man with symmetrical features and luscious hair whose chief ability was an imitation Valentino intensity, a gaze that struck me as dyspeptic although the average film-goer reacted with the breathlessness of a blow to the solar plexus. Daniel Marks (“Making his Marks!” “Hitting the Marks!” et cetera) had a more important knack: He never, ever, made Fflytte feel short.
Even now, the actor automatically took up a position well behind his director at the gangway’s head, so that any photographs from below would place them on an equal plane: famous director, dashing young man in fashionable soft cap, beautiful girl in flapper clothes and drooping spit-curls furiously chewing her chronic wad of Doublemint. One would have thought them Americans, although all three were British; but for the weather, the trio might have been getting off a train in Los Angeles.
However, there were no photographers, to the irritation of the man in the white coat. And far from the sun coming out, the rain gathered its petulance and threw itself at the fur and the hat.
Fflytte, Marks, and Bibi, the leading lady—just Bibi, no surname—slid down the boards and dove into the first of the waiting motorcars.
Marks might be Fflytte’s invention, but Bibi was the most prominent of several near-stars stolen outright from Valentino’s own Famous Players-Lasky company earlier that year. It was a coup that had shaken the California studios and dubbed Fflytte with his current (and appropriate) nom de cinéma: The Pirate.
I watched the car take away my blueblood piratical employer and his two prized possessions, and turned to Mr Pessoa. Both of us reached up to wipe the rain from our spectacles. He, and his coat, looked sodden through.
“I’ll introduce you when we meet them at the hotel,” I told him. “First, we have to see to the rest of the lunatic asylum.”
Mr Pessoa looked startled, clearly wondering if his English had failed him, but I just waved him at the motley crew gathered on the decks before committing themselves to foreign territory, and we got to work.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PIRATE KING: And honorary members of our band we do elect you!
T HE FIRST ORDER of our Lisbon business was to hire actors to play the pirates—although we might have been hiring actors to play actors who played pirates, who were actually pirates who …
As Hale had suggested, it was better not to think about it too closely.
As I understood matters, Fflytte’s initial impulse had been to use actors from Morocco itself—I was already sick of the word Realism —but Hale had convinced the director that finding people both decorative and capable of acting in front of a camera, in a country so backward it had no motorcars until ten years previously, threatened to consume a dangerous amount of time and hence money. They had compromised on collecting actors along the way.
The English cast was already with us: Daniel Marks, playing the director and the apprentice pirate Frederic; Bibi, the
Instead, Fflytte would make his own star. His eye had lit upon a rather stupid young man with symmetrical features and luscious hair whose chief ability was an imitation Valentino intensity, a gaze that struck me as dyspeptic although the average film-goer reacted with the breathlessness of a blow to the solar plexus. Daniel Marks (“Making his Marks!” “Hitting the Marks!” et cetera) had a more important knack: He never, ever, made Fflytte feel short.
Even now, the actor automatically took up a position well behind his director at the gangway’s head, so that any photographs from below would place them on an equal plane: famous director, dashing young man in fashionable soft cap, beautiful girl in flapper clothes and drooping spit-curls furiously chewing her chronic wad of Doublemint. One would have thought them Americans, although all three were British; but for the weather, the trio might have been getting off a train in Los Angeles.
However, there were no photographers, to the irritation of the man in the white coat. And far from the sun coming out, the rain gathered its petulance and threw itself at the fur and the hat.
Fflytte, Marks, and Bibi, the leading lady—just Bibi, no surname—slid down the boards and dove into the first of the waiting motorcars.
Marks might be Fflytte’s invention, but Bibi was the most prominent of several near-stars stolen outright from Valentino’s own Famous Players-Lasky company earlier that year. It was a coup that had shaken the California studios and dubbed Fflytte with his current (and appropriate) nom de cinéma: The Pirate.
I watched the car take away my blueblood piratical employer and his two prized possessions, and turned to Mr Pessoa. Both of us reached up to wipe the rain from our spectacles. He, and his coat, looked sodden through.
“I’ll introduce you when we meet them at the hotel,” I told him. “First, we have to see to the rest of the lunatic asylum.”
Mr Pessoa looked startled, clearly wondering if his English had failed him, but I just waved him at the motley crew gathered on the decks before committing themselves to foreign territory, and we got to work.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PIRATE KING: And honorary members of our band we do elect you!
T HE FIRST ORDER of our Lisbon business was to hire actors to play the pirates—although we might have been hiring actors to play actors who played pirates, who were actually pirates who …
As Hale had suggested, it was better not to think about it too closely.
As I understood matters, Fflytte’s initial impulse had been to use actors from Morocco itself—I was already sick of the word Realism —but Hale had convinced the director that finding people both decorative and capable of acting in front of a camera, in a country so backward it had no motorcars until ten years previously, threatened to consume a dangerous amount of time and hence money. They had compromised on collecting actors along the way.
The English cast was already with us: Daniel Marks, playing the director and the apprentice pirate Frederic; Bibi, the
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