The Book of Illusions Read online

  As it turned out, that year lasted only three months. I pushed on for another two hundred fifty pages, reaching the chapter about the fall of Napoleon in the twenty-third book (miseries and wonders are twins, they are born together), and then, one damp and blustery afternoon at the beginning of summer, I found Frieda Spelling’s letter in my mailbox. I admit that I was thrown by it at first, but once I had sent off my response and given the matter a little thought, I managed to persuade myself that it was a hoax. That didn’t mean it had been wrong to answer her, but now that I had covered my bets, I assumed that our correspondence would end there.

  Nine days later, I heard from her again. She used a full sheet of paper this time, and at the top of the page there was a block of blue embossed type that bore her name and address. I realized how simple it was to produce false personal stationery, but why would anyone go to the trouble of trying to impersonate someone I had never heard of? The name Frieda Spelling meant nothing to me. She might have been Hector Mann’s wife, and she might have been a crazy person who lived alone in a desert shack, but it no longer made sense to deny that she was real.

  Dear Professor, she wrote. Your doubts are perfectly understandable, and I am not at all surprised that you are reluctant to believe me. The only way to learn the truth is to accept the invitation I made to you in my last letter. Fly to Tierra del Sueño and meet Hector. If I told you that he wrote and directed a number of feature films after leaving Hollywood in 1929—and that he is willing to screen them for you here at the ranch—perhaps that will entice you to come. Hector is almost ninety years old and in failing health. His will instructs me to destroy the films and the negatives of those films within twenty-four hours of his death, and I don’t know how much longer he will last. Please contact me soon. Looking forward to your reply, I remain very truly yours, Frieda Spelling (Mrs. Hector Mann).

  Again, I didn’t allow myself to get carried away. My response was concise, formal, perhaps even a bit rude, but before I committed myself to anything, I had to know that she could be trusted. I want to believe you, I wrote, but I must have proof. If you expect me to go all the way to New Mexico, I need to know that your statements are credible and that Hector Mann is indeed alive. Once my doubts have been removed, I will go to the ranch. But I must warn you that I don’t travel by plane. Sincerely yours, D. Z.

  There was no question that she would be back in touch—unless I had scared her off. If I had done that, then she would be tacitly admitting that she had deceived me, and the story would be over. I didn’t think that was the case, but whatever she was or wasn’t up to, it wasn’t going to take long for me to find out the truth. The tone of her second letter had been urgent, almost imploring, and if in fact she was who she said she was, she wasn’t going to waste any time before writing to me again. Silence would mean that I had called her bluff, but if she answered—and I was fully expecting her to answer—the letter would come quickly. It had taken nine days for the last one to reach me. All things being equal (no delays, no bungles by the post office), I figured the next one would come even faster than that.

  I did my best to stay calm, to stick to my routine and forge ahead with the Memoirs, but it was no use. I was too distracted, too keyed up to give them the proper attention, and after struggling to meet my quotas for several days in a row, I finally declared a moratorium on the project. Bright and early the next morning, I crawled into the closet in the spare bedroom and pulled out my old research files on Hector, which I had packed away in cardboard boxes after finishing the book. There were six cartons in all. Five of them held the notes, outlines, and drafts of my own manuscript, but the other one was crammed with all sorts of precious material: clippings, photos, microfilmed documents, xeroxed articles, squibs from ancient gossip columns, every scrap of print I had been able to lay my fingers on that referred to Hector Mann. I hadn’t looked at those papers in a long time, and with nothing to do now but wait for Frieda Spelling to contact me again, I carried the box into my study and spent the rest of the week combing through it. I don’t think I was expecting to learn anything I didn’t already know, but the contents of the file had become rather dim to me by then, and I felt that it deserved another look. Most of the information I had collected was unreliable: articles from the tabloid press, junk from the fan magazines, bits of movie reportage rife with hyperbole, erroneous suppositions, and out-and-out falsehoods. Still, as long as I remembered not to believe what I read, I didn’t see how the exercise could do any harm.

  Hector was the subject of four profiles written between August 1927 and October 1928. The first one appeared in Kaleidoscope’s monthly Bulletin, the publicity organ of Hunt’s newly formed production company. It was essentially a press release to announce the contract they had signed with Hector, and because little was known about him at that point, they were free to invent any story that served their purposes. Those were the last days of the Hollywood Latin Lover, the period just after Valentino’s death when dark, exotic foreigners were still drawing large crowds, and Kaleidoscope tried to cash in on the phenomenon by billing Hector as Señor Slapstick, the South American heart-throb with the comic touch. To back up this assertion, they fabricated an intriguing list of credits for him, an entire career that supposedly predated his arrival in California: music hall appearances in Buenos Aires, extended vaudeville tours through Argentina and Brazil, a series of smash-hit films produced in Mexico. By presenting Hector as an already established star, Hunt could create a reputation for himself as a man with an eye for talent. He wasn’t just a newcomer to the business, he was a clever and enterprising studio boss who had outbid his competitors for the right to import a well-known foreign entertainer and turn him loose on the American public. It was an easy lie to get away with. No one was paying attention to what happened in other countries, after all, and with so many imaginative possibilities to choose from, why be hemmed in by the facts?

  Six months later, an article in the February issue of Photoplay presented a more sober view of Hector’s past. Several of his films had been released by then, and with interest in his work growing around the country, the need to distort his earlier life had no doubt diminished. The story was written by a staff reporter named Brigid O’Fallon, and from her comments in the first paragraph about Hector’s piercing gaze and lithe muscularity, one immediately understands that her only intention is to say flattering things about him. Charmed by his heavy Spanish accent, and yet praising him for the fluency of his English, she asks him why he has a German name. Ees very simple, Hector answers. My parents was born in Germany, and so too I. We all emigrate to Argentina when I was a leetle baby. I speak the German with them at home, the Spanish at school. English come later, after I go to America. Steel not so hot. Miss O’Fallon then asks him how long he has been here, and Hector says three years. That, of course, contradicts the information published in the Kaleidoscope Bulletin, and when Hector goes on to discuss some of the jobs he held after arriving in California (busboy, vacuum cleaner salesman, ditchdigger), he makes no mention of any previous work in show business. So much for the glorious Latin American career that had turned him into a household name.

  It’s not hard to dismiss the exaggerations of Hunt’s publicity department, but just because they ignored the truth doesn’t mean that the Photoplay story was any more accurate or believable. In the March issue of the Picturegoer, a journalist named Randall Simms writes of visiting Hector on the set of Tango Tangle and being altogether astonished to find that this Argentinian laugh machine speaks flawless English, with scarcely the trace of an accent. If you didn’t know where he was from, you would swear that he had been raised in Sandusky, Ohio. Simms means it as a compliment, but his observation raises disturbing questions about Hector’s origins. Even if one accepts Argentina as the place where he spent his childhood, he seems to have left for America much earlier than the other articles suggest. In the next paragraph, Simms reports Hector as saying: I was a very bad boy. My parents threw me out of the house when I
was sixteen, and I never looked back. Eventually, I made my way north and landed in America. Right from the start, I had only one thought in mind: to hit it big in pictures. The man who speaks those words bears no resemblance to the man who spoke to Brigid O’Fallon one month earlier. Had he put on the heavy accent for Photoplay as a gag, or was Simms intentionally mangling the truth, emphasizing Hector’s proficiency in English as a way to convince producers of his potential as a sound actor in the months and years ahead? Perhaps the two of them had conspired on the article together, or perhaps a third party had paid Simms off—possibly Hunt, who by then was in deep financial trouble. Could it be that Hunt was trying to increase Hector’s market value in order to sell off his services to another production company? It is impossible to know, but whatever Simms’s motives were, and however badly O’Fallon might have transcribed Hector’s statements, the articles cannot be reconciled, no matter how many excuses one makes for the journalists.

  Hector’s last published interview appeared in the October issue of Picture Play. On the strength of what he said to B. T. Barker—or at least what Barker would have us believe he said—it seems likely that our boy had a hand in creating this confusion himself. This time, his parents are from the city of Stanislav on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Hector’s first language is Polish, not German. They leave for Vienna when he is two, stay there for six months, and then go to America, where they spend three years in New York and one year in the Midwest before pulling up stakes again and resettling in Buenos Aires. Barker interrupts to ask where they lived in the Midwest, and Hector calmly replies: Sandusky, Ohio. Just six months earlier, Randall Simms had mentioned Sandusky in his article for the Picturegoer—not as a real place but as a metaphor, as a representative American town. Now Hector appropriates that town and puts it in his story, perhaps for no other reason than that he is attracted to the gruff and lilting music of the words. San-dus-ky, O-hi-o, has a pleasant sonority to it, and the smart, triple syncopations scan with all the power and precision of a well-turned poetical phrase. His father, he says, was a civil engineer who specialized in the building of bridges. His mother, the most beautiful woman on earth, was a dancer, singer, and painter. Hector adored them both, was a well-behaved religious little boy (as opposed to the bad boy of Simms’s piece), and until their tragic deaths in a boating accident when he was fourteen, he was planning to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer. The sudden loss of his parents changed all that. From the moment he became an orphan, he says, his only dream was to return to America and begin a new life there. It took a long string of miracles before that could happen, but now that he is back, he feels certain that this is the place where he was always meant to be.

  Some of these statements could have been true, but not many of them, perhaps not a single one. This is the fourth version he has given of his past, and while they all have certain elements in common (German-or Polish-speaking parents, time spent in Argentina, emigration from the old world to the new), everything else is subject to change. He’s hard-nosed and practical in one account; he’s cowering and sentimental in the next. He’s a troublemaker for one journalist, obedient and pious for another; he grew up rich, he grew up poor; he speaks with a heavy accent, he speaks with no accent at all. Put these contradictions together, and you wind up with nothing, the portrait of a man with so many personalities and family histories that he is reduced to a pile of fragments, a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces no longer connect. Every time he is asked a question, he gives a different answer. Words pour out of him, but he is determined never to say the same thing twice. He appears to be hiding something, to be protecting a secret, and yet he goes about his obfuscations with such grace and sparkling good humor that no one seems to notice. The journalists can’t resist him. He makes them laugh, he amuses them with little magic tricks, and after a while they stop pressing him about the facts and give in to the power of the performance. Hector goes on winging it, careening madly from the cobbled boulevards of Vienna to the euphonious flatlands of Ohio, and eventually you begin to ask yourself if this is a game of deception or merely a blundering attempt to fight off boredom. Maybe his lies are innocent. Maybe he isn’t trying to fool anyone so much as looking for a way to entertain himself. Interviews can be a dull procedure, after all. If everyone keeps asking you the same questions, maybe you have to come up with new answers just to stay awake.

  Nothing was certain, but after sifting through this jumble of fraudulent memories and spurious anecdotes, I felt that I had discovered one minor fact. In the first three interviews, Hector avoids mentioning where he was born. When asked by O’Fallon, he says Germany; when asked by Simms, he says Austria; but in neither instance does he provide any details: no town, no city, no region. It is only when he talks to Barker that he opens up a bit and fills in the blanks. Stanislav had once been part of Austro-Hungary, but after the breakup of the empire at the end of the war, it had been handed over to Poland. Poland is a remote country to Americans, far more remote than Germany, and with Hector doing everything he could to downplay his foreignness, it was an odd admission for him to have named that city as his birthplace. The only possible reason for him to have done that, it seemed to me, was because it was true. I couldn’t confirm this suspicion, but it makes no sense for him to have lied about it. Poland didn’t help his case, and if he was intent on manufacturing a false background for himself, why bother to mention it at all? It was a mistake, a momentary lapse of attention, and no sooner does Barker hear this slip of the tongue than Hector tries to undo the damage. If he has just made himself too foreign, now he will counteract the error by insisting on his American credentials. He puts himself in New York, the city of immigrants, and then hammers home the point by traveling to the heartland. That’s where Sandusky, Ohio, comes into the picture. He plucks the name out of thin air, remembering it from the profile that was written about him six months earlier, and then springs it on the unsuspecting B. T. Barker. It serves his purpose well. The journalist is sidetracked, and instead of asking more questions about Poland, he leans back in his chair and begins reminiscing with Hector about the alfalfa fields of the Midwest.

  Stanislav is located just south of the Dniestr River, halfway between Lvov and Czernowitz in the province of Galicia. If that was the terrain of Hector’s childhood, then there was every reason to suppose that he was born a Jew. The fact that the area was thick with Jewish settlements was not enough to persuade me, but combine the Jewish population with the fact that his family left the area, and the argument becomes quite convincing. The Jews were the ones who left that part of the world, and beginning with the Russian pogroms in the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking immigrants fanned out across western Europe and the United States. Many of them went to South America as well. In Argentina alone, the Jewish population increased from six thousand to more than one hundred thousand between the turn of the century and the outbreak of World War I. No doubt Hector and his family helped add to those statistics. If they hadn’t, then it was scarcely possible for them to have landed in Argentina. At that moment in history, the only people who traveled from Stanislav to Buenos Aires were Jews.

  I was proud of my little discovery, but that didn’t mean I thought it amounted to much. If Hector was indeed hiding something, and if that something turned out to be the religion he had been born into, then all I had uncovered was the most pedestrian kind of social hypocrisy. It wasn’t a crime to be a Jew in Hollywood back then. It was merely something that one chose not to talk about. Jolson had already made The Jazz Singer at that point, and Broadway theaters were filled with audiences who paid good money to see Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice, to listen to Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, to applaud the Marx Brothers. Being Jewish might have been a burden to Hector. He might have suffered from it, and he might have been ashamed of it, but it was difficult for me to imagine that he had been killed for it. There’s always a bigot around somewhere with enough hatred in him to murder a Jew, o
f course, but a person who does that wants his crime to be known, to make use of it as an example to frighten others, and whatever Hector’s fate might have been, the one certain fact was that his body was never found.

  From the day he signed with Kaleidoscope to the day he disappeared, Hector’s run lasted only seventeen months. Short as that time might have been, he achieved a certain measure of recognition for himself, and by early 1928 his name was already beginning to crop up in the Hollywood social columns. I had managed to recover about twenty of those pieces from various microfilm archives during the course of my travels. There must have been many others that I missed, not to speak of others that had been destroyed, but scant and insufficient as those mentions were, they proved that Hector was not someone who tended to sit around at home after dark. He was seen in restaurants and nightclubs, at parties and movie premieres, and nearly every time his name appeared in print, it was accompanied by a descriptive phrase that referred to his smoldering magnetism, his irresistible eyes, or his heart-stoppingly handsome face. This was especially true when the writer was a woman, but there were men who succumbed to his charms as well. One of them, who worked under the name Gordon Fly (the title of his column was Fly on the Wall), went so far as to offer the opinion that Hector was wasting his talents in comedy and should switch to drama. With that profile, Fly wrote, it offends one’s sense of aesthetic proportion to watch the elegant Señor Mann put his nose at risk by repeatedly bumping into walls and lampposts. The public would be better served if he dropped these stunts and concentrated on kissing beautiful women. Surely there are many young actresses in town who would be willing to take on that role. Sources tell me that Irene Flowers has already had several auditions, but it appears that the dashing hidalgo now has his eye on Constance Hart, the ever-popular Vim and Vigor Girl herself. We eagerly await the results of that screen test.