King Con Page 22
“We’ll go,” he replied. “We’ll go. It was fun being an actor, but it’ll be nice to be a politician, too.”
On that note, he and the others climbed into the car and departed. For their first night they’d have to make do with the temporary beds set up for them at the offices of Famous Players–Lasky. After that, they’d be staying in a hotel on one of the boulevards until their tipis were shipped from London.
Sleeping under a roof wasn’t to their tastes, though. In New York—as Farlow may have explained to Edgar—they’d pitched their tipis on the grounds of the Museum of Natural History. And in London they’d camped in the park at suburban Crystal Palace.
* * *
—
Over the next three days, Edgar was expected to become properly acquainted with the Wind River contingent. He also had to master his duties as chaperone. These included keeping the hard-drinking Arapaho sober enough to appear onstage. Neither Ed Farlow nor Famous Players–Lasky knew Edgar well enough to realize that he, too, had a powerful thirst for liquor, rendering him ill-suited to the task.
The plan was for Farlow to hand over supervisory responsibilities to Edgar by that Sunday. All being well, Farlow would then go back to London, where he could rejoin the other half of the Arapaho touring party, which was still appearing at West End screenings of The Covered Wagon.
Early on the morning after the press conference at the Gare du Nord, Old Eagle and the rest of the group were taken on the first of a series of tourist trips around Paris—trips that had the dual purpose of potentially attracting press coverage. These began with a visit to an exhibition of telescopes at the giant, glass-roofed Grand Palais. When Edgar’s flock emerged from the exhibition, they strolled down the Champs-Élysées, where the leafless trees added to the wintry ambience and where the traffic characteristically ranged from horse-drawn hansom cabs to Rolls-Royces, Hispano-Suizas, and other luxury vehicles. Along this immensely broad street, glorious vistas across the adjoining parks and over the river toward the gilded dome of Les Invalides clicked into place like images from a slideshow. Lining the park were donkey rides, as well as Punch and Judy shows that now attracted only the youngest children, the older ones having been lured away by movie theaters.
On the Champs-Élysées, the Arapaho were approached by a journalist. Old Eagle used the opportunity to declare, “The Indians are victims of serious wrongs. The whites want to annihilate what is left of once rich and powerful nomadic tribes.”
* * *
—
Ed Farlow arranged for Old Eagle and his companions to be shown the other tourist sights, presumably by Edgar. Bored though the Arapaho were by this enforced dose of Gallic culture, they were dragged around the Arc de Triomphe, Napoléon’s tomb, and the cathedrals of Notre-Dame and Sacré-Coeur. Plus, they were taken up the Eiffel Tower. Near its upper platform, just over nine hundred feet off the ground, a number of the Arapaho complained about the cold. Another confessed to feeling scared. Uniting them was their impatience to ride the elevator back down. One of them expressed surprise that anyone would want to build a tower like that, because it might fall over and kill people.
Dining with Old Eagle and the others in cafés or restaurants presented Edgar and his boss with problems also. Foremost among those was the tendency of the Arapaho to ignore their utensils when served meat. In breech of European-style etiquette, they’d simply pick up the meat and gnaw it. Or they’d grip it between their teeth and start hacking at it. Then they’d lick their fingers.
Elaborate French cuisine didn’t, in any event, comply with their idea of good food. To them, meat was thick and juicy and cooked over an open fire. It wasn’t thinly sliced and doused with creamy sauce, or reduced to the gray and tasteless consistency it had been at the London boardinghouse where they’d moved after the damp English winter forced them to quit their tipis.
As contemptuous as the Arapaho were toward turkey feather headdresses of the type he wore, Edgar redeemed himself by talking with them in their own language. He’d probably picked this up from the Native American woman who had traveled with him back when he used to sell snake oil. Hearing Edgar speak Arapaho impressed his wife. Ethel was also impressed by how well he got on with Old Eagle and the rest of the troupe. In her eyes, Old Eagle treated Edgar as “a fellow tribal chief.” Often, though, it was hard to be certain whether the Arapaho were being serious or just teasing.
* * *
—
Edgar and his Arapaho friends were due to attend the French premiere of The Covered Wagon, scheduled for the Friday before Christmas. As an indication of just how exclusive an occasion this would be, a strip of carpet had been laid across the sidewalk leading into the Madeleine Cinema, where the premiere was being held. Above the carpet, an awning had been rigged up. En route into the movie theater, stars of the city’s art, cinema, and political worlds posed, resplendent in elegant evening dress. Glamorous girls handed bouquets to the women as they sailed through the entrance, across the lobby, and into the auditorium, which was garlanded by carnations and roses.
By nine o’clock, all the seats in the stalls and balcony were taken—a good omen for future screenings. Punctuality was not a strong suit of Old Eagle and his compatriots, yet they arrived with time to spare. No instructions had been issued to them about what to wear onstage. They’d just been told “to show the white man audience how they looked when they felt beautiful.” Wearing a joyous, multicolored array of eagle feather headdresses, gold earrings, fringed buckskin shirts, medallions, beaded trousers, seashell chokers, and embroidered moccasins, they prepared to stride in front of the audience.
At these live prologues, a painted wilderness backdrop covered the screen and a tipi stood near the side of the proscenium arch. Leaves, branches, and the remains of a pretend campfire meanwhile embellished the stage.
With what one witness regarded as “great finesse,” Edgar announced the arrival of the Arapaho onstage. A tremendous ovation greeted the men and papoose-laden women, who communicated among themselves with sign language. Edgar gave a humorous speech, in which he claimed to have used the lure of the dollar to recruit the Arapaho from the plains of the Far West.
Led by an accomplished conductor, an orchestra was on hand to provide the accompaniment as The Covered Wagon’s opening sequence appeared on-screen. The film that unspooled over the next ninety-eight minutes told the story of a wagon train making the two-thousand-mile trek across America in 1848. Many of the story’s ingredients—its fights, its chases, its battles—were familiar from the Western serials that were a staple of movie theater programs. Yet it possessed a newfound scale and epic seriousness that lived up to its advance publicity, which highlighted its use of three thousand actors, one thousand covered wagons, six hundred cattle, and one thousand mules and horses.
A wave of applause swept through the auditorium when the closing titles appeared. If Edgar needed reminding of how movies and the experience of watching them had been transformed since the first movie theater opened in the neighborhood where he was raised, then that night’s screening of The Covered Wagon provided it. Strictly speaking, the first movie theater in Central Falls was what was known as a nickelodeon, a slightly disreputable storefront with space for almost two hundred hard kitchen chairs and a musical accompanist competing against the barker or record player out front booming “It’s only five cents! See the moving picture show!” As a work-shy sixteen- and seventeen-year-old, Edgar would surely have idled away many hours there with his friends, yakking, smoking, flirting, singing along to the verses periodically projected onto the screen, and watching the ten- or fifteen-minute films, which the projectionist would sometimes speed up or run backward just to get a laugh.
Writing about the entirely different experience afforded by the French premiere of The Covered Wagon, one of the Paris newspapers the next morning proclaimed, “Nobody should miss this sensational spectacle.” The similarly
rhapsodic response of most of the other critics teed up the movie for its first public screenings at the Madeleine Cinema, where Edgar and the Arapaho were paid to appear three times daily. On the third night of this hectic rotation, Edgar took a couple of the Arapaho out drinking after their final performance of the evening. They went to a nightclub, probably in Montmartre, little more than a mile from the movie theater. For expatriate American and English artistes such as Edgar, the preferred all-night hangout was Kiley’s, known as “Jed’s” in homage to its congenial Chicagoan owner, Jed Kiley. Located on the rue Fontaine, sometimes dubbed “the 42nd Street of Montmartre,” it had classy, Art Deco furnishings, a large dance floor, and a roster of bands blaring hot jazz. Its clientele always featured a surfeit of desirable girls, ensconced at tables where sweating champagne buckets stood on pristine white tablecloths. Stop by at Jed’s for a nightcap and you’d find time accelerating. Before you knew it, the band was packing up and the remaining customers were breakfasting on ham and eggs.
Still drunk, Edgar and his two Arapaho friends stumbled into the Madeleine Cinema around lunchtime the following day. Their boss was appalled. If anything, Edgar was in worse shape than the Arapaho whom he was meant to be keeping an eye on. Farlow had trouble sobering them up and maneuvering them into their fanciest clothes in time for their matinee performance. That afternoon Farlow wrote to the London office of Famous Players–Lasky, bellyaching about the choice of Edgar to chaperone the Arapaho on their continental tour. Unable to count on Edgar looking after them in his absence, Farlow elected not to go back to London as planned. Instead, he’d remain in Paris.
* * *
—
Crowds continued to flock to screenings of The Covered Wagon and, in his off-duty hours, Edgar continued going to the Café du Dôme. But his attempts at rivaling its troupe of exhibitionists had been so unsuccessful that he no longer bothered showing up in his Native American outfit.
Lately the Dôme had been further enlivened by a gregarious chain-smoking twenty-two-year-old who styled her hair in a severe bob, her eyes and lips accentuated by dramatic makeup that stood out against her heavily powdered face. She modeled for prominent artists and fellow Dôme denizens Maurice Utrillo, Tsuguharu Foujita, Moïse Kisling, and her two-timing photographer boyfriend, Man Ray. Her name was Alice Prin, though everyone knew her as Kiki. And everyone did seem to know her, Edgar probably included.
Kiki had just come back from New York City, where she’d hoped to land a movie contract and begin a new life. After a few weeks in America, however, she had wired a request to Man Ray for money to buy her a ticket back to France. She’d celebrated her homecoming by visiting the Dôme and her other favorite haunts. Her return heightened the Dôme’s atmosphere of predatory female sexuality, typified by the recent incident when another young woman had drunkenly shouted after two passing sailors, “I love seafood!”
About the time Kiki reappeared at the Dôme, Edgar received some important news. Old Eagle and the other Arapaho disclosed that they wanted to return to Wyoming instead of going with The Covered Wagon on the rest of its European tour. Despite Farlow’s damning letter about Edgar, Famous Players–Lasky hired him to substitute for the Arapaho. When the tour moved on to Belgium and then the South of France, Edgar would perform the prologue and, with the assistance of a publicity manager, help to whip up press coverage.
18
“Gentlemen, this isn’t an official visit to Belgium, but I wanted to express to your country the admiration that the Indians feel for it,” Edgar said in his most formal French. He was addressing a group of reporters, who had been invited to the room at the luxury hotel where he and his family had registered after alighting in Brussels at noon on Thursday, February 14, 1924. The instant he’d emerged from the train, bright-eyed with excitement, his Chief White Elk costume rendering him unmistakable, he had been mobbed by photographers and journalists.
Later that day, he said to the reporters assembled in his hotel room, “The Indians are a people for whom loyalty, nobility of heart, and courage are the virtues we value above all others. Therefore I would remind you that it was thanks to our tribes that the first food-relief train was sent to Belgium after the outbreak of the Great War. We raised $75,000 to pay for this. During your king’s visit to the United States, we had the honor—several tribal leaders and I—to be presented to him as the true American citizens. He was keen to acknowledge our gesture and thank us.”
“We’d like some information about your claims,” asked a journalist, rightly dubious about what was, in truth, one of Edgar’s flights of fantasy.
Like a politician dodging a tricky question, Edgar countered with another barrage of invention: “There are now 2,672 million Indians, divided into 124 tribes, each speaking its own dialect. These tribes all speak the same sign language. I, for my part, am the hereditary chief of the Cherokee tribe that originally lived in North and South Carolina. After the Civil War, we moved down to Virginia, Texas, and finally the state of Oklahoma, where we and other tribes were confined on reservations by the U.S. government.
“We ask one thing—U.S. citizenship. Though it has been offered to us, it has only been offered under unacceptable terms. To obtain it, we’ll have to give the government our land, yet those terms aren’t applied to black people, Japanese, or Chinese residents in America. Why is this the case when we are the true Americans? Why should we give our land, which is all we have, to people who are already millionaires?
“Do not believe that we are tempted. Do not be deceived by our feathers, our necklaces, our rings, and our clothing, which seem to you so strange. Instead, look at the depths of our hearts, our ardent desire for friendship. We have a large and beautiful civilization. Why should we be enslaved? We once had Indian universities, but the government has withdrawn its subsidy for them under the pretext that there was no money to spare. Do they want to kill us? Our schools have been closed down and 12,000 children are reliant on being taught at home.”
“Were you well received in Paris?” one of the reporters inquired.
“Beautifully.” He underlined his own elevated status by casually adding, “The Council of the League of Nations was very interested in our delegation. They gave us a lovely welcome.”
Edgar wrapped up the press conference by telling a lighthearted story. He said that a woman had asked him if it’s true that feathers grow out of Indians’ heads, to which he’d replied, “Certainly, madam, I need to pluck them every week.” At this, he gave one of his deep, childishly uninhibited laughs, which may have owed more to cocaine or alcohol than to what one of the listening reporters interpreted as his “sincere and friendly” disposition.
* * *
—
THE INDIAN CHIEF WHITE ELK IS IN BRUSSELS, the headline declared. It graced the front page of the next morning’s edition of La Nation Belge, among Belgium’s foremost newspapers.
In the wake of this, boxed gifts started being delivered to the hotel room Edgar was sharing with his wife and stepson. The boxes contained jam and candy, as well as lavish presents such as an electric toy train and a miniature cinema projector for Leslie. Edgar also received five hundred invitations to dinner parties, trips to the theater, and other social occasions. He was even offered honorary membership in the city’s exclusive shooting clubs.
Between his appearances at the Brussels movie theater where The Covered Wagon was playing, he strolled around the city, its patisseries, glowing electric signs, swirling street life, and handsome architecture showing why it had earned its reputation as “the miniature Paris.” He visited the vast Palais de Justice, received complimentary dinners at restaurants, signed autographs for adoring girls, gambled using free chips, and attended parties thrown by diplomats and members of Belgian high society. Deploying his well-tested line about how King George V was about to return to him millions of acres of tribal land in Canada, he hustled large sums of money from many of the people h
e met.
His main victims were wealthy old women, overawed by his courtly manners and exotic stories. One of his marks was an elderly dowager who bankrupted herself by lending him a million Belgian francs. He supplemented this with money cadged from a midwife he’d befriended. The aggregate take from these two scams was equivalent to around $220,000, more than 20 percent of the entire budget of The Covered Wagon.
Among the other people who succumbed to his spiel were several unsuspecting and glamorous young women. In exchange for worthless checks, they gave him their jewelry, which he said he wanted as a souvenir of his trip. Under the influence of the moneyed crowd with whom he was mixing, Edgar started spending on a scale worthy of the tribal potentate he was pretending to be. As he walked around Brussels, he scattered handfuls of money to street urchins—a habit that reinforced the impression of him being boundlessly rich. Cheerful flocks of impoverished children followed him. But the police soon ordered him to desist.
Greedy for acclaim, he wasn’t simply passing himself off as a wealthy Cherokee. He was selling people his old line about being a war veteran. And somehow he even duped the local press into believing he was “a poet of rare sensitivity.” His poetic output—illusory, of course, unless his regular displays of poetic license were taken into account—garnered him an invitation to speak at a public meeting organized by a student literary circle based at the Free University of Brussels. Known as La Lanterne Sourde (the Deaf Lantern), the group hosted talks by cultural figures as significant as the writer Stefan Zweig, the composer Erik Satie, the painter James Ensor, and the architect Le Corbusier. Edgar accepted the group’s invitation to lecture on the evening of Tuesday, February 19, 1924.