Conquistador Hops Express Train, Cinema Left Behind

Truthfully, no one who is still alive can be all that certain about what actually happened. There is only a handful of dates in books and documents, some of them approximate, and a few vague collective memories of stories Bo used to tell. Only one of the stories is set in Poland, around 1891, the year that Louis's father Samuel, a harness maker, left Lublin for the United States, four years after Louis was born. As Bo told it, always laughing at the end of the anecdote, the only toy he ever had as a kid was a hoop and stick, and his father took that away from him, saying that a hoop and stick never made anyone any money.

The other stories all take place in the United States and are on the whole

more cheerful. In Salem, Massachusetts, around the turn of the century—sometime after Louis arrived with his mother Ida and his kid brother Harry in 1896, and before the whole family (including the baby, Charlie) moved to Denver on account of Samuel's TB—Louis memorized a spiel in English about Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables, which he would deliver for a modest fee to any interested visitor to this landmark. It was apparently during this same period that he completed his only three years of schooling.

But the story that most concerns us here is one about a dream, and a missed train connection in 1915 that landed Louis in Little Rock. (Another story was about traveling by himself at seventeen, not long after Samuel died, from Denver to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis—the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, where the ice cream cone was invented—and hearing William Jennings Bryan speak at a bandstand pavilion about Opportunity in America, the Chance Everyone Has To Become Whatever He Wants To Be, a speech that excites Louis so much that he goes back every night, seven nights running, to hear Bryan deliver it, and then decides to go into business for himself. Back in Denver, he starts out in dry goods.) But if we want to get this show on the road and make sure that it has legs (the better to follow the Conquistador with), let's conceive his train journey from Douglas in wide-screen format—even if this means a certain loss of image when it turns up on TV—and start with a humorous scene set in 1915 between Louie from Lublin (we'll call him Chance Rosenbaum) and the ticket agent at the Douglas train station (we'll call him Abner Claypool, for he might as well be Cora's dad, a year before he and his family move east to Milburn, Indiana, where he will enroll Cora for accordion lessons with a hayseed named Hubert, who hails from Douglas himself). Basically, Chance will try in broken English to explain his route from Douglas to Texarkana and back to Abner, who will scratch his head and try to make out the ticket correctly. The broken English will be hard for Abner to understand, but easy as pie for us, and this will afford us plenty of opportunity to interpose exposition about Chance's past, immediate as well as distant, particularly because Chance at twenty-eight is a cheerful and gregarious sort who likes to talk about himself.

When, for instance, Chance explains to Abner that he's going to Texarkana because of a dream he's recently had—a dream, a vision in which he achieves wealth and fame in a town known as Texarkana, located four or five states away, on the border between Texas and Arkansas—we can convey the basic purpose of his trip and at the same time exploit the comic effect by playing on Abner's cool responses (e.g., nodding mechanically, perhaps interspersing a "yep" or a "yup" here and there, like Pa Kettle, meanwhile reflecting lazily to himself—and to the audience, via sly winks—that this sheeny Polack must be plumb stark crazy). Chance can also explain that he wants his trip routed through Denver so that he can visit his mother and his two brothers.

He can go onto explain (his voice becoming narration over a silent flashback) that Denver is where he married Anna Block in January 1910 and where his only son Stanley was born the following October. He might add something about being routed through St. Louis, too, because of a thrilling trip he made there eleven years ago (which could lead, via lap dissolve, into another narrated flashback, to the World's Fair, if the budget will allow the extra sets). And Abner could nod lazily at that, too, meanwhile making up Chance's ticket on the other side of the window counter, and then suddenly come up with a payoff line when he hands it over—something like, "If that's the ticket you want, Mister, that's the ticket you got, 'cause the customer's always right in this green land of ours [note to rewrite people: make sure that any slang used fits the period ].—and then add, "Only watch out for Little Rock, bub, 'cause that's a close connection you got there."

And because dreams are a serious business with Chance Rosenbaum, a real matter for concern, where—as W. B. Yeats and Delmore Schwartz successively put it—responsibilities begin (and possibly where they end, too: in Florence during the fifties, for instance, Bo has no copy of Be Glad You're Neurotic resting on any bookshelf in his house, like Stanley and Mimi do, maybe because he just doesn't see how anyone could be glad that anyone was neurotic. Glad? ), it's important that we get him to Little Rock as quickly as possible, without lingering too much over the intervening wide-screen scenery. Nothing so crude as a wipe here, mind you; a few slow lap dissolves of Chance's train moving across these vast Panavision vistas should do just fine.

In Little Rock, we focus on Chance—full of beans and clenching a cigar—stepping off the train only to discover that (1) he has just missed the train for Texarkana and (2) the next one won't be along for three days. Three days! Chance stands there in a panic, squeezing his hands together and inadvertently crushing his cigar into splinters, totally distraught, not knowing what to do. My God, my God, is it really possible that his dream could just take off without him like that, leaving him high and dry? A moment of reflection. No, it is not possible. Dreams are portents, clues and signs, not precise predictions. And maybe Little Rock is good enough. (Maybe it will have to be.) And, sure enough, he finds himself a couple of business partners in Little Rock right away and, after returning to Douglas for Anna and Stanley (an old-fashioned montage sequence à la Vorkapich would work fine here), builds a movie house across the Arkansas River, in North Little Rock, and calls it the Princess. Four years later, he takes a train to Florence, Alabama, where he does essentially the same thing all over again. So in a way, you can say that the Florence Princess is not the first but the last in a series—not the beginning but the end.

And the rest, as they say, is History. The Florence Princess, an $85,000 Opera House, opens triumphantly on Labor Day, September 1, 1919, with

Produced under the direction of

Harry D. Orr

A Melodic Pageant of Youth, Beauty, Laughter, Joy, Sunshine and Pretty Girls. 20 Wondrous Girls Under 20. Positively the Original New York Cast and Chorus Intact

An average of twenty-five stage shows a year follows. Will Rogers, the popular minstrels McIntyre and Heath, the Shakespearian tragedians Fritz Leiber and Robert Mantell, the romantic actor Lou Tellegen, the cowboys Gene Autry and Lash LaRue, the lovely Edna Goodrich, and other famous personages appear. The plays performed include The Green Hat, The Circle, Scandal, The Bat, The Cat and the Canary, Abie's Irish Rose; there are grand operas such as Faust, light operas and musical comedies such as The Bohemian Girl, Robin Hood, Blossom Time, The Gingham Girl, No, No, Nanette, Listen Lester, and Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue . Mischa Elman plays his magic violin, Gene Krupa plays his drums, W. C. Handy plays his cornet and talks about his childhood in Florence to an integrated audience (a one-shot), Fats Waller turns up during Prohibition and demands (and gets) a quart of vodka before he will sing and play piano, Carl Sandburg reads his poems, and William Howard Taft, former president of the United States, speaks on public affairs. Around 1926 Stanley, age sixteen, has a date with Lillian Roth (on tour with her mother), who during the evening offers him a joke about Life Savers: the man who invented them, she says, musta made a mint.