All That Glitters Read Free

reeking of aplomb. When the door closed behind us, I found myself drowning in the most palpable darkness I had ever experienced. The newsreel was on. I instantly panicked; my ears were assaulted by the deafening sounds of rapid gun and cannon fire, while a soundtrack voice accompanied by imposing blasts of music intoned a majestic narration (I think the Japanese had invaded Manchuria that spring), and I clung the tighter to Jessie’s hand.
    Another usher, picking out the way by the discreet pencil beam of flashlight, conducted us past the top of the first aisle, across the rear of the theatre to the farther aisle, where I glimpsed my first sound-film image: a heap of civilian corpses in a blasted railroad station. Still clutching Jessie’s hand, I followed obediently down the sloping, carpeted aisle to perhaps midway, where the pencil light directed us to four seats at the side. The others went in first, I the last, with the aisle seat saved for my father. As my eyes adjusted to this velvet void, I became aware of rows of human heads protruding in front of me, and wildly leaping images on the screen that seemed to my young mind scrambled, almost abstract, and it was all I could do to look, so overwhelmingly huge did they seem, so filled with light and shadow, so far beyond my powers to conjure or imagine.
    At length the newsreel ended and I felt a sense of relief and a return to some sort of reality as the curtain closed across the screen and the footlights came up to warm the spangled pleats in shades of pink. Patrons filed out; others entered and were seated. As I gazed about, I saw theatre boxes above, to right, and to left, and a lofty rococo ceiling whose gorgeousness in retrospect defies description. I recall giant frescoes sprawled across that blue plaster expanse with gods and goddesses contending à la Tiepolo in Venetian grandeur. The plasterwork was a riot of rococo and there was a giant chandelier hanging down from the center of the medallion.
    As I was staring up at this astonishing sight, the lights went slowly down again and I was once more plunged into that overwhelming, womb-like darkness. Always sensitive to my moods, Jessie patted my hand reassuringly and slipped a comforting arm around me, drawing me close as though firming me up for greater shocks to come. Then, while the curtains were still closed, a pattern or design was flashed on the folds of material, which, as they began to travel apart to a fanfare of music, revealed more and more clearly on the white screen the image of a bearded lion that moved its head and gave off ferocious roars. Was this lion real? I believed it not to be, yet it seemed very real to me at that instant. The lion’s head was framed by a circlet of scroll-like tapes with lots of little print that I couldn’t read. Poli’s played only MGM and Fox pictures, and already the Ars Gratia Artis of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed on my fevered brain.
    On this particular occasion we were on hand to be entertained by the MGM studio’s latest hit release, Fanny and Kiddo. The film starred the famous acting team of Crispin and Maude Antrim as well as Jackie Cooper, and it was solely because of Master Cooper that we were present at all; in 1931 young boys could be taken to see Jackie Cooper more or less with impunity. He had a grin like a yard of picket fence, and he could cry buckets; I never saw a kid-actor cry the way Jackie Cooper could. Our second movie was Oliver Twist , our third Skippy , to be succeeded by a seemingly endless string of “literary” offerings— Great Expectations , David Copperfield , and the like, with maybe a Tom Sawyer or a Huckleberry Finn tossed in for good measure. Though he never held any great brief for the movies, Dad nonetheless believed in “the classics,” and he believed that Jackie Cooper was a Good Influence.
    But where was Dad? The credits were unrolling and still he was nowhere to be seen. Even my mother, usually the soul of calm, evinced