Hungarian Goulash, with Battered Noodles

Why the memory of a screen actress named Constance Talmadge should cause, after two highballs and three decades, a constriction in the throat and misty vision is something I can’t readily explain. I suppose it is one of those idiosyncrasies I must accept as normal nowadays, along with progressive penury and the vertigo that attends lacing my shoes. Though I realize such belated homage crackles like a paper of ancient snuff, I may as well ’fess up that yesteryear I was spoony over Miss Talmadge to the point of idolatry. I wallowed in every picture, major or minor, she deigned to appear in, and, when called upon, could instantly furnish authoritative data on her birthstone, favorite flower, and bust measurement. It seems singular, therefore, that with such a financial and emotional investment in this quicksilver creature, the only movie of hers I could recall until recently was a boudoir farce called The Duchess of Buffalo, and that merely because of the circumstances under which I first saw it. One autumn afternoon in 1926, I dropped in to visit a former college classmate of mine, Steamy Welch, who was employed as a copywriter in some vast advertising agency near Grand Central. Steamy, said my informants, was the coming man in the agency, an embryonic tycoon, and it sounded credible; he had been a big wheel under the elms, a miracle of scholarship and co-­ordination, and classified, in the jargon then stylish, as a snake, or suave operator with the ladies. I still retain a clear image of him at a Junior Week tea dance, clad in a four-­button jacket of unbleached sisal and pants with twenty-­two-­inch bottoms, expertly weaving his partner through the intricacies of the toddle. The orchestra, full of saxophones and tenor banjos, was playing either “Dardanella” or “Wildflower,” and when Steamy whirled to complete an arabesque, you caught the glint of an octavo-­size metal flask in his hip pocket. There were no flies on Steamy.

At any rate, I found my schoolfellow in one of a maze of tiny glass cubicles, moodily biting his knuckles and trying to evolve some dithyrambs for a process cheese. He hailed me effusively and confirmed the rumors of his success. He was now earning a salary well in excess of twenty thousand a year—without bonuses, of course—and expected to be made vice-­president of the firm shortly. He had just acquired a Spanish hacienda at Rye, in the yacht basin of which he proposed to moor a forty-­five-­foot yawl. Actually, he confessed wryly, he never knew a moment’s leisure; all manner of pestilential bores like Charlie Schwab and Eugene Grace kept badgering him for advice on their securities, and he was debating the idea of leasing a grouse preserve in Scotland as a way of escaping them. Did I have any more cogent suggestion, he asked with appealing candor. Just as I was studying the problem, the door flew open and a forthright gentleman entered without bothering to remove his hat.

“Hi ya, Welch,” he said, consulting a notebook. “You’re two months behind on that suit of clothes. Cough up a double sawbuck or we’ll hang a judgment on you.” As my friend, glowing like a bed of phlox, slowly fished out his wallet, his nemesis scrawled a receipt and gave him a short, incisive lecture on the ethics of installment buying. When he had departed, Steamy looked so shopworn that I suggested a small libation on the altar of Silenus. Three or four shells of needle beer restored his amour-­propre, and by easy stages we gained a Hungarian restaurant in Yorkville, where I remember downing a great deal of synthetic Tokay and dancing a czardas in a rather abandoned fashion. There was a fuzzy interval outside a phone booth while Steamy vainly besought two nurses on Staten Island to join us in making whoopee, and then I was in a neighborhood movie house, blinking ponderously at Miss Talmadge’s antics and wondering how a film called The Duchess of Buffalo came to be laid in Russia. Steamy had vanished to fulfill his portion, which, the last time I heard, was managing a lubritorium outside Spearfish, South Dakota.

A few days ago, while peaceably traversing West Fifty-­third Street, I was set upon by a hooded trio lurking in the entresol of the Museum of Modern Art, forced at pistol point upstairs into the film library’s projection room, and compelled to see The Duchess of Buffalo again. The press gang gave no clue to its motives in shanghaiing me, but it was made clear that I could expect reprisals against my loved ones should I fail to report my findings. If, consequently, an apprehensive note steals into the following recapitulation from time to time, the reader will understand I speak under duress. Here and there, from sentences patently meant to be read backward, he will glean some conception of the ordeal I underwent. Honestly, my hand still shakes whenever I light up a strip of film.

Hungarian playwrights always having been pre-­eminent in the field of laborious fun, The Duchess of Buffalo was derived from a piece written by two Hungarian playwrights and adapted for the screen by a third. The megaphone and the production reins were handled by two local boys named, respectively, Sidney Franklin and Joseph M. Schenck, but their contribution was so much of a piece with the authors’ that if I were aedile, I would have conferred honorary Hungarian citizenship on them. As for the cast supporting Miss Talmadge, it was nothing if not cosmopolitan—Tullio Carminati, Edward Martindale, Rose Dionne, Chester Conklin, and Jean de Briac, all of them gustily impersonating Russians of every degree of eminence from Grand Duke to hotelkeeper. Mistaken identity, of course, was the theme, and it was exploited with such tenacity that for seventy minutes the chills never stopped rippling down my spine. To be sure, the gun that was kept pressed against it throughout didn’t help any.

The plot of The Duchess of Buffalo, woven of summerweight thistledown, concerns the obstacles surmounted by a wellborn young dragoon, Lieutenant Orloff (Carminati), in wedding Marian Duncan, an American ballerina from Buffalo (Miss Talmadge). As we fade in on the latter’s triumphant recital before an audience of St. Petersburg swells, the opening title sets the mood: “Marian Duncan danced in America with a veil. Then she tried Russia without a veil, and oh boy-­ovitch. She was so good that two visiting Scotchmen forgot their change at the box-­office.” One gathers from the spectacle onstage, which resembles a spring pageant in the secondary schools, that the Muscovites are ravenous for entertainment, but it presently develops that Marian is the magnet of every eye, and in particular that of a seasoned voluptuary named the Grand Duke Gregory Alexandrovitch (Edward Martindale). His surreptitious ogling and mustache-­twirling, under the very nose of the jealous Grand Duchess Olga Petrovna (Rose Dionne), are guaranteed to tickle anyone’s risibilities—save those, possibly, of a man with a Colt in his back—and the camera now leaps to another spectator, even more deeply interested, Marian’s lieutenant. Orloff, a dashing youngster from the tips of his well-­polished boots to his paleolithic forehead, has been chaperoning his ladylove from the wings, tremulous lest she discard her ultimate veil. Fortunately or otherwise, the corps de ballet interposes itself as she does, the curtain falls, and, by the time the lovers grapple, Marian’s charms have been fireproofed in a baggy leotard clearly improvised from a suit of heavy woolen underwear. In this decent if oppressive garb, she receives from Orloff a ring plighting their troth, and amid protracted twittering the couple finalize plans to marry at once.

As anyone conversant with dragoons is aware, a Russian dragoon desirous of matrimony must first obtain his Grand Duke’s consent, so next day, piling Marian into a sleigh, Orloff sets about procuring it. His superior, abstractedly selecting a diamond brooch to be sent to Marian, at first views the petition with favor but, on learning the name of the prospective fiancée, harshly forbids alliance with a dancer. “Then,” says Orloff, unbuckling his sword with the élan any dragoon worth a hoot in Hollywood would be expected to display, “I must ask to resign my commission.”

Well, sir, if there is one art at which a czarist noble excels, it is dealing with insolent puppies. Placing his arms akimbo—the akimbo position is mandatory in all productions budgeted at three hundred dollars or over—Gregory Alexandrovitch icily rejoins, “You are to be detained in your quarters three days. Perhaps you will have changed your mind by then.” Marian, meanwhile, has driven home to order dinner. With rare insight into the native character, not to say political clairvoyance, she realizes that once those Russkis get to jawing, a person may as well grab herself a hot meal.

The misunderstandings now begin to sprout like forsythia; the Grand Duke hurries straightway to Marian’s scatter, where she tenderly awaits Orloff, in the belief that he has sent her the brooch, and there is a passage of kittenish lovemaking to congeal the blood as the two, separated by a folding screen, tickle each other delirious. Eventually, her fingertips surprise his beard—the same classic dénouement in which Charley Chase or Larry Semon discovers he has been stroking a runaway lion—and she is compelled to dampen his ardor without alienating him altogether. The Grand Duke, nevertheless, refuses her entreaties to spare Orloff and exits majestically, not suspecting that Marian, a hoyden to the last, has pinned the brooch to his cape. Incredibly enough, someone neglected to add the obligatory hilarious scene of his wife stumbling on the bauble and foaming like a Seidlitz powder. For an instant, I had a flicker of suspicion about the scenarist’s real nationality. Ferenc Molnar never would have muffed an opportunity like that.

Presumably desolated by this impasse, Marian sends word to her lover urging him to forget her and departs for Orel, a step that provokes a wholesale migration to that city. Orloff breaks arrest to follow her, the Grand Duke conceives the notion of renewing his courtship there, and his Duchess, suspecting that he is philandering, decides to pursue and eavesdrop. We thereupon cut to the manager of Orel’s leading hotel, Chester Conklin (obviously sheepish about his role in this enterprise), reacting to a telegram reserving space for the Grand Duchess and commanding secrecy. In the tradition of Hungarian farce, he of course instantly disobeys. He confides the secret to his staff, confuses Marian with the patrician visitor, for no earthly reason, and installs her in the imperial suite. Orloff has meanwhile overtaken Marian and suggests they flee to Paris. Before they can do so, though, the local company of dragoons insists on tendering a banquet in honor of the putative Grand Duchess, which, nobody needs to be told, is the signal for the Grand Duke to step back into the plot. Playing on Marian’s fear of exposure—she has used her influence to shield Orloff from arrest—he caddishly enclasps her waist in public and begs indulgence of the officers to retire, as he and his lady are fatigued from their journey. Knowing the monkeyshines this portended, I sagged down in my seat in the projection room with a dolorous sigh, but my escorts were plainly diverted. “Hot spit!” chuckled one of them under his hood. “Let’s see you crawl out of that one, sister.” I hinted, as unobstrusively as I could, that she undoubtedly would. “Shaddap,” he ordered, prodding my spine with his roscoe. “Pipe down if yuh know what’s good fer yuh.” I don’t, but I piped.

The sequence that follows is the sort of demented inter-­bedroom frolic Avery Hopwood used to write with his left hand while feeding himself aspirin with his right to deaden his sensibilities. The alarums and excursions in the imperial suite, the headlong buffooneries as the Grand Duke and Orloff pop in and out of closets manhandling Marian and evading each other, generate the same cast-­iron glee as Getting Gertie’s Garter and Up in Mabel’s Room. Whenever my contemporaries are disposed to bemoan the decline of the theater, by the way, they might profitably recall that these high jinks and the dramas of Eugene Walter were the only available pabulum in their youth. Anyhow, at the height of the carnage the real Grand Duchess comes blundering in like a bluebottle, the lovers manage to smuggle her husband offscene and establish their bona fides, the Grand Duke benevolently excuses Orloff’s desertion, and everything ends copacetically with a Greek Orthodox wedding presided over by an archimandrite from the Central Casting Agency.

I fatuously imagined that the psychic welts left by The Duchess of Buffalo had subsided until, somewhat later the same day, I stopped by the New York Public Library to renew a card that had lapsed. It must have been a purely instinctive response, but when the clerk demanded my occupational status for the application, I replied, “A hostage.”

After a wary silence, during which she pretended to examine my references but actually fumbled for a buzzer under the counter, she cleared her throat. “We don’t recognize that as a vocation,” she said. “Just what is the nature of your work?”

“Golly, I don’t know,” I pondered. “I guess you might call me a snapper-­up of unconsidered trifles, but right now I’m in jeopardy on account of a movie. You see, it’s like this—” Before I could expatiate, a uniformed man with a rather burly neck took me by the collar and guided me to the Forty-­second Street exit. All around, a hell of a day, though I have one thing to be thankful for. At least I didn’t run into Steamy Welch.