Absolute Fiction

Beneath the statue’s dead gaze, Elephant and Castle pulses with traffic. Five lanes speeding around a concrete dead-zone. Red double-decker walls fly past, separated from women pushing prams on the sidewalk by a few inches and flimsy steel fencing. A bilevel shopping mall, pink walls covered in grime, hangs on the roundabout’s outer rim. Local vendors crowd the sidewalk with second-hand clothing and wilted plants. Facing the traffic treadmill, reaching above the noisy commercial jumble, the giant elephant stands guard. on his back legs, ears outspread, Dumbo poised for flight, front legs pawing at the sky, smog-stained tusks piercing a leaden sky.

Downpour-dodging, Randall took shelter beneath the pink elephant. Standing between the statue’s rear legs, he looked up, wondered. Like every oddity in London, the suburb’s name, “Elephant and Castle,” must have some historical explanation. He groped through his memory for a snippet of information about an eastern monarch who sent ten elephants to London for a coronation in the Nineteenth Century. Wait—was he confusing that with the King of Siam’s offer to send pachyderms to Abraham Lincoln for fighting the Civil War?

Randall cursed his defective memory, then swore again at his wasted day in the British Museum. Eight hours of sorting through directors’ diaries, correspondence between early film producers, fragments of scripts for movies never made. Another full day, another blank in the research for his book. Getting soaked seemed trivial in comparison, so he opened his cheap umbrella and began the long walk down New Kent Road.

On most evenings, drunks and other wastrels staggered up to him. “Changeguv?” they would slur in a single oiled syllable. But this evening the sidewalk was empty. Relieved, he slowed his pace when he reached a row of abandoned houses. Behind an iron fence crusted with green mold, skeletal tenement frames hulked against the grey horizon. Post-Blitz structures thrown up to last ten years, windows smashed, doors boarded. But a soft yellow light burned in a window on the third floor. As he watched, wondering, it winked out. Squatters? C3ould even they take refuge in a slum so decayed?

Get home, he thought. Home to the dinner included in his room and board. Lascoll House lay two blocks ahead. Six stories of incandescent light blazing through ruined neo-Gothic grandeur. Flying porticos, cut stonework, a Dickensian chimney roofworld. Two weeks earlier, a balmy February Sunday, he had walked into Lascoll House for the first time. Heat and humidity bled odors from the moldy draperies and pummeled oriental carpets. The scent of mildew blended with steamed fish and boiled beef rising from the basement kitchen. Randall had dropped his bags, aghast. Impoverished aristocracy came to mind, Moscow mansions converted to slums after the revolution. Telling himself the place had character, he heard the door open behind him. Suddenly, a crowd of bearded Muslims in black silk robes milled past him. With their smart leather luggage, they carried gnarled wooden staffs. From an office at one side of the foyer, an aged man in a dark suit and round-brimmed hat emerged. Laughter and hand-shaking, the old man wading through a forest of conical scarlet caps. Welcome! shouted the old man. Joyous Ramadan, friends!

Cowed by the panoply, Randall tried to remember the event that Ramadan commemorates. Did the word mean “the hot month” or “the cold?” What an entrance, he thought jealously, sulking behind a potted elephant’s ear.

You’ve all read so much bloated theory on race and culture that a simple empirical observation might surprise you. Let’s think about the representation of race in the early Hollywood period. Take the first American adaptation of Dracula, the Universal version that most people take to be the equal of Frankenstein, but which in fact is relentlessly uncinematic. The Mina character in that film, Helen Chandler, appears so ghostily anemic that the count’s lust for her seems wildly misconceived. Look at her in this slide … ah, there she is. Far from juicy, she looks more cadaverous than the vampire sisters (wives?) whom Drac abandons for the pulsing vitality of western European capitalism. Yet, he sets his cape on wan little Mina. Look at her. You can hardly tell where that white, gauzy dress stops and her skin begins. What if we assume that the (good) heroine’s exaggerated whiteness has the effect of making us read the (bad) vampire as being black, metaphorically? Keep in mind that the count’s menace is not a simple matter of sucking blood. He also repels and attracts through his identity as a foreigner, his kinship with the Orient of Europe. Those Balkan lands of curses, gypsies, gnarled trees with thorns like knives. Look up the etymology of “gypsy,” by the way. So, is it too much of a stretch to think that the heroine’s coloring makes the count’s ashen skin seem like a mask, a concealment of the exotic and dark, of the nearest counterpart to black savagery to be found among Caucasian folk?

And not to change the subject completely, but, in our next slide … King Kong! The big monkey’s love interest, Anne, is played by Fay Wray, of course, the screen’s first scream-queen, the pathetic waifette whom a big-shot director plucks off the street and whisks away to Skull Island. As you can see in this slide, Wray out-whites even Chandler’s Mina. Does anyone remember the shipboard scene where the director puts Anne through a screen test? Gussied up in a pure white gown (natch), Anne must pretend she sees something terrifying. “You’re only hope is if you can scream!” Robert Armstrong hollers at her like a maniac. “Scream, Anne, scream!” These next few slides show the tightening close-up in incremental stills. See what I mean about her whiteness? When she finally lets loose with that famous shriek, her mouth looks like a gopher hole in a snow-field. We’ll let the vaginal symbolism lie for the moment, but look at this still of Wray in profile here, talking to the hunky hero. Her hair and face and chest are nothing but a blur; her profile virtually dissolves into the white background. She’s so white/virtuous that she’s incorporeal.

Interesting as this may be, though, it’s all just a preface to today’s real topic. You can turn up the lights now.

Take the most beautiful woman who’s ever lived, a self-promoted African (but not black) queen who, barring bad beauty judgments, happens to be immortal. Take an (almost) equally gorgeous male, a bone-headed Brit, a golden, virginal Oxoniensis—that means Oxfordite, but, hell, you all should know that. He has the august name of “Leo Vincey”—the surname is related to Latin “vincere,” meaning “conquer”; but he never behaves very lionlike or victorious. Anyway, this torpid Leo turns out to be the reincarnation of a defrocked Egyptian high priest. The very priest, in fact, who steered our white African queen on her road to immortality. Put these white folk against a backdrop of ignorant African natives just a-busting for rebellion against the queen, who apparently has not been studying diplomacy all these years. These natives, the “Amahagger”—one could argue, I think, for a pun on “I’m a nigger”—are very dark, in the film versions, but in the novel they’re described as the yellowish result of miscegenation between Persian colonists and the degenerate survivors of an extinct but once-noble (and white!) African civilization called Kôr. Now take a subterranean cave with a bottomless abyss. This chasm can only be traversed by walking across a vibrating spur of rock that might as well have “castration anxiety” spray-painted on it in day-glo pink. And if all of that’s not enough, throw in a comet that passes earth only once every several hundred years. When its light reaches a subterranean chamber, it ignites a fountain of cold flame that imparts eternal youth to anyone who has the courage to enter and bathe therein. Just don’t try a second dip.

They don’t write them like this anymore. Adventure novels in the grand tradition are gone forever. But when Sir H. R. Haggard wrote She, colonized Africa, leeched upon by every European nation with enough cash to send off some ships, was ripe for exploitation of the literary type. By this time, the white west had a huge literate middle class, readers fairly salivating for stories set on that big, black, primal continent. Think of shop clerks and factory workers goggle-eyed with visions of white men running amok, screwing their way through hordes of dusky black women. But don’t get me going on a Marxist analysis of entertainment consumption. We have trendier goals today.

With raw materials like those packed into She, you would think Hollywood couldn’t go wrong. Only a moron could ruin this property, right? With a little luck, even a cheapie studio could make this novel into an epic on the Lawrence of Arabia or Cleopatra scale. Well, you’d be wrong. As epics go, both adaptations of She are very thin gruel. First came the 1934 version from RKO-Radio—smallest and cheapest of the major studios—starring Helen Gahagan in (I think) her only film role. Does that name ring a bell for anyone a bit older than I? Yes, the future Helen Gahagan Douglas, the beauty queen/opera singer who became a politician, the very woman whom Richard Nixon smeared with his famous quip that her politics were as red as her panties. Well, when Gahagan sweeps on screen for the first time—oh, down with the lights again, please. What a sight. Imagine her in the Halls of Congress! Obviously, she’s inhumanly white, her hair peroxided and swept up like the bride of Frankenstein’s. Perhaps some producer saw Douglas’s death-white skin and platinum hair as appropriate to the narrative’s location. And why would this be appropriate, you ask? Because some lunatic switched the location of She’s kingdom from Africa to—yes, I’m serious!—the North Pole. Perhaps, though, something other than stupidity was at work here, because the film was directed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, the very pair who had made King Kong only one year earlier. Do you think that maybe the Kong’s success tempted them to indulge their whiteness obsession even further? No, no, hang onto your questions for a few minutes. I’ll tell you later how they rationalized the African natives dancing around bonfires in caves beneath the ice fields.

Unfortunately, 1934 was not a good time in America for camp, intentional or otherwise. I don’t know how much money RKO lost on the Gahagan fiasco, but thirty-one years passed before any producer picked up Haggard’s novel again. In 1965, Hammer made a big budget extravaganza from the novel, painted stem-to-stern with that studio’s trademark lush coloring. Ursula Andress’s hair—there she comes now—is a flaming reddish gold, perfectly matched in one scene by a mile-long feathered robe and headdress. And you can’t deny that Andress, unlike Chandler, Wray, and Douglas, looks fairly robust, if only because of her majestic bustline. The natives, of course, are still black as jet. It’s too bad that the director affected a stately, fatalistic ambience, because this makes the movie look posed and stilted. Andress works hard, though, revolving her way through more gowns and crowns than she does facial expressions, huge white bosom always a-heaving with fury or lust. But all of the changes made in the novel (none involving the North Pole) were bad calls.

So now you’re probably wondering why no one has tried again. The dumb-ass natives could be given an upgrade, right? Beef up a few parts for black actors who have box office weight? Maybe have a non-light-skinned black actress play Ustane, the Amahagger woman who falls in love with Leo and eventually gets blasted by She? Or maybe even make She herself black? What a notion! But before we anticipate the future, we need to consider the film versions that preceded the Gahagan movie. I know I said that RKO’s version was the first, but I meant the first sound version. Before 1934—long before, in fact—America and England had churned out a quantity of silent adaptations. Strange to think, isn’t it, that something compelled the early film industry to adapt this one novel to the screen seven times in fewer than fifteen years? Haggard himself even wrote the title cards for one of them. Turn up the lights again, would you?

In a sandwich shop on Great Russell Street, staring through dirty windows at the grey rain, Randall said to himself You are now a thief. You cannot come out of this clean, only a lighter degree of sordid. He sat still for several minutes, looking at his food, finally picked up a pen and opened a notebook. In his best penmanship, he wrote “Made an interesting find today while looking through a collection of shooting scripts. Might lead to something. But there would be consequences.” He had found it while browsing a folio containing the unpublished papers of Branshaw Tellyragh, the director of the seventh and final silent version of She. When he touched a sheet of stationery pasted to a quarto page, one corner came loose, and something fell from behind it. Randall stared at the thin strip of paper in his lap, looked up, around, and down again. After reading it once, without turning his head or looking up, he slipped it into his shirt pocket. When he had his briefcase checked at the exit to the Manuscripts Room, he expected alarms to blast. Walking through the lobby, up the stairs, and across the Oriental galleries, he broke into a sweat, expecting guards to apprehend him. Now he drew the letter from a front pocket, unfolded it, brushed some crumbs aside and spread it out. He was surprised that the letter still read the same. Luck like this just doesn’t strike often. Not me.

As I feared, blasted Harold Tarnsower has informed Sir Henry that some company other than mine is also filming his Egyptian novel. I cannot explain why Sir Henry even talks to Tarnsower, after the botch he made of his own filming of the novel six years ago. But they both belong to the same club and that explains much about men of their class. The old man was quite incensed, railing at me over the telephone about the endless pirating of what he always calls his “African romances.” I should never have told Tarnsower about this upstart company, not given his feelings about the Africans in England.

I calmed Sir Henry somewhat, telling him we hardly need worry about a movie made by a group of amateur Negroes. And he was eager to hear that my film is nearly complete, even though Miss Dialgihev has been ill and we have had to shoot around her for five days. Jameson’s ideas for filming the queen’s death in the pillar of flame are most ingenious. Nearly all the stunt effects, I think, can be done in the camera. I feel fortunate to have Jameson with me, even if some of my workers object to giving such an important position to an uneducated Negro.

It was obviously genuine. The vertical handwriting perfectly matched that of Tellyragh’s other papers. Fragments of his version of Haggard’s novel were preserved at the British Film Archives, about twenty minutes of footage from an original three-reel feature. Tellyragh’s film, although later, had been lost completely. But another film, an unknown eighth silent version of She contemporaneous with Tellyragh’s? A movie made by “a group of negroes?” Did England have any black film-makers in 1912, when Tellyragh shot his film? Had Tarnsower been, even for that time, a vocal racist? Could the purloined letter make his filmography of She into the book he noted for promotion to professor? Something people outside academia would buy?

Carefully, he folded the letter, replaced it in the flimsy envelope, and put it away. He doubted he could find more evidence of a lost eighth version, but the process of detection might be interesting. He picked up his pen again, pulled the notebook to him, wrote another few words, then looked at them: “Consequences not as strong a deterrent as previously thought.”

After breakfast at Lascoll House one morning, he put on his best jacket and trousers, his only white shirt. Then all ten fingers fidgeted with a bowtie. Billions of people in the world and only a handful know how wretched these things are to fix, he thought. A fact that gives one pause. You need fingers two feet long to stuff the bow through that damned loop, and if it’s not tight enough to begin with, you can’t take up the slack later. But what else gives me that pencil-necked-geek look that I’ve cultivated so well? When another attempt failed, he swore aloud and jumped up and down, one end of tie clamped between his front teeth. Finally he settled for a bow with an-center knot and a long sag on the right.

Walking down three flights of stairs, his mood changed with every new carpet pattern. This book is doomed, he thought on the third floor. I’ll be trounced by academia and by the tens of adoring fans who read my first two books and my one horror story. Reaching the second floor, he scanned the halls, found them pilgrim-free. Then again, this book might be a bullet. Maybe even go into paperback. Routledge will buy any piece of tripe with race, culture, and sexuality. Beginning his final descent down the grand curved staircase, his confidence became giddy. I wonder if dukes and dukettes trodded this staircase before me? I’d sing a song from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, but I don’t know one.

Anne, the heir-apparent to Lascoll House, was working in the lobby office, her Doberman Pinscher sleeping on a couch in the corner. When Randall stuck his head over the counter, the dog bounded toward him, barking and gnashing her teeth. “Nice doggie,” he said, backing away. “Have you got a good grip on her, Anne?”

“She’s usually very gentle. You’re the only guest who’s ever bothered her this way. Shut the bloody hell up, Gudrun!” she yelled. “Hang on a bit, the mail’s not been sorted yet.” She picked up a stack, began flipping through envelopes. “No, nothing for you.” She threw the bundle on the dog’s couch. “Did you give your address here to anyone in the States?”

“No one who cares to use it, apparently.” As he turned to leave, he remembered something. “You know, Anne, the other night I saw a light burning in one of the tenements, the one closest to the hotel. Could someone be living there, do you think?”

“Damnable squatters,” taking a long drag from a cigarette. “The police rousted out a group of them a few months back, but they always return. Did you see if—”

He saw the Muslim celebrants at the top of the grand sweep, heard them laughing. “Got to run now, Anne,” he called, hustling into the drizzle, wishing he had called a cab.

A fresh downpour erupted as he emerged from Tower tube station and headed for Pall Mall. One block from the station, a gust of wind gutted his umbrella. Feet soaked, odorous, he took a seat on a burgundy leather sofa. “Thanks so much for agreeing to see me,” he said. “I’m sure you must be busy.”

“Nonsense. We don’t get inquiries like yours every day, Mr. Traner. You piqued my curiosity.” The man wore a pin-stripe suit with a flowered silk tie and matching pocket square. “American, aren’t you? Cigarette? Been to any exceptional clubs in London yet? How did you trace Reciprocity to us?”

Randall thought a second. Then, mock-methodically: “Yes. God-Almighty-yes, but I quit. Not really. And, fourth, it wasn’t difficult.”

After a blank moment, the man’s face broke apart. “Oh, in order, I get it!” He tilted back in his chair. “I love an American sense of humor!” Finished laughing, he rocked forward in his chair, put his elbows on his desk, and stared hard at Randall. “Now, really, exactly what do you want? Are you writing a book? Did the BFI send you here?”

“In reverse order this time,” Randall answered. “No, yes, and I’ll be happy to tell you.”

The man brayed again, then lunged across his desk for a cigarette lighter in the shape of a £ symbol. “Sure you won’t have one? No? All right, let’s get down to business, whatever the hell you said your name was. This better be good, and if those Labor Party culture vulture BFI communist bastards are behind this you’ll find out that—”

“Please,” raising his hand, “let me to tell you how I found your firm, Mr. Signet. Purely by accident, while I was browsing at MOMI, the Museum of the Moving Image, I came across a still from a silent version of H. Rider Haggard’s She, the version made by Reciprocity, which was owned by Harold Tarnsower. You know MOMI, I assume? On the South Bank, by the National Film Theater?”

The man nodded, smoking. “Tourist trap,” he hissed. “Never’ve gone there, myself.”

“Probably. But the still caught my attention, because I knew it wasn’t taken from the extant footage of the Reciprocity version. I had already viewed those clips, at the British Film Archives.”

“So what?” He sounded impatient. “The MOMI people took the still from …” He waved a hand. “From an old poster or something.”

“Not very likely, I don’t think. No one at MOMI could tell me anything about the source, but it seems possible that the original still is something that the British Film Archives never found. Perhaps even some additional footage has survived somewhere.”

“Maybe so. But just what do you want from my firm, Mr. Traner? You already seem to know much more than I do about Sir Harry’s film.”

What do I want? I don’t even know if this book has an argument, so how am I supposed to know how to scavenge through decaying reels of film? “When Tarnsower quit directing and founded your investment firm, he became a collector of film memorabilia, even at that early date. I hoped you might know something about his collection, Mr. Signet. Maybe the still I saw at MOMI indicates that Tarnsower saved more of his version of She than people know about. So I would like to know if his collection was sold. Or does it remain in his family, maybe?”

Mr. Signet leaned back in his chair. After several minutes of contemplation, he rose, walked around the desk, and sat on the leather sofa close to Randall. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” his voice hushed through compressed lips. “But I like your … bowtie. Such nuisances to knot properly, aren’t they? My firm still owns Sir Harry’s collection that you seek so earnestly, Mr. Traner. It’s never been catalogued or indexed, except for insurance purposes. After Sir Harry died seven years ago, we moved the collection to an air-conditioned vault in a warehouse in Richmond. I have a key.” A conspiratorial wink, then he lowered his voice even more. “But unfortunately for you, Mr. Traner, Sir Harry put a peculiar clause in his will. No one is allowed to use the film materials until certain people are all dead. Several people named in his will.

Randall waited for more, but the man sat smiling at him, yellowish teeth showing behind thin lips. “Someone Harold Tarnsower knew is still alive?” Randall asked. “He must be nearly one hundred years old. Or she.”

“Mr. Traner,” leaning close to Randall’s face, “I’d like very much to show you an interesting gentlemen’s club tonight. A very British institution. Not a tourist trap for the Yanks and the Japs.” He reached out one hand, lifted the sagging side of Randall’s tie. “Perhaps a tiny exception to Sir Harry’s restrictions could be made. As I said, I have a key.”

Randall twitched. Eek! Unhand my bow, sir! As the man waited, Randall coughed, edged away across the leather. Silence fell, until Randall finally whispered: “Why all the secrecy?”

Take me back to the metaphysicals, Randall thought. Shining his flashlight beam on each step before moving forward, he picked his way up the rotting stairs. The man had only appeared at the window for a moment in pallid light before he disappeared. But Randall knew who he was. The same black man who had begged from him several times, sometimes in the underground pedestrian tunnels around Elephant and Castle, sometimes on New Kent Road.

“I’m quite sure he’s dead, sir.” The woman at the British Film Archives had been stern, professional. “When I first began working here, he would show up from time to time, asking to see some old footage. He never had money for the fee, but we accommodated him when we could. Back then, everybody on the staff wanted to ask him questions about the early days. Some of us even helped him get into rehab programs for alcoholism, but he always went back on the bottle.”

“But I have seen this man,” Randall told her. “He’s alive. He panhandles near my hotel in Elephant and Castle. It must be the same man.”

“If he were alive now, sir, he’d be nearly one hundred.” The woman sounded pestered. “And he was in bad health fifteen years ago. How did you say you got his name, anyway?”

Later, when Randall had used the old key, after he flipped on a row of spitting incandescent bulbs and saw the trash heap that filled the entire room, he almost gave up before looking through the debris. Books and albums thrown everywhere, battered film cans, heaps of yellowed photographs, busted wooden chairs and cartons filled with nothing but dust. He would destroy something, he worried, if he began rummaging around blindly. Not to mention contracting some fungal disease. How can it be that no one has catalogued all this, to hell with storing it properly. But after wandering among the shelves and tables for a few minutes, he found the photograph. Keeping it beside him as he read through Harold Tarnsower’s diary for an hour, glancing up at it as he turned pages, pieces began to fall into place. And after he finished with the diary, he stumbled across the film can.

“Tell me the name of the last man on Sir Harry’s list, Stanley. The one who’s still alive. There’s only one, right?” In the empty tube station at Baker Street, Randall had tried to make his voice casual.

“Oh, Mr. Traner, I couldn’t possibly.” Mr. Signet had laughed. The Randall had taken the invitation for a drink. The pub had been borderline squalid.

“I need to know,” Randall insisted. “In the warehouse today, I found a photograph of Tarnsower and Tellyragh with two black men. And suddenly I need to know the name of the last man on your list.”

“Oh, how can anything for some professor’s book be so important?” He looked down the tracks. “Really, I wish you’d stop talking about your bloody—”

When Randall shoved him against the curved brick wall of the tube station, Signet gasped, then smiled uncertainly. But when Randall’s hands gripped his throat, the smile died.

“Is it Jankinn?” Randall shouted. “Rudolph Jankinn? Tell me!” Signet sputtered and coughed, twisting his head. Then he nodded, eyes blurred and wide.

Randall had let him go, I’m afraid that academic books can be serious in more than one way, Mr. Signet.” Walking away, he had called over his shoulder: “And I’m no one’s ‘Randy.’”

He stood in the storage vault now, wiping dust from the can, beginning to twist the steel platter top. Don’t be dissolved entirely. Don’t. But the film looked almost new. Perhaps it had been used only a few time. Randall unreeled about a foot of film, then more, until he saw a frame with writing. He shone the flashlight from behind the silver nitrate. He peered closely, he squinted, he forced his eyes to be stronger than they were. A pause, then he dropped the ribbon on the junk.

When he reached the hallway at the top of the stairs, he edged past broken chairs and mounds of trash. At the far end, a light burned through an open doorway. Randall found Jankinn lying on a mattress in the corner. When he stepped into the room, the man shifted his bulk, fixed a gaze on Randall through the dim light. “You here to kick me out?” he asked slowly. But when Randall began to explain himself, the man slowly heaved himself up, then fell into a chair, sighing.

“And after I found the photograph, I found this,” Randall concluded. He took a pair of tweezers from his pocket, opened the small film can. “Do you know what it is?” He plucked the short strip of silver nitrate from the can, held it dangling by one end.

The man sniffed. “You think I got a movieola around here to look at that with? Looks old, though. Don’t even got power in here. What is that, about five minutes running time? Hey, you got a cigarette for me?”

“Cartons full,” Randall said, “but first let me describe to you what’s on the film. Can you hear me all right?”

He nodded. “Ain’t too deaf, guv,” his eyes glancing between Randall and the film. “Let’s hear.”

When Randall was finished telling him about the film, the candle in the window had burned down to the sill. Randall caught his breath, suddenly aware again of where he was. Jankinn reached out a shaky hand, closed it around Randall’s wrist. At the touch of his scabrous, rugged skin, Randall winced. “Where’d you get that there footage, sir?” He coughed out the words, wiped his lips with his sleeve.

“It’s a long story, Mr. Jankinn. Please, do you know anything about it?”

A long pause. He licked his lips. “Anything? Hell, I know everything about it. My own father made it, the same time that some other company, a white company, was doing the same book into a film. My father’s brother worked on that crew.”

“Your uncle?” Randall asked. “Was his name Jameson?”

“Jimmy we called him. He thought Jameson Jankinn sounded snobbish. He was working for my daddy, too, but his white boss didn’t know about it. That man’s name was … hell, what was it now?” He stared off into space, lost.

“Branshaw Tellyragh?”

“That’s it, all right. You got another snobbish name there. Damn nice man, though.” He jerked his head up, looking at the film strip again. “Hey, how’d Tarnsower get a copy of daddy’s film, anyway? Or what’s left of it?”

“What else?” Randall coaxed. “What else do you remember?”

“Like I said, I remember everything else. That’s me in the film, ain’t it?”

“You’re in it?” Randall said. “Did you play a native?”

“A native, yes. And the hero, too, in my daddy’s version. Man, my uncle and my dad would laugh and laugh, just thinking what the guy who wrote the book would say about that.”

The hero, Randall thought. The black hero. A vision of his book’s dust jacket flashed through his mind. Laughing, he dropped to the floor next to Jankinn’s chair.

“You okay, son?” In the dying candlelight, the man regarded him cautiously.

“Never better, Mr. Jankinn,” Randall finally managed. “Let’s get you out of here. I think you need a change of location before we start talking.”

“How about those cigarettes?” He glared, truculent.

“Sir, I’m afraid that I lied about the cigarettes. You have smoked your last. And drunk your last drop of alcohol, by the way. You are now on the Randall Traner fitness and longevity program. Our first stop is a health center where you get checked out every way from Sunday. Then I take you to the best hotel either one of us has ever stayed in. And then you start telling me everything that you know about your father’s version of She. And about his ‘negro’ company.”

“Pardon me for saying it, sir.” Jankinn drew himself up from the chair, walked to the window and blew out the candle. “But if you think anybody today would give a good damn about a black film made from that old book, you’re the one needs a fitness program.”

As you know, the Hammer production of She (1965) ends with Ayeesha (She) and Leo, her reincarnated true love, the man whose return She has awaited for centuries, alone at last in the subterranean cavern visited once a millennium by a comet. To assure Leo that the fire sparked by the comet bestows immortality, She walks into the flame. A long, high shot of the chamber interior, the column of green flame roiling between the lovers. The pillar of fire opens. Enter She. A panning shot of her body as the flames was over her thin white gown. A close-up of She’s face, smiling with sensuous satisfaction. But slowly the smile falters. She lifts her hands, sees that they are veined and gnarled. Raising her arms to Leo, entreating him, She exposes her face. A series of dissolves finally culminates in a close-up: the ravaged visage of an ancient crone. Leo recoils. As She looks down at her body, perceiving her disastrous error, her long blonde hair falls in a pile at her feet. “Oh, horror!” she cries.

But what you don’t know is how the story ends in the eighth silent version of the novel. This is from the reconstructed shooting script for A Romance of Old Africa, directed by William Jankinn for Juli Imperial Players in 1912.

As She begins to enter the pillar of flame, Ymbsloppogas races down the stone steps into the cavern. Shoving Leo aside, he pulls She back from the flame.

Dialogue Intertitle: “Stop, O Queen! To bathe again in the star’s fire is to die in agony!”

Leo pulls Ymbsloppogas away from She. The two men wrestle each other to the ground. Finally, Ymbsloppogas pulls his knife, stabs Leo through the heart.

Dialogue Intertitle: “Die, English dog! Leave our Queen for Ymbsloppogas and her people!”

Rising, he faces her. They embrace. Close-up of She’s face.

Dialogue Intertitle: “Now I know it is you I have always loved, brave warrior! My centuries of waiting end at last!”

Tinted bright green, the comet swells in a jagged gap in the rock. The camera slowly pulls back. Below, Leo lies dead, the fair skin of his naked chest spattered with blood. As the camera recedes further, darkness clouds the edges of the frame. Far below, in an iris shot, Ymbsloppogas enters the fire while She watches. As the white flames play over his black skin, She raises her ebony arms, laughing, waiting for him to emerge, immortal.