SOUTH FLORIDA DEVASTATED 1000 DEAD, 38,000 DESTITUTE 4 страница

"Silence," yelled Madame Esther in a shrill woman's
voice that almost scared Margo out of her wits. "Frank
is waiting. No, he has been called away. He left a message
that all would be well. He left a message that tomorrow

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he would impart the information the parties desired and
that his little girl must on no account take any step with-
out consulting her darling Agnes."

Agnes burst into hysterical sobs and a hand tapped
Margo on the shoulder. The same greyhaired woman led
them to the back door again. She had some smellingsalts
that she made Agnes sniff. Before she opened the ground-
glass door she said, "That'll be fifty dollars, please.
Twentyfive dollars each. . . . And Madame says that the
beautiful girl must not come any more, it might be dan-
gerous for her, we are surrounded by hostile influences.
But Mrs. Mandeville must come and get the messages.
Nothing can harm her, Madame says, because she has the
heart of a child."

As they stepped out into the dark alley to find that it
was already night and the lights were on everywhere
Margo pulled her fur up round her face so that nobody
could recognize her.

"You see, Margie," Agnes said as they settled back into
the deep seat of the old Rolls, "everything is going to
be all right, with dear Frank watching over us. He means
that you must go ahead and marry Mr. Margolies right
away.""Well, I suppose it's no worse than signing a three-
year contract," said Margo. She told the chauffeur to drive
as fast as he could because Sam was taking her to an open-
ing at Grauman's that night.

When they drove up round the drive to the door, the
first thing they saw was Tony and Max Hirsch sitting on
the marble bench in the garden. "I'll talk to them," said
Agnes. Margo rushed upstairs and started to dress. She
was sitting looking at herself in the glass in her stepins
when Tony rushed into the room. When he got into the
light over the dressingtable she noticed that he had a black
eye. "Taking up the gentle art, eh, Tony?" she said with-
out turning around.

Tony talked breathlessly. "Max blacked my eye be-

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cause I did not want to come. Margo, he will kill me if
you don't give me one thousand dollars. We will not leave
the house till you give us a check and we got to have some
cash too, because Max is giving a party tonight and the
bootlegger will not deliver the liquor until he's paid cash.
Max says you are getting a divorce. How can you? There
is no divorce under the church. It's a sin that I will not
have on my soul. You cannot get a divorce."

Margo got up and turned around to face him. "Hand
me my negligee on the bed there . . . no use catching
my death of cold. . . . Say, Tony, do you think I'm get-
ting too fat? I gained two pounds last week. . . . Look
here, Tony, that squarehead's going to be the ruination
of you. You better cut him out and go away for another
cure somewhere. I'd hate to have the federal dicks get
hold of you on a narcotic charge. They made a big raid
in San Pedro only yesterday."

Tony burst into tears. "You've got to give it to me.
He'll break every bone in my body."

Margo looked at her wristwatch that lay on the dress-
ingtable beside the big powderbox. Eight o'clock. Sam
would be coming by any minute now. "All right," she
said, "but next time this house is going to be guarded by
detectives. . . . Get that," she said. "And any monkey-
business and you birds land in jail. If you think Sam
Margolies can't keep it out of the papers you've got an-
other think coming. Go downstairs and tell Agnes to make
you out a check and give you any cash she has in the
house." Margo went back to her dressing.

A few minutes later Agnes came up crying. "What shall
we do? I gave them the check and two hundred dollars.
. . . Oh, it's awful. Why didn't Frank warn us? I know
he's watching over us but he might have told us what to
do about that dreadful man." Margo went into her dress-
closet and slipped into a brand new eveninggown. "What
we'll do is stop that check first thing in the morning. You

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call up the homeprotection office and get two detectives
out here on day and night duty right away. I'm through,
that's all."

Margo was mad, she was striding up and down the
room in her new white spangly dress with a trimming of
ostrich feathers. She caught sight of herself in the big
triple mirror standing between the beds. She went over
and stood in front of it. She looked at the three views of
herself in the white spangly dress. Her eyes were a flash-
ing blue and her cheeks were flushed. Agnes came up
behind her bringing her the rhinestone band she was going
to wear in her hair. "Oh, Margie," she cried, "you never
looked so stunning."

The maid came up to say that Mr. Margolies was wait-
ing. Margo kissed Agnes and said, "You won't be scared
with the detectives, will you, dearie?" Margo pulled the
ermine wrap that they'd sent up on approval that after-
noon round her shoulders and walked out to the car.
Rodney Cathcart was there lolling in the back seat in his
dressclothes. A set of perfect teeth shone in his long brown
face when he smiled at her. Sam had got out to help her
in, "Margo darling, you take our breaths away, I knew
that was the right dress," he said. His eyes were brighter
than usual. "Tonight's a very important night. It is the
edict of the stars. I'll tell you about it later. I've had our
horoscopes cast."

In the crowded throbbing vestibule Margo and Rodney
Cathcart had to stop at the microphone to say a few words
about their new picture and their association with Sam
Margolies as they went in through the beating glare of
lights and eyes to the lobby. When the master of cere-
monies tried to get Margolies to speak he turned his back
angrily and walked into the theater as if it was empty, not
looking to the right or the left. After the show they went
to a restaurant and sat at a table for a while. Rodney
Cathcart ordered some kidneychops. "You mustn't eat too

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much, Si," said Margolies. "The pièce de résistance is at
my flat."

Sure enough there was a big table set out with cold
salmon and lobstersalad and a Filipino butler opening
champagne for just the three of them when they went
back there after the restaurant had started to thin out.
This time Margo tore loose and ate and drank all she
could hold. Rodney Cathcart put away almost the whole
salmon, muttering that it was topping and even Sam, say-
ing he was sure it would kill him, ate a plate of lobster-
salad.

Margo was dizzygiggly drunk when she found that the
Filipino and Sam Margolies had disappeared and that she
and Si were sitting together on the couch that had the
lionskin on it. "So you're going to marry Sam," said Si,
gulping down a glass of champagne. She nodded. "Good
girl." Si took off his coat and vest and hung them care-
fully on a chair. "Hate clothes," he said. "You must come
to my ranch. . . . Hot stuff.""But you wear them so
beautifully," said Margo. "Correct," said Si.

He reached over and lifted her into his knee. "But,
Si, we oughtn't to, not on Sam's lionskin." Si put his mouth
to hers and kissed her. "You find me exciting? You ought
to see me stripped.""Don't, don't," said Margo. She
couldn't help it, he was too strong, his hands were all over
her under her dress.

"Oh, hell, I don't give a damn," she said. He went
over and got her another glass of champagne. For him-
self he filled a bowl that had held cracked ice earlier in
the evening. "As for that lion it's bloody rot. Sam shot it
but the blighter shot it in a zoo. They were sellin' off
some old ones at one of the bloody lionfarms and they
had a shoot. Couldn't miss 'em. It was a bloody crime."
He drank down the champagne and suddenly jumped at
her. She fell on the couch with his arms crushing her.

She was dizzy. She walked up and down the room

-422-

trying to catch her breath. "Goodnight, hot sketch," Si
said and carefully put on his coat and vest again and was
gone out the door. She was dizzy.

Sam was back and was showing her a lot of calculations
on a piece of paper. His eyes bulged shiny into her face
as she tried to read. His hands were shaking."It's tonight,"
he kept saying, "it's tonight that our lifelines cross. . . .
We are married whether we wish it or not. I don't believe
in freewill. Do you, darling Margo?"

Margo was dizzy. She couldn't say anything. "Come,
dear child, you are tired." Margolies' voice burred sooth-
ingly in her ears. She let him lead her into the bedroom
and carefully take her clothes off and lay her between the
black silk sheets of the big poster bed.

It was broad daylight when Sam drove her back to the
house. The detective outside touched his hat as they turned
into the drive. It made her feel good to see the man's big
pugface as he stood there guarding her house. Agnes was
up and walking up and down in a padded flowered dress-
inggown in the livingroom with a newspaper in her hand.
"Where have you been?" she cried. "Oh, Margie, you'll
ruin your looks if you go on like this and you're just get-
ting a start too. . . . Look at this . . . now don't be
shocked . . . remember it's all for the best."

She handed the Times to Margo, pointing out a head-
line with the sharp pink manicured nail of her forefinger.
"Didn't I tell you Frank was watching over us?"

HOLLYWOOD EXTRA SLAIN AT PARTY

Noted Polo Player Disappears
Sailors Held

Two enlisted men in uniform, George Cook and Fred Cos-
tello, from the battleship Kenesaw were held for questioning
when they were found stupefied with liquor or narcotics in the
basement of an apartment house at 2234 Higueras Drive, San
Pedro, where residents allege a drunken party had been in

-423-

progress all night. Near them was found the body of a young
man whose skull had been fractured by a blow from a blunt
instrument who was identified as a Cuban, Antonio Garrido,
erstwhile extra on several prominent studio lots. He was still
breathing when the police broke in in response to telephoned
complaints from the neighbors. The fourth member of the
party, a German citizen named Max Hirsch, supposed by some
to be an Austrian nobleman, who shared an apartment at
Mimosa in a fashionable bungalow court with the handsome
young Cuban, had fled before police reached the scene of the
tragedy. At an early hour this morning he had not yet been
located by the police.

Margo felt the room swinging in@great circles around
her head. "Oh, my God," she said. Going upstairs she had
to hold tight to the baluster to keep from falling. She
tore off her clothes and ran herself a hot bath and lay
back in it with her eyes closed.

"Oh, Margie," wailed Agnes from the other room,
"your lovely new gown is a wreck."

Margo and Sam Margolies flew to Tucson to be mar-
ried. Nobody was present except Agnes and Rodney
Cathcart. After the ceremony Margolies handed the jus-
tice of the peace a new hundreddollar bill. The going was
pretty bumpy on the way back and the big rattly Ford tri-
motor gave them quite a shakingup crossing the desert.
Margolies' face was all colors under his white beret but
he said it was delightful. Rodney Cathcart and Agnes
vomited frankly into their cardboard containers. Margo
felt her pretty smile tightening into a desperate grin but
she managed to keep the wedding breakfast down. When
the plane came to rest at the airport at last, they kept the
cameramen waiting a half an hour before they could trust
themselves to come down the gangplank flushed and smil-
ing into a rain of streamers and confetti thrown by the
attendants and the whir of the motionpicture cameras.

-424-

Rodney Cathcart had to drink most of a pint of scotch
before he could get his legs not to buckle under him.
Margo wore her smile over a mass of yellow orchids that
had been waiting for her in the refrigerator at the airport,
and Compton looked tickled to death because Sam had bought
her orchids too, lavender ones, and insisted that she stride
down the gangplank into the cameras with the rest of
them.

It was a relief after the glare of the desert and the
lurching of the plane in the airpockets to get back to the
quiet dressingroom at the lot. By three o'clock they were
in their makeup. In a small room in the ground floor
Margolies went right back to work taking closeups of
Margo and Rodney Cathcart in a clinch against the back-
ground of a corner of a mud fort. Si was stripped to the
waist with two cartridgebelts crossed over his chest and
a canvas legionnaire's kepi on his head and Margo was
in a white eveningdress with highheeled satin slippers.
They were having trouble with the clinch on account of
the cartridgebelts. Margolies with his porcelainhandled
cane thrashing in front of him kept strutting back and
forth from the little box he stood on behind the camera
into the glare of the klieg light where Margo and Si
clinched and unclinched a dozen times before they hit a
position that suited him. "My dear Si," he was saying
"you must make them feel it. Every ripple of your muscles
must make them feel passion . . . you are stiff like a
wooden doll. They all love her, a piece of fragile beau-
tiful palpitant womanhood ready to give all for the man
she loves. . . . Margo darling, you faint, you let your-
self go in his arms. If his strong arms weren't there to
catch you you would fall to the ground. Si, my dear fel-
low, you are not an athletic instructor teaching a young
lady to swim, you are a desperate lover facing death. . . .
They all feel they are you, you are loving her for them,
the millions who want love and beauty and excitement,

-425-

but forget them, loosen up, my dear fellow, forget that
I'm here and the camera's here, you are alone together
snatching a desperate moment, you are alone except for
your two beating hearts, you and the most beautiful girl
in the world, the nation's newest sweetheart. . . . All
right. . . . hold it. . . . Camera."

NEWSREEL LXIII

but a few minutes later this false land disappeared as
quickly and as mysteriously as it had come and I found before
me the long stretch of the silent sea with not a single sign of
life in sight

Whippoorwills call
And evening is nigh
I hurry to . . . my blue heaven

LINDBERGH IN PERIL AS WAVE TRAPS HIM IN
CRUISER'S BOW

Down in the Tennessee mountains
Away from the sins of the world
Old Dan Kelly's son there he leaned on his gun
Athinkin' of Zeb Turney's girl

ACCLAIMED BY HUGE CROWDS IN THE STREETS

Snaps Pictures From Dizzy Yardarm

Dan was a hotblooded youngster
His Dad raised him up sturdy an' right

ENTHRALLED BY DARING DEED CITY CHEERS
FROM DEPTHS OF ITS HEART

FLYER SPORTS IN AIR

-426-

His heart in a whirl with his love for the girl
He loaded his doublebarreled gun

LEADERS OF PUBLIC LIFE BREAK INTO
UPROAR AT SIGHT OF FLYER

CONFUSION IN HOTEL

Aviator Nearly Hurled From Auto as it Leaps Forward
Through Gap in Crowd

Over the mountains he wandered
This son of a Tennessee man
With fire in his eye and his gun by his side
Alooking for Zeb Turney's clan

SHRINERS PARADE IN DELUGE OF RAIN
Paper Blizzard Chokes Broadway

Shots ringin' out through the mountain
Shots ringin' out through the breeze

LINDY TO HEAD BIG AIRLINE

The story of Dan Kelly's moonshine
Is spread far and wide o'er the world
How Dan killed the clan shot them down to a man
And brought back old Zeb Turney's girl

a short, partly bald man, his face set in tense emotion, ran
out from a mass of people where he had been concealed and
climbed quickly into the plane as if afraid he might be stopped.
He had on ordinary clothes and a leather vest instead of a coat
He was bareheaded. He crowded down beside Chamberlin
looking neither at the crowd nor at his own wife who stood a
little in front of the plane and at one side, her eyes big with
wonder. The motor roared and the plane started down the
runway, stopped and came back again and then took off per-
fectly

-427-

ARCHITECT

A muggy day in late spring in eighteen eighty-
seven a tall youngster of eighteen with fine eyes and a
handsome arrogant way of carrying his head arrived in
Chicago with seven dollars left in his pocket from buy-
ing his ticket from Madison with some cash he'd got by
pawning Plutarch's Lives, a Gibbon Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire and an old furcollared coat.

Before leaving home to make himself a career in
an architect's office (there was no architecture course at
Wisconsin to clutter his mind with stale Beaux Arts
drawings); the youngster had seen the dome of the
new State Capitol in Madison collapse on account of
bad rubblework in the piers, some thieving contractors'
skimping materials to save the politicians their rakeoff,
and perhaps a trifling but deadly error in the archi-
tect's plans;

he never forgot the roar of burst masonry, the
flying plaster, the soaring dustcloud, the mashed bodies
of the dead and dying being carried out, set faces livid
with plasterdust.

Walking round downtown Chicago, crossing and
recrossing the bridges over the Chicago River in the
jingle and clatter of traffic, the rattle of vans and
loaded wagons and the stamping of big drayhorses and
the hooting of towboats with barges and the rumbling
whistle of lakesteamers waiting for the draw,

he thought of the great continent stretching a
thousand miles east and south and north, three thou-
sand miles west, and everywhere, at mineheads, on the
shores of newlydredged harbors, along watercourses, at
the intersections of railroads, sprouting

shacks roundhouses tipples grainelevators stores
warehouses tenements, great houses for the wealthy set

-428-

in broad treeshaded lawns, domed statehouses on hills,
hotels churches operahouses auditoriums.

He walked with long eager steps
towards the untrammeled future opening in every
direction for a young man who'd keep his hands to his
work and his wits sharp to invent.

The same day he landed a job in an architect's
office.

Frank Lloyd Wright was the grandson of a Welsh
hatter and preacher who'd settled in a rich Wiscon-
sin valley, Spring Valley, and raised a big family of
farmers and preachers and schoolteachers there.
Wright's father was a preacher too, a restless illadjusted
Newenglander who studied medicine, preached in a
Baptist church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and then
as a Unitarian in the middle west, taught music, read
Sanskrit and finally walked out on his family.

Young Wright was born on his grandfather's farm
went to school in Weymouth and Madison, worked
summers on a farm of his uncle's in Wisconsin.

His training in architecture was the reading of
Viollet le Duc, the apostle of the thirteenth century
and of the pure structural mathematics of gothic stone-
masonry, and the seven years he worked with Louis
Sullivan in the office of Adler and Sullivan in Chicago.
(It was Louis Sullivan who, after Richardson, invented
whatever was invented in nineteenthcentury architec-
ture in America).

When Frank Lloyd Wright left Sullivan he had
already launched a distinctive style, prairie architecture.
In Oak Park he built broad suburban dwellings for
rich men that were the first buildings to break the hold
on American builders' minds of centuries of pastward
routine, of the wornout capital and plinth and pedi-

-429-

ment dragged through the centuries from the Acropolis,
and the jaded traditional stencils of Roman masonry,
the halfobliterated Palladian copybooks.

Frank Lloyd Wright was cutting out a new avenue
that led towards the swift constructions in glassbricks
and steel

foreshadowed today.

Delightedly he reached out for the new materials,
steel in tension, glass, concrete, the million new metals
and alloys.

The son and grandson of preachers, he became a
preacher in blueprints,

projecting constructions in the American future
instead of the European past.

Inventor of plans,
plotter of tomorrow's girderwork phrases,

he preaches to the young men coming of age in
the time of oppression, cooped up by the plasterboard
partitions of finance routine, their lives and plans made
poor by feudal levies of parasite money standing
astride every process to shake down progress for the
cutting of coupons:

The properly citified citizen has become a broker,
dealing chiefly in human frailties or the ideas and
inventions of others, a puller of levers, a presser of
buttons of vicarious power, his by way of machine
craft . . . and over beside him and beneath him, even
in his heart as he sleeps, is the taximeter of rent, in
some form to goad this anxious consumer's unceasing
struggle for or against more or less merciful or mer-
ciless money increment.

To the young men who spend their days and
nights drafting the plans for new rented aggregates of
rented cells upended on hard pavements,

-430-

he preaches
the horizons of his boyhood,

a future that is not the rise of a few points in a
hundred selected stocks, or an increase in carloadings,
or a multiplication of credit in the bank or a rise in the
rate on callmoney,

but a new clean construction, from the ground up,
based on uses and needs,

towards the American future instead of towards
the painsmeared past of Europe and Asia. Usonia he
calls the broad teeming band of this new nation across
the enormous continent between Atlantic and Pacific.
He preaches a project for Usonia:

It is easy to realize how the complexity of crude
utilitarian construction in the mechanical infancy of
our growth, like the crude scaffolding for some noble
building, did violence to the landscape. . . . The crude
purpose of pioneering days has been accomplished. The
scaffolding may be taken down and the true work, the
culture of a civilization, may appear.

Like the life of many a preacher, prophet, ex-
horter, Frank Lloyd Wright's life has been stormy.
He has raised children, had rows with wives, over-
stepped boundaries, got into difficulties with the law,
divorcecourts, bankruptcy, always the yellow press
yapping at his heels, his misfortunes yelled out in head-
lines in the evening papers: affairs with women, the
nightmare horror of the burning of his house in Wis-
consin.

By a curious irony

the building that is most completely his is the Im-
perial Hotel in Tokyo that was one of the few struc-
tures to come unharmed through the earthquake of
1923 (the day the cable came telling him that the

-431-

building had stood saving so many hundreds of lives
he writes was one of his happiest days)

and it was reading in German that most Ameri-
cans first learned of his work.

His life has been full of arrogant projects unac-
complished. (How often does the preacher hear his
voice echo back hollow from the empty hall, the drafts-
man watch the dust fuzz over the carefullycontrived
plans, the architect see the rolledup blueprints curl
yellowing and brittle in the filingcabinet.)

Twice he's rebuilt the house where he works in his
grandfather's valley in Wisconsin after fires and disas-
ters that would have smashed most men forever.

He works in Wisconsin,
an erect spare whitehaired man, his sons are archi-
tects, apprentices from all over the world come to work
with him,

drafting the new city (he calls it Broadacre City).

Near and Far are beaten (to imagine the new city
you must blot out every ingrained habit of the past,
build a nation from the ground up with the new tools).
For the architect there are only uses:

the incredible multiplication of functions, strength
and tension in metal,

the dynamo, the electric coil, radio, the photo-
electric cell, the internalcombustion motor,
glass
concrete;

and needs. (Tell us, doctors of philosophy, what
are the needs of a man. At least a man needs to be
not jailed notafraid nothungry notcold not without love,
not a worker for a power he has never seen

that cares nothing for the uses and needs of a
man or a woman or a child.)

Building a building is building the lives of the
workers and dwellers in the building.

-432-

The buildings determine civilization as the cells
in the honeycomb the functions of bees.

Perhaps in spite of himself the arrogant drafts-
man, the dilettante in concrete, the bohemian artist for
wealthy ladies desiring to pay for prominence with the
startling elaboration of their homes has been forced by
the logic of uses and needs, by the lifelong struggle
against the dragging undertow of money in mortmain,

to draft plans that demand for their fulfillment a
new life;

only in freedom can we build the Usonian city.
His plans are coming to life. His blueprints, as once
Walt Whitman's words, stir the young men: --

Frank Lloyd Wright,
patriarch of the new building,
not without honor except in his own country.