The Paramount Child

...Thoughtful of me as ever, he said, "Never mind me, kid...

...Horrible...

...I've seen a good many deaths in the pictures, of course, but they always heaved their chests...

...What a happy adult world it will be when all children are children of the theatre...

...A snapshot of it was found in her purse and is among my curiosities...

...I learned to read with great ease, of course, with the pictures explaining the text, and the text itself so brief and full of feeling...

...I felt my reason leaving me, and I bent lower over my dear and dying protector...

...I gather that he grudgingly allowed one of the women attendants to see that I was clothed and fed, but he took care of my education...

...What might have been my fate in this great organization trained to polite precision in the performance of assigned duty, I shudder to think...

...He just smiled and ceased to breathe...

...At that hour, I tqok my place in an orchestra chair and the world unrolled itself for my pleasure...

...The only sounds in life to me had been music exquisitely adapted to my moods, hushed footsteps, and precise, lowered, well-trained voices of ushers...

...Up and down the thickly carpeted staircase in the early morning hours, in and out among the seats on each floor until I had triumphantly scrambled to the very last four thousandth one in the very top row...

...The organ grills of wrought steel, crystal, and illuminated glass would catch these lights at sudden thrilling angles...

...I am unlike any other child in the world and I say it proudly, for I alone am the product of the superlative and the essential...

...But my definite school hours began at eleven-fifteen each morning when physical play was over...

...Time to go out into it, Buddy, and help yourself to a swell time...

...What ability I developed, what strength and size in that endless climbing up and down...

...Then the world's greatest Wurlitzer would boom out suddenly in a mighty breaking wave of sound which always left me breathless for a few moments...

...why, it can produce most of them all at once...

...Of course, I have had an unexcelled musical education, for there is no effect our organ cannot produce...

...He was out in the world for the morning, and he was carrying back a new suit of clothes for me, for I could never be induced to go out with him and leave this fascinating place...

...Look up and around...

...Was this the world...

...I saw the light of day at last...

...Under such conditions one eats with a zest that turns one into a lion cub...

...Could any little boy have had more thrilling playmates...

...I am very large for my age and very well-informed, and no one knows so well as I every inch of my Paramount home...

...My only knowledge of "intimate effect" is gained from my beloved Paramount home, but I feel sure there could be no more intimate effect anywhere...

...I shall live and die happily in Shadowland...

...The pervasive ground-swell of the great organ throbbed through to the black and gold couch on which she reclined, and blended now and then with the nearer notes of the Louis XVII gold piano in the Jade Room just above...

...I have never been bothered with the doings of anyone less exalted than the first in their respective fields—presidents and kings, prize-fighters, criminals, actresses, Derby winners, the largest boa-constrictors in the world, and the most stupendous waterfalls...

...How wise...

...Life did not at once flicker out and they sent for me...

...Then came the animated cartoons...

...I never knew what a draught was, or a change in temperature, and the seasons were merely a name to me—until that day of horror dawned last week...

...no Paramount child should—I would let loose my energies on my stair-sled...

...No wonder she loved the movies...

...You see, I am the Paramount child that I am largely because I have been spared the insignificant clutter of life...

...Great little old world, after all...

...Such a thin, inept, little wail of a sound, touching, I grant you, some strange unaccustomed focus of sensation, but so direfully inadequate beside my wonderful Wurlitzer...

...I know there must be a woman in every story of the screen and so I am already wise to their ways in life...

...Even this palace of entertainment, surpassing in architectural beauty the dream palaces of the Arabian Nights, cannot provide facilities for every human activity...

...These hours I knew as instinctively as a young animal, and you may be sure I never missed a food-rendezvous...

...But I like to think, that with her romantic nature she saw what an exquisite place it was to die in, stately with rare marble of Italy, carpeted with splendors of the Orient...

...Passed the little years...

...How different from her own little home in the Bronx...

...After these, with the bracing, stirring music adapted to each item, came the feature picture...

...the Venetian Room (Ladies' Cosmetic Room) which was my favorite, perhaps, because each bronze and china fixture represented a lady with the headdress of a special period, from the Elizabethan to the modern bob...

...What divine play, what a super-childhood it was, I realize from my acquaintance with home life gained from the screen...

...Soon I may become an usher...

...It was eleven-thirty of a morning in March, and suddenly there I was in the open air, bending over the huddled form of the only human being I knew...

...An early blighted love had shattered his hope of connubial joy, and he had retired from the world to live happily and usefully in this palace of truly international art...

...Such noises...

...How he managed to secrete me is his own affair, and the secret died in that valiant, conniving heart a few days ago...

...He sank back...

...I stored all their lessons in memory...

...It was a playground in every part of history which has proved worthy to find a place in interior decoration...

...For here are to be found relaxation, happiness, and joy...

...The soft lights, the velvet tread, the glitter of crystal, the mellow temperature, the silent, expectant, eager crowds of beauty-lovers—all gone...

...After a short concert came the news of the day...

...I know they are meant to be hauled around, and kissed in a long, slow, troubling manner—and they are always there when there is a small baby in the picture...

...The jeweled, illuminated fronts of the boxes faded into darkness, the light died out over my white and gold fountains in their crystal niches—all was dark except for the high blue gleam on the tops of golden arches far above me, and there in front of me the magic footlights glowing upward against the deep brocaded crimson of the curtain...

...There was the Chinoiserie (Ladies' Smoking Room) done in Chinese of French influence...

...It is marching that is the real thing, and fighting, and great ships at sea, and travel all over the world...

...And what an education...

...I am perfectly familiar with the way they hang around men's necks and always must kiss them goodbye at the wrong moment, which makes trouble for them without fail...

...The pandemonium of Times Square tore at my nerves with a myriad claws...

...No wonder that I am old for my age and wise beyond my years...

...Brought into those magnificent walls through a washer and thus freed from the dust of life, it was humidified and warmed all winter and dehumidified and refrigerated all summer...

...There is a place in such houses called a nursery...

...My Paramount "nursery" was a different matter...

...In that light my senses ached with its tension and starvation...

...And in that golden glow I hope to live until the end...

...I might have died from sheer lack of administrative provision for unexpected infants...

...To look on, not to do!—what a perfect motto for an enlightened race...

...But some thwarted parental passion still glowed in that form, though all day long his arm rose and fell in a West Point manner as he murmured, "Exit this end to the corridor, please...

...I use the well-worn phrase, though, of course, I do not mean the tawdry and garish effect to which it usually refers...

...My mother died on that memorable occasion...

...How my growing soul reveled in the lonely luxury of it all—the deep soft red of the upholstery, the crystal grills with the gigantic tree of life worked in jewels, the glorious golden arches soaring to their ten stories of height, yet somehow achieving that intimate effect which my usher told me had been the aim of the architects in every detail of the building...

...So little, so squalid, so dusty, so fetid, so raucous, so jumbled, so patchwork ! And miles above this colorless crawling confusion, a chill and watery sky...

...This was the only time when I felt a longing for the meagre world outside...

...But among the ushers was one with a heart of gold, which was as good goods as the lovely gold braid on his uniform...

...My whole being shudders at the thought that most of my fellow-creatures are condemned to such prisons...

...But how I loved its bright, round, mechanical perfection of tone...

...Once, when in the course of play I could not quite fit together the numbers of all the Louis furniture, I asked my usher why there were only Louis Cans and Louis Saze and Louis Eighteen...

...And now, in a page-boy's uniform, I have ceased to be an onlooker at life and am doing my part, acting as a guide to those thousands who daily pay tribute to art in this temple...

...A thin, watery, flat, disillusioning, whitish light fell blankly over the scene...

...Imagine how quickly I came to understand life in all its ramifications and meanings...

...How I wish all children could learn their history in this way...

...He was run over by a giddy taxi almost opposite our great bronze marquee...

...How often, when the cleaning women had finished their noiseless vacuum task, I used to lie on my back in the broad cross aisle of the orchestra and look for hours at the wonderful sun in splendor so high above me...

...How well I remember his answer: "Any Louis that ain't represented in this super-theatre must have been a flop in his day, and you don't need to load up your mind with him...

...The air I breathed was perfect...

...Then to look down from that last row to the small distant stage with the lights glowing on it, dizzy blue and red and violet, as my friend the spotlight man practised his art...

...I spent hours in this room making up stories about them, though only, of course, when it was not being used by the Publix patrons...

...Narrow, anaemic, lived in those monotonous greys and whites and blacks which are the colors of so-called real life, under unbelievably restricted surroundings...

...I did not know at first that he was dead...

...For, of course, the bill changes every week and sometimes oftener...

...I wished that I had never seen it...

...Shall I ever forget that first contact of mine with the world...

...Beautiful, large-faced cows and cats and dogs, racing black and alert across the white plains on which they did such vivid deeds of daring...

...My infant eyes actually opened on that marvelous artificial light, the daylight of the future, with which our patrons are familiar, radiating insistently and without variation from sconces illuminated with the gold and chromatic richness of the French renaissance...

...I looked up and about at this world which he recommended to me and my heart sank...

...Those marvelous animals...

...Those few glorious sovereigns who initiated styles in furniture so that ages later this temple of art should become a magnificent reality—what others, indeed, need we remember...

...But it is a pretty word and I knew no other...

...I could have gone on forever...

...A week ago my foster-usher died...

...We ate where we could, with food sneaked in somewhere from the world outside...

...Only the grand, important events of the world are fit to flash upon the silver screen...

...My foster-usher didn't believe in kiddie-shows for me any more than in infantile food...

...And pervading its sterile thinness were a thousand noises...

...I named them all from my favorite heroines of the screen, Gloria, Bebe, Mae, Arleen, and others...

...And what a place to learn to crawl and walk and run was my palatial Paramount home...

...So passed twelve years of my magic life...

...But they don't really count, my usher says...

...You have all 546 seen it and I won't describe it, wretched little space that it is, with a few dull toys on the floor...

...But fate held other things in store for me...

...Take the whole of it, Buster—girl-shows and all...

...My foster-usher had made me this, a little board seat just wide enough to hold me, with rails at each side to grip...

...I called it my sun, that gorgeous elliptical golden dome, though I seemed to insult it when I did so, when I thought what a pale grey thing was the sunlight of the screen...

...The first time I heard a violin solo on that stage, I burst out crying...

...Then there were the Peacock Alley, the Club Room, the Hunting Room, the Jade Room, the Powder Box, the Marie Antoinette Room (my revered birthplace), the Music Room, the Colonial Room, the Empire Room...

...Horses with wings which could jump up and down cliffs more swiftly than the eye could follow...

...Home life indeed...

...And repressing a mad impulse to shout aloud— for, of course, I have never spoken above a whisper...

...In the Marie Antoinette Room (for ladies) "just as the principal feature of the program went on, I first saw the light of day...

...So I fled back here...

...Gone was the hushed splendor of my beloved gilded Paramount home...

...I was unhampered by the continuous physical supervision of the narrow and limited private home, and allowed free range between the hours when I ate and slept...

...I wept and wept...