American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum Page B

had once been. The city had only one hope: The voters would have to approve $22.5 million in bonds to build an aqueduct from the Owens River to Los Angeles.
    Concerned, even frightened, the voters dutifully fell into line, Billy explained. The sale of the bonds was approved. And the release of the bond money allowed the first part of the scheme to be realized. Eaton and his clique of money men—including the publisher of the Times— resold, at an enormous profit, the land they had acquired along the Owens River to the city of Los Angeles. They made a fortune. But only a small fortune. The truly big money, Billy noted with genuine awe, would be earned once the aqueduct was completed, and the rest of their insiders’ plot could come to fruition.
     
    Suddenly Billy’s narrative came to a halt. One moment he had been going on in his intense, rapid-fire way, poised to reveal to MacLaren the final, audacious component of Otis’s scheme. Then, abruptly, he was distracted. The dining room, he realized, had turned quiet, an unnatural hush descending like an enveloping veil. Curious, he looked up and saw that people had stopped eating and talking. Everyone appeared to be following the progress across the room of a retinue of women. They were young, giggly, a bit flamboyant, and very glamorous. They moved with a confidence, a recognition, that all eyes were on them.
    Leading the pack, striding very purposefully as though oblivious to the commotion their presence was causing, was a familiar face. On the other side of the vast room, D.W. Griffith stopped at a table covered with a starched white cloth and set with heavy silver. The director stood very erect, waiting until the ladies were seated. He remained in this position for several moments, motionless and quiet, like a conductor preparing to lead his orchestra into the opening notes. At last, full of ceremony, D.W. took his seat. As if on command, the women at the table immediately turned their attention toward him.

THIRTEEN
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    T HE TROUPE HAD made their way across the country to Los Angeles in style. They had traveled in reserved coaches with red leather seats on trains renamed in their honor the Biograph Special. Conductors eagerly saw to their needs. Stewards hovered attentively in the dining car, and they had a generous three-dollar allowance to spend each day on food. In San Bernardino all the ladies were presented with bouquets of sweet-smelling carnations. When they arrived in Los Angeles the principal players were, to their surprise and delight, booked into the Alexandria, the city’s finest hotel.
    Gone were the days of traveling with theatrical stock companies from small town to small town. No more paying with their own money for railroad sleepers and greasy meals. No more finding themselves dropped at the train station at dawn and every hotel in town fully booked. They had been lifted out of the scramble of their previous lives. The movie business was booming, and they were part of it.
    That night, sitting in the hotel’s splendid dining room, full of a sense of the glittering enterprise that was their new calling, they listened as D.W., as usual, took center stage. He grew voluble when he had had a few glasses of wine, and it was his practice to use these communal meals to share a bit of what he had in store for the troupe. He was always open to their ideas, as long as he had the final say.
    He had plans, he revealed, for “something grand. ” He wanted them to take a second try at a story he had filmed before, Tennyson’s tale of an ocean voyage and doomed love, Enoch Arden. But this time it wouldn’t be shot in a Fourteenth Street ballroom in front of painted studio sets. He’d do it “right,” outdoors, by the sea. And if it took more than one thousand feet of film to tell the story, well, he’d figure out a way to get the exhibitors to accept such an unprecedented length. First thing, though, he needed costumes. There was