We were incessantly pestered by official mendicants and well-to-do beggars, by friends of the management or of the cinema employees, by “influential people” in droves. Favor to a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, the friend of a friend’s friend, to anyone with an authoritative manner, and the lack of moral courage that goes with it, is the curse of all Brazilian door-keepers. If a man had ever met a person in any way connected with the institution, he expected to get the glad hand and a smiling invitation to “go right in.” It was not so much that they were trying to save money; the milreis admission fee was not serious to the official and influential class; it was fazendo fita, showing off by stalking past the cringing ticket-collector with an air of daring him to challenge them. To march in with his whole decorated, upholstered, and perfumed family gave a man the sense of being a person of superior clay, for whom there are no barriers. This attitude ran the full gamut of government officials. One of the standing privileges of a newly appointed Minister of War is to go to the theater and ignore the ticket collector; it is his visible and final proof of office. Negro youths employed in the customhouse forced their way in without protest because some form of trouble would be sure to follow any interference with that class. My ears were constantly being importuned with, “Please, senhor, may I go in? I am an ‘artist’ or a poet, or fourteenth cousin of the delegado, or great-grandmother of the town dog-catcher, or a bag of wind, or....” When mail arrived for me at our consulate the native clerk was careful to keep that fact to himself if I called during the day, so that he could bring it to me at night and use it as a ticket for himself and his female hanger-on. In addition to all this, the short-sighted managers think it necessary to give permanent passes to many of the “influential families” in their neighborhood so that others will see that the place is fashionable and will patronize it. As a result, those who have money do not need to spend it, because they have season tickets, and those whom they are expected to imbue with the desire to go cannot do so because they do not have the money.
A woman of the comfortable class comes to the cinema with two, or even three nearly full-grown children, and though she knows perfectly well that they are expected to pay at least half-fare, she presents a single ticket for herself and starts to drag the children in after her. If the door-keeper has the courage to halt her, the woman, feigning great indignation, says:
“Why do they pay admission, little bits of children like that?”
“Yes, senhora,” replies the bowing manager, with far more courtesy than firmness.
“Oh dear,” sighs the woman, “I have just ten tostões with me for my own ticket and I’ll have to go way back home and get the rest”—whereupon the manager hastens to say, “that’s perfectly all right, senhora, go right in,” for he knows that if she turns homeward it will be in wrath and he will lose even the “dez tostões” she has paid for her own ticket. As often as she comes to the cinema the woman, and many like her, works the same trick with a most serious and innocent face.
We had to admit free the chauffeurs of private automobiles in order to keep the friendship and family influence of the patrons who came in them. Sometimes it was evident that the cinema was making use of us during our short engagement to win friends for themselves during the rest of the season. One manager went so far as to try not to include us in the program at all one Sunday afternoon, knowing he would fill the house anyway with Edison’s portrait outside and not have to share the receipts with us. Then anyone in any way connected with a newspaper, from the office-boy down to the editor’s third mistress, must be let in without question or the entertainment is forever blasted in that community. A decent and unusually good show for Brazil opened near us one evening. Being newly arrived from Europe, the manager gave two seats each to the principal newspapers, instead of allowing anyone attached to them to get in merely by mumbling that fact as they passed the door-keeper. Next day, after highly praising a salacious and worthless thing at another theater, the papers one and all announced that no decent Brazilian families should be seen at this one, and the following night the police closed the performance.
At the “Cinema High Life”—the mulatto boy operators had chalked the name on the back brick wall of the stage so that they could remember how to pronounce it, “Ai Laife,” in three syllables—which prided itself on attracting “le monde chic” of São Paulo, I counted 215 “deadheads” one night out of an audience of barely six hundred, and I missed a number when duties took me away from the door. Moreover I did not count the score or more in uniform, nor the friends of the stagehands who saw the pictures from the rear.
I soon cut off some of this dead-heading, but it was at the expense of much diligence and audacity, not to say diplomacy, for one cannot manhandle the Brazilians as one can a more straightforward people, without running the risk of being boycotted by the entire community. It meant constant vigilance, too, for the crooked are notoriously more energetic and cunning than the honest. In the beginning I lost considerable sleep over this petty form of grafting, but one soon learns in Brazil to take a new view of life, to smile and be “sympathico” and fit in as well as possible with the society about him. It is the only society he will find in any appreciable quantity as long as he remains in the country, and he may as well make the best of it.
Once in a while, though by no means often enough to make up for the “deadhead” losses, men went to the other extreme in fazendo fita. A fop now and then came in alone and bought an entire box for himself; or men well known in the community might come the first night with their families, thrusting the door-keeper aside, and take seats in the parquet, while the next night, when he came with his bejewelled mistress, the same man would take the best box available, and pay for it, less out of a sense of fairness than in order advantageously to display his prize to his envious fellow-citizens.
However, in compensation for my troubles new honors were heaped upon me. The Brazilian dearly loves an honorary title, and being unable to think of any other that would fit a man of my undoubtedly important position as “concessionary” for all Brazil of a great invention, they took to calling me “doctor.” In time I grew accustomed to being introduced with deep bows and the words, “Permita-me presental-lhe o Doutor Frawnck.” In “movie” circles I let the error pass as unimportant, but when one day even the American president of the college of São Paulo publicly addressed me by that title, I protested.