“Bring them home!” demanded Craig; and she and her husband came to a deadlock over the issue. The husband was infatuated, she declared; he was as complete a madman as a Soviet director. They argued for days and nights; meanwhile, Eisenstein tore off the roof of a Tehuantepec mansion to photograph a dance inside, gave a bullfight to keep an actor from going to Spain, and made arrangements to hire the whole Mexican Army. Again Craig clamored, “Bring them home!” And again husband and wife took up the issue; this time the husband was seized by a deadly chill and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and he lay on his back for two weeks.
The raising of money went on, and freight trains groaned under the loads of raw film going into Mexico, and exposed film coming out. Eisenstein shot the standing mummies of Michoacàn, the flower festivals of Xochimilco, and the “dead peoples’ day” celebrations of Amecameca, and ordered the Mexican Army to march out into the desert to fight a battle with a background of organ cactuses thirty feet high. It was the beginning of the fifteenth month of this Sisyphean labor when Craig assembled the cohorts of her relatives and lawyers, and closed in for the final grapple with her infatuated spouse. “Bring them home!” she commanded; and for eight days and nights the debate continued. To avoid going to the hospital, the husband went to the beach for three days; then he came back, and there were more days and nights of conferences with the assembled cohorts. At times such as this, husbands and wives discover whether they really love each other!
Craig was with me in the dream of a picture—until she decided that Eisenstein meant to grind her husband up in a pulp machine and spin him out into celluloid film. She thought that thirty-five miles of film was enough for any picture. And then she stood and looked at her husband, and her hands trembled and her lips quivered; she had licked him in that last desperate duel, and she wondered if in his heart he could ever forgive her. He did.
V
The real reason for Eisenstein’s delaying tactics was that he did not want to go back to his beloved Soviet Union. He had been trying to get a contract to make a picture in India, one in Japan, one in the Argentine. His relations with Craig’s brother had reached a point where he cursed Hunter; and Hunter, a Mississippian, got a gun and told him the next time he cursed he would be shot. So, I sent a cablegram to Stalin, asking him to order Eisenstein to return home; in reply I received a cablegram signed by Stalin informing me that they no longer had any use for Eisenstein and considered him a renegade.
The history of that cablegram is amusing. Craig regarded it as she would a rattlesnake in her home. Anyone who saw it, including the F.B.I., would assume that I was a cryptocommunist. The evil document must be locked up in a secret treasure box that contained such things as the letters from Jefferson Davis and his daughter, Winnie. I was not even allowed to know where that box was hidden.
But I had told one or two friends about the cablegram. Way back in the early Greenwich Village days I had known Robert Minor, art editor of The Masses. I had played tennis with him at Croton; and much later, in the days when I was writing the Lanny Budd books, he provided me with a story of what it was like to be arrested by the French police—a story that makes a delightful ending for the first Lanny Budd book, World’s End. Now, a friend in New York mentioned the cablegram to Bob, and reported Bob’s comment, “Tell Upton if he has a cablegram from Stalin he is the only man in America who can say it.”
In the end, we made a contract with Amtorg, the Russian trade agency in New York, which handled the whole Eisenstein matter. We agreed to ship the film to them with precise specifications that the boxes should not be opened in New York but should be forwarded immediately to Moscow where Eisenstein would cut the film, and the cut film would be shipped to us. So Eisenstein received orders that he could not fail to obey, and Hunter did not have to shoot him.
The director and his two associates left Mexico City in our Buick car and drove to New York; but instead of going at once to Moscow, as the agreement specified, Eisenstein stayed in New York, and about a week later we received letters from persons in New York to whom he had been showing the film.
That settled the matter for us. We put it into the hands of our lawyer, with instructions to repossess the film, repack it, and ship it to Hollywood—which was done. We made an agreement with Sol Lesser to cut it, and that was done. And in the spring of 1934 Thunder Over Mexico was scheduled to open at the Rialto Theater in New York.