Cover

Other Books By This Author

Also by Glen David Gold

Carter Beats the Devil

Title Page

Dedication

For Alice

I was loved.

—Mary Pickford

Newsreel for
November 12, 1916

A Day’s Pleasure

It was quite a large war. It was stupendously big and very distant. The public really was not inclined to pay much attention to it. … We had grown used to the shouting. This perfectly understandable and honest public attitude was reflected more accurately and frankly in the motion picture than in any other institution.

—Terry Ramsaye
film historian and publicist (1925)

1

At its northernmost limit, the California coastline suffered a winter of brutal winds pitched against iron-clad fog, and roiling seas whose whiplash could scar a man’s cheek as quickly as a cat-o’-nine-tails. Since the Gold Rush, mariners had run aground, and those who survived the splintering impact were often pulped when the tides tore them across the terrible strata of the volcanic landscape. For protection, the State had erected a score of lighthouses staffed with teams of three or four families who rotated duties that lasted into the day and into the night. The changing of the guard, as it were, was especially treacherous in some locations, such as Crescent City, accessible only by a tombolo that was flooded in high tide, or Point Bonita, whose wooden walkway, even after the mildest storm, tended to faint dead away from the loose soil of its mountaintop and tumble into the sea.