THE ACCOMPANIST
JOHN HARRISON
I NEVER THOUGHT I would tell anyone this story. I convinced myself no one would believe it. It would surely be dismissed as fantasy, or worse, hallucination. But perhaps the real reason is that I wanted what happened to remain a secret of mine, precious and inviolate. There hasn’t been a day in almost seventy years I haven’t thought back to that December evening to marvel at what happened.
Now that Liberty is gone and my days are certainly numbered, I suppose there’s no good reason to keep it to myself anymore. Besides, I’m too old to give a damn whether anyone believes me. It’s hard enough holding this pencil.
I was only eighteen when I first met him. I’d been hired by The Mutual Life Insurance Co. as an apprentice accountant in their Pittsburgh office. Those were heady times for a young man like me. The country was booming, life was swollen with possibility, fortune was easily within reach. It was a dangerous time, too; more so than we realized at the time. We were lurching into the modern age. Seeds of economic chaos and social upheaval were already rooted in that fertile soil of ambition and self-assurance. Soon, we’d reap the riotous harvest of that discontent.
My first impression of him was curious, to say the least. I’d been forewarned by the office manager, Zack Smith.
“You’ll like Matthew Perdu. He’s a brilliant man with numbers. Maybe the best we got. He’s a little, how shall I say, distracted. But you’ll learn a great deal, don’t worry ’bout that.”
I’d expected a nice old gentleman with thick glasses and a thin voice. Instead, I was shown a man no more than thirty, with eyes as sharp as polished crystal and penetrating as the most intimate question; with a shock of unruly hair that seemed, as I noticed later, to rise and fall as he spoke. “He may not be with us much longer,” Smith had said with sincere regret. “His, uh, habits don’t quite conform to our standards, I’m afraid.”
“Habits?” I asked, fearing… no, hoping for some scandalous revelation. At my age, I craved the unusual, the taboo.
“His hours are irregular…”
Aha, I thought enthusiastically.
“I’ve put up with it because he is good, and, frankly, I like him. But you can’t run an office allowing individualism its head. Bad for morale, you know.”
Well, by now I was thoroughly intrigued, and my first view of him did nothing to dispel the curiosity. He was sitting at his high desk tapping methodically on a set of company books with his pencil as if working out some intricate musical pattern. He never heard us come in. He simply stared off through the window in front of him, tapping and swaying; humming, too, I believe, although it sounded more like chanting. As we stood there and watched, I thought I saw Smith smile affectionately.
“Ah hem,” Smith coughed.
Perdu turned and I swear his hair stood up a bit when he saw us.
“This is Justin Redding, Perdu, the young man I told you about.”
He smiled gently and came right over to me. “Yes, of course,” he said, almost singing.
“Matthew is aware of your background, Justin, and knows what you should do. Mark him well. You will learn. You will learn.”
I got the impression he meant more than bookkeeping.
Matthew was indeed the skilled and patient teacher that Smith had predicted. His sense of humor made the days fly as he punctuated his coaching with remarks on all manner of things, usually barbed with what I considered an appealing and healthy cynicism. No fool this man. He was highly educated and could comment reasonably on most subjects, even though his habit of drifting off mid-sentence to a place only he could go was, at times, a little embarrassing for me.
I soon discovered his real passions were music and the cinema. They called it moving pictures back then, and it was considered a rather low-class form of entertainment. His interest in it only served to feed my fascination with him. So when he invited me to his home for supper one evening, I accepted immediately.
He had a small apartment in the same neighborhood as my boarding house, and it appeared extremely well kept and comfortable, not the quarters of a bachelor with the absent-minded qualities of Matthew Perdu.
“I want you to meet my wife, Liberty,” he said as he led me to the kitchen.
She was standing over a counter in the center of the room preparing supper. I think my heart must have stopped for a split second because I almost fainted. My mouth went instantly dry, and I heard a marvelous tone rush by my ears.
“I’ve brought a friend home for dinner,” Matthew said. “Justin Redding, the new young man at the firm.”
How do you do’s were difficult but I managed. She had a smile that could melt iron and that wonderfully thick hair folded on the back of her head framed a magnetic expression of utter calm. Her voice was almost a whisper, but it wasn’t timid. I had never seen such a beautiful woman.
Matthew must have sensed my innocent infatuation with his wife, but he carried on in his inimitable way talking about this and that. Liberty was quiet most of the time, only occasionally commenting on what he was talking about. They seemed to know each other profoundly. I just sat there and marveled… at both of them.
“Are you the spirited sort?” he asked me over coffee.
“I’d like to think so,” I said eagerly.
“Good. In a moment we’ll go downtown.”
“Downtown?” But he was already up and out of the room. He returned a few minutes later carrying a stack of music manuscripts and signaled me to come along. I made my way to the kitchen and stammered with thank-you’s and see-you-again’s.
Liberty smiled broadly at me. I’ll never forget that smile. It never faded until the day she died.
Matthew and I took a trolley downtown and got off at Smithfield Street. He explained on the way that he had another job at night, one which he loved more than all else except it paid too little money. He’d met a man indirectly through our firm, a Mr. J. P. Harris, who had a number of ventures in the entertainment field, one of which was a storefront shop (he called it a Nickelodeon) where he exhibited motion pictures to paying customers. When Mr. Harris found out that Matthew was a pianist of some skill, the older man asked my friend to consider accompanying the shows at his establishment. It was an offer Matthew accepted on the spot.
I’d heard about this “movie” experience but was never allowed to go. My parents were a bit puritanical. Oh, I’d sneaked into the burlesque hall around the corner on Forbes Ave. once with several other boys, and at the time that was something to see, let me tell you. But I had no idea what to expect from this adventure.
Mr. Harris’s Nickelodeon was not the spare, odorous theater I’d expected. Not at all like the burlesque hall. In fact, this place had a certain class and charm, which, I found out later, was the owner’s expressed intention. He fully expected the movie industry to flourish, and he wanted to encourage the proper sort of people to attend.
As soon as we arrived, Matthew got me a seat and quickly disappeared. I caught sight of him moments later sitting at a piano near the front of the room. There were several other men in the room waiting patiently for the program to begin. All appeared to be veterans of this type of amusement.
After a few minutes the room darkened. I could hear movement and behind me somewhere, the cranking of machinery starting up. Suddenly a flickering light shot out over my head in a beam, exploding on the wall in front of me with the most magical set of moving photographs. The play was entitled Tess of the Storm Country. A dynamic young woman named Pickford had the lead. I can’t remember too much about the movie itself (it was a flop, it turns out), but the dizzying experience in that theater irrevocably changed my perception of the whole world. I instantly became a devoted enthusiast of the motion picture.
My only recollection of Matthew during the movie was as a figure off to the side of the room swaying back and forth to the rhythms of music and story. In fact, his music and the images on the wall became inseparable to me. His movements seemed to correspond exactly to the emotions on the screen. When the action was passionate, so was he; when it was calm, he seemed at ease. I was embarrassed to tell him this afterward because I felt I’d betrayed his invitation by not concentrating solely on his playing. On the contrary, he was delighted with my “review.”
I left him there for a second performance and returned home alone. Made the trip in an exalted state and didn’t sleep much that night. But I wanted to talk with Matthew more. I wanted to see more movies with him.
I wanted to see Liberty again.
Matthew was late for work the next morning.
It was a mild summer that year, and Matthew and Liberty often took me with them on their weekend rides into the country for picnics. We went to concerts together, and exhibits at Carnegie’s new museum. I loved their company and still treasure those memories as some of the happiest of my life. I continued to be astonished at Matthew’s store of knowledge, and Liberty seemed to grow more beautiful every day. I also learned that there was a certain impishness to her. She was a practical joker at heart, but never cruel or condescending.
I also went to the movies a lot that summer. In the beginning I’d accompany Matthew, but later on I began to go by myself, arriving just before the performance to sneak into a seat before he noticed. I’d become accustomed to this infant art form and soon developed a crude sophistication about it. I could distinguish the difference in the qualities of movies. I became familiar with the names of the New Jersey companies that made them. I was a fan of certain performers, especially the Pickford girl.
But I soon realized how great a part Matthew played in my enjoyment. One night when he was ill and couldn’t play, I watched a movie I’d seen twice before (I was a repeat offender, you see). I enjoyed the story without Matthew’s music, but surprisingly not as much as before. Somehow I felt the movie was not exactly the same one I’d seen earlier. Now, I always went to the Nickelodeon sober. I watched carefully. I studied, you might say, and this was the third viewing of this particular story. But there were minor differences. Sometimes these discrepancies were simply my emotional response to a scene. For example, in the previous viewings I’d been outraged by the behavior of a particular male character toward his wife. On this occasion, however, I felt somewhat sympathetic to his situation. Other differences were more manifest. I remembered an entire section of the plot happening differently from what I witnessed that night. On my way home I was angry with myself for the confusion. I’d come to think of myself as a bit of a movie aficionado. But what kind of an aficionado can’t remember a movie from one night to the next? I puzzled over this for some time.
When I told Matthew about this later, he only smiled enigmatically.
I’d often sit in his apartment and watch him practice at the piano while Liberty prepared our supper. His repertoire was extraordinary, all of it memorized. Composers I’d never heard of: Satie, Webern, and some truly challenging stuff by a man named Schoenberg who apparently liked mathematics a whole lot more than melody.
“I practice scales and intervals constantly. Liberty has to leave the house and take a walk sometimes,” he smiled gently. “Says it makes her feel odd. But this constant repetition reacquaints my fingers with the keyboard so that I never have to look… or think. I’m more interested in sound and texture than melody or chord progression.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But once during a routine practice of scales, he played something that made me twitch.
“What was that?” I cringed.
“It’s a tritone,” he laughed. “An augmented fourth. Meant to be annoying. Diabolus in musica.”
“Diabolic… what?”
“The devil in music.” He lowered his voice melodramatically. “An illegal interval in the middle ages… when music was the dominion of ecclesiastics and monks.”
He played it again, and I winced again. Couldn’t help it.
“Not very pretty, is it? But it has its uses, as you’ve noticed,” he chuckled. “I like it.”
Matthew would also work for hours on a style of improvising he called “spontaneous composition.” It was astonishing to hear. He said he wanted to use his music to cause a transmutation in the soul of the audience, a metamorphosis during which people would be transported to another place, another time. His theories were couched in a kind of spiritualism with which I wasn’t very comfortable, but I listened patiently as he attempted to convey his vision of a perfect marriage of music and cinema. He was convinced that the eventual alloy of the two would have a mystical effect on people.
I told him I thought his aspirations seemed to have theological origins.
“The artistic urge is essentially a spiritual urge,” he quickly replied.
I’d become so much a part of Matthew and Liberty’s household that I felt like a member of the family. Had I known what was about to happen I would have stayed away.
Or… maybe not.
Alone one night with Liberty while Matthew was at the theater, I quizzed her about Matthew’s theories, and she told me he’d been struggling with them for as long as she’d known him. To illustrate, she told me of their honeymoon. He took her to France, and, of course, she was thrilled. But his alternative reason for going there, she soon discovered, was to meet the inventor, George Melies, who had a movie studio in Paris. Matthew had seen a Melies movie based on Verne’s Trip to the Moon, and it had galvanized his thoughts. Although Liberty didn’t really mind the excursions away from their romantic pursuits, it was then she realized she’d forever share her husband’s love with another force.
Something else occurred during the honeymoon, which I found fascinating. Matthew had somehow gotten tickets to the premiere of a ballet by the composer Stravinsky. Liberty said it was called The Coronation of Spring. Apparently, this was quite a coup on Matthew’s part, and the couple prepared for the evening with the greatest enthusiasm. For her part, Liberty’s knowledge of music was parochial, but Matthew explained that Stravinsky was sure to be a giant in music, and their chance to see this premiere was a once in a lifetime thing.
Her eyes glowed as she told me the story, how they dressed to the teeth, how Matthew hired a private cab for the trip from the hotel to the concert hall, how he’d showered her with flowers from street vendors all evening and generally acted the lovesick fool. She was invigorated by it all. Then, the concert…
There had been some controversy surrounding the ballet arising from critics’ reaction to dress rehearsals, so the hall was filled with tension and anticipation. There were whistles and shouts before the curtain even rose. The first minutes of the performance were uneventful, but at one point a few members of the audience began to protest. It was extremely modern music, and from the way Liberty described it the choreography was quite suggestive. The hall lights came up, and the crowd quieted down, but within minutes a veritable riot broke out.
Supporters and antagonists yelled at each other across the aisles. Matthew leapt to his feet in defense of the music and was punched by a man in front of him. Nevertheless, they stayed until the end, at which point Matthew screamed, “Bravo,” for a good five minutes. (She told me his hair stood straight up on end.) He positively shuddered with excitement over the next few hours. He’d never experienced any music with such extreme visual power, he told her. It was evolutionary. A new way. He couldn’t remember much about the dancing.
That event and the trip to Melies’s studio convinced Liberty she’d married an artist. She was deeply in love with him then and still was now. But I detected a certain sadness in her voice, and I suddenly appreciated the simultaneous closeness and distance she felt about Matthew Perdu.
“I love him,” she murmured, not looking at me. “But it’s a changed love… not… not the love of a wife.”
I could barely hear her last words, but the meaning was clear enough.
One night I arrived at the theater late, cold and wet. Things had been harried at the office, and Mr. Smith was especially perturbed at Matthew for leaving early. I made a lame excuse for my friend, then angrily completed both my assignment and the one he’d left unfinished. His tenure at Mutual was fast coming to an end, that was sure. By the time I got to the Nickelodeon, the first performance had already begun.
I rushed the purchase of my ticket, dashed through the lobby hoping I’d only missed a little bit when Matthew’s playing stopped me dead. My sense of space and location suddenly vanished. Time evaporated. Images flooded my mind. Moving images. As if I were having some kind of waking dream. As if a movie were playing inside my mind.
“Aren’t you going in?” The manager interrupted my reverie.
“Oh, yes, of course.” How long had I been standing there? What had I been doing?
“I wish he’d stick to the text, you know,” the pudgy man said. Matthew had introduced me to him once, although he rarely came out of his tiny office off the lobby. “It’s… it’s disorienting, that… that crazy stuff he plays. Sometimes have to close my door or I can’t concentrate.”
“Have you had complaints?” I asked.
“No,” he murmured, “but he’s doing it more and more. Sooner or later he’s going to drive a customer away. I’m going to have to speak with him.”
I went in and watched the rest of the movie. And that’s when I realized I hadn’t missed a thing. I knew exactly what the story was about.
I startled a gentleman in the lobby afterward by grabbing his arm and asking him to listen to my synopsis of the early part of the movie, the part I thought I’d missed. He listened patiently then told me my recollection was correct.
On the way home I told Matthew of my experience. He smiled at me with that enigmatic grin again.
“Yes. I’m getting there. It’s working,” he said, adding nothing further.
By November Matthew was spending almost all of his free time at Harris’s Nickelodeon; hour upon hour in a dreary cell of a room beneath the theater where he’d wait between performances, studying strips of film provided by the projectionist with whom he’d established an enduring friendship (founded, I believe, on the old man’s love of whiskey and Matthew’s ability to provide it). It was a dank place, that dungeon. The smell, the graffiti on the walls, the harsh glare from that single bare bulb above him gave me the impression illicit activities went on here in his absence. I never understood why he preferred to lounge there instead of the lobby, or even outdoors.
“It’s quiet,” was his only explanation, ignoring the hiss of steam pipes, the “clank” and “bang” of monstrous furnaces somewhere… which always made me jump. But there he’d sit, quietly as if meditating, pieces of music and film scattered about the floor randomly.
Liberty seemed to be withdrawing. She was always so patient with him, but as he obsessively pushed closer and closer to some elusive goal only he could see, he was leaving her further and further behind.
I spent a lot of time with both of them, but separately, not together as during our leisurely summer months. My presence seemed to lift Liberty’s spirits, but I was treading on slippery and dangerous emotional ground.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could hear them talking?” I said while watching him tinker with his film in that tiny room below Harris’s Nickelodeon.
He suddenly turned to me with an expression I’d never seen before. A cold, unpleasant darkness swept into his eyes. And I swear his hair throbbed.
“It would add so much….” I stammered.
“That’s theater,” he hissed. “You want to hear people talk, go to the theater. This is a different art, an art of international language… like music. It needs no… dialogue.”
He said that last word with an unmistakable tone of contempt.
“Almost like dreaming,” I muttered absentmindedly.
“Yes. That’s it. Collective dreaming,” he said. And his eyes were gleaming once again. He continued to work for a moment, then he paused and bowed his head.
“They’ll do it, you know.”
“What?” I asked, troubled by the non sequitur.
“They’ll make the pictures talk. Sooner or later. To satisfy people like…”
“Me?”
He looked up. He tried to dismiss the accusation with a slight smile. It came off as a grimace instead.
“The promise of cinema will have been betrayed” was all he said.
When I watched the movie later that night, I completely forgot that it played without a single title card. You see, he had cut them all out! But I understood it perfectly.
For the next few weeks Matthew was fanatic about his work at the theater. All else seemed a distraction to him. I covered for him at the office. He became gaunt, his eyes lost their penetrating quality. Their vision had turned inward, I believe.
But on Thanksgiving his old spirits seemed to revive briefly. Liberty had prepared a wonderful meal, and Matthew was actually witty and animated, not at all distracted and aloof.
Liberty and I hoped he might take an evening off from the Nickelodeon but our hopes were short-lived. A new film was scheduled, and he couldn’t wait to see it. We watched unhappily as he stepped out into the snowy cold.
Liberty and I sat in front of the fire with our brandy saying nothing for the next hour. I was extremely uncomfortable. My heart, my mind, my nerves were a jumble of conflicting impulses. I wanted to say something, then held back. Silence was a sentinel against my stampeding feelings. Finally, though, it was she who overwhelmed my defenses.
“I’m so lonely, Justin.”
My heart shattered. I was in love with this woman. I had known it for some time, but I’d learned to live with it. Seeing her unhappy was something I could not.
Words failed me completely. I wanted to reassure her, dispel her fear, make everything right. But each time I tried willing my mouth to work, it refused.
Suddenly, I was in her arms. I don’t know how it happened. Not a word was spoken. My hand had reached out to caress her face. An innocent gesture, I meant, but she leaned into it easily, hungrily. And we melted into each other.
There, in the arms of another man’s wife, my best friend’s wife, I was horrified and excited at the same time. I could feel her heart. I was frightened by her passion. How had it come to this? We began to make love.
“My God,” I whispered as I buried my face in her luxurious hair, “what are we doing?”
“We’re going to hell,” she panted.
But as I looked deep within her eyes, it wasn’t hell I was seeing.
For a long time afterward we just lay there in each other’s arms. Listening to the fire… until she finally leaned over me, caressed my face.
“It’s all right now.” And she smiled.
I hurriedly left the apartment in a daze. How could I have done such a thing? How could she?
Before I realized it, I was standing in front of J. P. Harris’s Nickelodeon on Smithfield Street. Had I meant to come there? Had I been propelled by some imp of the perverse, excited to see me confront the friend I’d just betrayed? Had I been lured here by some external force… drawn inevitably by my perceptive friend who wanted to stare into my eyes and silently ask…“Well?”… as if he’d been sure what would happen after he left? Could he have somehow wanted it to happen?
What kind of madness was this? Were they both demons… set out to test me… each one pricking the soft tissue of my conscience to see if it would yield?
My mind ached more than my heart.
And that’s when I saw Williams, the theater manager, trotting impatiently up the street ahead of me.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Williams?” I asked as I fell into step next to him. “You seem upset.”
“You’d be too if you’d been dragged away from a warm holiday meal into a night like this.”
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s what I’m about to find out. Some street urchin arrived at my door with an urgent message from Bellows. Said I had to come to the theater right away.”
At the Nickelodeon everything appeared normal. Except Bellows, the old projectionist, was in the vestibule pacing back and forth like an expectant father. He was extremely pale. And when we came in he stuttered incoherently, which made Williams even angrier. The manager brushed past his tipsy employee and went into his office.
Inside the theater, Matthew’s music filled the lobby. I could see the manager through the cracked doorway of his office going over books and papers. He looked distracted. Matthew was playing like a man possessed. I’d never heard anything so disorganized, unrecognizable. Shrill and piercing, all in the upper registers one moment, then low and growling the next. It made no traditional sense, but it thrilled me anyway.
I felt like I’d stepped into another dimension. Everything around me took on an intense glow, and everything seemed to slow down. Williams came back out of his office carrying the nightly receipt card, but he and Bellows and the ticket girl all looked out of whack. The music overtook all other sound. I could hear nothing else. The walls began to vibrate, then melt. Color saturated my vision.
Suddenly I was no longer standing in the lobby. I found myself in a battlefield. The dead and dying were everywhere, and a green gas permeated the atmosphere. Men gagged, horses danced madly in the throes of death. Explosions rocked the earth. But for some reason I was calm and unafraid. A brilliant white light appeared on the horizon and began to come toward me. I tried to approach it, but my legs wouldn’t move. Then it began to change. For a moment I thought I was facing a beautiful woman. Then it was something else I can’t describe, but it too was beautiful, magnificent. Then the light reappeared. All this occurred within the same instant. The charred, lifeless earth had disappeared in the light. Voices spoke in reassuring, serene tones, but the words were unintelligible. I was swept over by an extraordinary, utter peace. There was music… no, not music… some unidentifiable sound. It came from everywhere, was everywhere, was everything.
And then it all came to an indescribable crescendo… and stopped. I gasped as if coming up for air after being held underwater too long. I looked around. The others appeared to have undergone a similar experience. Williams was sweating profusely.
And that’s when we heard it. The applause. A great roaring wave of it.
The door to the theater swung open, and the audience burst out. Some were in tears, others were laughing raucously. Several were shaking their heads in wonder. Not one, NOT ONE, seemed unmoved.
“So, why am I here, Bellows?” Mr. Williams demanded, waving the nightly receipt card. “We have a full house. They obviously… enjoyed the movie.” He said this last sentence glancing sideways at me with a bit of embarrassment.
“What is so important that I should leave my home and come down here?” he shouted at the quivering old projectionist.
I stared at this audience of excited people as they walked by. I heard comments like “astonishing,” “never seen anything like that,” “extraordinary.” What a wonderful movie it must have been.
“But you see, that’s just it,” Bellows stammered. “That’s just it.”
Williams and I exchanged a suspicious glance.
“There was no movie,” the old man protested.
Williams’s mouth fell open.
“There was no movie,” Bellows carried on. He was slobbering now. “It never got here. I didn’t know what to do. We sold the tickets, and I sent a boy to the train station to see if it was there. When he came back empty-handed I sent him to you. But then… but then,” he nodded at the theater, “he started playin’. And they didn’t leave. You hear me, they wouldn’t leave. I saw ’em through my hole back here. He was playin’ like a madman. His hair was standin’ straight up in the air. Lord Jesus, I never saw nothin’ like that. I heard ’em laughin’ and cryin’. They’d shout, then be quiet. And his playin’, Mr. Williams… you heard it. But there was no movie. It never got here. There was no movie!”
On the way home Matthew and I rode in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and I couldn’t look directly at him. But he seemed serene, peaceful, as if all was right in the world.
When we neared our stop, he took my hands in his and turned to me for the first time since we left the theater. I was shocked. His eyes had gone totally white… like albino eyes. They were soft and gentle looking, but the sight of them almost made me cry out.
“Don’t be frightened, Justin,” he said. The tone of his voice calmed me. “It’s wonderful. Believe me. It’s wonderful. I can see everything now.”
“What’s happened to you?” I wept.
“I’ve succeeded.”
And he said nothing more.
We got off the trolley, and I walked him toward his apartment. At the front door he turned to me again.
He smiled and touched my cheek with his hand. His eyes almost appeared to glow. “I love you both.” That was all he said.
He walked slowly up the stairs and fumbled with his keys in the lock.
I never saw Matthew Perdu again.
We got a letter from him several years later. It was the first we’d heard since he moved to California that January. Liberty and I were married shortly after he left, and two sons and a daughter followed in predictable order.
In his letter, Matthew sounded totally content, although he worried that his career as an accompanist might be coming to an end. The studios were committed to talking movies, just as he feared they would be, and the services of musicians on the set for actor inspiration would soon be dispensed with. As a blind man his job opportunities would be limited, especially in the movie business.
In the meantime he was working continually. In demand, he told us, by many of the top stars, some of whom would not appear in front of a camera unless Matthew Perdu were on the set. Most recently, though, he’d disappointed a number of these talents by signing an exclusive contract with an actor named Lon Chaney.
“When he plays,” Chaney told the studio bosses, “I see the whole movie all at once.”
We only heard from him intermittently after that. Mostly postcards encouraging us to go see this movie or that. After 1927 we didn’t hear from him again. He disappeared.
Liberty and I never went to movies after that either.
That was the year a movie called The Jazz Singer came out.