Years later, the Horus birds are home in Kansas…
A couple of weeks after moving to Los Angeles I found myself in Westwood in a small but prosperous-looking Egyptology shop. One half expected Kasper Gutman, Sydney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon, to pop out of the back room offering unctuous assistance. Instead, a handsome fiftyish lady walked up next to me as I eyed a pair of large, gold painted Horus falcons. They were well over three feet tall and imposing in a 1930’s Art Moderne or Deco design. Between the legs of each bird was a Rameses-like figure, a typical Egyptian soldier or warrior.“Those birds were in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra,” she said, “The 30’s film”
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “What are they made of?”
“Plaster, I’m sure. Most of the props of the day were Plaster of Paris. Take them home. Specially priced today.”
The real thing…
I really don’t recall exactly how much they were but the price was surprisingly reasonable, I felt, especially when she threw in a proof of authenticity from Paramount’s prop department, and the name of the art director who had them cast. I bought them with a credit card. I had no job at the time, no prospects, but enough to live on while enrolled in a McKee screenwriting class; we were studying Chinatown. Like thousands of others in L.A. I knew, just knew I had it in me to write that novel or that script that would take Hollywood by storm. Balanced by doubt, and the thought, What am I doing buying these things when I could end up sleeping in my car?
They were portents and they spoke to me. I couldn’t leave without them. We loaded them carefully in my trunk. I still have them. Before very long I had gone from dicey freelance work to a creative group head position at a large agency, so perhaps the birds were good luck. My circumstances certainly improved after acquiring the birds.
My own little piece of the mystery…
A year later, on one of my habitual pilgrimages to Venice Beach’s colorful shops, another bird landed in my collection; this time it was The Maltese Falcon. It has none of the grace of the Horus falcons; in fact it’s kind of klunky. The classic noir movie deserves a better leading bird for such a superb cast and script. But this was what Warner Bros. prop department came up with and it flew. Now I had my own replica of the bird to sit in my living room looking broodingly at the two sleekly designed Egyptian birds flanking a marble-topped bar.
I looked in vain for a pawned Oscar statuette as a placeholder for when I won best screenplay. Something about L.A.’s ozone perpetuates these dreams (and irritates the eyeballs on smog days—or at least it did back then). Anyway the bird grows on you. I began to hear rumors of high-dollar birds. I checked mine but, alas, it was not one of these. The mystery is alive and well today, with some of these squat homely birds commanding upwards of four million dollars. (This sentence is a link to Vanity Fair’s fascinating 2016 article about it.) The story even peripherally involves the famous Black Dahlia unsolved murder, in that the bird prop artist was a suspect. Leo DiCaprio is a player. If you find the right one, you can quit your day job. And, apparently, there are several black birds out there worth serious money.
My own Maltese bird was seventeen bucks. But it keeps the dream alive. Like Bogart’s Sam Spade told the cop who asked him what the bird statuette was, in the final scene, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”
Happy, prosperous, healthy June to all of you. G.
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