It was 1923. America was singing “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “Barney Google,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” “Who’s Sorry Now?” On Broadway, Little Miss Bluebeard, The Nervous Wreck, Cyrano de Bergerac , and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan were packing them in.

And on the silver screen the hit movies—silent, of course —included The Covered Wagon with Ernest Torrence; The Green Goddess with George Arliss; The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chancy; and Safety Last with Harold Lloyd.

That was the year I started my career as a silent-movie pianist at the Eagle Theater, a small, sour-smelling establishment at Sixteenth Avenue and Forty-second Street in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York. I was a senior at Manual Training High School, but on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and school holidays I did three-hour stints at the keyboard. I was relieved by the full-time pro, a thin, dour, erratic pianist in his thirties. He hated playing the piano, he hated the movies, and he hated the audiences, especially the kirls I loved all of them. And I loved accompanying such greats as Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, William S. Hart, Richard Barthelmess, John Gilbert. …

The Eagle Theater was a compact, boxlike affair seating a few hundred patrons. Up front, right under the apron of the small stage, not more than fifteen feet from the screen, 1 sat at the upright piano. Its guts and strings and hammers were exposed. When played, it emitted the characteristically tinny, tinkly, nickelodeon sound.

When I wasn’t playing, the house filled with the ghostly whir of the projector. Running like a leitmotif through every performance was the incessant cracking of Indian nuts (the popcorn of its day) between the teeth of myriad Indian-nut addicts during the picture—and underfoot as the audiences left the theater.

There was nothing passive about the silent movie audiences—especially the children. To heighten the dramatic effect of tender love scenes or to provide live sound for Western or battle scenes, the older ones would fire off their then popular Kilgore repeating cap pistols. The younger ones, identifying with the hero as he was being stalked, would blurt hysterical warnings: “Look out! He’s behind the door!” There were always children reading aloud to their immigrant parents or grandparents the florid, polysyllabic subtitles. And when necessary (which was pretty often), they supplied simultaneous translations into Italian, Yiddish, or German.

At critical points the film almost invariably split. This set off an orgy of applause, howling, whistling, banging, and floor kicking. The audiences seemed to enjoy these breaks more than the picture. Periodically a man (usually the owner of the theater) would walk up and down the aisles with a Flit gun, spraying a sickeningly sweet deodorant over the audience; the ventilation in the Eagle Theater and most other similar emporiums left