The Dividend

Summary

Steel magnate John Steele, whose fortune was forged in the hiss of Bessemer converters and the roar of rail-yard speculation, believes that blood can be alchemized into pedigree; his only heir, Frank, is paraded before Pittsburgh’s marble-lined drawing rooms like a newly minted coin. Yet every gilded corridor becomes a funhouse mirror: crystal chandeliers fracture into syringes, champagne bubbles rise like opium smoke, and the grand staircase spirals down into a basement jazz cellar where powdery white lines replace chalked debutante names. Frank’s fall is no mere binge but a systematic dismemberment of identity—first the signet ring is pawned for a single morphine ampoule, then the family crest is tattooed on a chorus girl’s thigh, finally the ancestral portrait is slashed so the eyes can watch him copulate with ruin. C. Gardner Sullivan’s screenplay treats capital as a centrifuge: the faster it spins, the quicker virtue is flung outward, leaving only the centrifugal husk of a boy who once believed that money was a safety net and now discovers it is a noose woven from silk stockings and telegraph wires. When the final curtain descends, Frank lies beneath the same locomotive that once carried his father’s iron ore, his blood mixing with soot in a rust-red dividend paid out to no shareholder except the night itself.

Synopsis

Wealthy John Steele has a handsome young son, Frank, on whom he pins his hopes. But riches lead Frank not into social standing and duty, but into depravity, drug-addiction, criminal activity, and finally to tragedy.