Part 5

When she arrived in Hollywood she didn’t know, of course, a single thing about making a film. “What,” she exclaimed on her first day, “why, I didn’t realize you had to make a single scene over four times.” This freshness of view-point placed her in a situation ideal for observation of the mental eagerness of which I have spoken. She asked questions of everybody in the studio from De Mille to “Grips.” It was wonderful to see the zest of her application to this new task, to watch that perfect implement of a brain cut and thresh and assort its selected subject.

There is no doubt about it. Geraldine Farrar enjoyed every minute of those first eight weeks spent in the movies. She loved the atmosphere of the motion-pictures. She liked the people in the cast. She told me she thought De Mille was great. I can hardly express what this wide area of satisfaction meant to me after eighteen months that had been instructive chiefly in the hardship of pleasing any star, at any given point.

So eager was Miss Farrar for her film day to begin that she used to arrive at the studio every morning at eight o’clock. She was then all made up for the set, and as this process is so much more exacting than the average woman’s dab of powder and rouge, one knew she had risen not later than six.

“H’m, where’s Mr. de Mille? Where’s everybody?” she used to ask.

Her manner was exactly that of a war-horse sniffing, “Here am I. Where’s the war?”

And when she began to work nothing seemed to tire her. At four o’clock in the afternoon, that hour when the average screen performer begins to wonder if she’ll melt before she takes root or take root before she melts, the great prima donna was as radiant with energy as she was at eight o’clock in the morning. The explanation of this sustained vitality lay deeper than her undoubted physical strength. She herself voiced it one day during her second engagement with the Lasky Company.

She was then making “Joan the Woman.” It was during the most intense heat of the California Summer. During this particular set she wore a suit of armor which must have been about as soothing to her feelings as wrist-warmers to a resident of Bombay. The set, which had been called for one hour, was not actually taken until more than four hours’ later. This wait, so characteristic of a studio day, was rendered more oppressive by the thud of adjacent carpentry work and by experimentation with the glaring electric lights.

While all this was going on a lady of the court of Charles VII. sat with her make-up box on her knee and from time to time dabbed with powder beads of perspiration rising above the surface of grease-paint. This manifestation of warmth was not unprovoked. For the lady wore a velvet dress with heavy trimming of fur and her head was engulfed in one of those gigantic coiffures prescribed for mediæval times. No wonder that as she administered her powder she made sweet moan about the hardships of life on “the lot.”

“People that think this life’s easy,” she muttered at last, “let them try it on a July day--let them wait around for hours all tucked up in these hot-water bottles of clothes. Whew! Say, are they ever going to start shooting?”

“Cut out your grouching,” retorted a more stoical fellow sufferer, “look how Jerry’s taking it.”

“Jerry” presented, as a matter of fact, anything but a wilted appearance. She was talking, now to this person, now to that. Her eyes were sparkling, her white teeth flashed in a frequent smile. Piqued by such revelations of fortitude, the first lady of the court walked over to her.

“Won’t you tell me how you do it, Miss Farrar?” she asked. “Don’t you ever mind anything; the heat or the long waits or anything?”

“Jerry” threw back her head and laughed heartily. “Not a bit of it,” she answered, “I’m too much interested all the time to know what’s happening on the outside of me.”

It was during the production of this same play that some gentlemen of the court of Charles VII. availed themselves of a contemporary solace. A long shot had been taken of the French court and it had been taken, according to custom, four times. None of these occasions had revealed anything wrong and it was only when De Mille “saw the rushes”--the technical term describing a first view of the previous day’s shots--that he discovered an anachronism which would have made Sir Walter Scott’s offenses in this direction seem blameless.

“For Heaven’s sake,” he cried, “look at that! The gentlemen of the fourteenth century are chewing gum!”

Miss Farrar whooped with merriment over this historical discrepancy, and to-day the incident supplies her with a favorite motion-picture story. I may mention casually that this mistake is eloquent with the possibilities of waste involved in a single wrong performance of a single extra performer.

In this case we used up a thousand feet of film and the hundreds of dollars involved in wages, lights, and other expenses on a scene which, of course, had to be entirely remade.

The eminent singing actress often showed back of the screens that impulsive generosity which has endeared her to so many people. Once she did not like the gown worn by a certain extra. Neither did the extra.

Quick as a flash Miss Farrar sent her maid to her residence in Hollywood to obtain a costume from her own personal wardrobe. And when she put this raiment into the extra’s hand it was for keeps. She sometimes lent her fine jewels to people in the cast, and her frequent “small” gifts to those about her were what most of us would call large. Such donations were always performed with a certain splendour of gesture that made one think of a mediæval prince taking off the gold chain around his neck to give to somebody who had chanced to say, “What a beautiful piece of jewelry you are wearing.”

If, indeed, Miss Farrar is a captain of industry, she belongs to that particular branch which flourished in the Florence of the fifteenth century.

While she was making “Maria Rosa” there befell Miss Farrar the great romantic adventure of which the world has heard so much. As a result of my interview with Mr. Lou Tellegen he was engaged by the Lasky Company to go to Hollywood during the Summer of 1915. He was not playing in Miss Farrar’s productions and it was not until after some days spent in California that the two met.

Mr. Fred Kley was responsible for the introduction. Here at this widely known figure of the film world I feel bound to pause for a few words of tribute. Kley, who now occupies an important position in the organization of the Famous Players-Lasky organization, had gone to California with Cecil de Mille. He it was who had selected the original site of the livery-stable, and after the Lasky Company moved there he had attended to a wide variety of details.

He kept books--often on the back of stray envelopes; he hired extra performers; he assembled properties, and when De Mille imported several rattlesnakes for the production of “The Squaw Man” it was he, I believe, who ministered to these pets. I am sure that Briareus with his hundred hands never accomplished more than did honest, faithful, Fred Kley with his limited equipment.

I shall give Mr. Kley’s own account of the introduction, for certainly nothing could be more vivid. “Mr. Tellegen happened to be with me one day,” he recounts, “when Miss Farrar, still in the Spanish costume she had been wearing in ‘Maria Rosa’ walked across the lot. ‘I want to meet Miss Farrar,’ said Mr. Tellegen, ‘Won’t you take me over?’ I did and I’ve never seen anything like it before nor since. It was just as if a spark came from his eyes and was met by one from hers.

“They began speaking in French right away,” adds he, “and of course I couldn’t understand. But, believe me, there’s a whole lot in a tone, and their tones gave them away as much as their eyes did. He walked across the lot with her, then to her dressing-room. And after that you’d see them together all the time just the minute they could get away from a set.”

In the light of this personal experience of Geraldine Farrar, that frequent question of hers “Who is to be my Don José” is invested with a strange, perverse, almost sinister, quality of destiny. It was not the Don José of her own life drama that she met in Lou Tellegen. It was the Toreador. When she came to California her heart, according to rumour, had not been untouched. But if this same rumour is to be credited further, it had never before been subjugated. Like the heroine of the drama and the opera with which she is so brilliantly identified, she had always retained her supremacy in love. Like this same Carmen, she surrendered at last, not to the most loving, but to the most conquering type.

The last memory of the beautiful Farrar’s first visit to Hollywood centers about the station from which pulled out her special train.

Tellegen had, of course, come down to see her off, and as the engine steamed away on its long eastern course the actor could be seen running along the platform beside the car from which his love still clung to his hand. For many yards he raced along and it was only a sudden acceleration of the engine that finally parted those reluctant hands.

A very different leave-taking from the one I shall record when several Summers afterwards Geraldine Farrar again came to Hollywood, this time to make pictures for the Goldwyn studio!

_Chapter Eight_

THE DISCOVERY OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN

While the Lasky Company and the Famous Players organizations were taking their long and often competitive strides forward numerous other motion-picture enterprises had been coming into prominence. Among these was the Fox Company.

Some years ago William Fox bought the story, “A Fool There Was.” For its leading rôle he engaged a very prominent actress. She disappointed him at the last moment, and it was while he was at his wit’s end to know how to replace her that he happened to go one day into his casting department. There were several extras standing around in the hope of picking up a day’s work, and among these Fox’s eye fell upon a dark-eyed girl. He looked at her. He looked again. Finally he said to his casting director, “I wish you’d have some tests made of that girl. It seems to me she’s got possibilities.”

The tests were made. They were so satisfactory that the girl was cast for the leading rôle of “A Fool There Was.” In it she scored such a triumph that Fox bought immediately more similar vehicles for her. The girl’s name was Theda Bara, and “A Fool There Was” was the first of the vamp stories which for some time seemed to consume the motion-picture industry.

Among producer, of a very different type, who had been waxing strong during these first years of our development, was Mack Sennett. Sennett, originally a chorus man earning five dollars a day, had been associated with Griffith in the old Biograph studios. From these he departed with only about five or six hundred dollars, and he produced his first films without any studio at all. The cameraman overcame this fundamental lack by focussing on people’s front lawns and on any other part of the landscape which looked appealing. When at last his financial returns justified it Sennett established a studio near Los Angeles.

Mack’s specialty had always been comedies, and among his early stars was that noted screen comedian of another day, Ford Sterling. At the time when the Lasky Company started, Sterling was getting a salary phenomenal for that period. Yet, being a perfectly normal star, he kept wanting more, and it was in an hour when Sennett feared he would not be able to keep pace with these increasing demands that he cast about him for some one to take Sterling’s place.

In this period of vigilance he chanced to go to Pantages’ in Los Angeles. Among the acts of this performance, which represented the second circuit--that employing the less costly talent of the organisation--there lingered in his mind the work of one comedian.

Months afterwards when Sterling really seemed on the point of leaving, Sennett thought immediately of the little comedian in the second circuit. He did not know where he was. He could not even remember his name. But he wired to an Eastern representative, “Get in touch with fellow called Chapman or Chamberlain--something like that--playing second circuit.”

The representative had a hard time locating the person thus vaguely defined. At last, however, in a little Pennsylvania town the agent caught up with Charlie Chaplin. He was getting fifty dollars a week for his work in vaudeville, and when Sennett took him on at one hundred and twenty-five he seemed stunned by his good fortune.

And did he make good at once in motion-pictures? Mack has told me that he did not.

“It was days and days,” the latter relates, “before Charlie put over anything real. He tried all sorts of make-ups--one of them I remember was a fat man--and they were all about equally flat. The fact of it was that for some time I felt a little uneasy as to whether my find was a very fortunate one.”

It must be remembered at this point, however, that Chaplin encountered at the outset of his screen career an almost inflexible conception of humour. He himself has told me how he had to combat this prejudice in creating his very first picture.

“I was a tramp in that story,” he recalls, “and they wanted me to do all the usual slap-stick stunts. I had to beg them to let me play the part my way. ‘If you want somebody to pull all the old gags,’ I said to Sennett, ‘why do you hire me? You can get a man at twenty-five dollars to do that sort of stuff.’ So at last they gave in to my idea. This I had worked out very carefully. A tramp in a fine hotel--there’s a universal situation for you. Hardly a human being that hasn’t duplicated the feeling of being poor, alone, out of touch with the gay crowd about him, of trying to identify himself somehow with the fine, alien throng. So I did the little touches here of imitation--the pulling down of shabby cuffs, the straightening of my hat, all the gestures that gave a wider meaning to the characterization.”

Chaplin’s own account of his start is eloquent of the creative imagination which has made him the supreme exponent of screen art. This first picture was a success. Even so, there were those in the Sennett studios who looked askance upon such advanced methods.

“They didn’t really appreciate Charlie in those early days,” so Mabel Normand has often said to me. “I remember numerous times when people in the studio came up and asked me confidentially, ‘Say, do you think he’s so funny? In my mind he can’t touch Ford Sterling.’ They were just so used to slap-stick that imaginative comedy couldn’t penetrate.”

When Chaplin went out to California to make his first pictures he found the pantomimist just quoted a star in the Sennett organization. After having been a model for Gibson and other noted illustrators, Mabel had worked with Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet in the Biograph studios. She was still here when Sennett, meeting her on the street one day, said, “How about going to California at a hundred dollars a week? I’ve just got some backing for my company and I’m going to settle out there in a short time.”

Mabel had been rendered incredulous by her salary at the Biograph. She was so sceptical of there being any such salary as a hundred dollars a week that Sennett’s backers, to whom he had referred her, thought she was hesitating because of the insufficiency of the recompense. They thereupon offered her twenty-five dollars more.

Not long ago my friend Edgar Selwyn, the theatrical producer and playwright, said to me: “We hear so much about our successful stars as they are to-day. Yet most of us are a great deal more curious to hear the details of their earlier years.” With this in mind I am devoting a short space to the Sennett studio of a former time, for, although these days did not come under my direct observation, they have been described to me so often by Mabel Normand and Chaplin and Sennett himself that they seem almost like a portion of my own experience. Certainly, too, such flash-backs are necessary to a complete participation in the stories of my own immediate contacts with these two stars.

The older Sennett studio, like the stable which first cradled the Lasky Company, presented a striking contrast to the modern film background with its meticulous divisions of labour, its attempts to introduce the efficiency methods of a business establishment. Everybody knew everybody else; all the performers talked over in the most intimate fashion the details of the day’s work; the stars could and did do all such chores as cutting films.

Instead of a honeycomb of dressing-rooms, there was a communal space where all the men put on their make-up; as to Mabel’s dressing-room, this was a crude, boarded cubicle with the oil-stove familiar to all the old-timers in California studios. Altogether, an atmosphere informal and light-hearted as that which we imagine surrounding a group of strolling players in Elizabethan times!

Every one knows the long rainy seasons which in California interrupt those months of brilliant, unflagging sunshine. During such times the rain would drip ceaselessly from the roof of Sennett’s projection-room, and his actors, shivering from the cold dampness, used to gather together after the day’s work around the one cozy spot in the studio--the oil-stove in Mabel’s dressing-room. Here, by the hour Chaplin, a slender little fellow of twenty-two or three, attired unvaryingly in a checked suit, used to sit and talk with Mabel about work, books, and life. They were great pals, these two, and whenever Charlie wanted a raise he would go to Mabel and say, “Come now, you ask Mack for me.”

Sometimes, according to those who worked with the pair, the friendship was invaded by a little feeling of rivalry, especially on Chaplin’s part. This was hardly strange, for Mabel’s talent as a comédienne was undoubted, and to this gift she added not only her experience on the screen but a very exceptional beauty. Of course the sentiment was only fleeting, but every now and then something would bring it to the surface.

One day when Chaplin entered the studio he found Mabel standing beside the camera. Running over to Sennett, he asked the producer what it all meant.

“Oh, nothing,” replied Mack. “Only I’ve asked Mabel to direct you to-day.”

Chaplin said nothing, but for an hour or so he was quite evidently ruffled. Before the end of the day, however, all irritation had vanished in the boxing-bout which represented the favorite muscular outlet of the two young comedians.

Charlie and Mabel, as will be remembered, appeared in many comedies together. One of their scenes which the public was never permitted to share involved a motor-cycle. On being asked if he could ride this vehicle Charlie had replied promptly that he could.

“Now you’re sure you know how, Charlie?” Sennett inquired of him again as on the day the scene was to be taken he confronted the comedian with this modern mechanism.

“Why, of course I do,” maintained Charlie stoutly, “I used to cycle all about London.” With no apparent trepidation he mounted the cycle. Mabel jumped on behind him. An instant afterward those watching the performance saw the two riders whirling down a steep hill with a fury that made a nor’easter look cool and collected.

“Talk about Jock Gilpin’s ride!” laughs Mabel to-day as she tells the story. “I knew from the moment we set out that Charlie hadn’t the least idea in the world how to guide or stop that machine, and as the trees and hills whizzed by us I closed my eyes. My only wonder was when and how badly. At last it happened. When I opened my eyes again it was from a long unconscious state. I had been dashed into a ditch at the side of the road, and a little farther on they found the souvenirs of poor old Charlie. You see,” she concludes, “he hadn’t realised that there was any difference between a cycle and a motor-cycle.”

Just a little farther on I shall pick up the thread of Miss Normand’s career where it became interwoven with my own professional interests. In the meanwhile closing these glimpses of the Sennett studio in its early days, I shall proceed to developments in the Lasky Company.

It had long been apparent to me that a merger of the Lasky and the Famous Players organizations promised many benefits. It would put an end to the costly competition for stars and stories and it would effect a corresponding reduction in other expenses. To all such arguments, however, Mr. Zukor turned a deaf ear, and it was not until 1916 that I succeeded in overcoming his reluctance. Then, under the name of the Famous Players-Lasky Company, these two enterprises, which only a few years before had launched out with a capital representing conjointly less than one hundred thousand dollars, were incorporated at twenty-five million!

It was a radiant day for me when the vision of this gigantic unification, held so persistently for many months, finally took form. But, as so often happens, the fulfilment of my most cherished dream proved to be a weapon, turned against me. Mr. Zukor was the president of the new organisation; I was chairman of the board of directors. I shall not enter here into the differences which sundered us, both men accustomed to domination, I shall merely relate that only a few months after the formation of the new company I resigned my interests in the Famous Players-Lasky organisation.

But before leaving this phase of my career I want to pay my heartfelt tribute to the man whom I consider responsible for much of the success won by Lasky films, Cecil de Mille!

Although I have had occasion to mention several instances where his judgment was at fault, I have never once lost the sense of how disproportionate these rare flaws were to the sum of his achievement. As a matter of fact, De Mille is seldom wrong in his valuations of either performer or story. Again and again his judgment proved superior to both Lasky’s and mine. Then, too, he adds to the qualities which make him a big director, a gift for personal relations which I have seldom seen equalled. Farrar was only one of the many Lasky stars who “got along” wonderfully with our chief director. The courteous, self-controlled, kindly De Mille--who, indeed, could dislike him?

Certainly my own thought of him always reaches far beyond our mere professional association. To me at a time when I most needed it De Mille was a true friend, and the memory of his truth and loyalty illumines one of the bitterest chapters of my life.

_Chapter Nine_

STARS, STARS, STARS!

Well, I left my company and I was then not quite thirty-five years of age. I was accustomed to a life where every working hour was inspired by the one thought, “How can I make the Lasky Company more significant?” You can imagine, therefore, the terrible blankness of those days following my resignation. Feverishly I cast about me for a new outlet for my organising energy, and in the Autumn of 1916 I, together with my friends Archie and Edgar Selwyn, the theatrical producers, Margaret Mayo, and Arthur Hopkins, the theatrical producer, founded the Goldwyn Motion Picture Company.

The beginning of this second film venture of mine involved conditions very different from those which attended the start of the Lasky Company three years before. Then the story was supreme and the Lasky Company was successful without any really overshadowing personalities. True, the field presented some great celebrities such as Mary Pickford, but the emphasis was not placed upon the player to the degree which afterward swayed the producer. Constantly this emphasis became more irresistible, and by the time that I started the Goldwyn Company it was the player, not the play, which was the thing.