PART TWO

I

“MR. BIOGRAPH”

They brought Dorothy from Alderson to Baltimore, and visited their old friends, the Meixners. One day they dropped into a “movie.” The picture was “Lena and the Geese,” a Biograph film, and when Lena walked out on the screen, behold it was Gladys Smith! So Gladys had fallen. At first it was a shock, but later in the day they considered the idea of falling, too. Especially Dorothy. Gladys was probably getting well paid for her surrender.

They went to New York, presently, took rooms and set out to find a theatrical engagement. Their hearts were set on Belasco. They knew that William J. Dean—the same who, ten years earlier, had rehearsed little Dot so strenuously—was associated with Belasco. Dean was their white hope. They found him at the Belasco Theatre. He remembered them ... who wouldn’t?

He took them into Mr. Belasco’s private office—a weird place, full of statuary, all in white summer dress—introduced them, and left them there.

Lillian and Dorothy were distinctly frightened. Each tried to propel the other in the direction of the great man. Belasco himself used to tell how each in turn got behind, to push the other forward, until they had backed halfway across the room.

When the interview finally began, he told them he was putting on a fairy play, called “The Good Little Devil,” and that Mary Pickford and Ernest Truex were engaged for the leading rôles. Neither name was familiar to them. Gladys Smith had become “Mary Pickford” the winter before, but they had lost sight of all the Smith family. Belasco said further that he needed one more fairy, and that he would engage Lillian for the part. It was a small part, but the best he had.

Lillian was delighted, Dorothy disappointed but not discouraged. They visited other managers, and some agencies. They decided to look up Gladys Smith, to see what could be done in that direction. Sure enough, the telephone book had it: “Biograph Co., 11 E. 14th St.”

“Hello, hello! Is this the Biograph Company?”

“That’s right. What’s wanted?”

“We’d like to speak to one of your actresses, Gladys Smith.”

“Sorry—no such person here.”

“But we saw her in a picture of yours, in Baltimore.”

“What picture?”

“‘Lena and the Geese.’”

“Oh, that was Mary Pickford.”

“Oh—oh, all right—can she come to the telephone?”

So that was who she was—Gladys ... so much the better. Gladys, who was now Mary, came to the telephone, and after a brief period of wild greetings and inquiries, arranged to have them come to the studio.

* * * * *

Lillian and Dorothy, at the top of the outer step at 11 East 14th Street, found themselves in a wide hall, confronting a great circular heaven-climbing stairway that ascended to the unknown. A tall man with a large hooked nose was walking up and down, humming to himself. A boy took in their names, and presently Mary, brighter and prettier than ever under her new name, appeared and flung herself into their arms. The tall man continued walking up and down, and now added some words to the tune he was humming: “She’ll never bring them in—she’ll never bring them in,”—a suggestion to Mary, who declined to take any such hint.

“Mr. Griffith,” she said, “these are my friends, Lillian and Dorothy Gish. They were on the stage for years, in child parts, just as I was; I know you’ll have something for them, here.”

David Wark Griffith, director of the Biograph Company, stopped singing, shook hands and looked at them.

“Won’t you come in?” he said.

They found themselves in quite a large room, in a violet glare of Cooper-Hewitt lights—weird, ghastly lights, that made living persons look as if they were dead—had been dead for some time. At one end of the room a group of people had assembled.

“You can begin right away,” Mr. Griffith said, “as extras. We are arranging an ‘audience.’ You can be part of the audience.”

And so in that casual way, their motion picture career began.

They “sat in the audience,” and then sat in it again, and again and again, for it seemed that Mr. Biograph Griffith was not satisfied with just doing a thing once, and made you do it over and over until he was sure it could not be any better, even if he had to keep you at it most of the night.

Lillian and Dorothy got five dollars each, for that day, and felt very proud of it. Dorothy especially. She had a grown-up feeling. Five dollars a day—a real job. But, alas, early next morning Lillian took her to a department store, and when the saleslady appeared, said:

“Have you a suit that would fit this little girl?”

But of course Lillian _was_ a good deal taller, and then she was “going on sixteen.”

That day they had their first parts as regulars. At the studio, Griffith said he would rehearse them a little. He took them upstairs, and chased them here and there about a room, firing off a revolver. It seemed unusual, but did not alarm them. They had been through too much rehearsing, for that. Griffith wanted to see how they reacted under fire. “All right,” he said when they came down, “but they don’t know what it’s all about.” The picture he was making was “The Unseen Enemy.” At the climax, two sisters are trying to telephone for the police, while burglars in the next room are firing at them through a stove-pipe hole.

Lillian and Dorothy must have given a good account of themselves, for they were at the studio daily, after that, absorbing a new technique. They had no parts to learn. Mr. Griffith stood by the camera man and told them what to do. Just what to do. Every minute. That was altogether a novelty. On the stage you had to learn your part before you began. If you forgot your lines, a prompter helped you out, but he didn’t tell you what to do ... never shouted at you, like Mr. Griffith, who on the whole was kindly ... even amusing. He tied red and blue hair-ribbons on them, to tell them apart, though the resemblance was not striking ... a fleeting thing ... momentary. Lillian was “blue,” Dorothy “red,” because he said she was the spunky one ... would talk back. Anyway, it was easier to call out directions to “Blue” and “Red.” They got in three days on their first picture, and an extra night. Eighteen dollars apiece. That was riches. They lived in furnished rooms, at 424 Central Park, West.

II

GRIFFITH’S GROUP OF PLAYERS

The “silent drama” had gone a good way by 1912, but had still a good way to go. There was not much yet in the way of “sets,” elaborate construction of scenic effects. Griffith had invented, or perfected, the “fade-out,” the “cut-back” and other devices still in common use, but he had built no castles or walled cities, no Bethulias or Babylons, had marshaled no battling armies. The Fourteenth Street studio was just a room, where one rigged up, as simply and inexpensively as possible, the hastily knocked together properties required at the moment. The costume wardrobe was notable for its scantiness—a collection to be picked over hopefully, and “made to do,” or supplemented from a costumer’s. Griffith had a curious old collector-man, always on the look-out for “good things,” which were not always convincing. Too often the players had the appearance of being “dressed up” in whatever they happened to have, which was precisely the fact. It did not matter. Neither the public nor the producers took the “movies” very seriously, as yet ... nor would they, for a year or so to come. They were still a cheap form of entertainment; something to be seen for ten or fifteen cents—even in the nickelodeons. The French were doing it better, then. Some of their films, their farces especially, were very good—light, chic—they were miles ahead of us in costume, scenario, settings, everything, until it became a question of money ... ah, there we had them. And then the War came.

But I digress—an ancient sin. This is not a history of the motion picture, but only the story of a little girl, who grew up in a kind of dream ... a land of make-believe ... who wandered at last into a still more shadowy realm, became a picture player ... by and by a _grande artiste_, with the world at her feet ... who one day, in the fabric of her life, found me waiting to tell about it, and said:

“Oh, very well, if you think it worth while”; and I did, and do, think it worth while, and will let it go at that.

* * * * *

Sometimes Griffith took them out “on location,” and those were joyous days, for it meant green fields and running brooks, and wooded hillsides, though sometimes the work was strenuous, even wet, when one had to fall into the cold water and be rescued, especially when it had to be repeated a dozen times or so, to get it just right. On the whole, those were good days—picnic days.

Griffith’s group of players was a notable one. Besides Mary, Lillian and Dorothy, he had Blanche Sweet, “the Biograph blonde,” a real star, melting, luscious; Miriam Cooper, Mary Alden, Robert Harron, Henry Walthall, Lionel Barrymore—most of them young twenty years ago—_had_ to be, to play anything like youthful parts, for all the indoor lightings were from overhead, the shadows were harsh and black—every line and wrinkle showed. There could be no retouching of the tiny film faces—the screen presented them not only as they were, but worse than they were, their defects magnified. Young girls like Mary and Lillian, even Dorothy, took grown-up parts:—the fairer and smoother their skin, the better the general result.

Slender youth had its disadvantages. Lillian was one day cast for the part of a vigorous young woman. The later, popular “boy form” was not yet appreciated. The public demanded a certain opulence in its heroines, especially in what was irreverently known as their “upper works.” Griffith regarded Lillian thoughtfully.

“I’m afraid you’re too young,” he commented; “not filled out quite enough.”

It was just luncheon time. The girls said nothing, but presently dashed out, and down Fourteenth Street, to a place where, in a show-window, they had noticed the desired contours for sale, substantial ones, firm and ample, of buckram.

A bite to eat, a trip to the dressing-room, and they were ready. Griffith, considering his cast, took another look at Lillian, rubbed his eyes, decided that after all she would do.

Thus was wrought the miracle of Fourteenth Street.

III

BELASCO DELIVERS A VERDICT

Nell wrote that she was to become a mother. Lillian, awe-struck, replied:

I can’t talk to anyone about it, not now. I want it all to myself for just a little while....

I am with the Biograph, but none of my pictures have been released as yet; will let you know the names of them. I have signed with David Belasco for next season, and we open here in New York on Christmas Eve at Belasco Theatre. Although it is a good company, I have a very small part. I am going to do pictures on the side, so that is some help.... Well, I must get supper.

But she could not carry the Biograph work with her rehearsing. In November she wrote:

I was worked to death my last days at the Biograph, and then I was so excited when I started to rehearse in this new play that I couldn’t even eat. The name of the play is “The Good Little Devil.” It is a fairy play, and we open December 10, in Phila. and Xmas night in N. Y. I play Morgane, a fairy....

Lillian enjoyed rehearsing when it did not last too long. There were some half-a-dozen of the fairies, and they flew—flew wonderfully, suspended on wires, pulled from somewhere below by eighteen strong Germans. She loved the flying sensation—so much that she would go before rehearsal-time and rehearse a little on her own account. She tried all the wires, and the big Germans delighted in sending her soaring into the air. In the play, she was the “Gold Fairy,” that flew highest. And there was one scene where she rested on a wall. Belasco, watching the rehearsals one day, was asked by a reporter what he thought of her looks. Belasco sent a glance at the slender figure on the wall, at the unearthly face surrounded by a tumbling mass of gold.

“Most beautiful blonde in the world,” he said, and next day that label found its way into print and general circulation.

Not long ago—a month or two before he died—Belasco qualified—a little: He had not then, he said, seen _all_ the beautiful blondes in the world. Perhaps he should have said: “_One_ of the most beautiful.” But as Belasco had seen a very great number of beautiful blondes—probably the pick of them—the verdict will be allowed to stand as reported, especially as it was never questioned. Lillian’s beauty was not then what it became later:—as revealed in “The White Sister,” for instance, in “Romola,” in “La Bohême,” and more recently in “Uncle Vanya.”

* * * * *

“The Good Little Devil” did not follow any of the announced dates. It opened successfully in Washington, or Philadelphia, and was in Baltimore for Christmas. They gave two performances that day, during the second of which there was an accident—serious enough, though it might have been worse.

In the act where she landed on the wall, she left it with a step-down of six feet. The wire, of course, lifted her down, but in this performance something was wrong, and she literally stepped into space. The sickening, helpless feeling of expecting support and finding none! The fall made her quite ill; her understudy had to finish the play.

“I cried all night,” she wrote Nell, “I was so lonely and broken-hearted.”

She was apparently not injured, but terribly shaken; and then, the audience had laughed. Mr. Belasco hurried to her dressing-room to comfort her. The audience was not laughing at her, he said, but at the incident. She must not mind that; everything was going to be all right. It was, but the shock had weakened her.

Back in New York, with another hard siege of rehearsing, before the opening there. Griffith, as was his custom each winter, had taken his company to Los Angeles, Dorothy with them. Lillian, to save money, lived in a tiny room at the Marlton Hotel, in 8th Street, and with a Sterno lamp, cooked her food, which consisted of tinned things and tea. Weakened as she undoubtedly was by her fall, this was but poor nourishment on which to meet Belasco’s strenuous rehearsals. January 8 (1913), she wrote:

It is now 3:30 in the morning of Wednesday, and I have just returned from a dress rehearsal. We open tonight, and everything has to be just so; we rehearsed until 4:30 yesterday morning.

Nell, I don’t know how to thank you for what you have offered me. You both can’t know how wonderful it is to have someone offer me a home, and how I would love to follow the desire of my heart and come to you. But I can’t. I can’t, because I have to make my way in this world from now on. Mother has worked all her life; surely, it’s my turn, now....

The picture you painted for me in your letter made me cry, because I was reading it in my dressing-room, and I happened to glance up at a mirror, and there I sat, all false, with paint and cosmetics covering my face, and it came to me what a distance it was from my life to yours.

Mary was getting a good salary, and had bought her mother a car. Lillian said to her, one day: “How happy you must be, Mary, to be able to give your mother so much.” Her own weekly twenty-five dollars went such a little way. The room—one had to have a decent address—took so much of it ... and clothes—one must make a decent appearance—and the extras! A new coat ... a mistake ... it looked well, but was not warm enough.

She was far from well, and knew it. Mrs. Pickford and Mary insisted on her seeing a doctor, who told them that she was threatened with pernicious anemia, and would die if she did not change her mode of living. They spoke about it to Belasco, who offered to send her to Florida at his own expense. When he learned that Griffith had offered her work on the coast, at double her present salary, he at once agreed to pay her fare to Los Angeles.

She hung on until the end of January—postponed until she was warned that unless she went at once, it would be too late. They did not tell her, but they were by no means certain that it was not too late already. So she surrendered. Belasco bought her ticket to Los Angeles; her mother was already on the way out there. Dorothy wrote of glorious California sunshine. It made her better to think of it.

And then, at the end, a tragedy: The eighteen strong Germans who pulled the wires, and adored her, went to the train with their own little brass band, to say good-bye. Ah, me, she had somehow told them the wrong station ... a heartbreak ... one that could not be mended.

She traveled by the Los Angeles Limited, and for the first time in her life, knew the full luxury of a Pullman. On the way, she wrote:

I am going on and on, with miles upon miles separating us, it seems, but it is not so, dear, as we are just as near to one another now as we were in the old days, when we used to take “John Halifax” and go to your room, and read. Can you ever forget those days, and will they ever come back again?

... I am going to work hard out there, and next summer or fall, I am going back to Mr. Belasco.

But she would never go back—either to Nell, or Belasco. Four days later, she was in Los Angeles, earning a salary of fifty dollars weekly. The hard days were over.

IV

A STUDIO ON PICO STREET

California sunshine, California Zinfandel—doctor’s orders, fifty cents a gallon—open air and exercise—worked their miracle. The pictures were made out-of-doors—even the interior sets were on an outside stage, with daylight illumination—and there were many “Westerns,” with riding.

In no time, Lillian, like Dorothy and the others, went racing over the hills behind Los Angeles—an Indian, a cowboy, a settler, a pursued heroine—sometimes all of those things in one day; for there was no star aristocracy in Griffith’s troupe. One might be a star one hour, and an extra the next, and nobody cared, and everybody was happy, and Lillian grew well, and physically hardened to the demands of picture making—by no means light.

Her riding practice with the Indian girl at Shawnee came in handy now. A horse, even a wild one, had no terrors for her. In one of the early pictures, Lillian, with two men, Raoul Walsh and George Siegman, were chosen for some special riding. The horses were range ponies—one of them looked dangerous. The men regarded him doubtfully. Lillian said, “I’ll take him.” He seemed to her no worse than those she had ridden in Oklahoma.

They swept by the camera beautifully, but they were supposed to turn and do it again. The others turned, but Lillian’s horse went on. His nose was toward the ranch. There were some trees and bushes, and he tore through them, to get her off his back.

Now, it happened that an Indian, a real Indian, named “Eagle Eye” lay asleep among the bushes, and the pounding hoofs awakened him. A real Indian knows what to do under such circumstances. He leaped straight from his nap, caught the mad pony’s bridle, and the heroine was saved.

In another picture, she had to jump from a buckboard, behind a runaway team, to a cowboy’s arms. Christy Cabanné was the director, and Bobby Burns, of the Burns Brothers who did most of the dangerous riding, was the cowboy rescuer. Lillian had no fear of the jump—her faith in Bobby was perfect—but the pony he was riding sank beneath the suddenly added weight, and nearly went down. “Closest and most dangerous thing I ever did,” Bobby said when it was over.

Lillian loved California, and why not? It had given her a new freedom, and with it, her health. News came of the arrival of Nell’s baby. Incredible to think of Nell with a baby! “Oh, Nell, does it really belong to you?” And a few lines further along, “This is a wonderful country! How I wish you could be here; it would do you so much good. It is just like summer, and they have wonderful mocking-birds and beautiful nights.”

* * * * *

I do not know the name of Lillian’s first California picture, nor the sequence of those that followed. Nobody today seems to remember these things, and they are not very important. There was a good deal of sameness about the Westerns, and most of them were that. “A Misunderstood Boy” was among the titles, “Just Gold,” and “The Lady and the Mouse”; but as Griffith was turning out pictures at the rate of one, or two and even three, a week—short films, in those days—these titles suggest no more than brief stages of preparation for the day a year or two later when he would begin to write the Greater Picture story across the screens of the world.

But they did something for Lillian and Dorothy: They taught them the technique and mechanics of film photography, in and out of doors, and their alert minds absorbed it as by instinct. It was only a little while until Griffith discussed his pictures with them, asked their suggestions. And something more: The public recognized their faces from the pictures of the previous summer, and began to inquire who they were.

One day Lillian was interviewed. Surely this was “coming on.” The reporter had heard of Belasco’s verdict; it had run ahead of her, and was known and repeated in California almost as soon as she arrived. The reporter wrote about Belasco, and then on his own account called her “Lillian, the adorable.”

It was pleasant, of course, to be written of like that, but she wished he had said more about her pictures. She led the next reporter around to them, explaining that her work was the important thing. He asked her what one must do to be a screen actress, and quoted her as saying:

“To play for the pictures is mostly a matter of the face, and the inside. You have to learn to think, inside.”

Being a young reporter, he was willing to believe that it was a matter of the face—_her_ face: “A tea rose” he called it, “reflected in a moonlit mirror.” Also he spoke of ivory, and pale jade, and of other things not closely related to acting.

There was no Hollywood in that halcyon day, no picture Hollywood. That “particularly irrational” corner of the universe had as yet neither name nor fame. The Biograph studio was in Los Angeles, on Pico Street, a building thought to be rather large, being one hundred or one-hundred-and-fifty feet long—a narrow shack, used chiefly as a carpentry shop, and for dressing-rooms—one each, for men and women.

As before mentioned, the photography was done on a stage set up outside, by daylight. There were sliding curtains above, like those in a photograph gallery, which is about all it was. The curtains controlled the sun, but the wind blew in and candles flickered, tablecloths waved ghostily, and occasionally something blew off the shelf, even in a “perfectly still” room. When it rained, they went into the carpentry shop and rehearsed. Often, the younger ones rehearsed while the older ones watched them. Always they rehearsed on rainy days. They spoke whatever words came into their heads, except during “silent rehearsals,” when they were supposed to convey the meaning in pantomime.

Griffith wrote most of his own plays—scenarios—a good many more than he needed. He could not afford to have them tried out by expensive people, so he used helpers—extras, stage-hands, anybody—for preliminary rehearsals. Sometimes it happened that a very humble servitor put astonishing life and conviction into what he, or she, was doing, and Griffith was just the person to recognize it. Bobby Harron, a property boy, had been like that. And there would be many others, including Constance Talmadge, Wallace Reid, and Valentino. It was Dorothy who suggested giving a part to Valentino. Griffith demurred, on the ground that he didn’t believe he would be popular with women—too “foreign-looking.” Amazing conclusion! But “Rudy” was cruder, then. Perhaps Mencken’s “catnip to women” would not have been so neat a turn.

They were a busy crowd in the Pico Street studio. Griffith had a vacant lot out back, and those not in the scenes were sent there to limber up—to practice running and walking, arm movements, a variety of gymnastic work, all in the direction of a better expression of emotions.

Long hours. For many of the pictures, they had to get up in the dark, to be “on location” by sunrise. Hard days in the field, home late, hot, hungry and ready for bed. And always, those not in action were rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing, or prancing up and down that deadly lot, making muscle for the next job.

They ate how and when they could. Something was taken along by those who went to the field. The others grabbed a sandwich or a plate of soup, or pie and milk, from the White Kitchen, a tiny nearby shack. Abbreviated luncheons were sometimes brought to the set—“studio food”—that is, something not messy, nor especially appetizing. Experimental luncheon-places were tried in the studio, but not very successfully.

There was nothing resembling dissipation among the Biograph group. On the contrary, there was an atmosphere of earnest study and thought. Stimulated by Griffith, himself a voluminous and inclusive reader, the young women, especially, rather put on airs in their devotion to research and philosophy: Nietzsche, Strindberg, Schopenhauer, Spinoza—these were their favorites. What time they found to read them, it is difficult to see, now—nights and Sundays, perhaps. At all events, they did read them, or read at them, and discussed them feverishly during any spare moments. Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Lillian and Dorothy, Miriam Cooper, Anita Loos—these chiefly were the students. Anita Loos was in the scenario department, and very keen, one of the best-posted. Anita discussed so much, and so capably, that Griffith called her “Madame Spinoza.”

When it happened that they made a picture that touched upon anything historic or geographic, they tried to “read up” for color, costume, background. Lillian reveled in such research; swiftly, eagerly, she added to her knowledge of the past, of life in general. The others were like that, too, more or less.

“Did those girls have sweethearts?” I asked Griffith, a little while ago.

“I don’t know; I don’t remember any. I don’t see where they would have found time for them. Today, stars and others make one big production, and have long waits between. We had nothing like that. We were producing every day. The demand was good, and not many companies. It was a different world.”

Such a little while ago ... less than twenty years ... just yesterday! But thinking of it now, and of all that has come, and gone, since then, it seems, somehow, a Golden Age.

* * * * *

I like to think of Lillian in that truly lovely environment, that “garden between dawn and sunrise,” among those wholesome, beautiful girls and those strong, handsome young men, all busy at a work which, however crude and inconsequential it may seem today, brought cheer and comfort to the millions, then. I like to think of her and Dorothy dashing along the hillsides, on range ponies, as painted Indians, or whooping cowboys; I like to think of them with their mother, in their apartment at the Brentwood, digging into the books which now for the first time they could afford to buy—making up, as far as might be, for the insufficient years.

How starved they were for books! They would drop into a book shop for one, and come out with an armful. Before they knew it, they were acquiring a library. Life was becoming worth while. Lillian to Nell: “The world unfolds itself to me more and more every day, and sometimes it seems so bright; then it changes ...”

For the most part she thought herself very well off—in a world where no one is more than passably happy—and increasingly devoted herself to her work.

She began to train her facial muscles to obey her, to reflect her thoughts. “You must think inside,” she had told the reporter, by which she meant, I suppose, that one must do one’s own thinking, rather than merely reflect the thought of the director, must persuade one’s muscles—all of one’s muscles and members—unconsciously to obey the inward thought. “Think inside and your trained body will take care of itself,” might have been her creed. Not all players could adopt it. Some could hardly be said to think at all. Thought, the director’s thought, filtered through them. Griffith found her always willing—eager—to listen—but not pliable.... More and more he left her alone. Lately he said—to the writer:

“Dorothy was more apt at getting the director’s idea than Lillian, quicker to follow it, more easily satisfied with the result. Lillian conceived an ideal, and patiently sought to realize it. Genius is like that: the ideal becomes real to it.”

From his lofty hotel window, David Wark Griffith looked out across the tops of Babylon. Reflectively, he added:

“She is the best actress in New York—the best I know. She has the most brains. Joseph Medill Patterson once said to me: ‘Lillian Gish has the best mind of any woman I ever met.’ But I knew that, already.”

V

THE PATH TO STARDOM

Lillian to Nell:

I want you to see “A Mothering Heart” ... I cried and lost so much sleep over that picture, that I am sure you would like it.

When the picture was an important one, she rehearsed the whole night, sometimes, alone in her room, going over the scenes again and again. She never required “glycerine tears”—she lived the part too vividly. A good many years later, she wrote:

“The first important picture in which I appeared was ‘The Mothering Heart.’ This was noteworthy, not only because it was in two reels, but because the vast sum of eighteen hundred dollars had been spent in the making.”

“A Mothering Heart” received gratifying notices: “Her best picture, thus far”; “Her lack of so-called acting is the secret of her success”; “Mr. Belasco said very little when he called her ‘the most beautiful blonde in the world’”; “The hit of her career.” All of which would indicate that those nights and days of rehearsal had not been wasted; also, that a picture “career” bore no very close relation to elapsed time.

There was some reason in this: fame of a sort had come to her with astonishing suddenness—the fame that comes to a striking face and personality, interestingly presented in a thousand towns and cities. It was like magic. She had really done nothing of importance, yet she had a “career”—her name and face were widely familiar.

There began to be a sifting-in of “fan” letters—rather a new thing in the picture world. Admirers did not always know where to write. And there was something remote, something baffling, in the idea of writing to a picture; something suggestive of the bibulous young man, waiting at the back door of a movie-house “to take Mary Pickford home.”

Then, more and more, the notices and the magazines gave addresses; the name of the producing company appeared on the title flash of the film itself, though it generally vanished and was forgotten before one had a chance to fall in love with the star. Still, the letters came, and the sift became a drift that in time would become an avalanche. Some were from children.

* * * * *

Lillian to Nell:

Tomorrow we start on our last picture out here, “Judith and Holofernes,” from the Bible story, a wonderful theme.

“Judith of Bethulia,” as they finally called it, was Griffith’s most pretentious undertaking up to “The Birth of a Nation,” of which it was the forerunner. He took his players up to Chatsworth Park, a desert place in the hills, and set up an ancient walled city, engaged an army of extras, men, women, children, even babies. Also, expert riders and trained horses, and went into strenuous daily rehearsal. The “Park” was a place of sand and rock and cactus, a good way from Los Angeles. They went by street car, then train, finishing the trip by hay-wagon. They got up at four or five o’clock, in order to be on the ground, dressed and made-up when the sun rose. Bottles of snake-bite antidote were issued to the players, for rattlers were very common there. An actress saw a coil of rubber tubing on a stump, and started to get it. It behaved curiously, and she lost interest—lost it at the rate of several miles an hour, until she was safely with the others.

It was June—the weather was blazing hot. They worked all day in the sun and dust, sweltering in Oriental garments, through the longest days of the year. When they got back to Los Angeles, it was dark, and they were hardly in bed before they had to get up again. As soon as the desert scenes were finished, Griffith packed up his players and set out for New York to finish the studio scenes there. In this picture, Blanche Sweet had the part of Judith, Henry Walthall was Holofernes. Lillian had a small part, a little Mother in Israel.

Only a little while ago, with Lillian, in a small New York projection-room, I saw “Judith and Holofernes” on the screen. I was amazed, and I think she was, at how good it was. The photography was excellent, would pass as such today: soft, brown in tone, with little of the jerkiness that came of the slow camera. Furthermore, the story was beautifully conveyed.

It was terribly dry, hot and dusty there, which took nothing away from the realism. The clouds of dust that rose from a battle scene gave a magnificence and mystery to the effect—a reality that was stirring, even today. It is easy to believe that an audience which had not yet seen “The Birth of a Nation,” was awed by the spectacle.

There was a great deal of fine horsemanship. Horses trained to fall, their riders flung far and wide, were not then so common. Blanche Sweet made a perfect Judith. Lillian’s part, though small, was quite lovely. She was a little mother, running about, seeking water for the baby held always close to her breast. There were other babies in the picture. Babies were easy to get, then. There was no enforced law about it, and one could pick them up by the dozen, in Los Angeles, or anywhere—Mexican babies—with a little girl to look after them when not in use.

* * * * *

The studio scenes of “Judith” were not made in the old Fourteenth Street place. During the winter, the Biograph Company had built a vast, new studio uptown, at 175th Street, great floor space, and dressing-rooms for all. They had thought their crowded dressing-rooms in California inconvenient—just one for women and another for men, rather scrambly and messy ... long tables, with mirrors back to back, in the center ... one side for the regulars, the other for the extras. Everybody thought the new place was going to be fine, but it wasn’t. All the fun, the cozy, intimate comradeship, was gone.

* * * * *

Griffith was restless. Primarily, he wanted to get out of picture making, and write. He had written his way into pictures, now he dreamed of writing his way out of them. He was a poet at heart. He had a poem and a play to his credit, besides dozens of scenarios. All the time he wanted to settle down to writing.

It was no use. He couldn’t settle down, even if they would let him, and they wouldn’t let him. He was too good a director for that—the best—much the best in the field. Settle down! Preposterous! But he quit the Biograph Company. They were niggardly about expenses; sometimes (often, in fact), he used his own money—and they had an economy complex in the matter of salaries. The Reliance-Majestic, a more recent organization, offered him a free hand. He went to them in October. With him went the Biograph players, almost in a body. A few were tied by contract, but the others went, Lillian and Dorothy among them.

Those young people had faith in Griffith, and loved him. Loved him when he raised their wages, loved him and were still faithful even when the day came, as presently it did come, when he was wading so deeply in the tide of battle and Reconstruction that attended “The Birth of a Nation,” that he could not find enough to go around. They knew he would pay to the last penny when it was possible, and he always did. With or without wages, they would stand by.

The Reliance-Majestic Company had a studio on the Clara Morris estate, Yonkers; another at Sixteenth Street and Union Square, West. It is said that in less than an hour after Griffith had closed the Biograph door behind him, he was directing on Union Square a scene for a new five-reel picture, which he made in six days and nights, working constantly—all day and night. Perhaps he wanted to make a showing to the new company. Perhaps there was a need of quick money—usually there was.

In this new picture, “The Battle of the Sexes,” Lillian was cast for the leading part: a daughter who suffers, and brings an erring father to repentance. In the beginning, it was called “The Single Standard,” and in that pre-war moment, was thought to be rather risqué. Today, it would be a Sunday-school picture, dramatically and morally suited to Third Avenue, New York’s remaining stronghold of respectability.

The cast included, besides Lillian, Mary Alden, Donald Crisp, Bobby Harron, Fay Tincher, and Owen Moore. In one scene, the climax, Lillian has a sixshooter ready for Fay Tincher, the vamp who has broken up the family. Her finger, however, refuses to pull the trigger. Her father, entering, finding her in this dubious association, asks: “You, my daughter, what are you doing here?” And the devastating reply: “You, my father, what are _you_ doing here?” gives him something to think about. A notice says: “The sets were lavish, but above all, they were true to the higher social sphere.” Third Avenue would adore it. “The Battle of the Sexes” was Griffith’s first release for the Reliance-Majestic. There was a prologue and four reels; longer than “Judith of Bethulia.”

VI

“HOME, SWEET HOME”

Griffith had far greater battles in his mind. In January he severed regular connection with the Reliance-Majestic, but arranged, under their auspices, to produce a Civil War picture, based on Thomas Dixon’s book, “The Clansman.” Then, early in February, he took his entire group of players to the Coast, and began, not that picture, but pictures that would earn money for the undertaking. No one, not even Griffith himself, guessed the size of that undertaking, but better than the others, Griffith knew that it would require an overhead which would cause, among his backers, an outbreak of apoplexy, if they got even a hint of it.

* * * * *

Griffith had a bent for melodrama. Also, he knew there was money in it, and money was very necessary just now, in view of the big project ahead. It occurred to him that John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home” had a more universal appeal than any similar composition in the nation’s history. A story of the author’s life, followed by a set of scenes using that old heart-throb as a call to the erring wanderer or comfort to the heavy-laden, would be irresistible. Walthall would be cast as Payne, Lillian as his sweetheart; at the end, a spiritual transition, as in “Uncle Tom.”

At the Reliance-Majestic, or Fine Arts studio, on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, the work was pushed forward rapidly, to have the picture ready for Spring release. In a full-page announcement of the big, new feature, we read:

“Twenty-five famous screen stars will participate in the play, which will be a very ‘portentous’ one.”

Whether the printer meant to set “pretentious” or “portentous,” is of small consequence. It was both. Griffith meant to make it the former. Payne, had he been consulted, would have voted for the latter, for in the picture, he dies and goes to Hell. That a poet, author of an immortal song, could have been sent to Hell, even temporarily, as late as the Spring of 1914, shows how far we have traveled since then. A newspaper symposium had abolished Hell a good while before that time, but perhaps Griffith hadn’t heard of it yet. Griffith made Payne abandon his sweetheart, so doubtless it was proper that he should have a taste of Hell, even in 1914.

Then follow the “episodes”: A young Easterner is about to forsake Mae Marsh (“Apple-pie Mary”), when the strains of “Home, Sweet Home” on an accordion, win him back to her “calico-covered arms.” A business man’s wife is about to “step out,” when a “great musician” in the flat below strikes up “Home, Sweet Home,” and a wife’s honor is safe. The fact that great musicians so seldom play “Home, Sweet Home” as a pastime, did not trouble Griffith. His did.

The picture ended in a manner no longer to be taken seriously. Payne (Walthall), dying in sin, goes promptly to an impressive Hell, a chasm in the mountains, where, arrayed in an astonishing costume, considering the climate, he is given a disagreeable time by certain devils wearing the falsest of false faces. His sweetheart (Lillian), dying a saint, had gone straight to Heaven—a sort of grown-up Little Eva. Must Payne remain in Hell? Not above a week, at the longest. “Little Eva,” suspended on wires, as when she had been the Gold Fairy of Belasco, descends in a white robe, and her poor renegade lover, seizing the folds of that immaculate garment, is borne upward and outward to Paradise, backing away from the audience, so that their faces may never be lost. Probably only the beauty of Walthall and Lillian saved such a scene, even in that remote time, from the shouts of joy which would surely greet it today.

Seventeen years later, in the little projection room on Seventh Avenue, I watched, with Lillian, an unreeling of this ancient film. It seemed to me, as, I think, to her, pretty crude:—in places, childish. The costumes had been selected from an assortment something more limited than the old Biograph wardrobe, and were either amusing or pathetic, as you happened to think. The acting was not much better. I don’t quite know what was the matter with it, but it conveyed the impression of being amateurish, though all the actors were, in effect, stars. Lillian’s half-hysterical “Wasn’t I terrible?” expressed one’s general feeling as to all of them. Mae Marsh in a comedy part, was the best of the lot. The photography was on a par with the rest of it. Yet it followed “Judith of Bethulia” by several months. What _was_ the matter?

And since we have been speaking of “Little Eva,” perhaps this is as good a place as any to state that Lillian had never, at any time, played that part. She might have done so, had there been any “Uncle Tom” combinations when she was a child trouper. “Uncle Tom” had died permanently, by that time. Interviewers, however, when they looked at her, could not believe, when she told them that she had played “Little Willie” in “East Lynne,” that she was not saying “Little Eva in ‘Uncle Tom,’” and they so often printed this statement that in time she almost believed it herself. I am making a special paragraph of this denial to set the matter straight—for all of us.

* * * * *

Busy days, these. Under one director and another, Griffith kept Lillian and Dorothy going, usually in different pictures, though sometimes, as in “The Sisters,” together. They made an attractive pair, but Griffith could not afford to waste them on small pictures—“program” pictures—besides, it was not easy to get stories—picture stories—to fit.

Dorothy became a star on her own account, with Walthall in “The Mountain Rat,” a Western; and in “The Mysterious Shot,” with Jack Pickford, who had joined the movie forces. Jack, apparently, had conquered his old infatuation, for we hear nothing further of it. “The Rat” was Dorothy’s first star part, and a very good one of its kind, being that of a red-light girl, considered then rather a daring portrayal for a girl of sixteen. All these were pot-boilers, while preparations for the great Civil War spectacle went forward.

They also kept the names and faces of Griffith’s stars before the public—an important matter, for the field was getting full of producers—stars were being created almost overnight. Nor did Griffith let them get into a rut by working always under one director. Lillian, alternately under Christy Cabanné and Jack O’Brien, was receiving liberal training.

“Which would you rather work under?” a reporter asked.

“Both. Their methods are entirely different; I learn a great deal from each.”

Interviews were very frequent, now, the reporters kind. They referred to Lillian and Dorothy as the “darlings of the screen,” and they rarely failed to remember Belasco’s verdict, which found its way even to Massillon. “MASSILLON GIRL CALLED THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BLONDE IN THE WORLD” made a three-column headline, with a picture of Lillian to prove it; as if everybody in Massillon hadn’t known that, long ago.

VII

“THE BIRTH OF A NATION”

David Wark Griffith was the son of a soldier, and had been brought up on war tales. He believed the time had come when the talk that had been so vivid to his childhood, should be given form and motion—that the bitter struggle of four years, with its rankling sequences, should be presented on the screen.

From Thomas Dixon’s “The Leopard’s Spots” and “The Clansman,” he outlined his scenario, and began work. The latter title was to be the name of the picture. The new, and far greater, title, “The Birth of a Nation,” was not used until the film had been actually finished and shown. The story of this achievement—the first, and still, in many respects, the greatest, of war pictures—has many times been told. One or two paragraphs, however, from Robert Edgar Long’s biography of Griffith, may not be out of place:

Six weeks of constant rehearsals preceded the taking of the first scene, and throughout the next six months required to complete the spectacle, so many things happened it would require an entire volume to enumerate them.

Among the most notable scenes in the finished production were the battle of Petersburg, fought by eighteen thousand men on a field five miles across; the march of Sherman to the sea, culminating in the burning of Atlanta; the assassination of President Lincoln in the crowded Ford’s Theatre in Washington; the wild rides of the Ku Klux Klan, and the session of the South Carolina Legislature under the negro carpet-bagger régime.

Had Griffith guessed that the World War was coming, he would hardly have had the courage to begin. He had to assemble a vast horde of extras, horses, thousands of uniforms and Ku Klux gowns; arms; he had to construct breastworks, trenches—all the front of war; he had to do all this when a real war was sweeping Europe, and all prices, especially of the things he needed, soaring to the sky. Horses were the hardest. I do not yet see where he got them, when European agents were everywhere in search of just the horses he wanted.

And then the money: The treasurer of the Reliance-Majestic company must have believed that Griffith thought him the treasurer of the United States, the way he drew on him. Of course, there was an end to that: Griffith had to go outside for money and credit. One may imagine him buying all the white cotton in Los Angeles to make those Ku Klux gowns, most of it on credit. Long says:

It became a battle for dollars, and it is told that the determined Griffith himself actually went begging among the merchants of Los Angeles to get the final one thousand dollars with which to complete his work.

Most of Griffith’s players went into the cast, as the rôles seemed to fit them. Of the female parts, Mae Marsh was supposed to have the best. Blanche Sweet was still held to be Griffith’s chief star and as the part of Elsie Stoneman, the Northern girl who becomes the sweetheart of the Southern Colonel (Walthall), did not seem quite big enough for her, Griffith gave it to Lillian. At least, that is the way it is remembered, now. I think there were other reasons: In the first place, Walthall was of small stature, which accounts for his being dubbed the “little Colonel” in the play. Blanche was of ample proportions; the two were not a good match. For another thing, Griffith knew that Lillian’s frail loveliness set against the big mulatto features of the villain of the piece, the man bound to possess her, would move the audience as would the face of no other member of his company. It is also just possible that Griffith, in the beginning, did not realize how big the part of Elsie Stoneman was to be. He had a fashion of making his play as he went along. Fifteen years later, he only said:

“When I gave Lillian a part in ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ I merely thought she could play it, without considering how well, or at least without thinking she would make anything special out of it, though of course, by that time, I knew she would do it in her own way.”

The field work of the “Birth” was done at the Universal Ranch, a place of diversified scenery outside Los Angeles. The play itself was made at the Fine Arts studio, which consisted of an exterior stage like that on Pico Street—only, instead of a large building, a lot of little shacks served as temporary, very temporary, dressing-rooms. Any player so inclined could build one for his or her own use, and trim it and decorate it according to fancy. The roof was merely a piece of canvas, held in place—also according to fancy. It rarely rained.

At one side of the lot, was constructed the “street” on which fronted the Cameron Southern home, about which most of the play centered. There was not much in the way of scenic designing. A stage carpenter, Huck Wortman, one of the old-fashioned kind who chewed tobacco and cocked up his eye, was equal to most things. If Griffith wanted a village street, with a vine-covered cottage; or a Southern mansion; or a hospital; Huck cocked an eye, shifted his quid, and said, “Aw right,” and it was so.

* * * * *

As a Civil War spectacle, “The Birth of a Nation” will probably never be outdone. The battle-field, with its miles of hand-to-hand fighting; the assembling of the Klan—hundreds of them in white robes, mounted;—Lincoln’s assassination—these things were more impressive than even the reality could have been, for no one of them was ever viewed in its entirety, or with deliberation, and it seems impossible that they should ever have been more real. Stirring, appropriate music, fitted by Griffith to the scenes, added a final thrill.

The negro aspects of the picture were not entirely fortunate ... within the facts, but hardly within the proprieties. It attached no blame to the negro for the abuses of Reconstruction, but presented him in an unfavorable light. Negro political domination in the South was an evil growing out of the war—a war and an evil for which the negro was the last person to be held responsible, the last person to be reminded of them.

“The Clansman,” as if was first called, was shown publicly at Clune’s Auditorium, Los Angeles, on the evening of February 8, 1915, all the film colony of Los Angeles being present. Reports had been spread that there would be negro rioting, and the police were out in force. There was no trouble. The theatre was jammed. Here and there in the audience were negroes.

Following this presentation, a print of the picture was hurried to Washington, and shown to President Wilson, members of the Cabinet, and their families. A few days later, February 20, this print was run in New York, for the censors, and others concerned. Thomas Dixon, author of the story, was present, and declared excitedly, to Griffith: “‘The Clansman’ is too tame a title for what you have done. Let’s call it ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” which became its title, then and there.

On March 3, the picture was shown at the Liberty Theatre, New York City, at two dollars a seat, the first time a motion picture ever became a full-sized theatre attraction. Even so, it was in for a record run.

* * * * *

Lillian’s success as Elsie Stoneman was a complete surprise to her, for she had not liked the part, and then it had dragged on so long. But when the notices poured in, she must have begun to wonder if anybody but herself and Walthall were in the picture. Their faces together, or hers alone, looked out from every page. From New York, Thomas Dixon wrote:

_My dear Miss Gish_:

I don’t care to tell you all the beautiful things I’d like to say about you and your exquisite work in our picture....

Between the acts, last week, a distinguished young man of letters—editor of a great magazine—found me in the lobby, dragged me one side and whispered “For God’s sake, tell me quick, who is the glorious little girl playing Elsie?” I answered, “Miss Lillian Gish.” “I want to meet her right away! Where is she?” he gasped.

He’s only one of many hundreds. How can I ever thank you for such work? Believe me it belongs to the big things in life for which money never pays. I am your debtor for services, for which I not only could never pay but don’t know how to thank you....

Sincerely, THOMAS DIXON.

Dorothy fortunately had no part in “The Birth of a Nation”—fortunately, because she was overtaken by an accident when the picture was well under way. Of course, it was just a coincidence that a fortune-teller, only a little while before, had warned her against an automobile accident. Anybody could do that. Nevertheless, he _had_ warned her—and she _would_ walk across the street where automobiles were passing. On that particular day—it was Thanksgiving—she had been lunching with Griffith and Mae Marsh and Miriam Cooper, and coming out of the restaurant, held to Griffith’s coat, demanding that he buy her something.

“Oh, Mr. Griffith, please buy me some candy, Mr. Griffith. Please buy me some chewing gum. Oh, Mr. Griffith—please——”

They were crossing a street just then, the Boulevard, crowded with cars—the others a little way in advance of Dorothy. She never knew quite what happened, but in the wink of an eye, she was down on the ground on her face; a car that had struck her in a variety of places—was standing with its front wheel between her feet, one of which it had crushed.

Dorothy’s disaster was not all sorrow. Lillian was with her most of the time. Friends were willing to entertain her steadily. Griffith had a miniature screen installed, with a projection machine, and gave her a private view of so much of “The Birth of a Nation” as was then complete. No damaged young queen had ever been so royally entertained. In a reasonably brief space, she was on her feet—limping for a time, but otherwise as well as ever.

VIII

“INTOLERANCE”

The Griffith lot was at 4500 Sunset Boulevard, on the edge of Hollywood, then a residential suburb, named for one of the earliest homes there. Hollywood residents observed with curiosity, but with no special alarm, the interesting picture-making plants that were appearing here and there in their neighborhood. California has a taste for publicity:

“Ladies and gentlemen, since there seems to be nothing further to be said for the Dear Departed, I should be glad to make a few remarks about California.”

That Griffith, on the very edge of Hollywood, had made the great picture then sweeping the country, was something on which to “make a few remarks,” though it is unlikely that even the most sanguine residents guessed that within a comparatively brief time, their little suburb would become the center of one of the world’s richest industries; a collection of amazing architectural construction; a strange, irrational region, in and about whose environs frail cities and quaint villages, fair palaces and weird ships and oceans, would appear and vanish, beyond the dreams of all the fairylands of time and change; that with these things would assemble an exhibit of feminine loveliness and masculine perfection, of human freaks and human vanities, such as probably no other planet could show.

The change began quickly enough, now. There was money to be made in Hollywood—not only by producers, but by actors. On Broadway, men and women with lean parts, or no parts at all, turned their eyes westward. The exodus set in. The word “Hollywood” began to be passed about like some magic bauble, a talisman. Once more, California held out to men and women a lure of gold.

* * * * *

The little group of players on Sunset Boulevard hardly knew what to make of the first incursion of “real actors” that swept in upon them. They had two ideas about it: they wondered if they would be able to keep their jobs, and if so, would they learn how to act. They realized, presently, that it made very little difference to them. They did keep their jobs, and they did not learn how to act—not in the stage way. It was the newcomers who had to learn—if they stayed.

Most of them did stay—adapted themselves. Producers with new, big undertakings, were all about. Griffith himself, returning from first showings of the “Birth,” began on what promised to be a still more important, more expensive, picture.

It started as rather a small venture, with Mae Marsh and Bobby Harron in the leading parts. It was to be called “The Mother and the Law,” based upon a famous murder case, wherein an innocent man, through intolerance—man’s inhumanity to man—was brought to the foot of the scaffold.

Lillian was not to have a part in this new play. For one thing, she was working in another picture—as Annie, in “Enoch Arden”—one of the best of her early films—and in Richard Harding Davis’ story of “Captain Macklin.” And then, Griffith perhaps did not think it wise to push her forward too fast.

But one night, after a day of hard rehearsal, he picked up a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and his eye caught:

... endlessly rocks the cradle, Uniter of Here and Hereafter.

He saw a picture: a girl—Lillian—endlessly rocking the cradle of humanity, binding the ages together—ages of human intolerance.

Feverishly, he mapped out a new scenario, far-reaching, comprehensive, covering the great episodes of intolerance: back through the religious wars, with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, through the Crucifixion, back to the days of Belshazzar, tyrant of Babylon. Beginning with the modern story, he would lead it through episodes of tyranny and bloodshed, down to the blind cruelty and intolerance of today. And always, between, that young mother, endlessly rocking the cradle of the child who, in every age, must pay the price.

The preparations for “Intolerance,” as the new production was now called, were architecturally far more pretentious and costly than those for “The Birth of a Nation,” or for any spectacle play up to that time. Gigantic plaster elephants rose a hundred feet above the street level; the towering buildings of Babylon stretched, a profile of ancient Asia, across the sky. Nubian lions roared; a motley assemblage of Persians, Egyptians, Babylonians, priests, dancing-girls, charioteers, and fifty-seven other varieties, gathered for rehearsal. Says Griffith’s biographer:

The luncheon hour “on location” composed one of the most picturesque sights ever witnessed by human eyes. At times there were as many as fifteen thousand men, women and children scattered about the various lots during the noon hour. Thousands of horses and sheep grazed along the green enclosures, their shaking heads mingling with the flashing swords and helmets of the fighting-men.

When the great mob scenes were being photographed, it seemed as though the entire population of Los Angeles had come out to Griffith’s place, to take part in the various pageants and mighty rushing armies. Actors from other studios—many of them prominent stars—joined in the scenes.

The writer assures us that in spite of the fierce conflicts waged on the parapets and walls and towers, only sixty-seven players were injured, and these but slightly; also that a modern field hospital, with surgeons, nurses and ambulances, was maintained.

Actors whose names were well known, or have since become so, first appeared on the screen in “Intolerance”: Count Erich von Stroheim, Frank Bennett, Tully Marshall, Constance Talmadge. Constance was an extra, used at first for rehearsal, but presently—in the “Mountain Girl who worshipped Belshazzar from afar”—Griffith could see only Constance, so gave her the part.

Griffith had money to work with, now, and spent it like Belshazzar himself. “Intolerance” required a year and a half to make, and an expenditure of nearly two million dollars.

Some of the items are impressive: A jeweled costume for the “Princess Beloved” cost seven thousand dollars; the dancing-girls at the feast of Belshazzar, twenty-thousand—a good deal more than they ever cost that early Belshazzar, even in his palmiest days, but of course these were war prices.

“Intolerance” was shown for the first time at the Liberty Theatre, New York, September 6, 1916. Its magnificence impressed the public. What wouldn’t Griffith do next? On the night of April 6, 1917, Griffith personally presented “Intolerance,” at the Drury Lane Theatre, London.

On that day, the United States entered the World War.

IX

THERE WERE NO LOVE AFFAIRS

Lillian did not consider that she was really in the new picture. To Nell she wrote: “I am not in it in person, but my heart runs all through it—and it seems more to belong to me than all my other work together.” As of course it did—the mother who, through the ages, rocked humanity’s cradle.

She had made a number of smaller pictures, meantime—very good pictures, if we consult the notices, which even sometimes forgot to remember that she was the “most beautiful blonde in the world.” How tired she had become of that phrase! “If they want an angel on a wire, they send for me,” she told one reporter, who managed to omit Belasco, though he did call her “a young goddess” and a “daffodil.” You couldn’t stop them.

The pictures she made at this time were important only as they were steps of development—program pictures, little remembered today. “Diane of the Follies,” in which she played a kind of vamp and wore remarkable costumes, was more memorable.

“But Diane was very easy to play,” she said afterwards. “Anybody can play a character of that sort—it plays itself. It is the part of a good woman, whose colorless life has to be made interesting, that is hard.”

Her own life could hardly be said to be exciting. There were no love affairs. Plenty of opportunities, but she was always too busy for such things, or for the social life, of which there was now a good deal. “I was not gay enough for the parties; Dorothy was sought, for those. They didn’t care much about me.” And once she wrote:

“When Dorothy goes to a party, the party becomes a party: When I go to a party, I’m afraid it very often stops being a party.... She, as I once heard a girl described in a play, is like a bright flag flying in the breeze.

“All music, even the worst, seems so beautiful to her. All people amuse her.... I have fun, too, but it is only the fun I get out of apparently never-ending work.”

It was true, though: Work was her “fun”—work and study—always a book under her arm: often a French one.

And being kind to those about her—that was fun, too. She never failed to acknowledge the smallest service—from the electricians, the stage-hands, the humblest property-boy. A friend of those days writes me:

“It was not only that Lillian was courteous to the electricians and the rest; many actors are that ... she was just another workman. She happened to be before the camera, that was all.”

The little Gish family had never lived in a house, always in an apartment: in the Brentwood Apartments, and in the La Belle. But in the autumn of 1915, they leased Denishawn, home of the dancer, Ruth St. Denis, fitted for a school, plainly furnished, with dancing-floor, horizontal bar and other equipment, all of which strongly appealed to Lillian, who had been studying with Miss St. Denis, and could continue her work there.

The owner had left the beginnings of a menagerie, which they completed. At Christmas time that year, most of Lillian’s friends gave her live things. A partial census shows an owl—one-eyed, gray—eight Japanese finches, two parakeets, love-birds, two or three canaries, one little poll-parrot; another, “John” (who, in 1932, still survives); also, squirrels, a pair of golden pheasants, and a pair of peacocks that Miss St. Denis had left.

They did not remain in Denishawn; the next paragraph explains why. Lillian to Nell:

We have moved from that huge house I told you about. We were there eight months, and during the last four, we had four burglars. One was so bold as to come in through the dining-room window, all the way upstairs into Mother’s room, at the improper hour of 2:30 in the morning.

Being an old house with many squeaks, Mother knew all about him before he made his appearance, and greeted him with two bullets, the first of which hit the ceiling (she would have been terrified if she had hit _him_), and the second went through the railing in the hall. However, the man ran away, and the police never did catch him. All this time I was out on the sleeping-porch, petrified—could not utter a sound or move an inch. Oh, I am very brave. Imagine, Nell, being awakened from a sound sleep by your Mother tearing through the house, shooting a gun.

So they went back to apartments, permanently, as they believed.

Mrs. Gish was not very well, and wanted only to have peace. She was something of a financier; her business experience partly accounted for that, though she was a natural economist.

“Your salaries,” she told Lillian and Dorothy, “are not income, but merely an exchange in money for your natural capital of youth and health. Salaries are capital, and all above actual needs should be invested as such. The returns you get from investment are income.”

Lillian and Dorothy were making very good salaries. The day of spectacular earnings had not yet arrived, but two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a week left a margin for banking. The little troupers who had received ten to fifteen dollars a week, and lived on less than half of it, began to feel themselves capitalists. This friend and that suggested wonderful “buys,” and exhibited dividend slips. Then the “olive grove” epidemic broke out. Everybody was investing in olive groves, certain that every ten dollar share of stock would be worth hundreds within a few years. Lillian considered this prospect, with prayer and palpitations. The beautiful gray-green olive groves were certainly very nice. She had a balance of three hundred dollars, and one day hesitantly subscribed for that amount of stock. The palpitations grew worse. Olive groves! Why, it would take ages, and there would be so many olives, nobody would buy them. Besides, Lillian found she needed the money. She went to the office of the olive growers, and stated her case. A stout, good-natured man there listened quietly, regarded her thoughtfully, and returned her investment. What an escape—the others did not get their money back, and to date, dividends are shy.

By and by, when the three hundred had grown to as many thousand, another epidemic was in the air. Oil! Everybody caught it, including Bobby Harron, who was terribly in love with Dorothy and anxious to make the whole Gish family rich. Mrs. Gish shook her head. There was a tract of land which she thought promising. Lillian took a look at it, and was unfavorably impressed. It was just dirt—unbeautiful with weeds, and depressing tin cans. Bobby’s oil stock looked valuable, and had an attractive name, something patriotic, like “Uncle Sam,” or “Union Jack.” There is a superstition that any such name is a hoodoo, but Lillian and Bobby did not know this—not then. When Bobby pulled out his next dividend, Lillian fell.

That was about all: dividends hesitated after that, finally forgot to arrive. The stock that she had bought around 60, was quoted around 3. Bobby said it would “stage a grand come-back,” but to date it has not done so. Bobby was a sweet soul, and they thought none the less of him. “John,” the Gish parrot, to whom they had vainly tried to teach some proper things to say, acquired for himself the disconsolate wail: “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“_Why_ do you suppose he does that?” Lillian asked Harry Carr, a Los Angeles newspaper man, of whom we are likely to hear again.

“That’s easy,” said Carr, “he is discussing oil stock.”

And the land? The dirt? Well, a lot of foolish people began to buy it and to cover up the weeds and things with houses, which made a lot of other foolish people want it, until its price increased ten, twenty, an-hundred-fold!

X

THE NIGHTMARE OF WAR

Griffith, in England, wrote that he had wanted to enlist, but was being urged by English officials, Lloyd George and others, to do a war picture as propaganda. He might send for Lillian, soon.

“Intolerance” had made a stir in London, and the war situation had made a stir in Griffith. Like his ancestors, he wanted to carry a gun—to go into the trenches and pull a trigger. Lord Beaverbrook said to him:

“That is nonsense. You can do a thousand times more for the cause by making a picture that will show the need of American intervention on the largest possible scale.”

Griffith already had a story in mind—one he had planned on a night when he had been reading of the German desolation of Belgium and the French frontier.

“We will help you,” Lloyd George and other high officials told him. “We will give you the use of our soldiers and training camps; we will put you on the front lines in France.”

Griffith was ever a wary person. Never one to close a door behind him ... to make an irrevocable decision, to fire until charged and primed. He wrote Lillian that he was looking for a location in Paris, guardedly adding that he would not begin work until the war ended. On the strength of which, Lillian, by this time in New York, paid a brief, happy visit to Nell, then living on the “Blue Dog Houseboat,” at Miami.

Two weeks later, with her mother, she was on her way across the Atlantic. In eight days they were in Liverpool where they sat down to wait for Dorothy. It was not decided when they sailed that Dorothy was to have a part in the new picture.

Dorothy sailed May 28. With her was Bobby Harron; also, Griffith’s faithful camera man, Gottlieb Wilhelm Bitzer, a terrible name to carry into England and France. The ship was the _Baltic_—General Pershing and staff aboard.

“Tell me,” Pershing said to Dorothy, “how one can learn to face calmly a moving-picture camera.” Everyone is afraid of something.

The _Baltic_ zigzagged across the ocean in thirteen days. Lillian and her mother became frantic, waiting. Dorothy, arriving, was shocked at her mother’s appearance. Her face was haggard with anxiety. Then, presently, they were on their way to London.

It was the first time any of them had been abroad. England in June: the tiny fields, the trim hedges, the stately trees, the thatched villages—picture-book land. At London they went directly to the Savoy Hotel, and were given a room on the Embankment, overlooking the Thames. Little did they guess what they were to see from those windows. All seemed quiet enough. They did some sight-seeing.

A few days later, they had a call from a post-office official, concerning a package from America. A courteous man, they asked him about the raids, on London. There would be no more, he said. The Zeppelins had proved easy targets, the Germans would not send them again. And he added: “Don’t mind if you should hear gun-fire at eleven o’clock; that will be our anti-aircraft gun practice.”

Barely were the words out of his mouth, when there came a far-off boom from the eastward. He looked at his watch. “Very extr’ord’nary,” he said, “they are beginning the practice half-an-hour ahead of time.” A moment later, he was gone.

The firing kept up. Lillian and Dorothy ran down the corridor, to a balcony. A waiter, passing, told them that the East End was being raided. He let them look through his binoculars. High in the air, to the eastward, one could make out a small, black speck—eighteen thousand feet up, he said.

They hurried down and got into a taxi, to see the raid. On the way to Whitechapel, they came to a post-office which had been struck. A corner of it was blown off—a number of persons killed. A great crowd had collected. They were told that much greater damage had been done in Whitechapel. They found there a schoolhouse, where ninety-six children had been killed. Crazed mothers swarmed about, looking for fragments of their dead.

Other bombs had fallen in the neighborhood. People were insane from grief. A schoolmaster carried out his own child. A woman standing near had just discovered that her boy was among the victims. Her face was distorted—it was as if someone had pulled it out of shape.

XI

UNDER FIRE

With the one thought of getting out of London, Mary Gish and her daughters went to Cambridge. But Cambridge, too, had been raided. At night, streets and houses were pitch dark. No anti-aircraft guns. No protection of any sort.

Two nights satisfied them. They returned to London, where for ten days it was quiet enough. Then, one morning, Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, were awakened from sound sleep by a terrific explosion. They ran to the windows. Coming up the Thames, in perfect formation, were twenty German planes, flying in what seemed a slow and majestic manner, dropping bombs as they came. They were so low that one could distinguish the crosses on the under side of their wings. Mrs. Gish and her daughters watched them, fascinated.

Were they afraid? Undoubtedly they were: with death hovering in the air, likely to come plunging down at any moment, not many of the race—a race blessed, or cursed, with imagination—could be wholly indifferent. The rest of the party—Griffith, Bobby Harron and Gottlieb Wilhelm Bitzer—came crashing in.

They supposed the planes would drop bombs on Waterloo Station, and especially on the Hotel Cecil, headquarters of the English Flying Corps, its roof covered with anti-aircraft guns. The Cecil was near them—next door. Nothing of the kind happened. The German planes, undisturbed by the shells fired at them, circled slowly around the Houses of Parliament, without dropping a bomb; then, turning, left London. This was on Saturday, July 8, 1917. The papers next morning reported thirty-seven dead, one hundred and forty-one wounded—numbers probably minimized. The Griffith party was shaken, dazed. It seemed incredible that in a world supposedly civilized such things could happen.

There was no longer any rest. Raids came at night, and in relays. One followed another—two and three in one night. They were meant to break the English morale.

The first night raid was by glorious moonlight. Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, sitting in their apartment about ten, heard a distant booming, then a far-off voice calling: “Take cover—take cover!” They merely sat there, while the bombing came closer and closer, with aircraft guns going. By and by it was over. Next morning, they heard that less damage had been done than before, but enough.

About two nights later, as the girls stood in front of a dressing-table, in their nightgowns—Mrs. Gish already in bed—there came from just under their windows such an explosion as could not be described in words. The electric lights in the bathroom went out—windows were shattered. They rushed into the hall. All on that floor were there, in wild confusion. They called to one another that the hotel had been struck. Then, from outside, came a man’s scream. They had never realized how terrible a man’s scream could be. Cries and groans followed. They stared their inquiry into one another’s faces.

The bomb, they learned, had struck just by Cleopatra’s Needle, a few yards distant. It had hit a tram and killed eleven persons, wounding many others. The conductor had had his legs blown off. It was he who had screamed, no doubt. Other bombs had fallen nearby. One on the little Theatre on Adelphi Terrace; another at the Piccadilly Circus; still another by Charing Cross Hospital. They had heard none of these, because of the concussion in their ears from the one that had fallen beneath their windows.

Lillian and Dorothy crept into one bed, shaking, unable to sleep. At four they got up, dressed, saw the dawn breaking over London—workmen going to their jobs. On the street, they found that many windows had been blown from shops, the glass so finely shattered that it was like snow. The girls said little, but listened to the comments of the working people—comments not pleasant to hear.

The raids now came regularly. The nights became hideous nightmares. Lillian and her mother seemed to get their nerve back. When the raids came, they would take their pillows and go into their little foyer, to try to get away from the noise. Dorothy took her pillow, too, but she did not sit on it—she hugged it. Finally, it was September. They had been there three months!

“... You cannot imagine, Nell, what terrible things those big things in the sky are, dropping death wherever they go. If this war would only end.... I am still here, and will live to see you and Tom and the babies again, in spite of it. So don’t worry.”

Lillian went out a good deal, and, as was her habit, made a study of the people ... to see how they acted under the stress and agony of war. She went to the Waterloo Station, to watch them saying good-bye. Always she was watching ... on the street ... everywhere.

XII

FRANCE

Days ... nights ... they seemed to have passed out of any world they had ever known, into a sinister, topsy-turvy world, where murder and destruction ruled.

Griffith down on the Salisbury plain, where there were great camps, was already making portions of the picture. Returning, at last, to London he escorted his little party down to Southampton, to take boat for France. It was a transport, crowded with soldiers. Mrs. Gish and the girls were in one tiny room, two in one bunk. Twice they started, and were sent back because of floating mines. Finally they were at Havre, and next evening at Paris, at the Grand Hotel.

Paris was dark—a place where almost anything could happen—but Griffith and the girls somehow managed to grope their way about, to the river and elsewhere. By daylight they did some shopping.

Griffith got the papers that would permit them to go to the fighting area; then, one morning, with Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, and Bobby Harron, set out in an automobile, passed through the gates of Paris. In an article for a home paper, Lillian described their journey:

Paris still has gates, just as you read about in the romantic novels. There is a particular gate that leads to the war zone and not a single, solitary human being can go through it unless he is a soldier, or one who has business in the zone.

Can you imagine how important you feel when you go through that gate? You find it very hard to believe that you are not just acting in a “movie,” in a Los Angeles background that Mr. Huck, the man who builds the moving-picture sets, has built—the road and everything.

And how you do go! By tall poplar trees, by long fields of France. France! Why, the very name is a poem and a romantic novel, all by itself. Lombardy poplars! It sounds like an old-fashioned song.

Through the fields are the long lines of barbed wire. That is where the trenches are. The very trenches that used to defend Paris. Then, after fifteen minutes’ ride, you are where the French stood in defense of Paris.... This is where the Germans were. They came this far. This very road ... these very trenches are where the men were.

But now you see the first town that the Germans bombed. You come to the same kind of houses, blown all to pieces, wreck and ruin everywhere. In one second-story, there was part of a bedstead still left, and pieces of bed-clothes, that no one had taken the trouble to pick up, after the French had come back. I can write about it, and I can talk about it, and you can read about it, until you are old and gray and sit in a rocking-chair, but you could not understand it unless you saw it. Just streets, muddy and deserted, and little graveyards of houses, hundreds of them.

You may not know it, but if you have been in one raid, or one bombardment, where you hear the explosions coming closer and closer, and you shake and shake and tremble and get sick at your stomach, and dizzy, and lose your mind with fear, every moment, you can imagine what it was to these people who had to endure it for hours and days, and finally had their whole places blown away.

Were they running down the road we have been on, when this happened? Sometimes they would not leave, because they did not know where else to go. They could not believe it was true, anyhow, and they stayed and stayed on.

The farther they went, the greater the desolation. They worked in Compiègne and Senlis, and anyone who visited that neighborhood, even as late as 1921, can form a dim idea of what it must have been in 1917. Ruin everywhere, broken homes; furniture in fragments, and scattered. Pieces of everything; clothing, little playthings, bits of lace, scraps of another existence.

To the eastward, the guns were always going. All that part of France was still subject to bombing raids. There were days when it was necessary to take refuge with a little French family, in a bomb cellar. Lillian wrote:

I have been in cellars myself, with a lot of other people around, frightened to death, sitting close to Mama and Dorothy, who had the shakes and whimpered as she used to when she was a baby, because it was so terrible.

They learned a number of things: they learned to tell enemy planes, to know shrapnel by its gray drift of smoke. They did not remain long in that sector—only long enough to get the required pictures. Griffith went to the front line, and made trench scenes—in the line itself. Then directly they were all back in London, in the raids again. Apparently they had not stopped ... they would never stop.

One night when the planes had been over three times, the noise was so terrific that Dorothy suggested they go down into one of the ballrooms. They found English officers and ladies strolling about, calm in their English way, apparently not greatly concerned by the raid which was still going on. Dorothy, nervously watching, saw a lovely girl about her own age, come in. They looked at each other, at first without speaking. Then the girl said:

“You are an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I,” and they fell into each other’s arms.

They spoke of the horrors of the raids—of the one then going on. Finally, Dorothy said:

“One thing I’m thankful for, I’m soon going back home, and will get away from all this.”

The girl’s eyes grew big. She said:

“You are going back! And you are not afraid?”

“Afraid? After all this? At least, if one is hit by a torpedo, it’s direct, and sure, and soon ended. In a raid like this, you never know.”

But the girl said:

“I can never imagine crossing the water again.”

“Why?”

“I was on the _Lusitania_, coming to England with a chaperon, to meet my fiancé. I clung to a deck-chair for four hours. My chaperon was drowned right beside me.”

Dorothy, telling of it afterwards, said:

“I did not know her name—I do not know it now. She never knew mine. She had a look in her eyes she will carry the rest of her days.”

XIII

“HEARTS OF THE WORLD”

October found them safely home. After all their wish to get there, America seemed a poor place: uninteresting, flat, tepid, futile—its people had little idea of what was going on, “over there.” No wonder the returning soldiers could not settle down to a humdrum life of work. It was a thing next to impossible.

Mary Gish and her daughters found their nerves on a tension. Blasting in the street made them jump. The strain had been terrible. Mrs. Gish had lost thirty-five pounds—she would never be quite the same again. Dorothy, by her own statement, had lost ten pounds. “Lillian is brave; besides, she couldn’t afford to lose. She gained a whole pound.” Lillian had no desire to go back, yet was sorry it was all over. Sometimes, looking back, it seemed to her that she had been dreaming.

“Hearts of the World” was shown for a tryout at Pomona, California, on Monday, March 11, 1918, and during the rest of the week at Clune’s Auditorium, Los Angeles.

Both Lillian and Dorothy had studied and worked very hard for this picture, and it had been obtained at the risk of their mother’s life and their own. It deserved success, and it had it. Lillian, as the heroine of the story, captured and mistreated, gave a beautiful and pathetic presentation of her part. Dorothy, “the Little Disturber,” a strolling singer, had a rôle suited to her gifts. A lute under her arm, she romped through the war scenes with a jaunty swagger, which, set to music, was irresistible. A London street-girl had provided the original. Lillian discovered her one day, and followed her about, to copy her artistic points. Bobby Harron was the hero-lover of the story—a very good story, on the whole—though it was the ravage and desolation of war that was the picture’s chief value.

On April 4, “Hearts of the World” was presented at the 44th Street Theatre, before an invited audience. When, on the following evening, the theatre was opened to the public, seats sold by speculators brought as high as five and ten dollars. There were long runs everywhere. In Pittsburgh, the picture broke all records for any theatrical attraction in that city.

* * * * *

The writer of these chapters saw the film at this time, and again, with Lillian, in 1931. A good deal of it was remembered vividly enough. It had been the first World War picture, and it remained one of the best. The trench fighting was terribly realistic. There were scenes taken on the field that were war itself. Always, the action is swift. Toward the end of the picture, where Lillian and Bobby are defending themselves against a German assault, it becomes fairly breathless.

Throughout, the picture has a tender quality, in spite of its cruel setting. But there are exceptions to this, one especially: Lillian in the hands of a German, whipped because she cannot handle a big basket of potatoes.

“Did the beating hurt?” I asked.

“Terribly. I was padded, but not nearly enough. My back bore the marks for weeks. Mother was fearfully wrought up over it.”

She approved the picture, as a whole. Thought it better than many of those made today. She was not far wrong. There was more sincerity of intention—more earnest work. At one place, the heroine, through the shock and agony of war, becomes mentally unhinged. Lillian’s portrayal of the gradual approach of this broken condition was as fascinating as it was sorrowful.

XIV

“BROKEN BLOSSOMS”

Lillian was entering a period of super-effort and success. Effort, especially—at first. The indefatigable and relentless Griffith kept them going, night and day. Hardly had he launched one war picture till he made another. He had much war film left, and he built another story around it. Two, in fact, though the second came somewhat later. While in England, Queen Alexandra and a number of titled women had lent themselves to the cause, by posing in arranged groups before the Griffith cameras. In “The Great Love,” these films were used. “The Romance of a Happy Valley,” and “True Heart Suzie” followed, idyllic countryside pictures, with Lillian in tender comedy parts.

Griffith no longer directed her—not really. “I gave her an outline of what I hoped to accomplish, and let her work it out her own way. When she got it, she had something of her own. Of course, she was imitated. A dozen actresses would copy whatever she did. They even got themselves up to look like her. She had to change her methods.”

What a joy to work for Griffith! At night, in bed, you thought out your part, and mentally rehearsed it—over and over. Then, next day, you tried it, and when at last it was “shot,” you eagerly looked, a day or two later, for the “rushes,” to see what you had done. Sometimes it was pretty bad—not at all what you had expected. Never mind, that was the advantage of playing for the pictures: you could see yourself, and correct your mistakes. You could do it over and over—Griffith was never stingy with film. He nearly always made twenty times what he used. He would let you try, and keep trying, until both you and he were satisfied. He knew that you had studied the lights, and angles, and groupings—that you had something definite in mind. Often, he consulted you—sometimes let you direct a scene.

* * * * *

It was during the summer of 1912 that Lillian had begun work with Griffith, at the old Biograph studio on Fourteenth Street. Now, almost exactly seven years later, she arrived at what may be called the crest of her film career. Not suddenly: she had been climbing steadily, working like a road-builder, almost from the first day. Now she had reached the top, that was all.

In an article for the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ (Sept., 1925) she said:

When anyone asks me to pick out from the many I have been in, the picture I like best, I answer without much hesitation, and without much thought, “Broken Blossoms.” I say this not because the picture was an artistic picture, which it was. I say this not because it was a compelling or tragic story with no clearing-away, no laying of tracks, no getting ready for the tragedy—it was exactly all this; but because the picture was quickly and smoothly accomplished. It took only eighteen days to film.

She does not say that it was her most notable characterization, and in the broader sense, it may not rank with some of her later work: with Mimi, for instance, in “La Bohême”; with Hester Prynne, in “The Scarlet Letter.” Nevertheless, it is the film rôle for which she will be longest remembered, the part that for artistic conception and delineation and sheer beauty has not been surpassed, either by herself, or by any other. To this day, the magazines reproduce flashes from the now immortal closet scene of “Broken Blossoms,” as the “highest example of screen realism.”

“Broken Blossoms,” a poetic tragedy of the Chinese slums of London, was a film adaptation of “The Chink and the Child,” from Thomas Burke’s collection entitled “Limehouse Nights.” Griffith and Lillian recognized its possibilities, and what she could make of the part of the “Child.” She at first thought the part too young for her, but agreed to try it.

The story is that of a brutal father, a pugilist, who beats and browbeats his twelve-year-old daughter until she has become a terrified, trembling little creature, a stunted human semblance, with a pathetically lovely face. A young Chinese, drift of the quarter, out of pity and adoration for her loveliness, one day gives her shelter, when, after a beating, she staggers into his poor shop. The ending involves the tragic death of all of them, the final scene being one of exquisite art. This is Griffith’s version, but the character of Lucy Burrows is the same in both. This bit is from Burke’s story:

... always in her step and in her look was expectation of dread things; ... yet for all the starved face and transfixed air, there was a lurking beauty about her, a something that called you in the soft curve of her cheek, that cried for kisses and was fed with blows, and in the splendid mournfulness that grew in eyes and lips.

In the world of drama, there are rôles which the competent artist “creates”—well, or less well—and makes his own; there are rôles—oh, rarely enough—which are his from the beginning, created _for_ him: “Disraeli,” for George Arliss—“The Music Master,” for David Warfield. I have told my story very badly if the reader does not recognize that for Lillian Gish, the character of Lucy Burrows offered such a part: a part such as would not come to her during more than another ten years, and then, not for the screen.

* * * * *

To a young man named Richard Barthelmess, lately a graduate of Columbia College, Griffith gave the part of the “Chinaman,” because he was rather small, very good-looking, with a face that could make up “Chinese.” To Donald Crisp, an Englishman (he had been General Grant in “The Birth of a Nation”), he gave the part of Battling Burrows. Crisp was a realistic person, and had a face that in full war-paint was a thing to put fear into the stoutest heart.

Lillian was just over the influenza—not equal to the strenuous Griffith rehearsing. Carol Dempster, who had been a dancer in “Intolerance,” rehearsed the part under his direction. Lillian rehearsed with Barthelmess, earning his gratitude.

“It was my first important picture,” Barthelmess said recently, “and I was anxious to do it well. Lillian had had six or seven years’ experience, and she was the soul of patience.” Reflectively, he added: “Lillian, Dorothy, and Mary Pickford are the three finest technicians of the screen. I learned more from Lillian than from any other person, except Griffith.”

The labor of production began. Lillian had been promised that she could work short hours, with nine hours each night for sleep. But of course, Griffith could not stick to that. He could not keep away from the studio; nor could the others.

It was during this strenuous period that Lillian evolved what Griffith calls “the one original bit of business that has been introduced into the art of screen acting.” In his ghastly preparation for beating Lucy, Battling Burrows pauses, and commands her to smile. Griffith and Lillian had discussed how this could be done most effectively. Then, in the midst of the scene, Lillian had an inspiration: Lifting her hand, she spread her fingers and pushed up the corners of her mouth. The effect was tremendous. “Do that again!” shouted Griffith, and they repeated the scene until they got that heart-wringing bit of technique to suit them. Griffith couldn’t get over it.

Another classic bit is where the cringing Lucy, to arrest her father’s hand, looks up in an agony of pleading terror:

“Daddy, your shoes are dusty!” And flings herself forward to clean them.

The closet scene was the climax—the terrible moment where Lucy’s father is breaking in, to kill her. Nobody could rehearse that for her. For three days and nights, she rehearsed it almost without sleep. Small wonder, then, that the hysterical terror of the child’s face was scarcely acting at all, but reality. It is said that when the scene was “shot,” there was an assemblage of silent, listening people outside the studio, awe-struck by Lillian’s screams. Griffith, throughout the scene, sat staring, saying not a word. Her face, during the final assault and struggle, became a veritable whirling medley of terror, its flashing glimpses of agony beyond anything ever shown before or since on the screen. When it was ended, Griffith was as white as paper.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that?” he asked, shakily.

“What impressed us all,” writes Harry Carr (he had become Griffith’s assistant), “was that all her reactions were those of a child. Her wild terror in the closet scene—the finest example of emotional hysteria in the history of the screen—was the terror of a child.” Carr further remembers that she had been to several hospitals, to study hysteria, and to inquire how one would be likely to die, from beating.

* * * * *

Griffith was not quite sure what to do with “Broken Blossoms.” He believed it a great artistic success, but it was unusual, tragic: It might win great and instant approval; it might be an utter failure. Harry Carr and Arthur Ryal, the latter a well-known press agent, urged him to take it to New York. Griffith agreed, and took everybody with him. Morris Gest, who saw it at a private showing, “went quite mad” over it: “Greatest picture the world has ever seen—charge what you please for it. You can pack the house at any cost.” They agreed that two and three dollars would be the proper figure.

XV

“I WORK SUCH LONG HOURS”

“Broken Blossoms” was first shown as the initial offering of Griffith’s “repertory season” at the George M. Cohan Theatre, New York, May 13, 1919, before as distinguished an audience as had ever assembled in a Broadway theatre. There was not a hitch anywhere. The film was mechanically perfect; it was accompanied by special haunting music. The Chinese scenes showed an effect of pale blue lighting. Griffith, Lillian and Barthelmess were present. When the picture ended, its success assured, Morris Gest darted back stage, kicked over chairs, waved his arms, wept and laughed hysterically. The Sun, next evening, called it the “most artistic photoplay yet produced.” The Tribune said: “_It is the most beautiful_ motion picture we have ever seen, or ever expect to see. When it was over, we wanted to rush up to everyone we met and cry: ‘Oh, don’t miss it, don’t miss it!’” There was a great deal more in the same strain, echoed by every critic. The elder Schildkraut said of it: “I have seen every actress of Europe and America during the last half century. Lillian Gish’s scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed.”

* * * * *

And Lillian: if she had been no more than widely popular before, she was indubitably famous now. All day long, reporters and photographers waited outside her rooms at the Commodore. Invitations piled on her table. What a commotion!

“Life,” she wrote Nell, “is just one long photograph and interview.” Was she all they said? “Queen of the Silent Drama”? “Duse and Bernhardt of the Screen”? How could anyone be both? And why must she be anybody but herself? Still, it was rather fun to have them say those things; gratifying, too. Was she the little girl who such a brief while ago had lost her little telescope bag, running for a train, and slept on the station benches—tired, so tired?

She was tired, now. And there seemed no resting place. Almost immediately back in Los Angeles, she was writing Nell:

“I work such long hours. Sometimes I don’t even see Mother for days. Can you imagine us living in the same house and hardly seeing one another?

“I must go to the studio, now, to have what I hope will be my last interview for years. I certainly was not made to be famous, it is beginning to get on my nerves.”

Somewhat later, she wrote:

Nell, we don’t belong to that set where they think they buy happiness with dollars. I think that is why I didn’t like New York, this time—though of course I shouldn’t say that, as they were wonderful to me, both the press and the people....

The studio gave a party for Mr. Griffith, Saturday night; all the stage-hands, electricians and working men, their wives and families, and of course the actors, and such. It reminded me of Massillon—was just such a party as we would have there—bright studio, all decorated with lanterns, and music playing, dancing, sandwiches, _baked beans_, ice-cream.... Madam (the colored lady who cleans the place) sang and danced. Dick, Dorothy and Bobby acted the fool—it was just a foolish party.

Her taste was for her friends, her work—the simple, daily round. Did she sometimes stop to look back over the way she had come, and along a royal road that stretched before? I think not often. She was not a dreamer in that sense. When fan letters praised her to the skies, when the newspapers labeled her “The World’s Darling,” she was pleased, no doubt, but kept her balance; and sometimes, about three in the morning, she found it no trouble to remember that “the world’s darling” was just a frail, little figure, huddled in the dark, trying to get to sleep.

XVI

DIRECTOR LILLIAN

Griffith now took an important step. He removed himself and his players from California to New York, really to Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound, where he had leased the old Flagler mansion and grounds, and contracted for a studio, soon to be completed. The mansion itself would serve for the executive offices, possibly for occasional scenes of grandeur. Lillian and her mother made the transcontinental journey with Harry Carr, now Griffith’s right-hand man. Their train passed through Massillon, but at lightning speed. Carr remembers that all the way across the country, Lillian looked forward to this splendid moment, and though very late, refused to go to bed until it had passed.

She was greatly excited, and kept trying to point out things to me, though you couldn’t see anything but the ticket office. I was impressed by how much of the child she had.

Lillian, with her mother and Dorothy, established themselves at the Hotel Commodore, to be handy to the Grand Central Station, and thus within thirty minutes of Mamaroneck. It was costly, and sometimes they planned to have a farm near the studio: “five acres, with pigs, cows, chickens, horses.” At least, it was something to dream about, for Spring.

Griffith, having got his new studio about ready, conceived the notion of making two pictures in Florida, neither of them with a part for Lillian—a great disappointment, for Nell still lived on the Blue Dog houseboat, at Miami.

However, there were compensations: Griffith wanted a picture made in his absence, and agreed to let Lillian direct it. To direct had been her ambition.

“I have changed my career,” she wrote Nell, “—am a director; yes, am directing Dorothy’s next picture; will start Friday—have the story all rehearsed, and will start taking, then.”

They had done the story themselves, she and Dorothy. It had been partly inspired by a piece of “business” that Dorothy had found in a comic magazine: A husband had complained to his wife that she wore such dowdy clothes, no one would notice her on the street. When they went out again, the wife walked a few steps ahead and made faces at every man she met, with the result that all looked at her, much interested.

“We decided to make a picture around that situation”—Lillian telling the story—“and call it ‘She Made Him Behave.’ We were always looking for picture possibilities—particularly for leading men. James Rennie was at the moment in New York, disengaged, and was very glad to get the part—his first picture. When I first proposed directing a picture for Dorothy, Griffith said: ‘Why do you want to break up your happy home?’ meaning that Dorothy and I would fall out over it. We took the chance, and he went away and left us.”

“He went away and left us!” She was barely twenty-three. However well-versed she was in the technique of picture-making, she had never directed an entire picture. She was taking over a new and untried studio; she was assuming the responsibility of spending what was at least a modest fortune. Moreover, Griffith had never seen the script of the picture, for with Harry Carr to help, they made many incidents and scenes as they went along. The fact that Griffith was content to go away and leave the venture in her hands, implies two things: First, that his confidence in Lillian was large; second, that the motion-picture business is conducted on less rigid lines than other important enterprises. Both conclusions are warranted: Griffith did know Lillian, and the motion-picture industry is conducted like no other business on earth.

To begin with, it is not really a business at all—not merchandising. You are not buying something which you are to sell again. You are creating something—painting a canvas, doing it with human beings. Your accessories are mechanical, but even here, the personal element is a chief factor—the enthusiasm and good-will of the photographers, the electricians, the stage-hands. Griffith believed that Lillian could shape these to her taste. On the set, they were her friends. She called them by their intimate studio names: “Slim,” “Whitey,” “Joe,” and so on, and never left a set that she did not go to each one, and in her grave, dignified little way, thank him for the help he had been to her.

But let Lillian continue:

“I believed that no director had brought out Dorothy’s sweetness, especially her comic sense. I believed I could do it. Of course, I had been in pictures a number of years, and knew something about directing, but nothing at all of practical mechanics. I knew nothing of the measurements for a set, and was afraid the company would lose respect for me if they found it out. I went home and paced the floor of my room, measuring the number of feet, to try to get some idea of what I wanted to talk about when I got back to the studio. As a result, I ordered a room that was too big for the height of it. The camera couldn’t get far enough away, without shooting over the back wall. The camera-man, who had come from the war with a case of shell-shock, would walk up and down and throw his hat on the floor, and declare he couldn’t stand it. But he was really very kind, and we learned something every day.

“But then the worst developed. Mr. Griffith had bought an engine to transform alternating to direct current, and when we were ready to shoot the picture, we didn’t have enough ‘juice’ for the lights. We had to put a wire all the way from Mamaroneck, on poles, a costly job. Still it wouldn’t do. We were promised the power, but we didn’t get it. Sunday was my big day. Our picture had a wedding party, and I could get extras from Mamaroneck, thirty or forty of them, at two dollars a day; then, when we were ready, our lights failed us. It would be six o’clock in the evening before we could do anything. Perhaps not even then.”

Desperate as was the situation, she appears never to have lost her nerve. In a letter from Harry Carr, always present, we gather that her mechanical assistants were most concerned.

The kindness she had shown to the rough-necks came ripe. They almost worked themselves to the bone for her. When anything went wrong, they looked ready to faint in a body. Lillian would sit hour after hour, alongside the camera, waiting for the lights to come on. One day she sat there uncomplainingly, from nine o’clock in the morning until eleven at night, without a flicker of light.

Uncomplainingly, but what must have been going on inside. There was a small studio in New Rochelle, the Fischer studio. It was a poor thing, but at least there were lights. The Mamaroneck electric people promised that if she would work there a few days, everything would be all right when she got back. So they carted themselves and their sets to New Rochelle, and began again.

“It was certainly a poor place,” Lillian remembered; “Damp, the cellar full of water, no heat, and being late November and into December, it was very cold. Often, the actors had to hold their breath so it wouldn’t photograph. The next Sunday we all moved back to Mamaroneck. The lights, they told us, were all right, but that was a mistake. Back we went to the Fischer studio. In all, we moved back and forth three times. I very nearly lost my mind.

“Of course, I was responsible, and spending money—oh, by the thousands. Mr. Epping, our business manager, every night brought me the items of what we had spent that day. I am not much at figures, but I could read the total, which was not cheerful. But everybody stood by me, the ‘boys,’ as we then called the electricians and property men, especially. The actors, too—everybody.

“The last day’s work had to be done on Fifth Avenue, New York. It happened to come on the day before Christmas, and I didn’t want to postpone it. We engaged a bus, from which Dorothy had to look down and see her ‘husband’ ride by in a cab with another woman. To work on the street without a permit laid us open to arrest and fine, with a good chance of spending Christmas in jail. To get a permit would take time, which we could not afford. ‘Will you take a chance?’ I asked those who were going to do the scene. They agreed that they would, but things had a dubious look.

“Nevertheless, we got our bus and our taxicab, and started. I was on the bus with the camera-man—George Hill, now a famous director—Dorothy at the other end, the taxi just below. We had not gone a block when an enormous policeman started over, to see what it was all about. Then he took a good look at me and stopped, placed his fingers at the corners of his mouth and ‘put up’ a smile.

“You remember the scene in ‘Broken Blossoms,’ where the brutal father commands his terrified daughter to smile. I knew right away the big policeman had seen it. He really smiled, then, and so did I. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ he said. ‘Yes, and this is my sister, Dorothy, and we’re trying to finish a picture before Christmas.’ ‘Go right on,’ he said. Farther up the Avenue, another policeman called out: ‘What do you think you’re doing up there?’ I put up the smile myself, that time, hoping he had seen the picture. Evidently he had, for he laughed and waved us along. I thought it safer not to break any new ground, so we turned and made the circuit. We made it several times, and were not troubled again, but helped.

“That night we knew we were done, and everybody was so happy, and so sorry, weeping on one another’s shoulders. By the time Mr. Griffith came home, our picture was nearly all cut, and ready. When he saw and approved of it, I was very happy, but it had nearly killed me.”

Lillian decided that directing was not for women. “Remodeling a Husband,” as the picture was finally called, turned out a financial success. She had spent fifty-eight thousand dollars, and twenty-eight days, making it, but it netted a profit of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, and doubled Dorothy’s picture value. She was proud of all that, but did not care to try it again. A little while ago David Wark Griffith said:

“Lillian directed Dorothy in the best picture Dorothy ever made. I knew she could do it, for whenever we were making a picture I realized that she knew as much about it as I did—gave me valuable ideas about lights, angles, color, and a hundred things. She had brains, and used them, and she did not lose her head. You see what confidence I had in her to go off to Florida and leave her to direct a picture in a new studio, with all the problems of lights and sets, and a thousand other things a director has to contend with. I know how her lights failed on her, and all the complications that came up, and how she handled them, and how, out of it, she got that fine picture. One of the best. She didn’t tell me, but Carr did.”

XVII

“WAY DOWN EAST”

Griffith now began work on his greatest melodrama. “Way Down East” had been successful as a book and a play, and was precisely the sort of thing he could do best. From William A. Brady, for a large sum, he secured the picture rights, and plunged into production. There were to be two great outdoor scenes: a blizzard, in which the heroine, who has been inveigled into a mock marriage—and is, therefore, under the New England code, fallen and outcast—is lost; and the frozen river, which, blinded and desperate, she reaches, to be carried to the falls on a cake of ice. There was very little that was artificial about such scenes, in that day: the blizzard had to be a real one, the ice, real ice—most of it, at any rate. Griffith began rehearsing some scenes at Claridge’s Hotel, in New York, continuing steadily for eight weeks; but all the time there was an order that in case of a blizzard, night or day, all hands were to report at the Mamaroneck studio. Lillian had taken Stanford White’s house on Orienta Point. Reading the play, she knew it was going to be an endurance test, and went into training for it. Cold baths, walks in the cold against the wind, exercises ... she had faith in her body being equal to any emergency, if prepared for it. In a magazine article, a few years later, she wrote:

The memorable day of March 6th arrived, and with it a snow-storm and a ninety-mile-an-hour gale. As I was living at Mamaroneck, near the studio, I quickly reported, and was made up as Anna Moore, ready but not eager for the work to be done. The scene to be taken was the one just after the irate Squire Bartlett turns Anna out of the house into the storm. Dazed and all but frozen, she wanders about through the snow, and finally to the river.

The Griffith studio was on a point or arm well out in Long Island Sound. The wind swept this narrow strip with great fury. The cameras had their backs to the gale. She had to face it.

She had been out only a short time when her face became caked with snow. Around her eyes this would melt—her lashes became small icicles. Griffith wanted this, and brought the cameras up close. Her lids were so heavy she could scarcely keep them open.

No need of spectacular “falls.” The difficulty was to keep her feet. She was beaten back, flung about like a toy. Her face became drawn and twisted, almost out of human semblance. When she could stand no more, and was half-unconscious, they would pull her back to the studio on a little sled and give her hot tea. A brief rest and back to the gale. Griffith had invested a large sum in the picture, and she must make good. One could not count on another blizzard that season. Harry Carr writes:

That blizzard scene in “Way Down East” was real. It was taken in the most God-awful blizzard I ever saw. Three men lay flat to hold the legs of each camera. I went out four times, in order to be a hero, but sneaked back suffocated and half dead. Lillian stuck out there in front of the cameras. D. W. would ask her if she could stand it, and she would nod. The icicles hung from her lashes, and her face was blue. When the last shot was made, they had to _carry_ her to the studio.

A week or two later, they were at White River Junction. Vermont, for the ice scenes. Griffith took a good many of his company, and they put up at an old-fashioned hotel, a place of hospitality and good food.

White River Junction is at the confluence of the White and the Connecticut rivers. There is no fall there, but the current moves at the rate of six miles an hour, and the water is deep. The ice was from twelve to sixteen inches thick, and a good-sized piece of it made a fairly safe craft, but it was wet and slippery, and _very cold_. It was frozen solid when they arrived; had to be sawed and dynamited, to get pieces for the floating scene. Lillian conceived the idea of letting her hand and hair drag in the water. It was effective, but her hand became frosted; the chances of pneumonia increased. To the writer, recently, Richard Barthelmess, who had the star part opposite Lillian, said:

“Not once, but twenty times a day, for two weeks, Lillian floated down on a cake of ice, and I made my way to her, stepping from one cake to another, to rescue her. I had on a heavy fur coat, and if I had slipped, or if one of the cakes had cracked and let me through, my chances would not have been good. As for Lillian, why she did not get pneumonia, I still can’t understand. She has a wonderful constitution. Before we started, Griffith had us insured against accident, and sickness. Lillian, frail as she looked, was the only one of the company who passed one hundred percent perfect—condition and health.

“No accidents happened: The story that I missed a signal and did not reach Lillian in time, and that she came near going over the falls, would indicate that she made the float on the ice-cake but once. As I say, she made it numberless times, and there were _no falls_. Lillian was never nervous, and never afraid. I don’t think either of us thought of anything serious happening, though when I was carrying her, stepping from one ice-cake to another, we might easily have slipped in. I would not make that picture again for any money that a producer would be willing to pay for it.”

At the end of the ice scene, there is an instant when the cake, at the brink of a fall, seems to start over, just as Barthelmess, carrying Lillian, steps from it to another, and another, half slipping in before he reaches the bank.

The critical moment at the brink of the fall was made in summer-time, at Winchell Smith’s farm, near Farmington, Connecticut. The ice-cakes here were painted blocks of wood, or boxes, and were attached to piano wire. There was a real fall of fifteen feet at this place, and once, a carpenter went over and was considerably damaged. In the picture, as shown, Niagara was blended into this fall, with startling effect.

Barthelmess remembers that Lillian kept mostly to herself. She took her work very seriously—too much so, in the opinion of her associates. But once there was a barn-dance at the hotel, in which she joined; and once she and Barthelmess drove over to Dartmouth College, not far distant, with Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Clifton, to a dinner given them by Barthelmess’s fraternity. After dinner, they heard a great tramp, tramp, and someone said to Lillian: “It’s the college boys, coming to kidnap you.” They sometimes did such things, for a lark.

But they only wanted to pay their respects. They gathered outside the window, which Mr. Clifton opened, and both Lillian and Barthelmess spoke to them through it.

The summer scenes of “Way Down East” were made at Farmington and at the Mamaroneck studio. Griffith had selected a fine cast, among them Lowell Sherman, the villain; Burr McIntosh, as Squire Bartlett; Kate Bruce, his wife; Mary Hay, their niece; and Vivia Ogden, the village gossip. The scene where Squire Bartlett drives Anna Moore from his home, was realistic in its harshness, and poor Burr McIntosh, a sweet soul who long before had played Taffy in “Trilby,” and who loved Lillian dearly, could never get over having been obliged to turn her out into the storm. Often, in after years, he begged her to forgive him.

* * * * *

A few minor incidents, connected with the making of “Way Down East,” may be recalled: Griffith had spent a great sum of money for the rights—$275,000, it is said—and was spending a great many more thousands producing it. He was naturally on a good deal of a tension. All were working to the limit of their strength, but they could not hold the pitch indefinitely. When Barthelmess, who is short, had to stand on a two-inch piece of board, to cope on terms of equality with Lowell Sherman, Sherman, who was a trained actor of the stage, could, and did, make invisible side remarks which made Barthelmess laugh. Whereupon, Griffith raged at the waste of time and film, and everybody was sorry, the villain penitent. “Stop that laughing! Turn around and face the camera,” were sharp admonitions perpetuated by a right-about-face in the picture to this day.

It was harsh in form, rather than by intention. They did not resent these scoldings. They believed in Griffith, knew something of his problems, wanted him to make good.

There was one scene during which Griffith had no word to offer—the scene in which Anna Moore (Lillian) baptizes her dying child. Harry Carr writes:

The only time I ever saw a stage-hand cry was in the baptism scene in “Way Down East.” It was made in a boxed-off corner, with only D. W., Lillian, the camera-man, a stage-hand and myself there. Everybody cried. It never made the same impression on the screen, because it was necessary to interrupt the action with the sub-titles. You saw her dripping the water on the baby’s head; then a sub-title flashed on, saying: “In the Name of the Father, etc.,” and the spell was broken.

Carr, Lillian and Griffith would sit far into the night, watching rushes from the scenes made the day before. It was a drowsy occupation—so many of the same thing—and after a day in the open, it was not surprising that Carr should nod. Across a misty plain of sleep, Griffith’s voice would come to him: “Which shot do you like best, Carr?”

It is noticeable in the baptism scene, that Lillian sits relaxed, her knees apart; that when she leaves the house, she walks with a dragging step, as one who had recently experienced the struggle and agonies of child-birth. It has been suggested that she had visited a maternity hospital for these details. When asked, she said:

“No, I did not do that. There was an old woman connected with the studio, who had borne a number of children. She told me all that I needed to know. I learned something, too, from pictures of the Madonna, by old masters. I noticed in all of them that the Madonna sat with her knees apart. I felt that there must be a good reason for painting her in that way.”

She had studied out every detail of the scenes she was to play. Many actors, even among the best, work by another method. They absorb the feeling of the plot, fling themselves into a scene, depending upon an angel to kindle the divine fire. This method never was Lillian’s. To her, the bush never of itself became a burning bush. She lit the fire and tended it. She knew the effect she wanted to produce, and found no research too tedious, no rehearsal too long—no effort too great, to achieve her end.

* * * * *

“Way Down East” was shown in October. Griffith, with Lillian and Barthelmess, were present in person, in the larger cities. It was like a triumphal tour. To present the “world’s darling” in scenes of actual danger, on the screen, and then have her appear in person, was to invite something in the nature of a riot. Reporters indulged in the most extravagant language. And there was a freshet of poetry, and of letters—love-letters, many of them, but letters, also, from persons distinctly worthwhile. David Belasco, whose “most beautiful blonde” verdict had long since gone into the discard, démodé, wrote:

_Dear Lillian Gish_,

It was a revelation to see the little girl who was with me only a few years ago, moving through the pictured version of “Way Down East” with such perfect acting. In this play, you reach the very highest point in action, charm and delightful expression. It made me happy, too, to see how you and your name appeal to the public.

Congratulations on a splendid piece of work, and good wishes for your continued success.

Faithfully, DAVID BELASCO

John Barrymore went even further, when he wrote:

_My dear Mr. Griffith_:

I have for the second time seen your picture of “Way Down East.” Any personal praise of yourself or your genius regarding the picture I would naturally consider redundant and a little like carrying coals to Newcastle....

I have not the honor of knowing Miss Gish personally and I am afraid that any expression of feeling addressed to her she might consider impertinent. I merely wish to tell you that her performance seems to me to be the most superlatively exquisite and poignantly enchaining thing that I have ever seen in my life.

I remember seeing Duse in this country many years ago, when I imagine she must have been at the height of her powers—also Madame Bernhardt—and for sheer technical brilliancy and great emotional projection, done with an almost uncanny simplicity and sincerity of method, it is great fun and a great stimulant to see an American artist equal, if not surpass, the finest traditions of the theatre.

I wonder if you would be good enough to thank Miss Gish from all of us who are trying to do the best we know how in the theatre.

Believe me,

Yours very sincerely, JOHN BARRYMORE

Mrs. Gish, who was not a motion-picture enthusiast, made a single comment:

“Well, young lady,” she said, “you’ve set quite a high mark for yourself. How are you going to live up to it?”

“Way Down East” was one of the most popular and profitable pictures ever made. Net returns from it ran into the millions. It has had several revivals, and at the present writing (Winter, 1931), is being shown at the Cameo Theatre, New York, “with sound.” Its day, however, is over. Taste has changed—has become what an older generation might regard as unduly sophisticated, depraved. This, with mechanical advancement—the talking feature, for instance—tells the story. A picture of even ten years ago—five years ago—is without a public.

“Way Down East” is a melodrama, but one that at moments rises to considerable heights. Putting aside the spectacular features of the picture—the blizzard and the ice-drift, where melodrama is raised to the nth degree—the scene where the villain reveals to his victim that their marriage was a mockery, the scene where Anna Moore, about to be turned out into the storm, denounces her betrayer, and the baptismal scene, already mentioned, are drama, and, as Lillian Gish gave them, worthy.

And, after all, what is, and is not, melodrama—and cheap. Cheap—because it is human. That is why we have invented for ourselves a hereafter—a place away from it all—of rest by green fields and running brooks. Very well, let us agree that the play was cheap, especially the comedy, which was low comedy and about the record in that direction. But if Lillian’s acting was cheap, and poor, then there is very little to be said for any acting, which, God knows, may be true enough, after all!

XVIII

SAD, UNPROFITABLE DAYS

Lillian to Nell, June 30, 1920:

Do you know that I am leaving Mr. Griffith? “Way Down East” that we are on, will be my last. I go with the Frohman Amusement Company, between the 1st and 15th of August. I am to make five pictures a year, for two years. If I make successful pictures, I shall make a lot of money. If I don’t, well, kismet—it’s all a gamble, anyway.

It was more of a “gamble” than she knew. Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as the “Frohman Amusement Company.” No Frohman—no _amusement_ Frohman—had anything to do with it. That was just a part of the gamble. Griffith, apparently, thought it all right, and so did his brother, for it was the latter who made the connection. Had Lillian made inquiries on her own account, her eyes might have been opened sooner, and less expensively.

Griffith and Lillian parted on the friendliest terms. Griffith said to her:

“You know the business as well as I do. You should be making more money than you can make with me.” He did not say: “Stay with me and share in the prosperity which you have brought, and will bring me. No one can be more successful than we two together.” To a simple-minded literary person, this would seem to have been the wisest course. Lillian thinks he had perhaps grown tired of seeing her around.

She did not make five pictures for the Frohman company, or even one. She did begin one, “World’s Shadows,” by Madame de Grésac, who claims here a word of introduction:

Somewhat earlier, Lillian had met this gifted French lady, god-daughter of Victorien Sardou, wife of the singer, Victor Maurel, herself a dramatist who had written French, English and Italian plays for Réjane, Duse, Marie Tempest, and others of distinction. Familiar with the best literary and art circles of Paris, considerably older than Lillian, small, red-haired, quick of speech—French, in the best meaning of the term—she was a revelation to the younger woman, who in spite of her years on the stage and screen, was a good deal of a primitive as to world knowledge, and art in its less obvious forms. The two were mutually fascinated: Madame de Grésac, dazed and delighted by Lillian’s gifts and innocence; Lillian, stirred and awakened, and sometimes shocked, by the French-woman’s brilliant mentality, her knowledge of life, her freedom of expression. In a brief time, they were devoted friends, confidantes.

When the so-called Frohman company wanted a picture for Lillian, Madame de Grésac agreed to prepare one. She did so, but about the time rehearsal was under way, Lillian’s first (and only) salary cheque from the company was returned from the bank, unpaid—“No funds.” They explained to her that certain backers had disappointed them. It may be so. At all events, there was a hitch somewhere, in this particular gamble. Lillian carried on, as a number of players had come with her from the Griffith staff, and as they seemed to be getting their money, she could not leave them in the lurch. But, of course, the end came. Their pay, also, stopped. The thing that had never really existed, ceased to function. It was all a fiasco—a tragedy ... so many tragedies in the show business.

“World Shadows” was discarded. It made no difference between the two friends. If anything, they were closer than before. The day was coming, not so many years ahead, when they would combine in another play—a success.

Madame’s husband, Victor Maurel, besides being a singer, had a passion for painting, and persuaded Lillian to pose for him. Lillian, with a view of sometime going back to the stage, greatly desired voice culture. They agreed that in exchange for half an hour’s posing, he would devote half an hour to training her voice. She had then finished “Way Down East,” which Maurel seemed to love. He watched it, time and again; then he had her go into a separate room, a dark room, and convey the feeling of it—paint the picture, as it were, with her voice. This was priceless training. It gave her voice a quality and value it had not possessed before. “From Maurel,” she said afterwards, “I got my consonants.”

* * * * *

Except for the triumph of “Way Down East,” a triumph not easy to understand in this more crowded, more inattentive day, that year of 1920 was hardly a cheerful one. For one thing, Mrs. Gish was in poor health. Dorothy had taken her to Italy, which might have been well enough but for the circumstances of their return.

It was the tragedy of Bobby Harron that brought them back. On September first, alone in his hotel room, Bobby shot himself. For years, he had been as one of the family. From the days of the Biograph company, he had taken part in pictures with both Lillian and Dorothy; he had shared the hardships and dangers of those days and nights of bomb and shrapnel, in London and France. He had been a brother to them—to Dorothy, for a time, at least, something more. Now, he was dead.

Exactly what happened will always be a mystery. Lillian, in Philadelphia, where they were opening “Way Down East,” wrote Nell:

These have been terrible days—the worst I have ever known. You have heard about it by this time, I imagine—about Bob: He was in his room, unpacking an old trunk, when a pistol fell out and exploded, the ball going through his lung. That was Sept, 1st, at 10:30 in the morning. He was taken to Bellevue, where he seemed to improve—we all held such high hopes—until Sunday morning, at 7:55, he breathed his last. Mother and Dorothy were some place in Italy—could get no word to them until Wednesday. They are taking the first boat home, which leaves today.

Bobby had been a Catholic, and when his mother and sister arrived, not knowing that he was dead, it fell to Lillian, with a priest, to meet them and break the news. Later, she took them home and looked after them for several weeks.

XIX

PICTURING THE REIGN OF TERROR

Lillian was in a position to make a new start. She made it with Griffith, who was having troubles of his own getting a group of players together for a production suited to his Mamaroneck studio. He wanted to do “Faust,” but Lillian prevailed upon him to do “The Two Orphans,” which would give Dorothy a good part, as Louise, the blind sister. Griffith agreed, and rehearsing for the new picture was soon under way. Lillian’s salary was now a thousand dollars a week. The bark of the wolf, which had become noticeable, died away.

“Orphans of the Storm,” as it was finally called, began as a rather close picture version of Kate Klaxton’s old play. Two sisters set out for Paris by stage-coach, to obtain cure for the blind Louise. One of them, beautiful Henriette, is kidnapped on arrival, by a dissolute roué, the other is picked up by the terrible Madame Frouchard and compelled to beg in the streets. In the picture, the rescue and reunion of the sisters is brought about through a handsome young aristocrat who, under revolutionary ban, is sentenced to death on the guillotine. Henriette (Lillian) herself is involved, and narrowly escapes—being on the scaffold with her head under the knife at the moment of rescue. The revolutionary feature was a Griffith addition to the original play.

Griffith spent great sums on the settings of this picture. He was never one to be sparing in such matters while his money held out, with the result that he was likely to be brought up with a round turn, at the end. For the guillotine scene, he required a great number of extras, and he could not afford to assemble them more than once. One morning he called up all the weather bureaus, and even an old man who had the rheumatism, to find out if it was going to rain. All said that it would not, and he got out the big crowd for the guillotine episode, as big as he could afford. And it didn’t rain, but it was cloudy. Never mind, he would make the picture anyway. He could not assemble that crowd again.

Interesting things happened during the making of the picture. Harry Carr recalls that a certain actor, fresh from Broadway, with the tricks not unfamiliar there, had the habit of easing back from the camera in his scenes with Lillian, so that she would have to turn her face to speak to him. She did not complain, but “Whitey,” head electrician, came to Carr, pale with anger:

“You tell that kike,” he said, “that the next time he does that, us boys will drop a dome light on his bean. Lots of accidents happen in studios, and one is about to happen now.”

Carr passed along the information, with the result that the offender made no more mistakes—was almost afraid to leave his dressing-room. According to Carr, Frances Marion, the distinguished scenario writer, once said: “There is plenty of real chivalry in motion picture studios, but it’s all to be found among the juice-gangs.” Carr adds:

Griffith had a way of rehearsing plays until everybody wished himself dead—chairs for horses—tables for thrones, etc. He rehearsed with anybody who happened to be around. Kate Bruce was rehearsed weeks on end, for a part that she very much wanted, but which Griffith, with his dread of the irrevocable, had never really assured her she could play. Lillian at last cornered him, just before the picture actually began. He reluctantly said that he supposed “Brucie” would get the part. “Then please let me tell her,” pleaded Lillian. “All right,” assented D. W., and Lillian ran to her like a little girl. Brucie was sitting in a chair on the set. Lillian almost picked up her frail little body. I don’t know what they said, but they stood there, crying in each other’s arms. They both realized that it would probably be Brucie’s last big part.

When Lillian got a new part, she flung herself into it completely. She wanted to know what such a girl would eat; what she would do on her holidays; what colors she would like. Making “Orphans of the Storm,” Lillian turned herself into French. She read French books, and did everything to avoid talking, even to us, who might drag her out of the picture.

“Orphans of the Storm” was finished in time to open in Boston about the end of the year 1921. Lillian and Dorothy accompanied Griffith to the first showing; also, to other first showings in the larger cities—as far South as New Orleans, as far West as Minneapolis and St. Paul. Everywhere they were fêted and entertained; in New Orleans the railway station was crowded when they arrived; the news correspondent says that a procession with a “real, honest-to-goodness brass band led the way to the City Hall, where the Mayor of New Orleans gave Lillian and Dorothy Gish a warm welcome and the freedom of the city.”

Perhaps there were not brass bands everywhere, but always a crowd, always entertainment, always a reception on the stage after the picture, with demands for a speech, which Lillian had to make. In Washington, they were given a special luncheon by President and Mrs. Harding, with great boxes of flowers which, with Griffith standing between them, Lillian and Dorothy were obliged to hold while they were being photographed. The papers spoke of the “democracy of these two celebrities, who were so cheerfully willing to meet in a ‘closeup,’ in the lobbies, after their appearance on the stage, proving the bigness of their characters.” True enough, but there was another side to it: Lillian to Nell:

We have been going around the country on the “Orphans” tour. It is all so nerve-racking. I would rather do anything else, but if it helps Mr. Griffith, of course I could not refuse, and I suppose it is a good experience. You can’t be a hermit all your life, though I do not enjoy crawling out of my shell.... I was never made for this life—if they would only let me go by unnoticed.

She could not hope for that. They had her back in Boston, to ornament the hundredth showing, and the celebration was greater than ever. Miss Crabtree, once the adorable “Lotta,” was there. Lillian went into a stage box to see her. The little old lady, darling of a former generation, kissed her affectionately, and taking her hands, sat stroking them. Presently she said, softly: “Take care of your beauty, dearest—it goes so soon—so very, very soon.”

In an interview, Lillian expressed a belief that colleges might give moving-picture courses, thereby improving the standards of both acting and morals in productions of the future. This was seized upon by the Harvard Dramatic Club, and she was urged to speak at the Harvard Union. She had spoken briefly at a number of churches, during her travels, and presently we find her addressing an audience of several thousand, at the Chelsea Methodist Episcopal Church, in 178th Street, New York. The burden of her purpose, as to the pictures, she conveyed in these words:

“The industry needs the development that the people of the church and the educators can give it. We players are doing our very best to get rid of all objectionable elements, but we want outside help.

“The time is coming when educational pictures will fill library shelves, exactly as books do now, and the universities should anticipate library educational advance. This is a great reason why cinema courses should be given in colleges.”

She did not write her speeches. She carried in her head a few main points, and spoke extemporaneously. Her clear, trained voice, reached every part of the great edifice—a treat for those who heard her. One of them, a woman, wrote:

If I were a poet, I suppose I might make a lovely poem about you; or I might, were I a painter, try to put on my canvas something so glorious that it would speak to everyone of what an inspiration and delight you are; but I am nobody at all—nobody except your sincere admirer.

And it was another woman who wrote of “Orphans of the Storm”:

I cannot get over your acting: I never feel the reality of a character so keenly as when you portray it. And there is no raving. Why, I have watched you play emotional scenes in which you scarcely moved a finger, and still, as someone said: “Your silence is as golden as the voice of Bernhardt.”

Which brings us back to the picture itself.

It was a beautiful and successful production. Some of the sets were especially fine: The garden picture, for instance, with its setting of palace and fountain and richly costumed guests, its magnificent outer gates.

The court scene, the sinister tribunal of the Revolution, was terribly realistic; the ghastly guillotine climax was quite as horrible as it was intended to be, with only the usual fault of such picture episodes, that the suspense was too prolonged—prolonged to a point where the horror evaporated.

The finest scene in the picture is where Dorothy, as the blind Louise, is singing in the street, while Lillian, in a room above, absorbed in the narration of Louise’s mother, hears and gradually recognizes her sister’s voice, and then is unable to reach her. The awakening recognition, gradual, tender, startled, in Lillian’s face, compares with the best of her screen work.

* * * * *

The old stage-coach in which Lillian and Dorothy drove to Paris ... whatever became of it? It was too good to go the way of old properties. “Orphans of the Storm” was worthy of Griffith and of Lillian. It seems fitting that their long association should finally end in this distinguished and happy way.