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BEHIND THE SCREEN
SAMUEL GOLDWYN
[Illustration: MR. AND MRS. DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS
Internationally beloved and known to millions the world over.]
BEHIND
THE SCREEN
BY
SAMUEL GOLDWYN
NEW [Illustration] YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_Copyright, 1923,
By George H. Doran Company_
[Illustration]
_Copyright, 1923,
By The Pictorial Review Company_
BEHIND THE SCREEN. I
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY WHICH
HAS BROUGHT ME SOME SUCCESS, A
WORLD OF GOOD FRIENDS AND PLEASANT
ASSOCIATES, AND, ABOVE ALL, THE
SUPREME SATISFACTION OF DOING THAT
WHICH I LOVE BEST TO DO, THIS BOOK IS
DEDICATED. IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION,
I LIKEWISE DEDICATE TO THAT INDUSTRY
MY SINCEREST EFFORTS FOR THE FUTURE.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I want to acknowledge the co-operation of Miss Corinne Lowe in the
preparation of these articles. But for her enthusiasm, her patience,
and her splendid co-operation given me in every way, this series could
never have been written.
S. G.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
_One_: IN WHICH IS FILMED THE BIRTH OF A NOTION 15
_Two_: RECORDS THE SUCCESS OF AN IDEA 23
_Three_: MARY PICKFORD 30
_Four_: FASCINATING FANNY WARD 50
_Five_: MARGUERITE CLARK MISSES FIRE AND EDNA GOODRICH
DOESN’T IGNITE AT ALL 60
_Six_: THE MISCHIEVOUSNESS OF MAE MURRAY 73
_Seven_: GERALDINE THE GREAT 81
_Eight_: THE DISCOVERY OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN 97
_Nine_: STARS, STARS, STARS! 108
_Ten_: THE MAGIC OF MARY GARDEN 127
_Eleven_: MAXINE ELLIOTT AND PAULINE FREDERICK 137
_Twelve_: A MARRIAGE OF TWO MINDS 149
_Thirteen_: THE REAL CHAPLIN 158
_Fourteen_: JACKIE COOGAN AND “THE KID” 169
_Fifteen_: DOUG AND MARY 179
_Sixteen_: RODOLPH VALENTINO 186
_Seventeen_: ROMANTIC TRUE STORIES OF SOME SCREEN FAVORITES 196
_Eighteen_: POLA NEGRI 212
_Nineteen_: THE TWO TALMADGES 219
_Twenty_: GOOD OLD WILL ROGERS 229
_Twenty-One_: SOME AUTHORS WHO HAVE TRAVELLED TO HOLLYWOOD 235
ILLUSTRATIONS
MR. AND MRS. DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS _Frontispiece_
PAGE
ELSIE FERGUSON 16
MR. GOLDWYN, MABEL NORMAND AND CHARLIE CHAPLIN 17
ALICE TERRY 32
BERT LYTELL 33
MR. GOLDWYN, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS AND MARY PICKFORD 48
BARBARA LA MARR 49
CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG 64
MR. GOLDWYN ACTING AS HOST AND WAITER 65
LOU TELLEGEN AND GERALDINE FARRAR 88
THEDA BARA 89
MABEL NORMAND 112
MAXINE ELLIOTT 113
MARY GARDEN AND GERALDINE FARRAR 128
WILL ROGERS BIDS PAULINE FREDERICK GOODBYE 129
CHARLIE CHAPLIN 160
RUPERT HUGHES 161
JACKIE COOGAN 176
GEORGE FITZMAURICE 177
RODOLPH VALENTINO 192
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 193
ERIC VON STROHEIM 208
“CHARLIE,” “DOUG” AND “MARY” 209
CONSTANCE TALMADGE 224
NORMA TALMADGE 225
SAMUEL GOLDWYN AND SEVEN FAMOUS AUTHORS HE WON TO THE SCREEN 240
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS 241
BEHIND THE SCREEN
_Chapter One_
IN WHICH IS FILMED THE BIRTH OF A NOTION
It was something more than nine years ago that I walked into a little
motion-picture theatre on Broadway. I paid ten cents admission. As I
took my seat a player-piano was digging viciously into a waltz. Upon
the floor a squalid statuette lay under its rain of peanut-shells.
And all around me men, women, and children were divided between the
sustained comfort of chewing-gum and the sharp, fleeting rapture of the
nut.
Only a decade ago! Yet this was a representative setting and audience
for motion-pictures. Likewise typical was the film itself. For, as
were practically all productions of that day, this was only one or two
reels. And, faithful to the prevailing tradition, the drama of to-night
was Western.
I looked at the cowboys galloping over the Western plains, and in their
place there rose before me Henry Esmond crossing swords with the Young
Pretender, wiry young D’Artagnan riding out from Gascony on his pony to
the Paris of Richelieu, Carmen on her way to the bull-fight where Don
José waited to stab her.
Why not? Here was the most wonderful medium of expression in the world.
Through it every great novel, every great drama, might be uttered in
the one language that needs no translation. Why get nothing from this
medium save situations which were just about as fresh and unexpected as
the multiplication tables?
When I went into that theatre I had no idea of ever going into the film
business. When I went out I was glowing with the sudden realisation
of my way to fortune. I could hardly wait until I told my idea to my
brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky.
“Lasky, do you want to make a fortune?” With these words I burst in
upon him that evening.
Lasky, who was at that time in the vaudeville business, indicated that
he had no morbid dread of the responsibility of great wealth.
“Very well, then,” I continued. “Put up some money.”
“In what?”
“In motion-pictures,” I answered.
“Motion-pictures!” scoffed he. “You and I would be a fine pair in that
business--me, a vaudeville man, and you, a glove salesman! What do
we know about the game? Besides, how about the trust?”
[Illustration: ELSIE FERGUSON
Dignified stage star who lost none of her lustre on the screen.]
[Illustration: MR. GOLDWYN, MABEL NORMAND AND CHARLIE CHAPLIN]
His last words touched upon a vital issue in the screen industry
of that period. The truth of it was that motion-picture theatres
throughout the country were practically at the mercy of ten companies
which, for the privilege of showing pictures, collected a weekly
license fee of two dollars each, from fifteen thousand theatres. I
shall not enter here into the argument by which the combine justified
their taxation. I shall merely remark that the existent system
presented an obstacle worthy of consideration. However, all the way
home I had been preparing an answer to this protest of Lasky’s, and now
I eagerly put it forth.
“Give the public fine pictures,” I urged. “Show them something
different from Western stuff and slap-stick comedies and you’ll find
out what will become of the trust. And why should your entertainment
have to be so short? If it’s a good story there’s no reason why it
couldn’t run through five reels. I tell you the possibilities of the
motion-picture business have never been touched. We could sell good
films and long films all over the world.”
Eventually Lasky was convinced that my idea presented at least a good
betting proposition, and he agreed to add ten thousand dollars to the
equal amount which I put up, provided he be relieved of any active
management. Considering that in those days many of the two-reelers were
made for less than a thousand dollars, our original capital seemed not
only adequate to the immediate cost of production, but to a handsome
margin for recovery from a possible first failure. With this assumption
of strength we took our next logical step. We hunted for somebody who
would make our pictures for us.
It was natural that the first person of whom we should think in this
connection was Mr. D. W. Griffith. He was then directing for the
Biograph Company, one of the units of the motion-picture trust, and
he had already experimented with the longer picture in “Judith of
Bethulia.” Indeed, I wish to say right here that I lay no claim to
pioneer thought in realising that the screen was susceptible of longer
and more varied treatment, for, in addition to our American “Judith of
Bethulia,” one or two foreign pictures had heralded the new era. Any
possible credit to me, therefore, must be accorded to my conception of
the new sort of photoplay as a systematic performance rather than as a
sporadic spectacle. Indeed, I was to find out later that even this idea
was not an exclusive visitation. Lasky and I had supposed that we were
the only ones in the field, but it was not long before we discovered
that even previous to us another man had acted on the same idea.
But to go back to my interview with Mr. Griffith. I met him for lunch,
and I was impressed immediately by the personality which has since
lifted him into his place as the greatest of screen directors. Tall
and spare and quite stooped, Mr. Griffith’s figure suggests by its
very lack of erectness that reserve of energy which transforms him in
the studio to the tireless, almost demoniacal worker. His features are
clear-cut, and to the suggestion of the eagle in his profile the clear
blue eyes--eyes which you could never possibly mistake for gray even
across a room--contribute a final authority. These eyes while he is at
work, so people tell me, glow with enthusiasm, but during the chance
interview they join with the mouth in a look of amused observation.
With this expression he heard me make my proposition that day. When he
finally spoke it was to quench any hope that Mr. Griffith might ever
become associated with Lasky and me.
“A very interesting project,” he commented, “and if you can show me a
bank deposit of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars I think we might
talk.”
I did not betray the meagre conversational basis which I had to offer.
Instead, Lasky and I now approached a friend of ours, Cecil de Mille.
Mr. de Mille, although very little more than thirty years of age at
this time, was already known as a playwright of considerable skill. His
father had been Belasco’s partner and he himself had been associated
with the celebrated theatrical producer in writing “The Return of Peter
Grimm.” With all of his dramatic tradition and achievement Mr. de Mille
had one limitation. At this time he had never directed a picture. More
than this, he had never even seen one directed.
However, neither he nor we were daunted by this slight flaw in his
equipment. And after a day or two spent in the Edison studios Mr. de
Mille went out to California to “shoot” our first picture. For his
services he was paid one hundred dollars a week and was promised, in
addition, some stock in the company. When you reflect that to-day he
receives approximately five thousand dollars a week, together with a
large percentage of the returns on every production, it helps you to
realise that the jinnee of the screen has functioned almost as well as
did his ancestor of the “Arabian Nights.”
And in no place is the magic more apparent than in California.
When De Mille went out to Los Angeles to look around for a site,
Hollywood promised nothing of its present pomp. The vast studios, the
beautiful villas, the famous pleasure-places--all have arisen in
the past decade. It needs, indeed, only a flash-back from the Famous
Players-Lasky studios of to-day to our humble residence of nine years
ago to give you a complete sense of the growth of the industry.
The site which we finally selected was one floor of a livery-stable.
Here in this space, out of which had been created, in addition to the
studio, five small dressing-rooms, our director made that first film.
The elaborate sets were then undreamed of. Painted backgrounds achieved
their duties, and our scenic equipment consisted of four canvas wings
and two pieces of canvas. Likewise absent was the modern complicated
system of lighting. The sun was our only electrician in those days.
And with the aid of three or four men De Mille set to work in a studio
where the weekly pay-roll now numbers eleven hundred and fifty people.
Yet, in spite of such simplified conditions, it cost us forty-seven
thousand dollars to make that first picture. Nowadays that sum
is inadequate for any long production, but in those times it was
unprecedented. Of course the cost of the motion-picture rights of
our first drama accounted for this expenditure. This drama was “The
Squaw Man,” recently revived by Mr. William Faversham, and for it we
guaranteed royalty rights of ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand, and
our capital was only ten thousand more!
On the twenty-ninth of December, 1913, De Mille began making the
picture. But before he had even touched it I had got enough orders on
that unmaterialized merchandise to insure the production of the second
picture. I represented the executive end of our enterprise, and my
first move had been to make newspaper announcement of the fact that the
Lasky Company, as we had decided to call our organisation, was going to
produce a yearly series of twelve five-reel pictures, beginning with
“The Squaw Man.”
In New York I awaited results. Which would prevail--the trust or the
new kind of picture?
I was not kept long in suspense. Almost immediately theatre managers
and letters from theatre managers began to pour in. These functionaries
had been partially paralysed by the trust, and their quick response to
our announcement indicated just how eager they were for an opportunity
to regain their prestige. Although I had, of course, counted upon such
reaction, the swiftness and volume of those first orders overwhelmed me
with incredulous joy.
_Chapter Two_
RECORDS THE SUCCESS OF AN IDEA
I am compelled to say right here that life had not led me to expect
any such facility. For I had been a poor boy--poor and often homeless.
Of formal schooling I had practically none. At the age when most boys
take arithmetic and a roof and three square meals as a matter of course
I was fending for myself. When I got these things it was through odd
jobs in blacksmith-shops and in glove-factories. Sometimes, of course,
I did not get them at all. For example, I remember how once as a boy of
twelve I wandered for a whole week through the streets of London with
no more ardent guaranty of the future than a loaf of bread.
My early boyhood was spent in Europe and I was just fourteen when,
absolutely alone and with no friend or relative to greet me, I arrived
in New York City. From the city I went to Gloversville, N. Y., and
there, after about four or five years spent in a glove-factory, I
succeeded in persuading a firm that I could sell gloves. I can say
without arrogance of heart that I did sell them. But there was no
miracle of ease about this process. I travelled from coast to coast; I
often worked eighteen hours a day; I put over my product in districts
where it never sold before. As a result of all this I was making about
fifteen thousand dollars a year at the time when I chanced in upon
that little motion-picture theatre. I also owned stock in my company
and, thanks to an expanded income, I had been able to supplement my
fragmentary schooling by many lectures and concerts and by frequent
trips to Europe.
But, although at thirty I was a comparatively successful man, I was
not satisfied. I never had been satisfied. I can remember how when a
boy in the cutting department I used to walk by the leading hotel in
Gloversville and look at the “drummers” who cocked their feet up in the
big plate-glass window. How I envied them--those splendid adventurers
with their hats and their massive cigars both at an angle! For to
me they represented the everlasting romance of the far horizon. And
when at last I myself was admitted to this peerage I was sensible,
of course, of another, greater goal. I have made many mistakes in my
life, but I can honestly say that they were all results of an unceasing
effort on my part to reach the bigger thing just beyond.
But to return to my story. It soon became apparent that we needed
more money for the production of “The Squaw Man.” How were we going to
raise that necessary twenty-five thousand dollars? Our first approach
to the problem was a personal one. Lasky and I asked any number of
people we knew if they didn’t want some stock in the Lasky Company. But
all of them were skeptical. At last, however, we were able to borrow
the needed funds out of bank. De Mille resumed work on the picture,
and a few weeks afterward he returned to New York with the precious
merchandise. Meanwhile he had wired us that there was something wrong
with the film, but even this did not prepare me for my first glimpse of
the production upon which I had staked everything.
Buzz! In the silence of that deserted studio we heard the machine begin
its work. And then, as from a very far shore, I heard Lasky’s voice.
“We’re ruined,” he cried.
He was saying only what I myself had been too sick with horror to
exclaim. For, like a mad dervish, the home of the noble English earl,
together with all the titled ladies who moved therein, had jumped
across the screen. Time refused to stabilise them. They went right on
jumping. And with gathering despair we looked on what we supposed to be
the wreck of forty-seven thousand dollars.
That it was not a wreck was due to the aid of some one from whom we
had no right to expect it. At that time the late Sigismund Lubin
of Philadelphia was head of one of the ten companies which we were
fighting. Nevertheless it was to him I appealed for expert advice.
I took the roll of film over to Philadelphia, and with a largeness
of spirit which I shall never forget the old gentleman saved me, his
threatened rival, from utter ruin. He pointed out that the time-stop
was wrong. No, not an irremediable defect. In the joy of this discovery
I overlooked the hardship of his cure. Yet this was to paste by hand
new perforations on both edges of a film that was nearly a mile long.
The story of the beginning of the Lasky Company is now coming to a
close. To it I might add a thousand picturesque and amusing details,
but I realise that the chief interest of my reminiscences is focussed,
not upon the development of the motion-picture industry--dramatic
as that undoubtedly is--but upon the celebrated personalities with
whom my life has brought me into contact. I have delayed this long
the more vital communications because the transition from the former
impoverished photoplays to the elaborate spectacle of to-day involved
many producers and brought with it the rise of all our famous stars. To
give a real insight into the lives of Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin,
Norma Talmadge, Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Reid, Harold Lloyd, Mabel
Normand, and other famous screen artists obligates, in fact, the
background of photoplay history involved in the start of the Lasky
Company.
My last word here touches upon the reception of “The Squaw Man.” It
scored an immediate success. Our second play established us even more
firmly. This prosperity resulted logically in helping the overthrow of
the trust. Beaten upon by the wave of new photoplay methods, some of
its units were carried out to oblivion. Others rose to the surface only
through conformity to the agent of destruction.
It was during an interview with one of the first exhibitors who came
to my office that I heard the name of the man who, unknown to me, had
already embarked on the very same enterprise that I had.
“So you’ve got this idea of the long film too?” remarked this exhibitor.
If one of the Indians who greeted Columbus had said, “So you’ve landed
too?” the explorer would have felt probably as I did at that moment.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“Why,” said he, “haven’t you heard about the man that brought over
Sarah Bernhardt’s first picture and produced ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’--a
fellow by the name of Zukor?”
It was not until some months after this that I first met Mr. Adolph
Zukor, then head of the Famous Players Company. I should like to have
more space to devote to the eminent producer who, through years of
alternating competition and co-operation, has touched my life at so
many points, but I can pause only long enough for a few words. Mr.
Zukor, like myself, started in the world as a poor boy. Unlike me,
however, he started film-production with a background of experience.
He had owned for some years a number of motion-picture theatres, and
a more intimate dissatisfaction with available resources was back of
his break from tradition. When he attempted to get financial backing
for his project, however, he met with the same objections which I had
heard, and he has often told me how the theatrical manager whose aid he
attempted to enlist scoffed, “What do you want to show a long film for?
People are not going to have the patience to sit through more than a
thousand feet of film.”
I might marshal a great many adjectives and nouns to Mr. Zukor’s
credit, but I feel that I can suggest his fundamental character more
skilfully by recalling one incident. Several years after I had met him
we were coming home from some entertainment together when we saw a
blaze in the locality of the Famous Players’ studio which, unlike our
own, was situated in New York. We were soon to discover that it was the
studio itself. In it were thousands of dollars’ worth of undeveloped
negatives--many of them of Mary Pickford. Their destruction would have
meant financial ruin to Mr. Zukor. He himself realised this fully. Yet
the only words that he said, the words which he kept repeating all
through the crisis, were, “Oh, do you think anybody’s hurt?”
_Chapter Three_
MARY PICKFORD
It was some months after I first met our competitor that I received
my first impression of the most noted screen actress in America. As I
walked into Mr. Zukor’s office one evening I noticed a girl talking to
him. She was very small and her simple little navy suit contrasted with
the jungle of fur coat from which peeped another woman.
“They’ve offered me five hundred for the use of my name,” I heard her
say, “but do you really think that’s enough? After all, it means a lot
to those cold-cream people.”
I looked at the lovely profile where every feature rhymes with every
other feature. I listened to the lovely light voice. And I was struck
by the disparity between sentiment and equipment.
Yet somehow she did invest these words of mere commerce with a quality
quite apart from their substance. There was something in her tone,
something in the big brown eyes, which made you think of a child asking
whether it ought to give up its stick of candy for one marble or
whether perhaps it could get two. As I saw her slight figure go out
the door it was the appeal of her manner rather than the text of her
question which made me ask immediately who she was.
“What!” Mr. Zukor exclaimed. “Didn’t you recognise her? Why, that was
Mary Pickford.”
That was just about eight years ago. Miss Pickford was already a star,
and she was twinkling under the auspices of Adolph Zukor; for, early in
his career of producing, our competitor had been fortunate enough to
secure the services of that great pantomime artiste who has undoubtedly
contributed more than any other single person to his present eminence.
Mr. Zukor made Miss Pickford a star. This is a mere formal statement of
the case. In reality she made herself, for no firmament could have long
resisted any one possessing such standards of workmanship. I am aware
that here I sound suspiciously like the press-agent, who invariably
endows his client with “a passionate devotion to her work.” It is
unfortunate, indeed, that the zeal of this functionary has calloused
public consciousness to instances where the statement is based on fact.
All screen stars are not animated by devotion to work. Mary Pickford
is. To it she has sacrificed pleasures, personal contacts, all sorts
of extraneous interests.
Several years before I walked into the theatre which inspired me with
my idea, Mary Pickford was working under Mr. Griffith in the Biograph
Company, which, you will remember, was a unit in the trust. Then she
was not a star. She was getting twenty-five dollars a week, and the
most vivid reflection of those early days of hers is afforded by a
woman who used to work with her.
“How well I remember her,” this woman has told me, “as she sat there in
the shabby old Biograph offices. She nearly always wore a plain little
blue dress with a second-hand piece of fur about her throat.”
Not long ago I asked Mr. Griffith this question: “Did you have any
idea in those days that Mary Pickford was destined for such a colossal
success?” His answer was a decided negative.
“You understand, of course,” he immediately qualified, “my mind was
always on the story--not on the star. However, I can say this: It was
due to me that Miss Pickford was retained at all, for the management
did not care for her especially. To speak plainly, they thought she was
too chubby.”
I gasped at the impiety of the word. It was some time before I could
rally to ask him another question: “Then was there anything that set
her apart from other girls you were engaging at that time?”
[Illustration: ALICE TERRY
Wife of Rex Ingram, noted director whose work in “The Four Horsemen”
compelled unusual attention.]
[Illustration: BERT LYTELL
Who brought great stage tradition to the screen.]
“Work,” he retorted promptly. “I soon began to notice that instead of
running off as soon as her set was over, she’d stay to watch the others
on theirs. She never stopped listening and looking. She was determined
to learn everything she could about the business.”
While considering these remarks of the greatest screen director anent
the greatest screen actress, it is interesting to parallel them with
Miss Pickford’s comments upon Mr. Griffith. One evening not long ago
I was entertained at the Fairbanks home at a dinner including Charlie
Chaplin and Mr. Griffith. After the meal was served Doug took Mr.
Griffith out to see his swimming-pool. Mary and I were left alone,
and as we looked after the tall, bent figure of the director, I took
advantage of our solitude to ask her a question which had often
occurred to me. “Mary,” I asked her, “how did you ever come to break
away from Griffith?”
“Well,” she answered promptly, “it was this way: I felt that I was
getting to be a machine under Mr. Griffith. I got to be like an
automatic doll. If he told me to move my left foot I moved it. When he
said, ‘Look up’ I did that just as unquestioningly. So I make up my
mind to see if I could really do anything by myself.”
I doubt if Mr. Zukor himself realised at first the tremendous
potentiality of Mary Pickford. It was some months, indeed, before the
Famous Players starred her, and Mr. Zukor has often told me how during
that probationary time she used to say to him, “Oh, Mr. Zukor, if I
could only see my name in electric lights I’d be the happiest girl in
the world!”
When the great moment to which she had so long and so eagerly looked
forward finally did come, the scenario-writer of Mary Pickford’s own
life displayed a dramatic deftness of touch.
One day Mr. Zukor asked Miss Pickford if she would go out to dinner
with him that evening. She agreed, and he appointed the Hotel Breslin
on Broadway for their meeting. When they sat down at their table it was
still light. At last when dusk began to fall Mr. Zukor rose and went
over to the window.
“Come over here,” he called to the girl. “I want you to see something.”
Wonderingly she followed him. She looked out at the street where the
swift Winter darkness was dimming the familiar outlines, and then she
looked back to his face.
“What is it?” said she. “I don’t see anything.”
“Wait,” he commanded.
As he spoke the lights of many windows began to brush like golden
flakes against the blurred buildings. And then across the street at
Proctor’s there suddenly leaped in letters of frosty fire these words:
+-----------------+
| MARY PICKFORD |
| |
| in |
| |
| “Hearts Adrift” |
+-----------------+
She had never suspected that she was to be starred in this play. And it
is not surprising that at the revelation of her success she burst into
tears such as have moved her audiences all over the world.
“Can it really, really be true?”--this might have been the subtitle of
that big scene in the drama of Mary Pickford’s life.
It was a moment after this first shock of incredulous joy that she said
to Mr. Zukor, “Oh, what will mother say when she hears this?”
Any one who knows Mary will not be surprised at this almost
instantaneous thought of her mother. I have met the average number of
daughters in my life and I can truthfully say that none of them ever
gave a mother such devotion as does she. Until the time Mary married
Douglas Fairbanks Mrs. Pickford was the one dominating influence in
her daughter’s life. In the vividness of this relationship you will
find perhaps the reason for one outstanding lack in Mary Pickford’s
life. There are many women who admire her. Of men pals, such as
Marshall Neilan, the celebrated director, she has a score. But to my
knowledge there is only one woman who has approached--and she very
tentatively--the position of intimate friend.
“Ma” Pickford, as she is known familiarly, is now her daughter’s
business manager. But in the old shabby days of the Biograph studio
her activities, although more limited, were equally pronounced. Every
single day she came with Mary to the studio and stayed with her until
she left. She watched every move she made. She gave her suggestions
about her work. She sat with the faithful make-up box while Mary was
on a set. In the Famous Players’ studio it was the same. Of course,
stage and screen supply numerous other instances of brooding maternal
solicitude.
I am now approaching a phase of the noted pantomimist’s career which
points to many adventures in which I myself have been involved. When
Mary Pickford first went with Mr. Zukor he paid her five hundred
dollars a week. Her success was so marked that before her contract
had expired he voluntarily raised this to a thousand dollars. After
this--but I am anticipating.
Whenever I saw Mr. Zukor looking homeless as a small-town man in
house-cleaning time I knew what was the matter.
“How much does she want now?” I used to ask him laughingly.
“We’re fixing up the contract,” he would answer with a significant lift
of the eyebrows.
It often took longer to make one of Mary’s contracts than it did to
make one of Mary’s pictures. Yet, strangely enough, the beneficiary
herself took no hand in the enterprise. The warfare of clauses was
waged entirely by her mother and her lawyer. Indeed, Mr. Zukor has
often told me that Mary Pickford had never asked him for a cent.
“Then how do you know she’s discontented?” I once inquired of him. “How
does she act?”
“Like a perfect lady,” responded Mr. Zukor stoically.
I made no comment, but I have always understood that one of the
advantages of being a perfect lady is that you can create a certain
atmosphere without creating the basis for any definite accusations.
During the time that this contract was being negotiated the newspapers
published an item to the effect that Charlie Chaplin had just signed a
new contract whereby he was to receive $670,000 a year. Right here was
where Mr. Zukor experienced a most acute manifestation of his periodic
disorder.
When the Chaplin contract was announced every film-producer knew
that Mary Pickford was negotiating a new contract, and I know of one
specific offer she received at fifteen thousand dollars a week.
On account of the pleasant relations that had always existed between
Mary Pickford and Mr. Zukor, however, she finally accepted the new
contract with him, in which Lasky and I joined with Mr. Zukor, as the
contract for ten thousand dollars a week, to apply on fifty per cent.
of the profits of the picture, seemed unusually large.
During this period of dissatisfaction she spoke to me one day about the
Chaplin contract. “Just think of it,” said she, “there he is getting
all that money and here I am, after all my hard work, not making one
half that much.”
This reminds me that, some time after the contract was made, Mary
Pickford started working on her first picture, entitled “Less Than
Dust,” and I saw more of her than I ever did before. As the enterprise
was so large we decided to have a separate unit for her, which meant
a separate studio that no one else worked in but Miss Pickford. As
there was trouble one day, and Mr. Zukor being away, I went over to
see her. Until that time any difficulties were always straightened out
with Mr. Zukor. While I was there she make this remark to me: “What
do you think? They all seem to be excited around here over my getting
this money. As a matter of fact, one of your officials said: ‘Watch her
_walk_ through this set. For ten thousand dollars a week she ought to
be running.’”
But to recur to the Chaplin contract: I was struck by the appeal in
these words about dollars and cents. Again she seemed to me like a
child, and this time all a child’s sense of injustice at what she
considered an ungenerous return for her services spoke in the big
brown eyes. If, indeed, my last paragraphs have cast the great screen
artiste in any doubtful light, I hasten to remind you that all her
tremendous professional pride was at stake in securing a concrete
reward. Certainly there can be no doubt--and I am sure Mr. Zukor would
be the first to admit this--that she was worth all the money she
ever received. In fact, there are many who will consider this a very
conservative statement.
Then, too, it will be remembered that my early impressions of Mary
Pickford were received from Mr. Zukor and that, although he has always
had the highest admiration for her both as a woman and as an artiste,
his interpretation of various episodes was doubtless affected by the
strain of financial adjustment. One memory of mine serves to establish
this point.
On a certain day when I met our rival producer for lunch he was wearing
what I had come to know as his “Mary” expression.
“What’s up now?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “She’s very balky over ‘Madame Butterfly,’” he
responded. “This morning she stopped acting because she said the shoes
weren’t right. In fact, nothing’s right about the whole play.”
Mr. Zukor attributed this mood to another crisis in wage fixation, but
I am quite sure that salary was, at the most, only a partial factor in
her dissatisfaction with that particular play. For not long ago she
confided to a friend of mine: “The only quarrel I can ever remember
having with a director was over ‘Madame Butterfly.’ It ought to have
been called ‘Madame Snail.’ It had no movement in it, no contrasts at
all. Now, my idea was to have the first scenes showing _Pinkerton_
teaching the Japanese girl some American game like baseball. But would
the director listen to me? Not a bit of it.”
Continuing with this same reminiscence, Mary Pickford spoke of
her friend Marshall Neilan. “Micky was playing with me in ‘Madame
Butterfly,’” she said. “And how well I remember the way we’d grouch
after we left the studio. We used to leave work in an old car that we
called Cactus Kate or Tuna Lil, and as we bumped into New York we’d
invent together all sorts of business that we thought might tone up
poor ‘Madame Butterfly.’ I was so impressed by Micky’s idea that I went
to Mr. Zukor and said: ‘Do you know you ought to make Micky Neilan a
director? He’d be worth at least a hundred and twenty-five dollars a
week to you.’”
I quote this last as a testimony to the almost unerring acumen which
Mary Pickford displays in her profession. Later on I myself engaged
Marshall Neilan for the Lasky Company, and he has developed into one
of the four or five great directors in the country. Incidentally I may
mention that the Goldwyn Company now pays him twenty-five thousand
dollars a picture, together with fifty per cent. of the profits. He
produces four pictures a year.
My first long talk with Mary Pickford was almost a year after I caught
my first glimpse of her in Zukor’s office. The conversation centred
almost entirely upon work, and I shall never forget my amazement as I
listened to her. There was no detail of film-production which she, this
girl, still in her early twenties, had not grasped more thoroughly
than any man to whom I ever talked. She knew pictures, not only from
the standpoint of the studio, but from that of the box-office. Back of
those lovely brown eyes, disguised by that lyric profile, is the mind
of a captain of industry. In appearance so typically feminine, Mary
Pickford gives to the romance of business all of a man’s response.
Certainly she would have had no trouble in filling a diplomatic post.
I realised this as, sitting with her one evening in the Knickerbocker
Hotel restaurant, where I had taken her to dinner, I heard her speak
for the first time of the Lasky studio. She was only twenty-two.
“I can’t tell you,” said she, “how I admire your photography.” And then
she went on to laud other features until I tingled with pride to think
that I belonged to such a superior organisation.
“It must be a wonderful pleasure to work in such a studio,” she
concluded in a voice soft as the southern wind.
Of course I may be mistaken, but it seemed to me that Mary was
conveying the impression that she would not be awfully offended if I
made her an offer from the Lasky Company. However, as this impression
was created after she had praised Zukor in the highest possible
terms--indeed, she always spoke well of him--it avoided all the
disadvantages of a direct statement.
I may mention incidentally that she did have offers from many
producers. Therefore when she was ready to make a new contract with
Zukor she had a very firm foundation of argument. “So-and-so’s willing
to give me so much. Also So-and-so”--this was the lever applied by her
mother and her lawyer.
There was another revelation made by that first evening. She and her
mother were living at the time in a little apartment on One Hundred and
Fifth Street. When I entered it I was never more surprised in my life,
for the room into which I was ushered contained only a few plain pieces
of furniture, and in its centre stood an inexpensive-looking trunk.
As I waited for Miss Pickford I wondered to myself, “What in the world
is this girl doing with her thousand a week?”
For you must remember this was no transient abode. Here in these
quarters, where Japanese ideas of elimination had been applied so
thoroughly, the famous star had been living for months. As I thus
speculated upon the destiny of Mary’s dollars the door opened and I
looked up to see a short, rather stout figure and a face where could be
traced some resemblance to that of the celebrity for whom I waited. It
was Mrs. Pickford.
She greeted me cordially and then she turned to the trunk. From it I
saw her take the gown her daughter was going to wear that evening, and
I could not help observing the simplicity of this garment. Many a girl
who makes fifty dollars a week would have considered it too plain for
herself.
On another occasion when Mrs. Pickford accompanied us to dinner I
heard the answer to my unspoken query in the meagre little room. She
was investing Mary’s savings. Most of these investments were made in
Canada, where Mary was born and brought up, and I was surprised to
learn the extent they had already attained.
I have spoken of the famous star as being, in reality, a captain of
industry. In the thrift to which I was introduced this first evening
you find a reinforcement of the statement. I was soon to discover that
waste of any kind offends Mary Pickford as much as it does John D.
Rockefeller.
But if Mary is controlled in her general expenditure, if she has never
been able to rebound from the fear of poverty impressed upon her by
the straitened days of her childhood and early youth, she displays no
similar restraint in one particular instance. Her family! Not only to
her mother, but to her brother Jack and her sister Lottie she has been
the soul of generosity.
In manner she is perfectly simple and unaffected. Unlike many other
screen actresses whom I have known, she does not act after working
hours. And when she is in the studio she is always courteous and
considerate. There on the set, where the soul-meter registers so true,
Mary Pickford never indulges in the spasms of ego which the afflicted
themselves are wont to call their temperament. Methodically as if she
were Mary Jones arriving in the office for dictation, she appears on
the Fairbanks lot.
There is absolutely no swank about her. An illustration of the quality
which has so endeared her to many other members of her profession is
found in a benefit performance given last year at Hollywood. Space was
limited and when the dressing-rooms were assigned no such poignant cry
of outraged property rights has been uttered since the little bear
whimpered, “Who’s been sitting in my chair?”
“What!” cried one of the motion-picture duchesses only just recently
elevated to the peerage. “Do you mean to say that I have to dress in a
room with three other people?”
Miss Pickford, however, whose audiences number twenty-five to this
other star’s one, sat down good-humoredly in a room with several other
performers.
“How jolly!” said she, according to report. “This reminds me of the
old days at the Biograph when I was getting twenty-five a week.”
If Miss Pickford has, indeed, any vanity, it is focussed more upon her
sense of being a good business woman than it is upon her ability as an
actress. All of her friends realise this, and Charlie Chaplin, upon
whose warm personal friendship with Douglas Fairbanks and his wife I
shall dwell in a later chapter, is very fond of teasing her upon this
one vulnerable point.
“Where do you get this idea that you’re such a fine business woman,
Mary,” Charlie asked her laughingly one evening.
“Why, I am,” she retorted indignantly. “Everybody knows it.”
“I can’t see it,” announced Charlie. “You have something the public
wants and you get the market price for it.
“And then,” recounts Charlie gleefully, “I wish you had seen Doug. He
looked as if he were going to hit me.”
A year or so ago I was at one of the big hotels in Hollywood with an
author making his first visit to the place. He looked around at the
dining-room with the faces of so many famous motion-picture folks, and
then he turned to me.
“I don’t see Mary and Doug,” he remarked. “Where are they?”
“No,” said I, “and if you live in Hollywood for a year you’ll probably
never see them--unless you go to their home.”
Poor chap! If he had gone to Switzerland and been told that the Alps
never came out he could not have looked more disappointed.
One evening I was invited to dinner at the beautiful home of Mary and
Doug in Beverly Hills. The idol of the screen, arrayed in a beautiful
evening gown, met me with a manuscript in her hand.
“Well, well, what are you doing?” I asked her.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m working on my story.”
We ate a dinner where the talk was all dedicated to pictures. Then as
soon as it was over Mary turned to me. “I’d like you to see my new
picture this evening,” she announced. “I’m awfully anxious to know what
you think of it and to find out if you have any suggestions to make.”
I smiled a little as I was led into the projection-room, where almost
every evening the star and her husband turn on their consistent diet
of amusement, for I realised that in this clever way Mary was going on
with her work under cover of entertaining me.
This incident is typical of the whole-souled concentration which I am
trying to point out. Every night after dinner the star and her husband
see some picture--either one of their own or that of somebody else. In
order to accomplish this they have installed in their home a machine
and, just as in the ordinary household you turn on the phonograph, one
of their men servants tunes up the silver-sheet. This home, by the way,
presents in its luxury a very different setting from the little room
where the star first entertained me, for since her marriage to Douglas
Fairbanks there has been a marked expansion in her mode of living.
At eight o’clock in the morning Miss Pickford appears in the studio.
It is often late in the evening when she leaves it. As to her working
environment, this has been so often reproduced that I shall pass
over the uproar, the glaring lights, the heat, the long waits, the
monotonous repetitions of every scene--all those features which make
a motion-picture day the most wearing in the world. Nor is the work
less exacting when she is not engaged in actual reproduction. For,
after the careful sifting of hundreds of stories, her final choice
demands innumerable preliminaries of costume, lighting, directing,
scenario-writing, and casting. And always, always she is thinking up
bits of business for her next play.
But, the reader may protest, you have given us Mary Pickford chiefly in
the terms of work. Can this be all? Is it merely a captain of industry
who, in the guise of the wistful, appealing, dark-eyed slip of a
girl, has played upon the heart-strings of the world? Decidedly not! On
the screen you can not humbug any of the people any of the time. The
camera shows, as the speaking stage does not, the fundamental quality
of the human soul. It has not deceived you, therefore, when you exclaim
involuntarily, “Isn’t she sweet?” the minute you see Mary’s face on the
screen.
[Illustration: MR. GOLDWYN, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS AND MARY PICKFORD AT THE
STUDIO]
[Illustration: BARBARA LA MARR
Whose work in “The Eternal City” stamped her as an actress of stellar
size.]
Mary Pickford has a real sweetness of spirit. Furthermore, it is a
woman’s sweetness. You find it in the look she bends upon her mother,
in her greetings to those who work with her, in her love of children
and of animals. It was that which led her to write to Mr. Zukor when,
after their long career of contract-making, she finally left his
organisation, the most affectionate and appreciative of letters. It was
certainly that which made the first words I ever heard her utter seem
not just a commercial inquiry, but the appealing wonder of a child.
Not only this. She possesses all a woman’s capacity for lyric response
fused with her man’s capacity for epic response. The great romance of
Mary Pickford’s life is undoubtedly Douglas Fairbanks, and upon this I
shall touch when I come to speak of Fairbanks himself.
_Chapter Four_
FASCINATING FANNY WARD
Before I happened into Adolph Zukor’s office that evening, of which
I had spoken previously, when Mary Pickford was consulting him about
the proper recompense for her indorsement of the cold-cream, I was, of
course, already launched on my own adventures with the stellar world.
Through my account of the difficulties experienced by Mr. Zukor and
Mary Pickford in arriving at a mutual understanding of a satisfactory
wage, the reader may perhaps have gathered that the intercourse between
producer and star is often clouded by the individual view-point. A
story of my own contacts will not weaken that impression. In fact,
before the Lasky Company was six months old I had discovered that the
need for adjustment between these two supreme functionaries of the
motion-picture world covers a wide ground, where salary represents only
a limited space.
Among the first of the stars whom I engaged was Fanny Ward. It was
shortly after we made our first picture that I chanced to meet this
widely known actress in the elevator of the Hotel Claridge, New York.
Fanny was not in her first youth. There was nothing, however, except
her birth certificate to indicate this fact. If Ponce de Leon in his
search for the Fountain of Youth had seen her that day he surely would
have cried, “Ho, man, we’re getting warm!”
I was so struck by that air of youthful witchery which she has so
often conveyed on the screen that I ultimately asked her if she would
not make some pictures for us. Up to this time her fame had been
confined to the speaking stage. But she was at once enthusiastic about
the opportunity I presented to her, and in a short time we concluded
arrangements for her trip.
The vehicle which we selected for her was “The Marriage of Kitty.” But,
alas and alack! The vehicle was unequipped with shock-absorbers or even
ordinary springs. After some very rough going in California, during
which time Mr. de Mille had expressed by wire his dissatisfaction with
my newly found star, the picture was sent back East. And along with the
picture was shipped Fanny herself.
Almost immediately I was apprised of the latter fact. “Miss Ward
phoned you just now,” announced my secretary on an otherwise pleasant
morning. “She wants you to call her immediately.”
That I did not heed this request was due to a misplaced confidence
on my part in the healing quality of Time. When the actress finally
succeeded in seeing me I found that Time had done no more for Fanny
than it does for a fireless cooker. Instead of cooling it had merely
conserved those inner fires.
I had just ordered my dinner on that night when she consummated my
capture, and as I saw her bear down upon my table I resigned myself to
the inevitable. The inevitable was punctual. “You!” cried she, glaring
up at me: “what have you done?”