of the court of Charles VII. availed themselves of a contemporary
solace. A long shot had been taken of the French court and it had
been taken, according to custom, four times. None of these occasions
had revealed anything wrong and it was only when De Mille “saw the
rushes”--the technical term describing a first view of the previous
day’s shots--that he discovered an anachronism which would have made
Sir Walter Scott’s offenses in this direction seem blameless.
“For Heaven’s sake,” he cried, “look at that! The gentlemen of the
fourteenth century are chewing gum!”
Miss Farrar whooped with merriment over this historical discrepancy,
and to-day the incident supplies her with a favorite motion-picture
story. I may mention casually that this mistake is eloquent with the
possibilities of waste involved in a single wrong performance of a
single extra performer.
In this case we used up a thousand feet of film and the hundreds of
dollars involved in wages, lights, and other expenses on a scene
which, of course, had to be entirely remade.
The eminent singing actress often showed back of the screens that
impulsive generosity which has endeared her to so many people. Once she
did not like the gown worn by a certain extra. Neither did the extra.
Quick as a flash Miss Farrar sent her maid to her residence in
Hollywood to obtain a costume from her own personal wardrobe. And
when she put this raiment into the extra’s hand it was for keeps. She
sometimes lent her fine jewels to people in the cast, and her frequent
“small” gifts to those about her were what most of us would call large.
Such donations were always performed with a certain splendour of
gesture that made one think of a mediæval prince taking off the gold
chain around his neck to give to somebody who had chanced to say, “What
a beautiful piece of jewelry you are wearing.”
If, indeed, Miss Farrar is a captain of industry, she belongs to that
particular branch which flourished in the Florence of the fifteenth
century.
While she was making “Maria Rosa” there befell Miss Farrar the great
romantic adventure of which the world has heard so much. As a result of
my interview with Mr. Lou Tellegen he was engaged by the Lasky Company
to go to Hollywood during the Summer of 1915. He was not playing in
Miss Farrar’s productions and it was not until after some days spent in
California that the two met.
Mr. Fred Kley was responsible for the introduction. Here at this
widely known figure of the film world I feel bound to pause for a few
words of tribute. Kley, who now occupies an important position in the
organization of the Famous Players-Lasky organization, had gone to
California with Cecil de Mille. He it was who had selected the original
site of the livery-stable, and after the Lasky Company moved there he
had attended to a wide variety of details.
He kept books--often on the back of stray envelopes; he hired extra
performers; he assembled properties, and when De Mille imported several
rattlesnakes for the production of “The Squaw Man” it was he, I
believe, who ministered to these pets. I am sure that Briareus with his
hundred hands never accomplished more than did honest, faithful, Fred
Kley with his limited equipment.
I shall give Mr. Kley’s own account of the introduction, for certainly
nothing could be more vivid. “Mr. Tellegen happened to be with me one
day,” he recounts, “when Miss Farrar, still in the Spanish costume she
had been wearing in ‘Maria Rosa’ walked across the lot. ‘I want to meet
Miss Farrar,’ said Mr. Tellegen, ‘Won’t you take me over?’ I did and
I’ve never seen anything like it before nor since. It was just as if a
spark came from his eyes and was met by one from hers.
“They began speaking in French right away,” adds he, “and of course I
couldn’t understand. But, believe me, there’s a whole lot in a tone,
and their tones gave them away as much as their eyes did. He walked
across the lot with her, then to her dressing-room. And after that
you’d see them together all the time just the minute they could get
away from a set.”
In the light of this personal experience of Geraldine Farrar, that
frequent question of hers “Who is to be my Don José” is invested with a
strange, perverse, almost sinister, quality of destiny. It was not the
Don José of her own life drama that she met in Lou Tellegen. It was the
Toreador. When she came to California her heart, according to rumour,
had not been untouched. But if this same rumour is to be credited
further, it had never before been subjugated. Like the heroine of the
drama and the opera with which she is so brilliantly identified, she
had always retained her supremacy in love. Like this same Carmen, she
surrendered at last, not to the most loving, but to the most conquering
type.
The last memory of the beautiful Farrar’s first visit to Hollywood
centers about the station from which pulled out her special train.
Tellegen had, of course, come down to see her off, and as the engine
steamed away on its long eastern course the actor could be seen running
along the platform beside the car from which his love still clung
to his hand. For many yards he raced along and it was only a sudden
acceleration of the engine that finally parted those reluctant hands.
A very different leave-taking from the one I shall record when several
Summers afterwards Geraldine Farrar again came to Hollywood, this time
to make pictures for the Goldwyn studio!
_Chapter Eight_
THE DISCOVERY OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN
While the Lasky Company and the Famous Players organizations were
taking their long and often competitive strides forward numerous other
motion-picture enterprises had been coming into prominence. Among these
was the Fox Company.
Some years ago William Fox bought the story, “A Fool There Was.” For
its leading rôle he engaged a very prominent actress. She disappointed
him at the last moment, and it was while he was at his wit’s end
to know how to replace her that he happened to go one day into his
casting department. There were several extras standing around in the
hope of picking up a day’s work, and among these Fox’s eye fell upon a
dark-eyed girl. He looked at her. He looked again. Finally he said to
his casting director, “I wish you’d have some tests made of that girl.
It seems to me she’s got possibilities.”
The tests were made. They were so satisfactory that the girl was cast
for the leading rôle of “A Fool There Was.” In it she scored such a
triumph that Fox bought immediately more similar vehicles for her. The
girl’s name was Theda Bara, and “A Fool There Was” was the first of the
vamp stories which for some time seemed to consume the motion-picture
industry.
Among producer, of a very different type, who had been waxing strong
during these first years of our development, was Mack Sennett. Sennett,
originally a chorus man earning five dollars a day, had been associated
with Griffith in the old Biograph studios. From these he departed with
only about five or six hundred dollars, and he produced his first films
without any studio at all. The cameraman overcame this fundamental
lack by focussing on people’s front lawns and on any other part of the
landscape which looked appealing. When at last his financial returns
justified it Sennett established a studio near Los Angeles.
Mack’s specialty had always been comedies, and among his early stars
was that noted screen comedian of another day, Ford Sterling. At the
time when the Lasky Company started, Sterling was getting a salary
phenomenal for that period. Yet, being a perfectly normal star, he kept
wanting more, and it was in an hour when Sennett feared he would not be
able to keep pace with these increasing demands that he cast about him
for some one to take Sterling’s place.
In this period of vigilance he chanced to go to Pantages’ in Los
Angeles. Among the acts of this performance, which represented
the second circuit--that employing the less costly talent of the
organisation--there lingered in his mind the work of one comedian.
Months afterwards when Sterling really seemed on the point of leaving,
Sennett thought immediately of the little comedian in the second
circuit. He did not know where he was. He could not even remember his
name. But he wired to an Eastern representative, “Get in touch with
fellow called Chapman or Chamberlain--something like that--playing
second circuit.”
The representative had a hard time locating the person thus vaguely
defined. At last, however, in a little Pennsylvania town the agent
caught up with Charlie Chaplin. He was getting fifty dollars a week for
his work in vaudeville, and when Sennett took him on at one hundred and
twenty-five he seemed stunned by his good fortune.
And did he make good at once in motion-pictures? Mack has told me that
he did not.
“It was days and days,” the latter relates, “before Charlie put over
anything real. He tried all sorts of make-ups--one of them I remember
was a fat man--and they were all about equally flat. The fact of it
was that for some time I felt a little uneasy as to whether my find was
a very fortunate one.”
It must be remembered at this point, however, that Chaplin encountered
at the outset of his screen career an almost inflexible conception of
humour. He himself has told me how he had to combat this prejudice in
creating his very first picture.
“I was a tramp in that story,” he recalls, “and they wanted me to do
all the usual slap-stick stunts. I had to beg them to let me play the
part my way. ‘If you want somebody to pull all the old gags,’ I said
to Sennett, ‘why do you hire me? You can get a man at twenty-five
dollars to do that sort of stuff.’ So at last they gave in to my idea.
This I had worked out very carefully. A tramp in a fine hotel--there’s
a universal situation for you. Hardly a human being that hasn’t
duplicated the feeling of being poor, alone, out of touch with the
gay crowd about him, of trying to identify himself somehow with the
fine, alien throng. So I did the little touches here of imitation--the
pulling down of shabby cuffs, the straightening of my hat, all the
gestures that gave a wider meaning to the characterization.”
Chaplin’s own account of his start is eloquent of the creative
imagination which has made him the supreme exponent of screen art.
This first picture was a success. Even so, there were those in the
Sennett studios who looked askance upon such advanced methods.
“They didn’t really appreciate Charlie in those early days,” so Mabel
Normand has often said to me. “I remember numerous times when people in
the studio came up and asked me confidentially, ‘Say, do you think he’s
so funny? In my mind he can’t touch Ford Sterling.’ They were just so
used to slap-stick that imaginative comedy couldn’t penetrate.”
When Chaplin went out to California to make his first pictures he found
the pantomimist just quoted a star in the Sennett organization. After
having been a model for Gibson and other noted illustrators, Mabel had
worked with Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet in the Biograph studios.
She was still here when Sennett, meeting her on the street one day,
said, “How about going to California at a hundred dollars a week? I’ve
just got some backing for my company and I’m going to settle out there
in a short time.”
Mabel had been rendered incredulous by her salary at the Biograph. She
was so sceptical of there being any such salary as a hundred dollars a
week that Sennett’s backers, to whom he had referred her, thought she
was hesitating because of the insufficiency of the recompense. They
thereupon offered her twenty-five dollars more.
Not long ago my friend Edgar Selwyn, the theatrical producer and
playwright, said to me: “We hear so much about our successful stars as
they are to-day. Yet most of us are a great deal more curious to hear
the details of their earlier years.” With this in mind I am devoting a
short space to the Sennett studio of a former time, for, although these
days did not come under my direct observation, they have been described
to me so often by Mabel Normand and Chaplin and Sennett himself that
they seem almost like a portion of my own experience. Certainly, too,
such flash-backs are necessary to a complete participation in the
stories of my own immediate contacts with these two stars.
The older Sennett studio, like the stable which first cradled the Lasky
Company, presented a striking contrast to the modern film background
with its meticulous divisions of labour, its attempts to introduce
the efficiency methods of a business establishment. Everybody knew
everybody else; all the performers talked over in the most intimate
fashion the details of the day’s work; the stars could and did do all
such chores as cutting films.
Instead of a honeycomb of dressing-rooms, there was a communal space
where all the men put on their make-up; as to Mabel’s dressing-room,
this was a crude, boarded cubicle with the oil-stove familiar to
all the old-timers in California studios. Altogether, an atmosphere
informal and light-hearted as that which we imagine surrounding a group
of strolling players in Elizabethan times!
Every one knows the long rainy seasons which in California interrupt
those months of brilliant, unflagging sunshine. During such times the
rain would drip ceaselessly from the roof of Sennett’s projection-room,
and his actors, shivering from the cold dampness, used to gather
together after the day’s work around the one cozy spot in the
studio--the oil-stove in Mabel’s dressing-room. Here, by the hour
Chaplin, a slender little fellow of twenty-two or three, attired
unvaryingly in a checked suit, used to sit and talk with Mabel about
work, books, and life. They were great pals, these two, and whenever
Charlie wanted a raise he would go to Mabel and say, “Come now, you ask
Mack for me.”
Sometimes, according to those who worked with the pair, the friendship
was invaded by a little feeling of rivalry, especially on Chaplin’s
part. This was hardly strange, for Mabel’s talent as a comédienne was
undoubted, and to this gift she added not only her experience on the
screen but a very exceptional beauty. Of course the sentiment was
only fleeting, but every now and then something would bring it to the
surface.
One day when Chaplin entered the studio he found Mabel standing beside
the camera. Running over to Sennett, he asked the producer what it all
meant.
“Oh, nothing,” replied Mack. “Only I’ve asked Mabel to direct you
to-day.”
Chaplin said nothing, but for an hour or so he was quite evidently
ruffled. Before the end of the day, however, all irritation had
vanished in the boxing-bout which represented the favorite muscular
outlet of the two young comedians.
Charlie and Mabel, as will be remembered, appeared in many comedies
together. One of their scenes which the public was never permitted to
share involved a motor-cycle. On being asked if he could ride this
vehicle Charlie had replied promptly that he could.
“Now you’re sure you know how, Charlie?” Sennett inquired of him again
as on the day the scene was to be taken he confronted the comedian with
this modern mechanism.
“Why, of course I do,” maintained Charlie stoutly, “I used to cycle
all about London.” With no apparent trepidation he mounted the cycle.
Mabel jumped on behind him. An instant afterward those watching the
performance saw the two riders whirling down a steep hill with a fury
that made a nor’easter look cool and collected.
“Talk about Jock Gilpin’s ride!” laughs Mabel to-day as she tells the
story. “I knew from the moment we set out that Charlie hadn’t the least
idea in the world how to guide or stop that machine, and as the trees
and hills whizzed by us I closed my eyes. My only wonder was when and
how badly. At last it happened. When I opened my eyes again it was from
a long unconscious state. I had been dashed into a ditch at the side of
the road, and a little farther on they found the souvenirs of poor old
Charlie. You see,” she concludes, “he hadn’t realised that there was
any difference between a cycle and a motor-cycle.”
Just a little farther on I shall pick up the thread of Miss Normand’s
career where it became interwoven with my own professional interests.
In the meanwhile closing these glimpses of the Sennett studio in its
early days, I shall proceed to developments in the Lasky Company.
It had long been apparent to me that a merger of the Lasky and the
Famous Players organizations promised many benefits. It would put an
end to the costly competition for stars and stories and it would effect
a corresponding reduction in other expenses. To all such arguments,
however, Mr. Zukor turned a deaf ear, and it was not until 1916
that I succeeded in overcoming his reluctance. Then, under the name
of the Famous Players-Lasky Company, these two enterprises, which
only a few years before had launched out with a capital representing
conjointly less than one hundred thousand dollars, were incorporated at
twenty-five million!
It was a radiant day for me when the vision of this gigantic
unification, held so persistently for many months, finally took form.
But, as so often happens, the fulfilment of my most cherished dream
proved to be a weapon, turned against me. Mr. Zukor was the president
of the new organisation; I was chairman of the board of directors. I
shall not enter here into the differences which sundered us, both men
accustomed to domination, I shall merely relate that only a few months
after the formation of the new company I resigned my interests in the
Famous Players-Lasky organisation.
But before leaving this phase of my career I want to pay my heartfelt
tribute to the man whom I consider responsible for much of the success
won by Lasky films, Cecil de Mille!
Although I have had occasion to mention several instances where
his judgment was at fault, I have never once lost the sense of how
disproportionate these rare flaws were to the sum of his achievement.
As a matter of fact, De Mille is seldom wrong in his valuations of
either performer or story. Again and again his judgment proved superior
to both Lasky’s and mine. Then, too, he adds to the qualities which
make him a big director, a gift for personal relations which I have
seldom seen equalled. Farrar was only one of the many Lasky stars
who “got along” wonderfully with our chief director. The courteous,
self-controlled, kindly De Mille--who, indeed, could dislike him?
Certainly my own thought of him always reaches far beyond our mere
professional association. To me at a time when I most needed it De
Mille was a true friend, and the memory of his truth and loyalty
illumines one of the bitterest chapters of my life.
_Chapter Nine_
STARS, STARS, STARS!
Well, I left my company and I was then not quite thirty-five years
of age. I was accustomed to a life where every working hour was
inspired by the one thought, “How can I make the Lasky Company more
significant?” You can imagine, therefore, the terrible blankness of
those days following my resignation. Feverishly I cast about me for
a new outlet for my organising energy, and in the Autumn of 1916 I,
together with my friends Archie and Edgar Selwyn, the theatrical
producers, Margaret Mayo, and Arthur Hopkins, the theatrical producer,
founded the Goldwyn Motion Picture Company.
The beginning of this second film venture of mine involved conditions
very different from those which attended the start of the Lasky Company
three years before. Then the story was supreme and the Lasky Company
was successful without any really overshadowing personalities. True,
the field presented some great celebrities such as Mary Pickford,
but the emphasis was not placed upon the player to the degree which
afterward swayed the producer. Constantly this emphasis became more
irresistible, and by the time that I started the Goldwyn Company it was
the player, not the play, which was the thing.
Every theatre-owner in the country wanted personalities. Stars were
now made over night. New names came out in electric light almost every
evening. Obviously, therefore, the only guarantee for the success of
a new motion-picture organisation was the assemblage of a list of big
names.
Hence it was upon an array of planets that the Goldwyn Company
concentrated its initial energy. The first star we engaged was Mabel
Normand; the second, Mae Marsh; the third, Madge Kennedy. Add to these
such towering figures from other histrionic firmaments as Mary Garden,
Jane Cowl, and Maxine Elliott, and you will see why our competitors
were warranted in feeling a deep uneasiness. For the engagement of
these people was attended by enormous publicity. Newspapers featured
many of our stellar connections and, added to this, huge posters
blazoned with the names of our trophies carried promise of greatness to
every hamlet in America. The first thing that I did, in fact, was to
scatter these posters broadcast.
Perhaps at first I did not quite realise that in building up the Lasky
name I had been in reality creating a Frankenstein. Later, however,
the full force of this figure was to occur to me, for at every turn
I was met by the ruthless competition of the Famous Players-Lasky
Company. This was particularly acute in the engagement of stars.
Added to obstructions of bitter rivalry came a personal misfortune.
While playing hand-ball at the Athletic Club one day I broke my
ankle. This kept me away from our studio for three months and, as my
associates were inexperienced in picture-production, my absence meant
a loss to the company of thousands of dollars. It was, indeed, a
maddening situation for one attempting to launch a new business where
the odds were already sufficiently against him.
It would seem as if the Greek dramatists had not overdrawn things.
When the gods decide they want to make things hard for you, they are
thorough, they overlook no executive detail. The first Goldwyn film was
just being released when America announced her participation in the
War. Heretofore the conflict had spelled advantage rather than disaster
to the American producer, inasmuch as our films had become the rage
in all neutral countries. But with America’s precipitation came a new
set of conditions. These, oppressive enough to picture industries long
established, almost succeeded in crushing our new venture.
First on the list were transportation difficulties. We were now unable
to procure space on ships to move our products. This handicap was
accompanied by shortage of fuel, conservation of light, and scarcity
of labor. The second obstacle of this group became so acute that we
were sometimes obliged to use four studios in order to complete a day’s
production. Obviously, therefore, our only chance of survival lay in
removing our establishment from the Fort Lee studio, where we had been
operating, to a California one. This we did in the Summer of 1918.
Somewhat less than two years after America’s entrance into the War our
pay-roll was ninety thousand dollars. How to meet it--here was the
question which tortured every waking hour. At last I felt it incumbent
upon me, as the largest single stockholder in the company, and as the
individual in our group personally responsible for loans amounting to
eight or nine hundred thousand dollars, to lay the whole situation
frankly before my associates. With one accord they advised that the
company should go into the hands of a receiver.
I could not sleep that night when everything which I had been building
for the past years threatened to go down with the morrow. Money,
credit, my reputation as a producer--how, how was I to save them?
Spent by my vigil I arrived in my office the next morning.
Here after a talk with Mr. Schay, the controller of our company, it
seemed to me that the one reprieve of which I had thought during the
night was really available. The reprieve was this. We had branches in
twenty-five different cities. Each branch represented two or three
thousand dollars of ready money. By removing the total amount from all
of them we should be enabled to meet one week’s pay-roll.
“And how about next week?” asked the controller.
I shrugged my shoulders. But inside I was thinking fiercely that
something had to happen.