the entire complexion of the picture situation changed. Shipments to
Europe came about almost immediately. Other difficulties cleared away.
It was not long before the Du Ponts, of Wilmington, and other prominent
financiers invested seven million dollars cash in the Goldwyn Company.
With this new capitalisation all my financial struggles ended. To-day
the organisation which bears my name is one of the three largest
companies in the world.
One day, while the receivership was threatening, Mabel Normand came
up to my desk and handed me a long envelope. “What is this?” I asked
her.
[Illustration: MABEL NORMAND
Whom Mr. Goldwyn pronounces the greatest comédienne in the world.]
[Illustration: MAXINE ELLIOTT
As she appeared in “The Eternal Magdalene” in 1917.]
“My Liberty bonds,” she answered, “There are only fifty thousand
dollars worth of them, but if they will tide you over you may have
them.”
Those interested in the personality of Mabel Normand can receive no
more illuminating introduction to her than the incident just sketched.
There are a hundred tales of this characteristic response to any human
appeal clustering about the name of Mabel Normand. One which came
directly under my observation relates to a poor girl with a dependent
family. This girl was stricken with tuberculosis and, although Mabel
did not know her, she became interested in her condition through a
friend of hers. Immediately she went to see her, and when she left she
pressed something into the sick girl’s hand. It was only after she had
gone that the other realised what her caller had left. It was a check
for a thousand dollars.
Nor does Mabel wait for the large demand upon her sympathy. Gifts
from her come unprovoked as manna. She is likely to go out and buy a
hundred-dollar beaded bag for a stenographer in the organization, and
just as likely to invest a corresponding amount in remembering somebody
whom she has met once and happened to like.
I used to find it very hard to get Mabel to a set when the set was
early in the morning. Extras and other members of the cast would have
been waiting there for hours. The director would be fuming. At last
somebody would be sent to investigate the whereabouts of the missing
luminary. More than likely she would be found writing letters in her
dressing-room.
“But I don’t feel in the humour this morning,” she would sometimes say
to me, pleadingly. “How can I go down there and act that way?”
My associate, Mr. Abraham Lehr, made frequent attempts to correct
this habit of Mabel’s. He found himself forever frustrated--indeed
disarmed--by the charm of manner, the delightful playfulness which
Mabel possesses so abundantly.
Once, I remember, when she was exceptionally tardy, Lehr, met her in
the studio with his face fixed in lines of righteous indignation. She
approached him with one hand behind her back and the other uplifted in
a gesture of the gayest, most irresistible command.
“Wait,” cried she, “before you say anything!”
With that she brought forward a new and very beautiful photograph of
herself and presented it to him with a curtsey. On the photograph were
written these lines:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
When I’m late
I think of you.
She watched him while he read these words and then, her big brown
eyes dancing with merriment, she said coaxingly: “That’s the reason I
was late, you see. I was thinking up something nice to write on your
photograph. I didn’t want to say just ‘Yours sincerely,’ or something
stupid like that.”
I do not need to say that Lehr’s face softened perceptibly or that he
forgot all about the judicial rebuke which he had evidently planned.
For the pictured collection of stage and screen celebrities which he
has had mounted under the glass top of his office-desk represents a
hobby, and this contribution of Mabel’s still occupies an honoured
place in the gallery.
I do not mean for a moment to convey the idea that Miss Normand is
an isolated example of tardiness. Many screen favorites heave in
sight as slowly as _Lohengrin’s_ swan. This is particularly true of
comedians. Chaplin, for example, often keeps his associates waiting for
hours--indeed, there are entire days when he is absolutely unable to
work. The fact of it is that the efficiency engineer will never be able
to control a picture studio.
Such an expectation is as vain as the belief that you could obtain a
poet’s best work by snapping your fingers over him and crying, “Come,
come, we want another sonnet and a gross of couplets before lunch.” For
the best screen acting is naturally inspirational.
True, some performers are able to turn on their emotional faucets
at any time. Mary Pickford, as I have related, rings up early every
morning. But then she is a systematised human being who presents in
temperament the opposite pole from Mabel Normand. The latter is a
creature of impulse. She never calculates the moment ahead for fear
that the moment itself might calculate something she liked better.
When she works she works hard, but she can’t do it in step with the
hour-hand.
Mabel has a really fine talent and she knows picture-production
from every angle. But the screen does not absorb all of her amazing
vitality. Eagerly she turns to people, books, gaiety, strange scenes.
She does not want to miss one glint of “this dome of many-colored
glass.”
The difference of degree in the attitude of Mary Pickford to pictures
and that of Mabel Normand is indicated by their varying response to
European travel. Chaplin once said to a friend of mine, “You know,
I was in Paris with Mary and Doug and often they really seemed lost
without their pictures.” Far from this state of mind, so familiar in
the American business man temporarily implicated with a gondola or a
ruined temple, is the eagerness with which Mabel Normand returned last
Autumn from her first trip abroad.
“Oh, how I enjoyed every minute of it!” she told me. “Pictures, music,
all the funny outdoor cafés, all the funny people!”
She has always been an inveterate reader. This, of course, is at
present one of the fashionable claims of the screen star, and in
some cases I am obliged to say that the claim rests on very flimsy
foundations. Right here, indeed, I feel compelled to anticipate by
telling a story illustrative of this point:
One day Charlie Chaplin went with me to a Los Angeles hospital where
a friend of mine was recuperating. Left alone in the corridor,
he wandered into a little sitting-room. It was filled with books
representing the most advanced taste in fiction, poetry, and criticism.
“Whose room is this?” asked Chaplin of the nurse hovering over the
scene.
Quite evidently she did not recognise him, for she replied without a
vestige of embarrassment, “Oh, this belongs to Mrs. Mildred Harris
Chaplin.”
Charlie’s face underwent a number of changes.
“Oh, indeed? And is she reading these books,” he finally inquired.
“Oh, no,” returned the nurse in a matter-of-fact tone. “The books she
really reads are in a little closet in her bedroom.”
Mabel Normand, however, does not regard books merely for their
furnishing value. She really gets into action on “literachoor.”
Many people who are generous with money and material possessions are
not equally so when it comes to that more difficult gift of time and
thought. No such limitation exists in Mabel’s nature. The thing which
makes her beloved is that going out of herself to others, that real
love of people irradiating her most casual contact.
Once, I remember, she was eating lunch in the Goldwyn studio
restaurant. The apple-pie struck her as being especially successful and
she asked to see the cook. A few moments later this functionary, an
ample old Irishwoman in a gingham apron and with her sleeves rolled up,
appeared behind the counter. Visibly she was overcome with awe at the
summons from the brilliant young star. It did not take Mabel long to
remove such oppressive sentiments. Only a moment and she had literally
vaulted over the counter and had grabbed the astounded old woman in her
arms.
“Bless your heart,” we heard her cry, “it’s the best apple-pie I’ve had
since I left home.” And as she left the scene she tucked one of her
inveterate bills into the cook’s hand.
Nor is her response to people merely an emotional one. It is practical
as well. She keeps a book in which are written the birthdays of all of
her friends, and she never fails to react to these dates with a letter,
a telegram, or a gift.
It was when she was in the Goldwyn studio that the death of Olive
Thomas occurred in Paris. Never have I seen such a passion of pity as
Mabel showed for the unfortunate girl, such a passion of indignation as
she expressed for those whom she believed responsible for the tragedy.
Nor did she stop there. The mother of Olive Thomas was in this country
and there was hardly a day when Mabel did not go to see her or take her
on a drive or send her some remembrance.
To a nature like this, so alive with human sympathy and understanding,
it is easy to forgive much.
There was one person from whom, so I always suspected, Mabel withheld
much of her usual kindliness. This was Madge Kennedy. I had engaged the
latter actress soon after making my contract with Mabel and the two
worked simultaneously, therefore, in the Fort Lee studio. That they
did not always work harmoniously is scarcely puzzling, for the fact
that they were both comédiennes represented perhaps the only likeness
between them. Indeed, that very similarity constituted in itself a
ground for conflict.
They each had the habit of slipping into the projection-room to look at
the rushes of the other. And the comment with which they greeted the
rival performances became fairly familiar to the studio.
“Hmph,” announced Mabel to her group, “she saw me do it and she quickly
did it first.”
“Hmph,” duplicated Madge to her group, “she saw me do it and she
quickly did it first!”
Mabel behind the screens is as full of pranks as she is on the screen.
Madge Kennedy’s professional manner, on the contrary, is decorous to
the point of primness.
My contract with Mabel Normand contained one clause providing that
she should pay half for the clothes worn in her stories and that the
company should pay the other half. Time went by, however, and brought
us no bill from the star for our share of her stage wardrobe.
“How’s this,” I asked her one day.
She looked very much embarrassed. “Well, you see,” she replied, “I’ve
ordered so many clothes that I don’t feel right about letting you pay
anything at all.”
It was quite true. She did order lavishly. Instead of buying one hat
at a time she bought twelve. With frocks and other accessories it was
the same. To be sure, there are other stars whose expenditures in
this direction are equally impressive. Pauline Frederick, for example,
once got an exemption of fifty thousand dollars from her income-tax on
the basis of an investment of that amount in her wardrobe. I am sure,
however, that only a few of this number would have been halted by any
such scruples as those revealed by Mabel Normand.
I had the same wardrobe arrangement with Madge Kennedy. In her case,
however, developments were slightly different. One day my studio
manager came to me in a towering rage.
“See here, Mr. Goldwyn,” he began truculently, “Miss Kennedy has been
ordering a whole lot of clothes----”
“Sure,” interrupted I. “They always are.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t need them for her picture. She needs them for her
Autumn--that’s what!”
It was with difficulty that I persuaded him of the fact that Miss
Kennedy would never be guilty of such an imposition. Indeed, my success
was only temporary. For almost every picture which she made revived
this supposition that Madge was ordering more clothes than she needed.
Madge Kennedy was always prompt on the set and was most conscientious
in her efforts to do good work. No moods, no sharp edges, obtruded
themselves into any business relation with her. I ascribe this to the
regularising influence of a very happy marriage. Obviously she was
very much in love with her husband, a young New York business man who
frequently drove over to the Fort Lee studio to take her back to town.
From a being so well disciplined as Madge you would expect the
relentless care with which she guarded her health. At any party she
was apt to go off unseasonably as an alarm-clock. Once, I remember, I
invited her to a dinner-party in Los Angeles to meet Mr. and Mrs. Rex
Beach. The dinner had just ended and the party had hardly begun when
Madge rose to depart.
“What!” exclaimed Pauline Frederick, another of the guests, “you don’t
mean to say you’re going?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Madge, “I told Mr. Goldwyn that if I came at all I
should have to leave early. You see, I have a call for eight-thirty in
the morning all made up.”
Pauline looked bewildered. In her mind there was absolutely no
connection between early to bed and early to rise. One of those rare
people who, like Edison and Bernhardt, thrive on a few hours’ sleep,
she never took 10 P.M. as anything more serious than the start of an
evening. Yet when she appeared in the studio the next morning her eyes
were glowing with health, her whole frame snapping with vigour. The
third member of the trio of feminine stars with which I began work in
the Goldwyn studio was Mae Marsh. One of the luminaries of whom I have
spoken in connection with “The Birth of a Nation,” Mae had also played
a leading rôle in Griffith’s “Intolerance.” Both of these performances
had inspired me with great confidence in her ability, and I looked
forward eagerly to her first Goldwyn venture.
I have spoken of my disappointment when Blanche Sweet, another Griffith
product, made her first picture for the Lasky Company. I was doomed to
the same experience now with Mae Marsh. She, too, seemed incapable of
any notable achievement when removed from the galvanising influence
of Griffith. To be sure, her Goldwyn pictures were not failures, but
comment on these pictures usually failed of any reference to Mae Marsh.
Take, for example, “Polly of the Circus,” the first vehicle we provided
for her. People spoke highly of the story, but Mae’s work in it created
no flurry of excitement. I was not, however, discouraged by this
initial experience, for it often happens that the very story which you
suppose exactly adapted to a performer’s personality fails to evolve
her best. So it was with unimpaired belief in her more sensational
possibilities that I made preparations for “The Cinderella Man.” These
included the engagement of George Loan Tucker, the celebrated director
of “The Miracle Man.” Here again Mae failed to strike twelve. For the
comedy which brought Tom Moore’s acting into such bold relief again
evoked only lukewarm appreciation of its star, Mae Marsh.
I can not say that Mae’s presence in the studio was invariably a
sunny one. She had a habit of balking at something which the director
suggested, and the terms of her objection were always the same.
“Oh,” she would say rather scornfully, “that isn’t at all what Mr.
Griffith would do. He would do so-and-so.”
Naturally such continued harping upon the one standard of artistic
merit did not exactly enlist the sympathy of the director thus reminded
of his limitations. Friction marked all subsequent relations between
the two.
There was one type of service in the Goldwyn studios which did inspire
her admiration. It was the thing removed from her own special sphere of
activity. She always liked the director assigned to the other stars.
She had a corresponding esteem for their stories.
Right here I wish to introduce one of the thorny elements of any
film-producer’s life. First of all, he buys at the advice of his
editorial staff some particular story. The purchase is made, of
course, with some one star in mind. But when the story is submitted
to that star there is hardly a chance in a hundred that she will like
it. Sometimes she may be convinced of its merits. In other cases she
remains obdurate. Either termination involves, of course, precious time
and money.
Mae Marsh was not, as I shall establish later, distinguished by her
captiousness in this regard. But she was exceedingly able in the
performance of rejecting scenarios.
“I don’t like this--it doesn’t suit me,” she would report after reading
something our editorial department had just bought for her. We would
then concede a new scenario, only to have it dismissed in the same
arbitrary fashion.
In this way weeks went by, weeks during which of course her salary of
more than several thousands was being regularly paid to her. Was it any
wonder that I began to feel uneasy as a man who sees his meter jumping
while his cab remains perfectly motionless?
In the beginning of these reminiscences of mine I said that it was
always the far horizon which had haunted me. While I was with the Lasky
Company I had tried always to march in its direction. Now that I was
head of the Goldwyn Company I was determined upon really catching up
with it. Far from limiting myself to those who, like Mabel Normand and
Mae Marsh, were representative screen stars, I reached out toward the
far lights of opera and the legitimate drama. To draw to the screen the
most finished histrionic ability, the names of deepest import in the
world of art--to this ambition may be traced the great disasters of my
professional career.
_Chapter Ten_
THE MAGIC OF MARY GARDEN
While I was still with the Lasky Company I had been attracted by the
reputation of Mary Garden, the most consummate of “singing actresses”
(I borrow the phrase from that famous musical critic, H. T. Parker
of Boston), and at the beginning of the War I wired our London
representative to see her. She was then in Scotland, where she was
connected with a hospital for war-relief, and all efforts of our
organisation to interest her in pictures failed absolutely. She refused
to leave her humanitarian work. When, however, two or three years after
this she came to America to sing in opera, I was prompt to get in touch
with her.
My first talk with the celebrated artiste was at her apartment at the
Ritz. As she swept in upon me I remember thinking that she looked even
taller than she does on the stage. With her clear blue eyes and her
finely modelled features and her heroic mould, a real Valkyr! Not for
one moment did she suggest any of those rôles to which her exquisite
art lends itself. _Thais_, _Melisande_, _Louise_, _Le Jongleur_--I
thought of these and was bewildered. I had never realised before how
completely the mind can transpose the entire meaning of a face.
Here in her apartment away from the footlights Miss Garden’s
countenance expressed a keen intelligence directed toward the problems
of the day. For a long time we talked about the War, and I was amazed
at her grasp of every industrial and economic phase of the conflict.
Her wide range of information, together with the vivid, forceful
phrases in which she expressed it--these made it hard for me to realise
that I was really talking to a prima donna, she who even in her
business transactions is supposed to distil an atmosphere of feminine
romance and caprice. If I had heard Miss Garden that evening without
knowing who it was I should have thought I was listening to some
keen-witted, able woman journalist.
So engrossed were we both in the impersonal that it was at least an
hour before I attacked the real purpose of my call. When I finally
broached the subjects of pictures I told her, of course, how eager
the Goldwyn Company was for the honour of first presenting her on
the screen. She responded to this tribute very graciously. There was
quite evidently not one moment’s doubt on her part that she could do
pictures. Her only misgiving, frankly revealed, was that I might not
pay her enough to justify her in making them.
[Illustration: MARY GARDEN AND GERALDINE FARRAR
Whispering gossip in Mr. Goldwyn’s ears.]
[Illustration: WILL ROGERS BIDS PAULINE FREDERICK GOODBYE
As she leaves Culver City, California, for a vacation in New York.]
I must say that for some time I, too, shared this misgiving. For the
sum on which she stood firm was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars
for ten weeks’ work.
However, a discussion of the matter with my associates, Edgar Selwyn,
Arthur Hopkins, and Margaret Mayo, brought out the fact that they were
all in favour of engaging her even at that sum. I took their advice,
and, triumphantly conscious that I was taking Miss Garden from the
numerous other film-producers who had been competing for her services,
I signed my name to the enormous contract. The news that Mary Garden
was at last to appear in pictures created a sensation throughout
the country and, as the newspapers carried the story in big type,
the Goldwyn Company profited by an enviable publicity. Seeing the
importance attached to her appearance, I grew more and more hopeful
that in the celebrated operatic star I was going to offset the various
hardships attending my foundation of the Goldwyn Company.
Naturally it was “Thais,” the most widely known of her operatic rôles,
which suggested itself as her first vehicle. This story, although
uncopyrighted in America, obligated the purchase of foreign rights, and
I paid M. Anatole France, its author, ten thousand dollars for these.
In so doing I felt sure that the French exhibitors alone would more
than return my expenditure. Just how little this belief was realised is
brought out by the conclusion of this episode.
No sooner had the actual production of “Thais” begun than I was beset
by grave fears. Miss Garden, feeling rightfully that her operatic
presentation of the rôle was authoritative, did not recognise the
difference of medium involved, and her first days on the set showed
her, as the studio people expressed it, “acting all over the place.”
That which was art in opera was not art on the screen, where the secret
of achievement is emotional restraint. Watch Charlie Chaplin, the great
exponent of motion-picture art, and you will see that he gets his
effects by suggesting rather than by presenting an emotion.
Those days when we were producing “Thais” remain with me as among
the most troubled of my history. Harassed by financial adjustments
and by production difficulties, assailed by complaints of scenarios
and directors from my various stars, I now had this supreme anxiety
regarding the outcome of my enormous investment in Mary Garden. Indeed,
I was constantly called upon to mediate between the singer and her
director.
The death of “Thais” was almost the death of Mary Garden. She had
fought bitterly the scenario’s departure from the original text here
in this scene. She asserted that the screen version, presenting as it
did the triumph of _Thais_, the woman, over _Thais_, the saint, was an
intolerable falsification. And she could, indeed, hardly be persuaded
to act in it at all.
When she saw the rushes of this scene, which so violated her artistic
conception, her rage and grief knew no bounds. “I knew it!” she cried.
“Oh, I knew it! Imagine me, the great _Thais_, dying like an acrobat!”
A moment later she rushed from the projection-room down to the office.
Here she found Margaret Mayo. “Did you see it,” she stormed to this
other woman. “That terrible thing? Did you see the way they made me
die? Imagine a saint dying like that!”
The actress looked her up and down and then she responded in a tone of
studied insolence, “You would have a hard time, Miss Garden, proving to
any one that you were a saint.”
Some time later when I came up on the set I found Miss Garden weeping
hysterically. “Oh,” said she, “that terrible woman! Have you heard what
she just said to me.”
Miss Garden never forgave this gratuitous insult.
At last, after such stormy sessions, “Thais” was completed. The
finished picture was not reassuring. But, even though I recognised its
shortcomings, I still hoped that Mary Garden’s name would carry the
production to triumph. If it went over it meant a lift from the deep
trough of the sea in which the Goldwyn Company had been weltering. If
it failed--but I did not dare allow myself to dwell upon this.
* * * * *
With the full sense of that evening’s significance, I went to the
opening of “Thais” at the Strand Theatre in New York. A woman friend of
mine went with me and as we walked out of the theatre her face told me
everything. “Oh,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I just hate
to tell you--knowing how much it means to you--but--well, you can see
for yourself how they took it.”